Political Quotes

“I would make one other point, and I am not trying to put my chairman in the hot seat, but nobody in this Chamber can name somebody right now who is trading on inside information. I believe that is a true statement. Yet we are changing the law not because anybody has done something wrong but because we are struggling to try to get people to think we are doing things right. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we are not going to entrap our colleagues. The question I have is, if we can't name somebody and if there is not factual truth, what we are really putting the Senate on notice for is that, by the way, you are assumed to be trading on inside information now, and therefore we must do this to ensure that you are not. Well, I don't believe anybody in this body is doing that. And when we put our Members in that position by changing the law to, for example, 30 days-- if I have three stock tradings and I miss it by 1 day, what is the consequence of that filing and of this bill? What is going to be the penalty that comes out of the Ethics Committee for missing it 1 day or missing one of the three trades because you didn't know? We have lots of questions that are not answered. I can tell my colleagues that many Members of this body have spent a lot of their personal money defending themselves on accusations that were absolutely untrue before the Ethics Committee, and that should be addressed and clarified in the body, the report language, of this bill.…”