STOCK ACT

CANTOR’S TAKE: The version of the Stock Act the House will debate today is significantly different from the government ethics package the Senate passed last week. The biggest difference is that the bill Cantor unveiled late last night has no provisions requiring the people in the “political intelligence consulting” industry to register like lobbyists. Senators added such language to their version last week, and since then the grumbling from K Street and financial services companies — which use such intelligence reports to shape their trading decisions — has grown intense, in part because the provision was written to define intelligence-gathering in a pretty vague and expansive way.


Unlike the Senate bill, Cantor’s measure would deny government pensions to lawmakers convicted of a felony. It would expand restrictions on how executive branch officials handle negotiations with prospective private-sector employers and make it a crime for those officials to retaliate against companies that don't hire them. It is more specific than the Senate’s about the new disclosures it would require of executive branch officials — and makes clear that it would apply to about 30,000 administration officials. And it essentially would prevent lawmakers from participating in initial public offerings — language clearly written to poke at Pelosi, whose husband bought stock in the 2008 Visa IPO while she was Speaker and the House was considering a bill to lower credit card fees. Both bills, however, are the same at the core: They would make clear that lawmakers and aides are subject to prosecution (or ethics committee punishment) if they trade securities based on information about legislative strategies or pending decisions that aren’t available to the public.

The bill is likely to sail through the House tomorrow — because members are eager to do something that sounds like they get the message about why the public holds Congress in such low regard — although Democrats will complain loudly that they were not consulted by Cantor even though the legislation's central piece really was their idea first.