IS YOUR CONGRESSMAN (OR CONGRESSWOMAN) TRADING ON INSIDE INFORMATION? “There’s not even a way to prosecute this under the law; it is at best ambiguous whether it’s even a crime for our legislators to trade based on their inside information (the way it is for every single other person in the country). And even if it were decided that it is a crime, I encountered a reluctance among government officials to even talk about the subject, which suggests that it would be difficult to get anyone to bring a case.”

Which is funny, because federal prosecutors can be quite creative when they have the desire to be so. For example, even if the Supreme Court holds that a GPS tracker placed on a citizen’s car isn’t a violation of privacy, I’ll bet that if I stuck one on the U.S. Attorney’s car, they’d find something to charge me with. But where members of Congress — who control budgets — are concerned, the wellsprings of creativity suddenly dry up. It’s almost enough to make me doubt whether we live under the rule of law.