The ‘Conscience’ of the Senate

No member of Congress has been more persistent, more voluble, more passionate in condemning the huge profits in commodities trading made a decade ago by Hillary Rodham Clinton than Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.). No member of Congress has been more scornful in his dismissal of Mrs. Clinton’s explanations, none has sought to make greater political hay out of the First Lady’s pre-White House speculations than New York’s junior senator.

Now, to the surprise of no one who has followed D’Amato’s ethically ambiguous career, a distinct sewage-like odor of gross hypocrisy is seeping from beneath the door of his private office. For D’Amato, as he now admits, has also been in the happy position of reaping big bucks in the speculative marketplace. To be precise, $37,125 of them in a single day of trading last year.

It didn’t take a stroke of genius for the senator to pocket those profits. D’Amato is the ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, which oversees Wall Street and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he was let in on one of those sweetheart deals often offered to influential members of Congress. Through his broker, D’Amato bought an initial offering of 4,500 share of stock in a small California company at $4 a share. Later that same day he sold at $12.25 a share.

As it happens, the brokerage firm that did D’Amato the favor had SEC fraud charges pending against it; it has since been fined and sanctioned. D’Amato, so he has been quick to proclaim, did nothing illegal in making a fast profit. Nor does he appear to have violated congressional ethics rules. But an act can be technically legal and can meet the feeble ethics standards of Congress and still be perceived by any ordinary person of common sense as wrong, wrong, wrong.

D’Amato has found himself in trouble before, most famously having been rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for letting his brother, who was subsequently convicted of mail fraud, use his office while he was representing a defense contractor. Now he’s revealed as profiting from a favor extended by a firm of highly sullied reputation. And this is the man who natters on about the ethical flaws of others! Will someone please open a window.