(FORTUNE Magazine) – Congressmen more familiar with yeas and nays than with puts and calls are getting a ''crash'' course in the arcana of Black Monday. Their primer: the President's Brady Commission report. Among other things, the 350-page study calls for a federal superagency coordinating markets, consistent margin requirements on stocks and futures, and ''circuit breakers'' to temporarily halt a buying or selling frenzy. Though the Administration's reaction to the report was cool, the lawmaking machinery is clanking to life. The General Accounting Office and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were set to unveil their market findings in late January. The big bash will come in February, when the Securities and Exchange Commission was scheduled to produce its report on the crash, and the Senate Banking Committee holds hearings featuring Black Monday's complete cast of characters. The committee is likely to ask some interesting questions. For instance, did the ''specialists'' on the New York Stock Exchange do their job of smoothing out trading by buying when the trend was for people to sell? The Brady report found that nearly a third of the big specialists were net sellers on Black Monday. Reform bills will sprout, but no legislation is likely in 1988. Congress is better at holding hearings than at passing laws, especially in an election year. That leaves the stock and futures exchanges to make changes on their own -- a much more reasonable course. The major futures exchanges, which recently imposed temporary limits on how far prices of index futures could move in a day, are making the limits permanent. The NYSE began testing ways to curb program trading -- futures-related buying or selling of baskets of stocks -- on days when the market is volatile. Another NYSE proposal: experimenting with automatic brief trading halts for stocks that fall or rise quickly -- a variation on ''circuit breakers.''