> Members of Congress (and their staff) should either simply be held to the already existing rules on insider trading. They should not be able to act upon material non public information.

This is the law, and has been since 2012 [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

> This is the law, and has been since 2012

It was the law for approximately 1 year.

I suggest you read the amendment [0] to the STOCK Act that was quietly passed the following year, 2013. It largely rendered the STOCK Act useless.

[0] (PDF) https://web.archive.org/web/20140419032033/http://www.gpo.go...

> It largely rendered the STOCK Act useless

This is false.

The bill [1] makes it harder to access records for e.g. Congressional staffers [2]. But insider trading restrictions for everyone remain. And the disclosure requirements for members of Congress are virtually untouched.

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-113s716cps/pdf/BIL...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/17749...

>Holman showed me how it works. You have to enter your name and address into a computer, and then you can search. But you have to know the name of the person you are searching for. If he or she has filed a financial disclosure form, it will come up as a PDF, which you can print at a cost of 10 cents a page.

>"The database itself is almost meaningless," says Holman. He says the only option for those who want to get a comprehensive look at what some 2,900 staffers have filed is to review the cases one by one. "And that's just too big a job for anybody to do."

>The STOCK Act was supposed to make this task significantly easier. Records for members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs were supposed to be posted online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.

>If you wanted to see who traded health care stock just before a committee acted on a health care bill, it would be easy. No trips to the basement required.

Taking the database offline due to identity theft concerns is understandable.

What isn't defensible is making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite. SQL was 43 years old in 2013. It's perhaps unobvious to a nontechnical person, but the average reader of Hacker News should immediately recognize that it isn't normal to be unable to search a database of textual records, whose total size is probably less than 10 TB.

> making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite

I agree. But this doesn't apply to members of Congress. Their trades are available online [1].

[1] https://www.smartinsider.com/politicians/

Is the law actually enforced though? It seems like every other month we see evidence of congress members selling off a ton of stock mere days before some critical piece of information goes public that makes the stock value drop.

With 538 members of our government bodies making trades at "random", with typical trading intervals, it doesn't seem so outrageous that a few times a year there will be a trade that looks to be made on insider information.

I'm not saying it never happens, but I think it's difficult to separate "insider trading" from "getting lucky" when you're talking about 538 generally well-off, active traders.

It's like when a CEO offloads stock before it drops and everyone loses their minds. But if you dig in to the story, the CEO is just selling stock on a regular schedule.

looks like we found nancy pelosi's hacker news account

> They should not be able to act upon material non public information.

That's not what insider trading is, though. Insiders are, well, inside.

If you come across non-public information as an outsider, you are of course free to trade on it. Congresspeople are, theoretically, at odds with companies (as they impose regulation restraining those companies) and it's hard to view them as having a duty of any kind to the company itself.

That's a nice idea, but how do you out legislate a legislator? Has that ever worked out before in history?

of course it's been done. everyone has a price or a fear.