For years, imposing a stock trading ban on members of Congress has been one of those few bipartisan issues on Capitol Hill where Republicans and Democrats seem to agree but are never capable of doing anything.
So when Republicans passed a bill Wednesday to prohibit members from buying new stocks, it seemed like a significant milestone.
But Democrats argued the measure was less a genuine attempt to rein in financial conflicts than a partisan messaging exercise — particularly because Republicans attached a national voter ID provision to the bill.
The House passed this stock trading legislation on Wednesday, 232-198, with 218 Republicans, 13 Democrats and one independent voting yes. All 198 no votes came from Democrats.
But as Democrats repeatedly pointed out, the measure would not amount to a full stock trading ban — and would not even prevent members from owning individual stocks.
Instead, the GOP bill would bar members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children from purchasing new stocks while in office. It would not prohibit lawmakers from holding stocks they already own or selling their existing positions. And the bill would also require states to establish national voter ID requirements, a provision Republicans have championed as part of the SAVE America Act.
Still, GOP leaders were quick to take a victory lap on their bill.
“Democrats only talk about corruption. Republicans are actually delivering real solutions to actually restore the public’s faith in our institutions because we believe in this country,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said Tuesday.
A ban on members of Congress trading stock has been a priority for many lawmakers for years. In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the STOCK Act, which placed insider trading guardrails on members of Congress and mandated disclosure of certain financial transactions. The legislation did not, however, ban trading stocks.
Ever since then, Republicans and Democrats have been trying to take the STOCK Act further. In this current Congress alone, lawmakers in the House and the Senate have introduced dozens of bills aimed at regulating lawmaker investments.
Democrats repeatedly argued Wednesday that the GOP’s bill fell short because it did not apply to the president or vice president — a criticism aimed squarely at President Donald Trump, who has made thousands of stock trades while in office.
“He’s an organized crime boss,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said of Trump last week. “And House Democrats are going to hold him accountable and are going to clean up corruption and make sure that when we pass a stock trading ban, it will apply to members of Congress, along with the president, the vice president and members of his corrupt administration.”
The GOP bill’s sponsor, Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., responded to Democratic criticism by saying the bill is a first step in broader ethics reform.
“This is the Goldilocks argument that we hear,” Steil said Wednesday on CNBC. “They say it’s a good bill, but it doesn’t go far enough. I say let’s take a step forward and then continue the work.”
While Democrats objected to the scope of the legislation, they said Republicans made the bill impossible to support by attaching the voter ID provision.
“If Republicans were serious about ending stock trading by government officials, they would not have attached a subsection of the SAVE America Act as a poison pill,” said Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee.
Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the bill a “Trojan horse,” saying it uses “the premise of congressional ethics reform to advance a broader effort to restrict access to the ballot box.”
“This legislation is not a genuine congressional stock trading ban; it is a legislative vehicle for continuing Republicans’ onslaught of voting restrictions, with devastating consequences for Black and other minority communities,” Clarke said.
Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., the co-sponsor of an alternative bipartisan stock trading ban proposal, also contended the GOP bill had become about voter suppression.
“What the Republican leadership has done this week is put in this voter suppression bill and include some very loose restrictions on stock trading as well, so that they could call it a stock trading ban and try to trick everybody into thinking that this is a good bill when it’s really a voter suppression bill,” Magaziner said in a video on X.
Even Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie called out the GOP, saying Republicans added the voter ID language to the bill so that Democrats would vote against it, the legislation would go nowhere, and Republicans could use the vote in the midterms.
“If we really wanted to ban stock trading for members of Congress, we would offer stand alone legislation and could get a large bipartisan majority, and the bill would have a chance of passing on the Senate. But today we have political theater cooked up by 25 yr old staffers,” he posted on X.
A vote on the bill was a long-term goal for the Republicans after they tried to tone down momentum built at the end of 2025 for Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Magaziner’s bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act. That bill would ban members of Congress from trading stock and require them to offload their existing stocks within 180 days of it becoming law.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., tried to force a vote on the bipartisan legislation through a discharge petition in December, which currently only has 84 signatures of the requisite 218.
House Republicans attempted to quell this momentum by positioning the Stop Insider Trading Act as their signature stock trading legislation, advancing it out of committee in January and earning Trump’s endorsement during his State of the Union speech.
The Republicans involved in the bipartisan legislation, like Luna, appear content — for now — with the more scaled-back measure.
“After the kicking and screaming, Rep. [Tim] Burchett and I endured, finally got a vote on it,” Luna said in a post on X.
But again, Democrats accused Republicans of choosing theater over results.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said if Republicans brought the bipartisan bill to the floor that had stricter requirements, the legislation would actually pass.
“And Republicans would have to admit that their bill does nothing,” Jayapal said.
Lillie Boudreaux contributed to this report.
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