Remember back towards the end of last year when it came out that members of Congress were exempt from insider trading laws? The Senate quickly acted to fix that, rightly so, yet the House delayed acting on it. Actually it wasn’t the whole House, but rather one man – Majority Leader, Eric Cantor. Here was his excuse back in December:
Cantor reportedly said he blocked the bill to give Congress more time to examine the issue. Critics of the move, however, fear that any delay could kill the bill entirely.
Well 5 months later and it finally got passed, but not before some “tweaks” went into it, by none other than Eric Cantor:
CNN is reporting that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-VA) office wrote a loophole into the House version of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) exempting Congress members’ spouses and children from having to report stock market transactions over $1,000 in a timely manner.
The Senate version of the bill requires these transactions be reported within 45 days by both its members and their families. But a memo from the Office of Government Ethics, which oversees all federal executive branch employees, used the House version, telling them spouses and children were not subject to the rule.
Neither of the bill’s Senate co-sponsors, Scott Brown (R-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), knew about the discrepancy.
“I mean, bottom line, we’re supposed to have that level of transparency and have us be treated like every other member of the United States,” Brown told CNN’s Dana Bash. “Bottom line, if we can’t do it, then — sorry, if they can’t do it — then we shouldn’t be able to do it as well.”
The second in charge of the people’s House decided to screw with the bill to offer people like him more protections. I can’t even say this is a “Republican” problem. This is Eric Cantor and how he acts. Hopefully the Republicans will go after Cantor for this though and he can watch his leadership role disappear. That is the least he deserves.