was one of the things that drove the “Gingrich Revolution”? And as I recall, the Congress passed legislation requiring that any law or regulation that applied to us ordinary folk should apply to CongressCritters™ as well.

Guess what? Yep.

Oh, and you know that “Financial Reform Legislation” that TheBoyPresident™ is making such a big deal about? The 2,000 pages that nobody’s read. Yeah, that one. More regulation for the financial sector and I would expect some banking Death Panels are buried in there somewhere. What’s not buried in there – or anywhere else – is language that requires that Critters and their staffs be held to any kind of SEC oversight. As a matter of fact they happen to be, and have been forever, exempt from the SEC and things like insider trading.

Here’s a hat tip to Pejman Yousefzadeh at The New Ledger for this little gem from Overcoming Bias:

Ordinary folks are banned from “insider trading.” For example, someone who noticed a factory fire via an airplane window was convicted of insider trading for trading on this info before it was publicly announced. But Garrett Jones tells me that US Congressional representatives, and all their staffers, have long been explicitly exempt from these rules – the SEC is not authorized to regulate Congress, and Congress has not chosen to regulate itself. So Congress-folk regularly profit by trading on inside info they gain from interactions with industry representatives. So much so that their average return on investment (ROI) is far larger than the public’s.

The logic under which ordinary insider trading is harmful while this is not escapes me. Alas, Congress is just too busy banning movie futures to deal with this “problem.” Sigh.

Now it’s not like Critters or their staffs might actually have information related to the future performance of any stocks huh?

This would be another fun thing for a new Republican Chair of the House Committee on Finance to investigate. Assuming he’s not up to his eyeballs in crap too.