WASHINGTON — The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, a congressional insider trading ban championed by Minnesota Democrat Tim Walz, is now law, signed by President Obama at a White House ceremony Wednesday morning.

 “The idea that everybody plays by the same rules is one of our most cherished American values,” Obama said. “It’s the notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else, and if we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and to our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials — especially at a time when there is a deficit of trust between this city and the rest of the country.”

Obama assembled a bipartisan group of lawmakers to join him at the signing, including Walz. The bill has strong bipartisan support in Congress — it passed with only five no votes between both the House and the Senate. Obama said it was a rare example of bipartisanship from a Congress that has been bitterly divided on most issues for more than a year.

“It shows that when an idea is right that we can still accomplish something on behalf of the American people and to make our government and our country stronger,” he said.

Walz congratulated current and former staffers involved with crafting the legislation on Wednesday.  He called the winding path the bill took toward passage — a “60 Minutes” report that inspired a surge of co-sponsors, a call from the president for Congress to pass the bill, and a game of political pingpong between the House and Senate before the bill’s final passage — a “microcosm” of how a bill becomes a law.

During congressional deliberations on the STOCK Act, there was a prevailing sense among most members that the bill was seeking to solve an overblown problem, that allegations of insider trading among members — including those in the “60 Minutes” report — were off the mark.

Still, outside ethics organizations said the bill could be stronger — the group Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW) put out a statement Wednesday declaring it was “lukewarm” on the new law.

“The version of the STOCK Act signed today is only a shadow of the strong bill initially passed by the Senate,” Executive Director Melanie Sloan said in a statement.   

Both Obama and Walz said the STOCK Act was only one stop toward strengthening ethics laws on Capitol Hill.

Obama said lawmakers should be banned from owning stock in industries they are charged with regulating, and fundraisers who bundle contributions for lawmakers and candidates should be banned from lobbying.

Walz said he’d like to see tighter regulations on “political intelligence” firms that sell information they glean from lawmakers and staffers, and backed more disclosure among donors to so-called SuperPACs.

“I disagree with some of my colleagues who think, when you bring these ethics bills forward, that you’re planting a seed in people’s minds that this whole place is corrupt,” he said. “I don’t think that people think that, but they do believe that the laws can be strengthened to make sure it’s not.”

Devin Henry can be reached at dhenry@minnpost.com. Follow him on Twitter: @dhenry