By a show of hands, who is astonished, puzzled, or even caught off-guard that the Senate blocked a bill that contained two items of great concern to the American people?
I know I’m not. I also know that many of you probably haven’t heard of this yet since the media, if it even bothered to cover it, has framed it as an attack on voting rights.
In July (yes, three months ago), the House passed a measure called Stop Insider Trading Act. The purpose of the bill was to prohibit lawmakers and their families from buying publicly traded stocks and requiring any sales to be disclosed at least a week in advance.
The idea here is to keep these folks from profiting from insider information.
However, the bill also contained language that would require IDs when voting in federal elections, kind of like the SAVE Act (which also died in the Senate), so of course Senate Democrats killed it. There were quotes from those folks saying that the measure “didn’t go far enough,” whatever that means.
(The more conspiratorial of those folks also claimed the measure was designed to fail because there was no way Democrats would approve anything like voter ID requirements, maybe to make them look bad for the midterm elections.)
I honestly have several questions: Why is another law necessary? Why is voter ID such a turnoff? How are lawmakers untouched by both the law and common sense?
The government, in its limited wisdom, passed a law all the way back in 1934 called the Securities Exchange Act, a codicil of which “prohibits trading on material nonpublic information relating to upcoming tender offers, regardless of whether a traditional fiduciary duty was breached.”
It has even been leveled at numerous people, including such notables as Martha Stewart, who actually served prison time. Others include Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Jeffrey Skilling, and James McDermott Jr. These cases were big deals, hammered by the press as cautionary tales. However, the only politician I’m aware of who was convicted for insider trading was New York Rep. Chris Collins. (He also was the first member of Congress to endorse President Trump in 2016, so make of that what you will.)
If the existing law was good enough to be used to convict these and other people of insider trading, why is a special law needed for the people in federal government? That seems to imply that members of Congress, members of the administration and anyone else connected to them have carte blanche to break laws willy nilly. If that’s the case, then I ask you which one of you voted for that?
In contrast, if by some happenstance they had made themselves exempt, like they did for every other federal program out there (Affordable Care Act, anyone?), it speaks to the government setting themselves up as an elite class, above the proletariat (as Orwell said) and falling down the same rabbit hole as all of the peerage of the United Kingdom, France, etc., except instead of bloodline being a determining factor, it’s by “virtue” of election.
In short, it’s become government of the people, by the people, for us first and foremost, which is how people with an annual salary of just over $170,000 end up as millionaires.
So during this midterm election season (just one month till November!), remember the promises made by the candidates, especially the ones who say they will fight for us and out fair share. That’s codespeak for “fair share after he gets his.”
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
