Will Congress ban itself from trading stocks?
An unusually bipartisan push.
Good morning! It’s Friday, January 17, 2025. Inauguration Day is three days away.
Breaking news: The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the bipartisan law requiring TikTok be banned in the U.S. if it isn’t sold by its Chinese parent company.
The ban is set to take effect on Sunday, although last-minute confusion has cropped up amid reports that President Biden — who signed the law and had never indicated any previous opposition to it — will decline to enforce it. As I previewed earlier this week, President-elect Trump’s allies have also signaled similar plans once he takes office.
I already covered President Biden’s farewell address in yesterday’s newsletter — if you missed it, catch up below:
But this morning, I want to call attention to an interesting line in the president’s speech that hasn’t received as much coverage:
“We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they’re in the Congress,” Biden said, during a section calling for other government and ethics reforms.
This was odd. No, not because of the policy itself. Banning members of Congress from trading stocks is hugely popular: according to a University of Maryland poll, 86% of Americans support the idea — 81% of Independents, 87% of Republicans, and 88% of Democrats. Not many proposals get those kinds of numbers.
What’s odd here is why, if Biden felt this issue was so important as to merit a mention in his final major speech, he waited so long to say anything.
In fairness, this isn’t the first time Biden has endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading. Except… that first time was only last month, in an interview with the progressive group A More Perfect Union. Joe Biden served in Congress for 36 years (during which, it should be noted, he did not trade stocks), then four years as vice president, and then four years as president — and is only mentioning his support for the policy change now, at the twilight of a decades-long career.
Back in 2022, when Biden’s party controlled both chambers of Congress, a congressional stock-trading ban was gaining bipartisan momentum, amid revelations that nearly one-fifth of lawmakers had reported trades by themselves or their immediate family members in stocks that intersected with the work of committees they sat on.
The push was ultimately killed by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — at least at the time, a close Biden ally — who scoffed at a ban, then later signaled support under pressure, and eventually allowed a compromise proposal to be released at the last minute, but then never brought it to the floor for a vote. (Pelosi’s millionaire husband is a prolific trader, often buying and selling stocks that intersect with his wife’s work.)
At the time, Biden refused to take a position. “He’ll let members of the leadership in Congress and members of Congress determine what the rules should be,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in January 2022. Democrats ended their period of united government without advancing anything on the issue.
As Republicans prepare for their turn with a trifecta, will 2025 be the year that lawmakers ban themselves from trading stocks?
Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX) and Seth Magaziner (D-RI) both hope so, which is why they re-introduced the bipartisan TRUST in Congress Act this week, which would require members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to either divest from individual stock holdings or move their investments into a blind trust while they serve in Congress.
Magaziner told me that it was a mistake — on both political and policy grounds — for Democrats not to embrace the proposal at the beginning of the Biden era. “I think that it was a missed opportunity when Democrats had unified control of Congress and the White House, that we did not do this,” Magaziner told me on the Hill this week. “And so we may have, as a party, hurt our image with the public by not passing strong ethics reforms when we had the chance to do it.”
(Magaziner, who entered office in January 2023, refused to speculate on why the Democrats declined to push the issue when they had the chance. “That was before my time,” he told me.)
At a Wednesday press conference with Magaziner, Roy offered a similar warning to his party. “Republicans need to move this bill this year, or they own this issue,” Roy said. “Then they’re telling the American people that they believe that members of Congress should be actively trading stocks while they’re voting and deciding the measures that would enrich themselves or their family members.”
“This is the year to get it done, so let’s get it done.”
Roy is an interesting figure to be pushing this proposal: a perpetual thorn in Republican leadership’s side, he was one of nine lawmakers who withheld their votes for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) until the last minute, an apparent warning shot at the speaker. (Nine is also the number of Republicans needed to trigger a vote on ousting Johnson.) “Today was ‘team player day,’” he tweeted after the vote, suggesting that the spirit of unity wouldn’t last forever.
“We’ve got lots of issues we need to move forward…I’ll give a little grace here in the first month or two,” Roy said at the Wednesday press conference, before adding: “But this is a bill that needs to move this year.”
When I asked, Roy declined to outline what it would look like when he stopped giving Johnson “grace” on this issue. “I’m not going to game out what I might do strategically to move the bill, but they know we need to move the bill,” he told me.
Is this something he would move to oust Johnson over?
“I’m not going to play those games right now,” he said. “There are a lot bigger-ticket items that might raise my ire.”
But, at the press conference, he did elude to the influence he wields, as one of the members in a fragile majority who has been willing to hold leadership’s feet to the fire. “There’s no room now for any excuses,” Roy said. “It’s time for us to deliver, and you know, I’ll just be kind of blunt. I’ve never had any real trouble forcing an issue if I’ve decided to put my full effort into forcing an issue, and it’s time to force the issue.”
Both Roy and Magaziner told me their first preference was to go through “regular order,” but both opened the door to a discharge petition — which forces a vote on a bill if a majority of House members sign on — if Johnson declines to schedule a vote.
“I don’t believe in discharge petitions when you’re in the majority,” Roy said. “But I’m hearing a few of my colleagues rattling about discharge petitions for other issues, and if they play that game, then everybody can play that game.”
Several other proposals have emerged to tackle the issue, all of them bipartisan. Reps. Zach Nunn (R-IA) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) introduced a version on Thursday that would fully ban members of Congress and their spouses from holding or trading individual stocks (without an exception for blind trusts), while also extending the length of time that former members of Congress are banned from lobbying.
Last year, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed a bipartisan bill — led by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) — that would have banned stock trading by the president and vice president, as well as lawmakers, their spouses, and dependents.
Roy and Magaziner said they were open to working with the sponsors of those other versions, adding that the sheer number of bipartisan proposals reflects the broad-based support for the broader concept. “When I was on the campaign trail in Texas, Florida, Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York, Georgia, a whole bunch of other places, [this was the] number-one applause line,” Roy said at the press conference. “People are just tired of watching this occur.”
Magaziner, whose predecessor’s stock trades stoked controversy during his tenure, told me the same thing. “This is an issue that I campaigned on when I first ran for Congress in 2022,” he said. “Just from talking with voters, this kept coming up: voters brought it up to me, I brought it up when I was campaigning. The more I brought it up, the more the voters were responding positively to it.”
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The day ahead
President Biden will deliver remarks at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, likely one of his last public speeches as he prepares to leave office on Monday.
Vice President Harris has nothing on her schedule.
President-elect Trump will meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) in Mar-a-Lago. Trump has previously expressed openness to pardoning Adams, who — like Trump — has been indicted by the Justice Department.
The Senate will hold a cloture vote on the Laken Riley Act, which would require federal authorities to detain undocumented migrants arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting. The measure will require 60 “yea” votes to advance.
The House is off for the week.
“Only five reporters braved the frigid cold to cover the (outdoor!) Magaziner-Roy press conference. But covering bipartisan legislation like theirs is exactly what I promised you I’d do when I received credentialed to cover Congress” Congrats on keeping your promise and reporting on this bipartisan effort with your trademark detail and context, Gabe. So glad you’re in a place in your self-made career to ask pointed questions of our lawmakers!!
Here is my contribution to protest. Today I’m canceling Facebook. If I had X I would do that
Do we really need them anyway. I lived 40 years without them
Finally if I got more than one package a month I would order less from Amazon
Just putting my money where my mouth is