California Democrat Nancy Pelosi has come under fire for years over her controversial and well-timed stock trades. Now, several of her Democratic allies are joining Republicans to introduce legislation this week banning U.S. lawmakers and members of the executive branch from owning stock while in office.
Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are set to introduce the legislation in the Senate, which would prohibit those affected from owning stocks in individual companies, even through a blind trust, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Senators, representatives, staffers on Capitol Hill, the president, the vice president, and members of the executive branch would all be subject to the law.
“It is critical that the American people know that their elected leaders are putting the public first,” Gillibrand told the Wall Street Journal in a statement, adding, “not looking for ways to line their own pockets.”
“Members of Congress and their spouses shouldn’t be using their position to get rich on the stock market,” Hawley said.
“The series of bills comes after revelations last year that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, traded between $1 million and $5 million of stocks for semiconductors just days before Congress allocated $52 million to the industry. The stocks were later sold at a loss to remove the appearance of impropriety,” Fox News reported.
Pelosi, in particular, has come under fire numerous times for her controversial and well-timed stock trades.
Pelosi attracted attention with yet another strategically timed stock transaction.
Pelosi sold over 30,000 shares of Google stock, according to a sale she declared in late December, just three weeks before the Justice Department and eight states announced their intention to sue Alphabet, Google’s parent company, for antitrust violations.
As Pelosi’s husband racked up many suspicious well-timed trades that made a lot of money, the Daily Beast noted how Pelosi and other Democrats “dragged their feet last year and ultimately did nothing” to pass anything on banning stock trades for lawmakers.
Several Democrats are also on board with a bill of some kind to address this problem.
Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said many Democrats are on board with the idea and have been open to working out the fine details.
“We’re not getting any sharp pushback,” said Fitzpatrick, who co-chairs the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. “It’s more like the devil’s-in-the-details kind of thing.”
Last month, New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined forces with Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz and others on a bill to block members of Congress and their families from stock trading.
“The bill, the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act, would prohibit financial investments by members of Congress, their spouses, and any of their dependents. It continues a string of legislation that has been introduced over the past few years to target the issue,” The Hill reported.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy previously said there will be an investigation into the Pelosis stock trading.
“I would look through it,” he said of the Democrat proposal to ban stock trading for spouses of Congress members. “What I’ve told everybody is we will come back, and we will not only investigate this, we will come back with a proposal to change the current behavior.”
“Her husband can trade all the way through, but now it becomes a crisis?” he said. “I think what her husband did was wrong.”
“I think we need to bring trust back to this institution,” he added. “I think we have to do a thorough investigation and look at what is the proper role for members of Congress and what influence they have, and I don’t think the proper way to do this is Nancy Pelosi writing the bill because we have proven that she can not do that.”
