A bipartisan measure that would block members of Congress from trading stocks while in office made progress on Wednesday as a key Senate panel reported the legislation to the floor.
The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved, 8-4, a revamped version of a bill that would ban members, their spouses and dependents, and the president and vice president from buying or owning individual stocks and other assets.
“Today we’re going to take a historic step toward passing legislation that will ban members of Congress from trading stocks. This is the first time that a Senate committee is marking up legislation to tackle this issue,” Chair Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said at the meeting. “Americans deserve to be confident that their federal elected officials are making decisions that are in the best interests of the public and not their own personal interest.”
The latest push to rein in members’ trading activity comes after years of failed attempts to strengthen an existing 2012 law that prohibits insider trading by members of Congress. According to its critics, that law is rarely enforced and carries insufficient penalties for violators.
The markup was scheduled hours before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to address a joint meeting of Congress. The committee had initially noticed a long agenda of bills to mark up, but on Wednesday morning it scrapped all except the legislation that would ban member trading. Peters said the committee would reconvene next week to take up the rest of the agenda. It was also the first full Homeland Security panel meeting since the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life earlier this month.
“We had initially planned a much more ambitious agenda,” Peters said. “But after the attempted assassination of former President Trump 10 days ago, the committee has been focused on getting answers and providing transparency to the American people.”
‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing’
Anti-trading lawmakers have worked for years to build on the existing law, but competing proposals and lack of buy-in from leadership have repeatedly grounded the effort. At least a dozen proposals in the House and Senate have been introduced this Congress to ban or limit members from owning and trading individual stocks.
After bipartisan negotiations, Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, who introduced a measure known as the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks (ETHICS) Act, arrived at a retooled version. He announced the agreement at a press conference earlier this month alongside Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Peters and GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Their version would ban members of Congress, as well as the president and vice president, from buying and selling securities, commodities, futures, options, trusts and other comparable holdings. It would require those elected officials and their spouses and dependent children to divest from their covered assets beginning in 2027. And it would increase penalties imposed under the 2012 insider-trading law from $200 to $500 per violation.
But the bill drew scorn from some Republican members of the committee.
Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney called the legislation “a wolf in sheep’s clothing because it’s been drafted in a thoughtless way.” Romney, who ranks as one of the wealthiest senators and isn’t seeking reelection, said the proposal was punitive and suggested it might be a “solution looking for problem,” since insider trading is already illegal.
“Have you thought about Donald Trump, for instance?” Romney said. “Under this bill, he couldn’t become president. He’d have to sell all of his Truth Social stock. He’d have to sell all of his private investments.”
“So yeah, we don’t want to have people trading stocks. And had the legislation been drafted to prevent that, I’d support it,” Romney, a Trump critic, continued. “But it calls for divestitures of all sorts of assets that people would have that will prevent them from running for political office.”
Romney introduced a second-degree amendment to the substitute amendment that would have excluded securities and other assets held prior to becoming a member of Congress, president or vice president. That amendment was defeated.
Blind trust provision dropped
An earlier version of the bill would have allowed members to transfer assets to qualified blind trusts, a solution that has been floated in several other pieces of legislation.
One such proposal introduced by Rep. Abigail Spanberger has more than 70 co-sponsors in the House, including 17 Republicans. Spanberger, however, has expressed her support for the “momentum” around the revamped Senate bill.
A Virginia Democrat currently running for governor in her home state, Spanberger last year urged Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to bring legislation to the floor. She renewed that call in July, but so far it’s gone unanswered.
“I’m encouraged to see this bipartisan momentum move us toward enacting this long overdue, much-needed reform,” she said in a statement on July 10. “It’s time for Speaker Johnson to do his part and bring bipartisan legislation before the U.S. House to finally get it done.”
Members’ stock market activity has been increasingly under the microscope since the pandemic, when some lawmakers dumped stocks before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on global markets. The Justice Department investigated, but no charges were filed.
The episode piqued the media’s attention and spurred the creation of a cottage industry of trade trackers. Dozens of sites and social-media accounts offer their followers tips to trade like members of Congress and document what prominent lawmakers are buying and selling. Public polling, meanwhile, continues to show that the practice is deeply unpopular.
But Congress, so far, has declined to act.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. — who, along with her venture capitalist husband has reportedly made millions while in office — in 2022 vowed to bring legislation to the floor after years of opposition, and then reneged on her promise.
Former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said he favored banning members from trading stocks while Pelosi was still speaker, but dropped the issue once he won the speaker’s gavel. And Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., endorsed the idea in 2022, but has said little publicly on the subject since.
Neither Schumer nor Johnson, through spokespeople, responded to requests for comment Wednesday.
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