Earlier this year, the Stop Insider Trading Act was cultivated and pushed by Republican House Administration Chair Bryan Steil and would have prohibited members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from buying any new stocks. It would have allowed them to keep the stocks they already own, as well as buy and sell diversified investment funds.
This latest agreement was birthed from a movement at the end of last year by some Democrats and a few Republicans to create a stricter consensus bill, which would require lawmakers to sell off all of their stocks within 90 days of taking office to ensure that no one could make more votes to benefit their current stock portfolio.
A discharge petition on the stricter consensus bill was filed by Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna at the end of last year and earned 84 signatures, including 15 Republicans, which would have been enough to tip the scales and force a floor vote if most Democrats had gotten on board. Ultimately, that bill lost momentum as Democrats also demanded that any stock-trading ban also include top executive branch officials like the president and vice president.
“If Republicans were serious about cleaning up corruption in this town, they would start at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told reporters last week. By the beginning of this week, House Republicans went on the attack when Luna told the press that “Hakeem Jeffries killed the discharge petition.”
What Democrats did was actually introduce their own legislation into the bill, which would have included executive branch positions in the ban against stock trading. At that point, House Republicans turned what began as an honest, bipartisan attempt to curb stock trading abuse by members of Congress into a completely unrelated voter-ID bill that will have no support from Democrats.
As it stands now, H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act, would restrict members of Congress, their spouses, and their children from purchasing new individual stocks while in office. But this version of legislation falls short of other initial proposed legislation that would require all elected officials to divest from all stock holdings while in office.
The bill with the new amendments also fails to ban congressional insider trading outright, and it does not address the abuse of insider trading by a sitting president and vice president, or any executive branch officers or Cabinet members. The final way in which Republicans intend to “kill the bill” is to pass portions of Trump’s SAVE America Act, and House Republicans have amended H.R. 7008 to include the addition of H.R. 9368, the Voter ID Act, which would implement all of the same restrictive voter ID provisions from the comprehensive version of the SAVE Act.
Here’s the truth that no Republican will mutter out loud — the Congressional “insider trading bill” was dead the second Democrats rolled Trump into the group of people who could no longer manipulate the stock market. At this moment in time, very few members of the Republican Party are willing to stand up against Trump on any issue, so they have tanked the bill with this ridiculous “voter ID amendment” and then blamed Democrats for rewriting the bill and then sinking it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sums it up perfectly: “Republicans are trying to pull a trick this week. They say we are voting on an ‘insider trading’ bill, but have snuck in massive SAVE Act-style voter suppression measures to it.” AOC continues, “This is a GOP effort to sabotage national mail-in voting, disguised as a trading ban. I’m voting NO.”
“If [the] GOP were at all serious about the insider trading issue, they would put it up on its own for a vote,” says AOC. “They know adding voter suppression to it will sabotage the effort to ban insider trading, she continues. “That’s exactly why they’re doing it this way. Don’t fall for it. Spread the word.”
It would be amazing if all of the constituents in Republican Districts would call their representatives’ local offices and tell them they see right through this scheme, you know, to add an even greater sense of “Beware the Ides of March” foreboding and overwhelming doom as the Midterm elections approach. Right now, please send this article to everyone to make sure we are doing our part to spread the word.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
Make a One Time SHERO Tribute Now
Paid subscriptions allow me to keep publishing critical and informative work that is sometimes made available to the public — thank you. If you like this piece and you want to further support independent journalism, you can forward this article to others, get a paid subscription if you don’t already have one or send a gift subscription to someone else today.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.