'This bill ought to be a one-line bill,' an exasperated Kent Conrad said Wednesday. A larded STOCK Act bogs down

President Barack Obama made it sound easy in his State of the Union address: Pass the STOCK Act “tomorrow” so he could sign it into law.

But it’s proving to be anything but easy.


Democrats and Republicans have proposed an avalanche of populist-tinged amendments and poison pills certain to become fodder for 30-second attack ads. On top of that, there appear to be growing reservations among senators over the potentially sweeping ramifications of the bill, a sign that the body was ill-prepared for the full-fledged debate over ethics and senatorial conduct that it now finds itself in.

Republicans are now pushing an amendment inspired by the White House’s Solyndra-loan debacle — a proposal aimed more squarely at Obama than congressional insider trading. Two Democratic senators, meanwhile, want to force all senators to divest their stocks. The Democrat and Republican leading the Senate Select Committee on Ethics want to make senators disclose the terms of their home mortgages in the wake of the Countrywide Financial loan scandal. Earmarks would be permanently banned under another idea.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

A conservative Republican wants to end pensions for retired senators who become lobbyists. Another wants to push a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on members of Congress. And another wants to target bonuses given to executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“This bill ought to be a one-line bill,” an exasperated Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said after lunch Wednesday. “Somehow this thing has gone off, spinning off into all kinds of directions.”

The amendments put senators in an awkward spot: They can either support them and look like they are trying to reform an institution for which approval ratings are in the tank. Or they can oppose them on the grounds that the measures have gone too far — and risk the ire of their political opponents.

The litany of politically loaded amendments threatens to stall a bill with popular support, the latest illustration of how this Congress has become increasingly unmanageable ahead of the November elections. The jockeying is happening in the House, too, with Democrats trying to force a vote on their bill and the GOP saying the toughest rules should also extend to Obama officials.

“You got to be careful,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) warned. “You don’t want a knee-jerk reaction to an issue that, I think, has been manufactured.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has co-sponsored several amendments, including the Fannie and Freddie proposal as well as one with Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) calling on both chambers to post legislation online 72 hours before a vote.

But he, too, acknowledged the slippery slope.

“It’s one of these things that turns into a bit of a feeding frenzy,” McCain told reporters Wednesday. “I think it’s a serious issue, but there’s always some kind of overkill.”

For the last two days, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have been locked in backroom negotiations to determine which amendments could come forward for a vote and whether they could change the bill to appease GOP demands that its most burdensome requirements affect the executive branch.

On Tuesday, a furious Reid called the process a “circus” and on Wednesday night, he said they still hadn’t reached a deal.

“We have not reached agreement on how to move forward on this simple bill,” Reid said on the floor Wednesday. “Everybody loved the bill, and [we] should be able to finish it, but that hasn’t worked out.”

Reid said he wanted to complete the bill Thursday afternoon, even though amendments had yet to be considered.

The STOCK Act gained steam in Congress after media reports late last year suggested that lawmakers had gleaned intelligence before making trades on the stock market. The lawmakers under scrutiny — including Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — strongly denied charges aired last November on the CBS program “60 Minutes.”

But the proposal got new life last week after Obama attacked Congress and the “corrosive influence of money in politics,” calling on lawmakers to “send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress.”

The bill is co-sponsored by a bipartisan coalition — Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.). And in an overwhelming 93-2 vote on Monday evening, the Senate agreed to open debate on the measure.

The Senate bill reaffirms existing conflict-of-interest rules prohibiting members of Congress from insider trading, and it would require lawmakers and their aides to report within 30 days a transaction they made on the market.

It’s the 30-day reporting requirement that is a chief concern among many on the Hill. Under current law, they have to publicly disclose their financial holdings once a year.

“The unintended consequences are great,” said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, who along with Coburn, were the lone Republicans to vote ‘no’ on Monday. “I think this is a very very dangerous thing.”

In particular, Burr warned that staff members — particularly young ones — could be ensnared by the legislation’s reporting requirements if their holdings are controlled by their parents or family members and trades are made unbeknownst to them.

Coburn warns that less wealthy members of Congress would be adversely affected by the proposal, and says that only the “super, super rich” would want to serve in the body if the law passes because they could more easily afford to put their money in blind trusts.

“There is still a lot of this stuff in our bill that I don’t think I fully understand,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), raising questions about buying and selling mutual funds.

But Paul himself is pushing one of the more charged amendments, which is aimed at limiting executive branch officials from making decisions over industries in which they or their spouse hold a financial interest. The measure is a shot at the administration’s effort to prop up the now-bankrupt solar energy firm Solyndra after a $538 million loan, which the GOP says failed because of cronyism in the highest ranks of government.

Paul says he would do “exactly the same thing” if there were a Republican president. But Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) noted the Paul effort — along with other GOP amendments to further expand the bill’s reach into the executive branch — serve a political purpose, as well.

“I think they saw this as a real political opportunity to make Congress look even worse,” Thune said of the White House. “I do think it sort of levels the playing field so to speak in terms of the argument.”

But some arguments appear to hit too close to home. Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) unveiled a bill Wednesday that calls on members of Congress to divest their stock portfolios, saying lawmakers should be serving the public — not their own individual bottom lines.

“I think that’s a ridiculous proposition,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) scoffed.

Added Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.): “I think that’s foolish.”

Kyl and Conrad — who both are retiring at year’s end — criticized a sweeping amendment by Paul calling on lawmakers-turned-lobbyists to give up their federal retirement benefits.

Conrad told POLITICO he wasn’t going to become a lobbyist, but he said the amendments are symptomatic of a larger problem.

“Part of what frustrates people around here is that we can’t focus for five minutes to get something accomplished,” Conrad said. “Instead, everything becomes a Christmas tree and then, guess what? It never passes.”