The U.S. Senate is taking up debate on a bill that would among other things clarify that lawmakers can't engage in insider trading and require more reporting of personal financial transactions. But is the legislation going to make much of a difference?

For starters, insider trading is already illegal, so the idea that lawmakers would be banned from trading stocks based on nonpublic information they've obtained during the course of policymaking doesn't change things much. To allow the public to better match transactions, particularly stock buys, with legislation under consideration by Congress, the bill would also require lawmakers to report financial transactions within 30 days.

Better yet, some lawmakers say, a provision in the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK, should ban members of Congress from trading in individual stocks.  

An amendment offered by Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, would require lawmakers to "divest themselves of any individual stock holdings or put them in a blind trust under an amendment," according to a joint statement.

Likewise, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee, told Alaska Dispatch that the STOCK Act may be a good start to curb unethical insider trading, but more ought to be done.

"I have not traded individual stocks while serving in Congress, and I believe other members should be discouraged from, perhaps prohibited from, holding and trading individual stocks," he said.

In Alaska, only one federal lawmaker engages in trading stocks, and he's a fellow Democrat of those asking for even more provisions in the bill. And even though Sen. Mark Begich is a co-sponsor of the STOCK Act, he still believes senators and congressmen should be allowed to buy and sell individual stocks.

Begich is an active trader, buying and selling stocks roughly 40 times in 2010 alone, owning between $311,000 and $1.2 million, according to his Senate disclosures.

In an Alaska Dispatch interview in December, Begich said he prefers to be in control of his investments and that owning stocks might be a cleaner way of doing things. Blind trusts aren't always truly blind, he said. And mutual funds can provide their own perceptions of impropriety, as some funds may focus on energy, say, or defense -- two industries of which Congress routinely debates and passes legislation. "You can actually see individual stocks," Begich said in December.

The problem, however, is that because reporting requirements are so broad it's impossible to know precisely how much a senator is making on investments or the exact value of his or her assets. And Begich has declined to provide a more detailed account of his portfolio.

The bill does nothing to address this problem.

Perception, in politics, is reality

There's growing public interest in congressional members who are profiting on their investments -- particularly stocks -- while many Americans are losing money or barely breaking even on their own investments.

A report by The Motley Fool, a financial-services company, highlights the issue. The report focuses specifically on transactions by lawmakers in the weeks before they voted on the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- the bank-bailout bill. Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 3, 2008, when the bill was passed, members of Congress made a total of 318 stock trades in financial companies. During that same period one year earlier, in 2007, only 115 trades were made. All told, during that period in fall 2008, Congress traded $6.7 million of shares in financial companies, compared to $1.7 million during the same period in 2007.