Yesterday the Senate voted 96-3 to approve a bill prohibiting lawmakers from making stock trades using insider knowledge they garner from their duties. When you see a lopsided vote, you know it’s either a completely non-controversial issue (like that nail biter 97-0 vote for a resolution to honor the people who helped kill Osama Bin Laden ) or it’s something that looks good but does little.

As we wrote a couple weeks ago – the STOCK Act falls in the latter category. It’s a big anti-corruption sugar pill.

That didn’t stop lawmakers from heading to the floor offering banal rhetoric about how most likely no lawmakers ever traded with inside trading information, and if they did, it would already be against the law. And after the STOCK Act , it would really be against the law. Wow.

Some lawmakers tried to toughen the law up. Senators Brown (D-OH) and Merkley (D-OR) offered an amendment that would require lawmakers and senior staff to either sell off stocks that represent a conflict of interest or put them in a blind trust. Clearly blind trusts aren’t a panacea, but it would be a good step in the right direction. Except the Senate rejected the amendment 26-73.

There were also dueling amendments that were intended to extend the STOCK Act to the Executive branch (where, like Congress, insider trading rules already apply). Both amendments, offered by Sens. Shelby (R-AL) and Lieberman (I-CT), passed. So now the Executive branch doubly knows they can’t trade with insider information.

The bill also ginned up dueling amendments on another controversial subject that has been the subject of corruption scrutiny in the past: earmarks. Sens. McCaskill (D-MO) and Toomey (R-PA) sought to turn the current moratorium on earmarks — those special interest spending provisions that used to litter spending bills — into an outright statutory ban. That gave rise to an amendment by one of the Senate’s biggest earmark apologists — Jim Inhofe (R-OK) — that would institutionalize earmarks under the guise of reform. Both failed, though the ban garnered 40 votes, almost twice as many as Sen. Inhofe’s amendment.

Still, in a Congress that has done little in the past year, the bill moved from the Senate like greased lightning (in Senate terms that equals a few days). And now it heads to the House for more posturing. House Majority Leader Cantor (R-VA) has said he wanted to “strengthen” the bill and then talked about extending it to the Executive branch. Been there, done that – twice.

What Congress really needs is to pass real reform, blind trusts, conflict of interest restrictions, and greater availability of information. As we wrote before, it’s not just about insider trading; it’s about trafficking insider knowledge. There’s a whole industry that’s grown up around legislative intelligence. The best way to shut down that industry is to make more information public. Information is power, and Congress is an information hoarder. There has been progress in the last years, but Congressional hearing information, reports, and documents all need to be made more widely available, understandable, and usable.

The bottom line is that few people are good at policing themselves and Congress is no different. But, it’s time to shame them into action. The House shouldn’t just swallow the weak Senate bill. They should make it stronger. It’s early enough in the legislative session (277 possible legislating days until the 2012 election) that the House can pass a stronger bill and the Senate can take it up.

Okay Congress, it’s time to be a representative of the people, not just play one on C-SPAN.

###

TCS Quote of the Week

“We have to get our fiscal house in order by reaching a big and balanced deficit reduction plan this year…Such a plan requires both getting a handle on spending and raising revenue.” — Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House. ( LA Times )