Congress Still Trades Stocks. One Republican Is Trying to Force a Vote Before Christmas.

Members of Congress can still buy and sell individual stocks while they write the laws that move those stocks. Most Americans figured that out years ago, and most of them hate it. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna just said she’s done waiting on the Senate to fix it.

“We have 5 weeks to pass a ban on Stock Trading in Congress,” the Florida Republican posted Thursday morning, with a video. “The Senate FAILED TO PASS this. Therefore, I will be bringing forward a discharge petition that includes the entire legislative executive branch.” She tagged Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee.

That last part is the news. Luna isn’t just asking for another vote on the bill the Senate already killed. She’s promising a version that reaches past Congress into the executive branch, which knocks out the main excuse Democrats gave for voting no the first time.

The House already did its part once

This fight has a paper trail. The House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, H.R. 7008, on July 22 by a vote of 232 to 198, according to the official record at Congress.gov. The bill came from Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the Republican who chairs the House Administration Committee. Only 13 Democrats voted for it.

What it does is simple enough. According to the Congressional Research Service summary of the bill, members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children would be barred from buying stock in publicly traded companies, and they’d have to give public notice before selling. Break the rule and you pay a fee of at least $2,000 or 10% of the trade, whichever is bigger, plus any profit you made. You can’t cover the fee with campaign money or your office budget. Broad funds that hold lots of companies, the kind of thing ordinary people have in a 401(k), stay legal.

Then it went to the Senate and died. On Sept. 30, the Senate voted 53 to 47 to take the bill up, seven votes short of the 60 it needed to get past a filibuster. Every Republican present voted yes. Every Democrat and independent voted no.

The excuses, and why they’re running out

Senate Democrats gave two main reasons. First, they said the bill didn’t go far enough. Lawmakers could hold on to stocks they already owned, and Democrats said that made it something short of a real ban. Second, Republicans had attached voter ID requirements to it, which Democrats called a poison pill.

Think about the first complaint for a second. A party says a stock ban is too weak, so it votes to keep the status quo, where there’s no ban at all. The result of that vote is that every senator who cast it can still buy whatever stock they want this afternoon.

Weeks later, after the election, Democrats discovered the issue again. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on Nov. 9 that “House Democrats will move to ban members of Congress from trading stock.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted Thursday that the president and every member of Congress should be banned from “owning, buying, or selling stocks.” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who voted no in September, wrote on Nov. 10 that “we need to ban presidents and members of Congress from stock trading.” Senate Republicans have been happy to point out the timing.

This is where Luna’s move gets smart. If the problem was that the House bill only covered Congress, she says hers covers the whole legislative and executive branches. If the problem was voter ID riding along, a clean stock trading petition takes that argument off the table too. A Democrat who says they want a ban would have a hard time explaining why they won’t sign one.

How a discharge petition goes around the leaders

A discharge petition is the House’s way of letting rank-and-file members force a vote that leadership or a committee is sitting on. Under House rules, a petition needs 218 signatures, a majority of the full House. Once it gets there, the bill goes to the floor whether party leaders like it or not.

There are hurdles. A measure generally has to sit in committee for 30 legislative days before a petition on it can be filed, and the House doesn’t have many legislative days left this year. Luna’s post didn’t say which bill her petition would carry or when she’ll file it, so the details are still to come. The quickest route would be a bill that’s already been waiting in committee long enough to qualify.

Luna knows how this works better than almost anyone in the building. She has made discharge petitions her calling card. Just this week she noted that the petition for the Major Richard Star Act, a bill for combat-injured veterans that she signed, now has enough signatures to force a floor vote. She’s also pushing a separate petition for congressional term limits.

The clock is the whole story

Five weeks is not much time. The House and Senate also have to deal with government funding, the defense bill and a pile of nominations before the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3. Every week the stock ban sits, the easier it is for everyone to say they ran out of time.

But the math on the House side isn’t as hard as it looks. The July bill got 232 votes, more than the 218 a petition needs, and Democrats in both chambers have now said, in public and on the record, that they want a ban. If even a slice of the Democrats who say they support a ban put their names on Luna’s petition, it reaches 218.

Then the question goes back to the Senate, where the same senators who said the first bill was too weak would be looking at a stronger one. They’d have to vote yes, or explain to voters back home why a stock ban covering Congress and the executive branch still isn’t good enough.

Voters of every stripe have wanted this for years. The people who write the tax code, hand out the defense contracts and get the classified briefings shouldn’t be day-trading on the side. Luna has put a date on it. The petition, once it’s filed, will show exactly who means it.