Eric Cantor protects political intelligence consultants from STOCK Act

Eric Cantor under fire for STOCK Act tweaks
Cantor's version strips a provision requiring consultants to disclose their activities.
By SEUNG MIN KIM
2/8/12
Politico

A feel-good bill has suddenly turned nasty.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has released his version of a congressional insider-trading ban, and it strips a provision that would require so-called political intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, like lobbyists already do. It also scraps a proposal that empowers federal prosecutors going after corruption by public officials.
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That’s stoked backlash from Democrats and even some Republicans, who are furious at Cantor and are accusing the Virginia Republican of watering down the popular legislation that easily passed Senate last week.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) slammed the House for deleting his amendment targeting the political intelligence industry, which tracks action on Capitol Hill and then sells the information to investors. Instead, the House bill requires just a study of the industry’s activities within 12 months.

“It’s astonishing and extremely disappointing that the House would fulfill Wall Street’s wishes by killing this provision,” Grassley said in a statement. “If Congress delays action, the political intelligence industry will stay in the shadows, just the way Wall Street likes it.”

Cantor spokeswoman Laena Fallon said the provision was deleted because it was “extremely broad” and added that the “unintended consequences on the provision could have affected the first amendment rights of everyone participating in local rotaries to national media conglomerates.”

Democrats weren’t comforted by that explanation.

“The thing we greatly feared has come upon us,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday. “It has been weakened, totally, as far as I’m concerned.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who co-authored with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) an amendment to crack down on public corruption using a number of measures, said he was “deeply disappointed” his provision had disappeared from the House bill. Leahy noted that a similar measure cleared the House Judiciary Committee in December.

“If we are serious about restoring faith in government and addressing the kinds of egregious misconduct that we have witnessed in recent years in high-profile public corruption cases, Congress must act now to enact serious anti-corruption legislation,” Leahy said in a statement. “The House Republicans’ version of the STOCK Act misses that opportunity.”

For Cantor’s part, the House’s No. 2 Republican has added provisions that he says strengthens the STOCK Act, which explicitly bars lawmakers and their aides from using nonpublic information gained through their jobs to profit themselves.

The new version of the House’s STOCK Act ensures that the bill’s insider-trading ban and its disclosure requirements apply to the executive branch, and it also bans lawmakers convicted of a crime from collecting pensions.

In a shot at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Republicans also added a so-called “Pelosi provision” that imposes stricter rules on public officials who participate in initial public offerings. The California Democrat was targeted in a “60 Minutes” probe that reported Pelosi and her husband participated in Visa’s IPO while a bill governing credit-card legislation was pending before Congress.

Pelosi has denied any conflict of interest or special access related to the Visa IPO.

Slaughter was peeved at the “Pelosi Provision” when asked about it on Wednesday.

“I think the fact that they put this in was strictly to cause grief to [Pelosi],” Slaughter said, “and I resent it.”

Cantor said in a statement late Tuesday that he consulted “dozens of members” as he reworked the bill. But neither Slaughter nor Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), the primary sponsors of the STOCK Act, worked with Cantor on the new bill, the Democrats said.

Despite the partisan bickering, the legislation is expected to pass when it comes up for a vote Thursday.

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda

Michael Takiff says threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral
Jul 22, 2011
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff
Salon.com

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Jul 22, 2011 07:45 ET
Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
By Michael Takiff

Eric Cantor: A debt ceiling shonda
AP
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, center, flanked by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, left, and House Speaker John Boehner, right

These days Eric Cantor is steering the United States Treasury to default -- and the world economy to catastrophe -- as he defends to the death the sacred right of corporate jet owners to amortize their aircraft over five years instead of seven. Not long ago he was giving George W. Bush all the credit for killing bin Laden. Before that he was threatening to shut down the government over the budget bill. Earlier he claimed that the House of Representatives could make law without the approval of the Senate or the president.

Am I the only Jew in America who finds the House majority leader deeply embarrassing to our people? Am I the only tribe member who considers this smarmy yutz today’s numero-uno shonda fur die goyim?

Shonda what?

* * *

My father used to tell us a morality tale. Not long after the events of November 22 and 24, 1963, our rabbi attended an interfaith meeting of clergymen from our midsize New Jersey town. He later reported to his congregation a conversation he’d had at the gathering. “The Protestant minister,” Dad would say, “said to the rabbi, ‘I see one of your people got Lee Harvey Oswald.’ Jack Ruby was Jewish, you know. [Right, Dad, I know from the other 18 times you’ve told me the story.] And the rabbi said, ‘Yes, and I see one of yours got the president.’”

It was an article of faith among American Jews of my parents’ generation -- people who came of age in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, when the best country clubs and colleges and suburbs and law firms still remained unpolluted by the Hebrew menace -- that the bad example of any Jew (e.g., Jack Ruby, né Rubenstein) casts disgrace on every Jew, even though no one generalizes about Christians on the basis of a single bad apple (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald). (Or even a string of bad apples: “Man, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson ... all the way to Clinton and Bush and Obama. Those dirty Christian bastards control the government!”) Our shtetl-minded insecurity survives today -- if not among all of us, if not as centrally in our lives -- when anti-Semitism, in the West, anyway, is but a bad memory. (Right, Mel Gibson, Oliver Stone, Julian Assange, Helen Thomas, John Galliano, and Charlie Sheen?)

When a Jew is publicly bad -- especially publicly really bad -- large numbers of the rest of us Jews cringe. That Jew becomes a shonda fur die goyim -- a disgrace for the non-Jews, an example for the gentiles to latch onto as evidence that every one of us is out to control their banks, run their newspapers, and make matzoh from the blood of their children. Think of the long list of Jewish financial miscreants of the past 25 years -- Ivan Boesky, Mike Milken, Bernie Madoff, the gonifs at Goldman Sachs. Let’s see, rich Jewish financiers screwing millions of ordinary people -- gee, that doesn’t play into any pernicious stereotypes about Jews, does it?

It’s gotten to the point that when I read about a swindler who is not one of us I’m ecstatic. A while ago the New York Times reported on the trial of an allegedly crooked defense contractor named Brooks: “A goy!” I said after reading the first paragraph. “Thank goodness. Keep reading.” I did, drooling with schadenfreude. Oh, this was a juicy one: According to the charges, he and another employee pulled down $190 million via stock fraud. To top it off, his company, which makes body armor for our troops in Afghanistan, allegedly paid out more than $6 million to cover his personal expenses, including plastic surgery for his wife and pornographic videos for his son.

But then came one last example of his obscene conspicuous consumption. The guy spent millions -- hiring 50 Cent and Aerosmith as entertainment -- on his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Bat mitzvah? So Brooks isn’t Brooks at all -- he’s Brodsky or Bernstein or Bergman or Buxbaum, whose grandfather changed his name years ago so he could be one of the goys. Such a shonda!

And the neocons. Oy, the neocons. Do so many of these momzers, so keen on sending other parents’ children off to war, have to be tribe members? Ken Adelman, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Elliot Abrams, Scooter Libby, and the Podhoretzes...

In other words, Ivan Boesky, you should know better. In other words, William Kristol, reread the list of sins -- the al chaits -- we reel off on Yom Kippur. In other words, Eric Cantor, didn’t you learn anything from your upbringing? Were you out on your shul’s front steps enjoying a smoke when your rabbi sermonized about the Jewish obligation to lead an honorable life?

Evidently you didn’t learn, because if you had, you’d share my belief that just as Jews should not stage multibillion-dollar Ponzi schemes, so they should not threaten to bring about world economic calamity for no better reason than to curry favor among a bunch of mouth-breathing fanatics who don’t know a principle of economics from a pulled-pork sandwich. You’d understand that a man who counts himself among the People of the Book, a people that has won Nobel Prizes in a ratio as much as a hundred times its share of the world’s population, should not dismiss the learned opinions of credentialed economists who warn of dire consequences should Congress not do its duty and protect the full faith and credit of the American dollar. You’d know, without being told, that pointing a gun at working people everywhere and threatening to pull the trigger unless you get your way is immoral...