STOCK Act Amendment Protects Politicians

What’s
Wrong Today:

You
say our Congress can’t act in a bi-partisan way and quickly pass something that
the President will sign?

Consider
the bill that modifies the transparency requirements under the STOCK Act. It was introduced
on April 11, 2013 and was signed by the President on April 15, 2013.

What
is the STOCK Act? Back in 2012, amid pressure from Mr. Obama including an
appeal for its passage in his 2012 State of the Union address, Congress passed
the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a bill
prohibiting the use of non-public information for private profit, including
insider trading by members of Congress and other government employees. The Act
was passed by a 96-3 vote in the Senate, and by 417-2 in the House.

It is unclear why,
prior to 2012, it was perfectly legal for congress to trade on inside
information, but apparently, it was.

Yet
even before the law became effective, the United States House and Senate voted
unanimously to repeal one of its provisions. The repealed provision
required that all financial
disclosure forms be accessible online.

The
provision would have required 28,000 senior government officials to post their
financial information on a publicly available online database. It had come
under harsh criticism from federal government employee unions.

Under
the new law, the elements of the STOCK Act that were removed include:

Creation of searchable, sortable
disclosure of the information contained in financial disclosure reports even for Congress, the
President, Vice President, the President’s cabinet and congressional
candidates.

Electronic filing for
Congress, the President, Vice President, the President’s cabinet and
congressional candidates, as well as high-level executive and
congressional branch employees. Even images of the staffers’ filings will
not be available for viewing on the web.

So, more hurdles that concerned Americans will have to jump to get the information.

Congress
twice had passed legislation to delay its implementation. As part of a previous
delay, Congress asked the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), to
study the implications of the requirement. Their report,
released in March, found the provision should be repealed, because it could threatened national security, the safety of government employees abroad, as well as make
it difficult to attract and retain talent in the public sector:

Posting
personal financial information as required by the act does indeed impose
unwarranted security and law enforcement [risks], as well as threaten agency
missions, individual safety, and privacy.

In other
words, according to the “nonpartisan and independent” NAPA, having
Congressional financial documents online represents a national security risk,
since terrorists will terrorize the US even more when they know on what days
Nancy Pelosi bought and sold the S&P 500.

Surely
this explains why the bill was rushed and voted in the matter of days: We can’t
have a debate over matters of “national security” especially if the
financial well-being of Congress is at risk. As the Washington Times recapped:

Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), introduced the bill on Thursday
and had the chamber vote on it later that evening. The House
took the bill up on Friday afternoon and passed it by unanimous consent, with no members objecting. Republican leaders
did not give lawmakers the traditional three days to read the bill before
holding a vote.

In other
words, while the STOCK Act passed nearly unanimously in 2012, showing how
“honest” congress was, this follow up legislation, which effectively undoes a
key reporting requirement of said anti-inside trading law, passed just as
unanimously.

Amending the STOCK Act was not a victimless
crime:
Those who truly would benefit from the lost transparency are the American
people and the media, or at least those few in the media who have not yet been
bought by Congress and who are willing to uncover which members of Congress might
be violating the STOCK law.

This is known as “security through obscurity.” Rather than
fixing the system’s flaws, you just make the system opaque or unusable enough that
those flaws never surface. If someone wants the public information badly
enough, they will jump through whatever hurdles were created to get it.

Congress
could have carved out exceptions for individuals in sensitive jobs. That would
actually be smarter than hoping that no one would bother to look for the
information on paper instead of online.

Security
through obscurity as a justification to repeal important transparency
provisions of the STOCK Act starts us down a slippery path where any government
action or information could be taken offline in the name of safety.

Why
is it that the public can use the Internet to research everything except what
their government is doing? We know that Congress is not tech savvy, but
how can its twisted wisdom be that information is sufficiently transparent if journalists,
academics, advocates and citizens are forced to dig through file cabinets in
basements in Washington, DC to find it?

And
does anyone think that makes us safer?

We
must note that both houses of Congress acted quickly and in a bipartisan manner
in order to hide their shady dealings, their insider trading and, oh yea, “identity
theft.”

Stealth
elimination of government transparency = bilateral shame.

The
entire Congress chose to act against the public interest in favor of their self-interest.