Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Emanuel Cleaver for yielding, and I thank my subcommittee ranking member, Mr. Hill, for a very good characterization of the project we are undertaking here. I will emphasize two things. Number one, at a moment when we are working hard to find ways to work in a bipartisan fashion in the public interest, this is landmark legislation. As Mr. Hill pointed out, we passed it in the last Congress with a vote of 410-13, and that was the result of a very comprehensive and fairly technical negotiation around the fine points of insider trading. The second thing I would point out is that everyone in this Chamber should agree that law is to be made in this Chamber, not in the chambers of unelected judges throughout the land. While Mr. Hill is correct that there has been a vast body of court-made law around insider trading developed over the generations, that is far from ideal and, frankly, an abrogation of the legislative responsibilities of the United States Congress. So, we are where we are. We have attempted to make clear and clear up a great deal of the uncertainty, the reversed convictions, the activities in the Second Circuit that have overturned convictions and created uncertainty in the law. This is an effort to make clear what I think everyone understands, which is that if you trade on information that you know to have been wrongly obtained or that you wrongly obtained or that you recklessly disregard was wrongly obtained, you are doing something wrong.…”