A little face time with the president can sometimes be worth more than a just photo clip for a campaign brochure.
And in the case of U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, it may serve that purpose and much more.
Anyone watching President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night would have seen Massachusetts’ junior senator having a brief conversation with the commander in chief as he departed the podium.
Apparently that chat had to do with the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a measure designed to eliminate the insider-trading advantages now enjoyed by members of Congress.
Brown, as a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has been working with members of both parties on getting this legislation passed and onto the president’s desk.
The president told our Republican senator if that bill made it to the Oval Office, he would sign it.
Evidently, Obama’s Democrat brethren got the message, because on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he will put the revised measure up for a vote on Monday.
The STOCK Act would legally require members of Congress to abide by the same rules as ordinary citizens when it comes to buying or selling stocks based on nonpublic knowledge. The initiative, first introduced in 2006, had heretofore failed to gain traction. It was re-energized when Brown and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, offered revisions to the legislation that was presented as a compromise by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
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This story first ran in the The Lowell Sun on January 28, 2012.
