The pundit class treats over-the-top corruption as though it is a normal, everyday part of congressional operations. The common phrase is, "the best Congress money can buy." We, in political science, do actual research on this, and our attempts to measure the frequency of straight-up corruption show that it is far rarer than pundits assume. Part of what is truly shocking about Trump and his corruption is that, yes, it really is unusual for someone to be that over-the-top corrupt. That's why we (political scientists) are (nearly) all so aghast at him. (Well, that and the racism, misogyny, stupidity, etc.) Blatant corruption gets news attention because it is a deviation from the norm.
So it is with Rep. Chris Collins, who just got caught with some serious insider trading. "Insider trading" is, itself, a rarity. Note the quote marks. The act itself is not a rarity in its occurrence. It happens all the time. In fact, if you trade individual stocks without inside information... why?! The only smart and legal thing to do is to invest in passively managed index funds, which is what I keep telling you to do. Don't trade individual stocks. Have I beaten this into your heads enough times? If you trade individual stocks, chances are pretty good that someone with inside information is screwing you. Insider trading happens all the time.
Most people just don't get caught for it.
So how do we know that it happens all the time? This gets tricky. There is no way to know, for certain, that any one trade was an insider trade without something like Chris Collins's idiocy. What we can do is look at the timing of trading patterns. So, for example, lots of trades that are highly profitable happen right before information is released. A suspiciously profitable set of trades... Can we know that any one of those trades was done with inside information? Not to the degree that anything is prosecutable, but it winds up suggesting a high frequency of insider trading. By people smarter than Chris Collins. So, yes, insider trading happens. Most of the time, it is just by people smart enough not to get caught, which is why the prosecution of insider trading is rare. Remember that even Martha Stewart didn't go away for "insider trading," technically.
What about straight-up corruption on this level in Congress? We don't get scandals like this very often. There are 435 US House districts, plus 100 Senators. Chris Collins is the story of the day, Congress-wise. Trump is the story, but he's always the story, and nothing can really overshadow his level of corruption, but I'm trying to not write about him every day. So, let's return to that insider trading observation. How much do we not observe? Is the deviation from the norm Collins's extreme corruption, or his stupidity in getting caught, given what we know about the regularity of insider trading outside of Congress?
That's actually kind of a hard question. By definition. Because it's about what others are smart enough to hide. To give one of my favorite examples of blatantly stupid congressional corruption, Randy "Duke" Cunningham let some lobbyists buy him a yacht, and they called it "The Dukestir." In fiction, that's called "hanging a lampshade" on what happened. Who does that?! From investigators' and prosecutors' perspective, you just say "thank you" and move on with your prosecution, but most of the time, that doesn't happen. Does that really mean everyone else is less crooked, or just less stupid?
That's not easy to say. We cannot know for certain what the unusual elements of the Collins scandal are, making it news.