Politics for profit? No thanks

Say what you will about the mainstream media and old-school journalism, but sometimes the power and prestige of a dinosaur like “60 Minutes” is just what it takes to get people’s attention.

A case in point is the recent story on congressional insider trading that aired on Nov. 13 on the venerable CBS news magazine show.

Maybe we should have all known already that Congress had exempted itself from regulation of insider trading. After all, most of us have long wondered at how senators and representatives seemed to always finish up their term of office richer than when they arrived.

But a vestigial sense of trust in our nation’s leaders had perhaps made us look the other way until finally “60 Minutes” and author Peter Schweizer took us by the hand and showed us just how naive we had all been.

Schweizer’s book “Throw Them All Out” inspired the “60 Minutes” report and spotlighted a number of members of Congress who had supposedly benefited by using information they gained on the job to trade in stocks. Prominently skewered were former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, and current Speaker John Boehner, a Republican.

Not mentioned in the “60 Minutes” story, but included in the Schweizer book was Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., who reportedly had traded in health-care stocks while heading up the effort to put together a health-reform package for President Obama.

The senator’s office has assured the Inter Lake that Schweizer’s allegations are misleading at best. A spokesperson for Baucus said that the senator’s investments have all been in a blind trust since 2002, and that he did not do any trading at all during the time the health-care legislation was being formulated.

That’s reassuring, but what the public needs now is a formal change in the law to establish once and for all that congressional members and their staffs must not be permitted to make money in the stock market based on information only available to Congress.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., who will be squaring off in a 2012 Senate campaign have both signed on to co-sponsor legislation that would ensure just that. Sen. Baucus has stated that he supports the concept in principle and will almost certainly support one of the bills as well.

“Everyone needs to play by the rules — especially Members of Congress — and I support any legislation to make that happen,” Baucus told the Inter Lake.

We think almost every voter in Montana will be happy to hear that all of our congressional representatives agree that no one should go to Congress to get rich.

But it will be up to all of us to make sure that this important legislation does not get swept under a rug. This is one issue that has broad support across party lines, and could be the beginning of re-establishing trust in our government.