Blind Ambition
Feb 2, 2012
On Monday, U.S. senators made a rare show of bipartisanship. By a 93-2 vote, Democrats and Republicans joined to take up legislation that would bar members of Congress from trading stocks based on confidential information they receive as lawmakers. The law currently features a fog factor regarding lawmakers and insider trading. This bill would erase the ambiguity.
Good thing that it would. Yet, as the cloture vote suggests, this measure hardly represents a tough choice, especially with the public approval rating for Congress approaching single digits. A much sterner test resides in an amendment put forward by Sherrod Brown. The Ohio Democrat would extend the principle. He rightly proposes a requirement that lawmakers divest themselves of any individual stock holdings or place them in a blind trust or broadly based mutual funds as part of serving the public.
