A Bill to Ban Congressional Stock Trading Failed 53-47. It Would Have Let Members Keep What They Already Own.

The Senate blocked a bill Wednesday that would have stopped members of Congress from buying new individual stocks while in office. The cloture motion to advance the Stop Insider Trading Act got 53 votes, seven short of the 60 required. Every Democrat and independent voted no.

Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska filed the bill in March with six Republican cosponsors. Its mechanics are specific: members would owe seven to fourteen days' public notice before selling any stock, filed with the House Clerk or Senate Secretary. A violation would cost the greater of $2,000 or 10 percent of the transaction's value, plus forfeiture of any gain made during the holding period.

What the ban would not have touched

Democrats' objection was not to the idea of a ban. It was to what the bill left standing. Members could keep every share they already held. They could still buy and sell private companies, which carry no public reporting requirement at all. And because the bill defines a covered official as a Member of Congress, it never reaches the president, whose trading has drawn more attention this year than anyone else's in Washington.

None of that volume falls under S. 4134. The bill's authors did not write the presidency into its coverage, and no amendment tried to add it. The Trump Organization says outside advisers run the accounts without the president's involvement.

“The Republican bill is as ineffective as a screen door on a submarine.”

Schumer's larger complaint was about what Republicans had attached to the stock trading language. House Republicans combined the Stop Insider Trading Act with the Voter ID Act, which mirrors SAVE Act provisions requiring proof of citizenship to register and photo identification at the polls. Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island called the pairing a sham and the voter identification language voter suppression on the floor.

The House had passed the combined bill 232 to 198 on July 22, with 13 Democrats joining nearly every Republican. That is more bipartisan support than the stock trading half drew on its own three months later, once the Senate forced a vote on the whole package rather than the two pieces separately.

The Republican case

Majority Leader John Thune defended the bill as a standard members should meet, telling reporters Democrats "can't take yes for an answer" and were trying to "politicize everything going into the election." Bryan Steil, chairman of the House Administration Committee and the bill's lead House sponsor, put it more plainly in a statement after the vote: "No lawmaker should be able to profit off of insider information. I'm encouraged that 53 senators voted to ban members of Congress from trading stocks this afternoon. Unfortunately, Senate Democrats filibustered this commonsense ethics reform."

Steil's framing leaves out why Democrats had the votes to filibuster in the first place. Senate Democrats who back a stock trading ban in principle, including several who cosponsored Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley's competing bill requiring members to divest rather than just stop buying, voted against this version specifically because of the voter ID language, not the trading restrictions.

This is not the only stock trading proposal stuck in Congress. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley's stricter bill, which would ban members from owning individual stocks at all rather than just buying new ones, has sat in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee without a vote. Merkley's bill has gone nowhere since Democrats first introduced it years ago. Three different versions, from the loosest to the strictest, have now stalled in three different ways.

Ricketts spent part of his career at TD Ameritrade, the brokerage his father founded, before two terms as Nebraska's governor and his 2023 appointment to the Senate seat Ben Sasse vacated. He built the bill's public case around removing the appearance that lawmakers trade on information the public does not have. That case was not what failed Wednesday. The bill failed over a voter ID provision Republicans chose to attach to it, and a list of carve-outs, existing holdings, private companies, the presidency itself, that neither party could agree were narrow enough to call the job done.