Senator attempts to gut congressional insider trading ban

Peter Schweizer’s book, Throw Them All Out, has been a topic of much discussion in Washington, in no small part because of shocking details about how congressmen trade stock based on their private knowledge of how legislation will affect markets. Amazingly, this is completely legal. As I put it in an editorial in the current issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “At a time when Americans hate Wall Street with the fire of a thousand suns, behavior that would get a bank executive a perp walk and a jail sentence is business as usual in the nation’s capital.”

Now that Schweizer’s book has been getting lots of attention, the Washington Post reports that a bill to ban congressional insider trading that had been languishing is “suddenly popular.” However, it seems not everyone in congress is too happy about taking away one of their lucrative perks. John Carney at CNBC reports New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand wants to radically alter the legislation in some unusual ways . . .

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