A Senate bill meant to clamp down on congressional insider trading has been stripped of its most substantive provisions while in the House, a pair of senators said in a letter Monday.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking minority member of that committee, wrote to Senate leadership Monday asking for the provisions to be put back in the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, known as STOCK.
The two provisions would improve transparency and give law enforcement more effective tools to combat corruption, and received strong, bipartisan support in the Senate, the pair wrote in a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
The first provision would require political intelligence agents to register as lobbyists, so the American people know who is feeding information to Wall Street. The other gave prosecutors new tools to identify, investigate, and prosecute criminal conduct by public officials.
The House removed those provisions from the Senate bill before passing it.
“Without them the legislation would be significantly weakened,” Leahy and Grassley’s letter states. “We urge you to take the STOCK Act to a conference committee to resolve the differences between the Senate and House bills and to encourage the conference to restore these two key provisions.”
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