Hawley and Hartzler: Ban stock trading in Congress

Last year, lawmakers in Washington bought over $267 million and sold $364 million in assets. One of the worst offenders is the Democratic House Speaker. In 2020, Speaker Pelosi and her husband managed to outperform the S&P 500 by a whopping 14.3 percent. That’s unusual. Making matters worse, almost 65 percent of her family’s investments are in Big Tech companies. One of Pelosi’s biggest gains came when her husband exercised options to purchase shares of Google, just one week before the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on antitrust legislation that would impact Big Tech. Regardless of her decision-making process, what you can’t deny is the clear appearance of a conflict of interest.

Americans don’t trust Congress. Last year, the number who did was just five percent. It’s not hard to see why. With corporate lobbying, billions of dollars in dark money, and rampant stock trading by members, voters simply do not believe that their representatives are working for them. That needs to change.

Clean government in Washington begins with members of Congress putting their financial interests on the back-burner. Working for the people is not about getting rich. It’s about putting the American people first in every decision, all the time. If there is even a whiff of a conflict of interest, then we must end it.

Year after year, politicians like Speaker Pelosi somehow manage to outperform the market, buying and selling millions in stocks of companies they’re supposed to be regulating. In 2021 alone, 105 members of Congress made stock transactions worth nearly $290 million. Of those, 35 members of Congress outperformed the S&P 500 in their trades. It is time to end this corrupt practice for politicians. The laws on the books we have today just don’t do the trick. All they require is infrequent disclosures, and penalties for noncompliance can be just $200. Dozens of our colleagues just ignore the rules entirely.

Yet, Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that she thinks Congress is doing nothing wrong. She has said that it’s a free market and that members of Congress should enjoy it. But the American people disagree — a recent poll found that 67 percent of Americans support a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, and they are right. It is clear that politicians with access to classified briefings and privileged information have an unfair advantage when playing the stock market.

One of the most basic things that we should be able to expect is that people who serve in Congress will be focused on actually doing what the people want and not on lining their own pockets. That is why we have introduced the Banning Insider Trading in Congress Act. This legislation will prohibit members of Congress and their spouses from holding, acquiring or selling stocks during their tenure in elected office. Instead, members can put their savings into broad-based mutual funds, like those used by most Americans, or place their assets in blind trusts during their tenure in office. Members of Congress who violate this law will be required to forfeit all of their stock profits to the U.S. Treasury, returning all their gains to the people they are supposed to represent.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, “There can be no offense heavier than that of him in whom such a sacred trust has been reposed, who sells it for his own gain and enrichment.” We should heed this same call for a higher standard for our elected officials. It is time to restore the American people’s trust in their representatives and end stock trading in Congress.

Josh Hawley is a U.S. Senator from Missouri. Vicky Hartzler is a U.S. Representative from central Missouri.