Will Democrats block the stock trading ban again after the midterm elections?
Americans do not agree on much these days, but they certainly agree on this: Members of Congress should not get rich trading stocks while writing the very laws that move those stocks.
The failure to ban insider trading in Congress is part of a broader rot now engulfing the swamp. Political corruption, in general, has become a top concern for voters — and for good reason. A new CNBC poll shows, perhaps surprisingly, that it is the most important issue facing the nation: According to CNBC, 36% of voters ranked corruption as the top issue facing the country. To these voters, corruption, and corrupt acts like insider trading, are even more important than the cost of groceries and gas.
Despite a slew of arrests in Minnesota, California and New York, where well-connected liberal groups and activists were caught stealing billions in taxpayer dollars, Democrats hold a four-point edge, 35% to 31%, on which party would better handle political corruption. Of those surveyed by CNBC, 93% said members of Congress and the president should not own or trade stock in companies that hold federal contracts, and 89% said companies owned by a sitting president’s immediate family should not receive federal contracts at all.
DOZENS OF HOUSE DEMOCRATS REJECT BILL FUSING CONGRESSIONAL STOCK BAN WITH FEDERAL VOTER ID
That all seems reasonable enough.
But apparently, it isn’t reasonable for Democrats. On Sept. 30, Senate Democrats rejected the Stop Insider Trading Act after it had already passed the House with Democratic votes. If it had passed, the law would have barred members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children from buying new stock in public companies while in office. It would have also forced public notice before lawmakers could sell what they already hold.
But every single Democrat in the Senate voted no.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., excuse? He claimed Republicans set the bill up to fail, loading it with intentional "poison pills" so that it would never pass. He also called it toothless, and said it didn’t go far enough. Democrats pointed to a provision requiring voters to show identification at the polls, which an overwhelming majority of Americans support and virtually every other first-world country requires.
DEMS HAND GOP FRESH MIDTERM WEAPON BY OPPOSING WIDELY USED VOTER ID
Schumer’s other objection — that the bill doesn’t go far enough — is hard to square with his record. One does not refuse to lock his front door because he would prefer an elaborate home security system. A partial reform on the books beats a perfect one that lives only in tailored press releases. Even more to the point: Democrats ran the Senate for years and never delivered the "real" ban on insider trading they now disingenuously purport to want.
Senate Democrats’ recent vote against the Stop Insider Trading Act also puts attention back on Nancy Pelosi’s household, which sold 2,000 shares of Visa, worth between $500,000 and $1 million, on July 1, 2024. Less than three months later, the Biden Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa. The stock promptly dropped.
As attorney and longtime Trump advisor Michael Caputo recently put it, "Plenty of legal analysts have questioned the suit... whatever the lawsuit ultimately accomplishes, its most conspicuous result so far has been helping a well-connected investor avoid the losses other Visa shareholders suffered."
That well-connected investor, of course, is "Princess Nancy" herself.
However, the Visa sale wasn’t the first time hubby Paul Pelosi’s stock trading timing attracted scrutiny. In 2022, he bought more than $1 million in Nvidia call options weeks before Congress voted on major subsidies for the chip industry. He then sold them once the story broke.
What funny timing!
The more things change, the more they stay the same. At the turn of the 20th century, this was sometimes referred to in the jargon of the day as "honest graft." In New York, insiders like George Washington Plunkitt, who ran New York’s infamous political machine of Tammany Hall, declared, "There's an honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by saying: ‘I’ve seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.’"
Today, Pelosi’s corruption is so obvious that stock-trading platforms like PelosiTracker, Quiver Quantitative and Unusual Whales attempt to mimic her stock portfolio. In 2024, that portfolio returned more than double the S&P 500.
The American people are not asking for much. They want the people who write the rules to stop playing the very game those rules govern. Republicans put a bill on the floor that would do that. Senate Democrats killed it.
The Senate is out until after the election. When Congress returns for the lame-duck session, it should take the bill up again before the end of the year. Senate Democrats can redeem themselves then — at least on this score.