I’ve spent 30 years managing money for wealthy families, and every one of those years I’ve operated under fiduciary rules that would land me in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission if I traded ahead of information my clients didn’t have. That’s not a courtesy I extend. It’s the law. So, when the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act on July 22, barring members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from buying new individual stocks, my first reaction wasn’t celebration. It was closer to relief that Congress is finally catching up to a standard the rest of us have lived under for decades.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), passed 232-198. It doesn’t force members to sell what they already own. What it does is stop new purchases of individual stocks while in office and require seven to 14 days’ public notice before any sale, with fines and forfeiture of profits for violators. Critics are right that this isn’t a full ban. A true ban would require divestiture on a fixed timeline, the way the bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act proposed. That bill never got a floor vote. This one did. I’ll take the incremental win over the theoretical perfect one.
Here’s what strikes me as someone who reads polling data for a living: this issue doesn’t split the way most things in Washington do. Surveys from the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland put support for banning individual stock trading by members of Congress at 86%, with majorities north of 80% among Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike. When 86% of the country agrees on anything, it’s usually the weather.
Two names explain why the public feels this way. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), no longer Speaker but still a sitting member, has become something of a folk hero to retail investors who track her disclosures for trading ideas; her portfolio posted returns north of 50% last year, roughly double the S&P 500. Then there’s Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) of Silicon Valley, who has built his political brand partly on advocating a stock trading ban, while his household ran up tens of millions in trading volume through a trust held by his wife. His defense is that it’s her money and he has no input. Under this bill, that defense stops mattering, since the purchase restriction covers spouses, too.
The Senate is where this stalls, and not because senators disagree with the stock provision. House Republicans bolted a national voter ID requirement onto the bill before sending it over, and that cost Democratic votes on the floor. I happen to support voter ID. New Jersey just made the case for it. Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) disclosed this week that a software error at the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission registered roughly 6,600 people who had told the state they weren’t citizens, and that nearly 400 of them actually cast ballots. Nobody’s claiming they swung an election. The point is that a state ran a registration system for a year with no working citizenship check, and found out by accident. A photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirement is exactly the guardrail that catches that kind of error before it reaches a ballot box.
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But a good idea doesn’t need to hide inside a bill about something else. Voter ID polls nearly as well as the stock trading ban, north of 80% in most surveys, which means it doesn’t need a hostage to pass. It needs its own vote. Bundling the two lets opponents of either provision vote no on both and blame the other side for the failure. Split them. Let every member of Congress go on record on stock trading, and separately on voter ID, where voters can see exactly who stands where. If a senator wants to defend the status quo on either one, that senator should have to say so in the open.
I manage other people’s money inside a legal framework built on the premise that access to information creates an obligation, not an opportunity. Members of Congress sit on committees that move markets, then trade in the same companies that their votes affect. The House just said that’s no longer acceptable, at least going forward. The Senate should say the same and vote on voter ID on its own merits, too. Split the bill, pass both, and let the people who write the rules finally live under one.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.