After her insider-trading bill passes the Senate, Gillibrand invites Cantor to make it bigger and tougher
Kirsten Gillibrand at Personal Democracy Forum. Personal Democracy via flickr
3:18 pm Jan. 31, 2012
On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said she'd prefer to see the House pass the Senate version of her anti-insider-trading bill, the STOCK Act, which sailed through a cloture vote yesterday, but that she'd consider any proposed changes from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to make the bill even tougher on members of Congress who engage in insider trading.
"I hope he passes this bill in the House," Gillibrand said. "If he wants to amend it and make it broader, wider, or stronger in any way, God bless him. He's welcome to do that. Any differences in the bill we'll work out in committee."
The bill has already undergone several revisions, as senators tried to figure out exactly what was covered by existing laws and how best to cover members of Congress.
Gillibrand introduced an early version of the bill after 60 Minutes reported in November that members of Congress were profiting off of non-public information. The resulting bill passed a cloture vote in the Senate yesterday by a vote of 93-2, but Cantor has said he's working on an even tougher bill in the House.
On the call this afternoon, there were still some questions about what exactly the bill covers. The first question asked if it applied to real estate.
"It prohibits all use of nonpublic information for public gain, so I believe it's covered," said Gillibrand.
Later, Gillibrand tried to simplify exactly what the bill does.
"We're not changing insider-trading laws, we're just taking away the ambiguity over whether they apply to us," Gillibrand said. "Because some people say, 'Of course they apply to us.' But when I talk to experts who are in charge of prosecuting these kinds of cases, they don't bring them because they say the law is undefined. And the part that's the unclear part is that insider trading laws are based on a fiduciary duty owed to the country.
"So let's say the typical example is the lawyer helps bring a financial deal public and before it goes public, he buys the stock so he makes a bundle of money. That lawyer had a fiduciary duty to the company. So what we've done in our bill is defined a fiduciary duty to the public. That you owe a duty to the public that you're not going to profit on nonpublic information that you learn in the course of your job."
Gillibrand was discussing the bill as the first in a series of proposed reforms to make Congress more transparent and accountable, including posting more federal records online.
Regarding that latter goal, which would be addressed in separate legislation, Tom Brune of Newsday asked whether that would apply to Senate financial disclosures, which are the only federal offices still allowed to submit paper reports. It's a difference that often means records lag in being posted online.
When Gillibrand said her bill would cover that, he asked if she planned to speak to the chair of the Senate Rules Committee, where a bill proposed by Jon Tester remains bottled up in committee.
"Chuck Schumer? Absolutely!" she said with a laugh.
Brune said Schumer has "said he's happy with the way the system is now." (A spokesman for Schumer said the senator is a co-sponsor of the Tester bill, and an Open Secrets story last year said Schumer is a "strong supporter of the measure.")
"My view is that all this information should be online," Gillibrand said. "I've always felt that my district when i was a congresswoman and now my state as a senator, I feel that it's better they can have access to that information. It allows me to do a better job, if they know what i'm doing, what I'm advocating for, who has my time."
Brune also asked if she'll post her tax forms, like the three years she posted when she first became a representative.
"We will at some point, yeah," she said.
