Eric Cantor has pledged to bring the bill to the floor next week. | JAY WESTCOTT/POLITICO Insider trading bill heads to House

The Senate broke through its usual gridlock on Thursday and easily passed a politically popular bill that would ban insider trading for lawmakers and their staffs.

After days of bickering over amendments, the STOCK Act sailed through the Senate on a 96-3 vote and now heads to the House, where Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has pledged to bring the bill to the floor next week. Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) were the only no votes.


President Barack Obama, who pushed for the bill during last week’s State of the Union address, called on the House to quickly pass the measure and said he’d sign it “right away.”

“No one should be able to trade stocks based on nonpublic information gleaned on Capitol Hill,” Obama said.

The Senate-passed measure would bar lawmakers and their staffers from trading stocks, bonds and other investments using information obtained from private congressional briefings — a practice that many already believe is illegal under existing insider-trading laws.

But with Congress grappling with voter distrust and approval ratings in the low teens, lawmakers are eager to show the public this election year that they’re serious about cleaning up corruption — perceived or real — in Washington.

“I’ve jokingly said I never knew you could trade on any insider information because I never got any or didn’t recognize it,” retiring Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) told POLITICO. “But the people think it’s a serious problem, and sometimes you just have to respond to what the people think to get some credibility.”

On Monday, the Senate agreed almost unanimously to start debating the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, but the bill got bogged down in the ensuing days as senators attempted to pile on dozens of often unrelated amendments.

A breakthrough came around noon Thursday. Floor managers of the bill — Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and ranking Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) — said they had struck a deal and would hold a round robin of votes on roughly 20 amendments, many of them populist-inspired proposals designed to restore voter confidence in Congress.

By a 40-59 vote, the Senate shot down an effort by Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to permanently outlaw congressional earmarks, even as Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said Thursday he would extend a temporary earmark ban one more year through 2013. The Senate also rejected a nonbinding resolution by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) that expressed the Senate’s desire to pass a constitutional amendment limiting terms for lawmakers.

But the chamber passed amendments that would prevent bonuses for top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, strip lawmakers of their federal pension if they’re convicted of certain crimes, and give prosecutors new tools to investigate and prosecute criminal conduct by public officials.

The STOCK Act also calls for members of Congress to report stock and other financial transactions within 30 days — more quickly than currently required — and ensures these filings are available online.

The bill also was successfully amended to require members of Congress, their staff and about 2,000 top policymakers in the executive branch to publicly disclose the terms of home mortgages. And an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) was adopted that requires securities trades and financial disclosure statements for about 300,000 executive branch employees to be published online.

Cantor, who manages the House floor, praised the Senate for passing the STOCK Act but said he believes the law should cover both the legislative and executive branches equally.

“Insider trading at any level of the federal government is unacceptable,” Cantor said in a statement. “We will quickly review the entire bill and the amendments that were added today to ensure that public servants, whether in the legislative or executive branch, do not personally profit from insider information.”

Even as they worked together to pass the bill, Senate Democrats and Republicans vied to claim credit.

Days after CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a special report on congressional insider trading last November, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) introduced a bill to outlaw the practice. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) later rolled out a similar measure of her own, and the Governmental Affairs Committee on which Brown serves eventually reached an agreement and passed the STOCK Act.

At a news conference Thursday, top Democratic leaders heaped praise on Gillibrand. Brown, whom Democrats are hoping to defeat in November, wasn’t mentioned once.

Gillibrand “recognized this proposal early on as the right thing to do. She’s been persistent in trying to move it forward — her persistence this week we’ve all seen,” said New York’s senior senator, Democrat Chuck Schumer. “And she saw this through, even when it looked like it would get bogged down in a sea of amendments.”

Not to be outdone, Brown called himself the “first senator to address the problem and introduce the STOCK Act.”

“Bottom line, members of Congress have to live by the same laws as everyone else,” Brown said in a video message after the vote. “With approval ratings of Congress at an all-time low, this bill represents an opportunity to build some trust with the American people.

“The truth is, members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information,” he added, “and it has to be clear that the information is being used to serve our country – not to make a personal profit.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby had failed. It passed.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Anita Ford @ 02/03/2012 05:58 AM An earlier version of this story incorrectly said an amendment by Sen. Richard Shelby had failed. It passed.