Hardly a week passes without another lawmaker violating the STOCK Act.
This time Representative Brian Higgins, a Democrat from New York, was revealed by the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) to have not disclosed several stock trades totaling at least $115,000 last August. In addition to violating the timely disclosure provisions in the STOCK Act, Higgins’ disclosure total differed from the total listed on the Periodic Transaction Reports filed that same day of $150,000.
The STOCK Act was signed into law in 2012 with substantial bipartisan support following the release of the Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer’s book Throw Them All Out. Schweizer’s book uncovered an epidemic of lawmakers, from both parties, leveraging knowledge acquired while in office to make insider stock trades.
Despite the bipartisan fanfare, however, the bill was thoroughly gutted less than a year later. As its original passage was heavily championed by both parties, the amendment to neuter the bill also enjoyed bipartisan support and was passed via unanimous consent.
Since then, lawmakers have continued to make insider trades and, like Representative Higgins, continue to get caught.
FACT called for an investigation into Higgins’s conflicting stock trade values for his trades and echoed the call made by others to hold lawmakers accountable for these violations. Higgins not only serves on the House Budget and Means & Ways committees, he also co-sponsored the original bill. This brazen disregard for the law is all too common in the halls of Congress today.
Higgins and his colleagues are allowed to amend their filings to bring them into compliance with the STOCK Act. But Kendra Arnold, FACT’s Executive Director, has emphasized the need for enforcement, telling Breitbart News that the law “must be strictly enforced to ensure that members do not use their official position for self-enrichment.”
Enforcing the STOCK Act has been a challenge, to say the least.
Section 18 of the Act allows for fines and up to 15 years in prison for insider trading violations, but to date no lawmaker has been charged, let alone convicted, of breaking the STOCK Act. But criminal charges are not the only way lawmakers can be held accountable for these actions.
Party leadership can implement rules and norms for members caught violating the STOCK Act, or any law. Committee assignments and leadership opportunities can be revoked or denied. Parties can encourage primary challengers to unethical members. Establishing guardrails for a party’s membership is critical not only for avoiding serious ethical and legal matters, parties can also use internal measures to demonstrate their commitment to an open and honest governance.
The problem with asking the parties to step up internal enforcement, of course, is that many senior party members have been implicated in ethical quandaries of their own, including 40 members of Congress (and more than a dozen from each party) accused of violating the STOCK Act.
STOCK Act violations won’t stop any time soon, so until the winds in Washington blow in a different direction, tune in next time for another round of lawmakers getting away with it.
