Officially, thanks to the 2012 STOCK Act, stock trading by members of Congress on information not available to the public is prohibited. In reality, there are still a lot of questions. The issue came to a head during the early days of Covid-19, when a bipartisan group legislators were found to have made some suspicious trades following briefings about the pandemic. A new bill from Senators Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Scott Kelly (D-AZ) would ban stock trading by Congress, their spouses and dependent children.
“Members of Congress should not be playing the stock market while we make Federal policy and have extraordinary access to confidential information,” Sen. Ossoff said. “Stock trading by members of Congress massively erodes public confidence in Congress with serious appearance of impropriety, which is why we should ban stock trading by members of Congress altogether.”
Polls have shown overwhelming support for the idea, with 87 percent of Republicans, 88 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Independents in favor of banning individual stock trades.
A New York Times investigation last year found 97 members of Congress that reported trades in companies overseen by committees they were sitting on. Ballotpedia compiled some numbers and found that in 2012 – a year when the economy was just coming out of the 2008 recession – those members of Congress that were millionaires saw their wealth increase by nearly 24 percent. And there is no shortage of data showing individual members of Congress jumping from higher than average wealth to tens of millions of dollars.
“Elected officials don’t just make policy; they also have access to valuable information that shapes different industries and the entire economy. Members of Congress should be focused on representing their constituents, not their stock portfolios,” Sen. Kelly said. “I’m reintroducing this legislation with Sen. Ossoff to prevent corrupt insider trading and make Washington work better for Arizonans.”
An investigation by Business Insider found that only ten members (out of 535) of Congress have put their investments into a “qualified blind trust” – an official arrangement that is approved by Congress in which a lawmaker transfers ownership of their assets to an independent trustee. In the Senate, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Jon Ossoff of Georgia, and Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota.
The House members were Democratic Reps. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Carolyn Maloney of New York, Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey.
Currently, the Senate legislation is limited to support by Democrats, despite the 2020 outcry garnering bipartisan support from the media, with Tucker Carlson calling on Republican Senator Richard Burr to resign and be prosecuted. Ossoff’s fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock is a co-sponsor, as well as Michael Bennet (D-CO), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI).
