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Izzi Olive

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    Congress

    Taking stock of congressional ethics

    Daniel Schuman
    Izzi Olive
    March 15, 2022
    Congressional stock trading

    Sen. Richard Burr is under investigation for selling millions of dollars in stocks following a briefing on Covid-19.

    Pool/Getty Images

    Schuman is policy director for Demand Progress. Olive is a writer and research assistant for the organization.

    Last year, 57 members of Congress and 182 senior-level congressional staffers violated the law requiring them to disclose their financial conflicts of interest, according to painstaking reporting from Business Insider. When first asked about the violations, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pooh-poohed the idea of prohibiting members from trading individual stocks, saying, “We are a free-market economy. [Members] should be able to participate in that.” In the months since, Pelosi has changed her public tune, asking one of her lieutenants to develop reform ideas behind closed doors.

    What caused the turnaround? A mounting number of lawmakers endorsed various proposals to stop members of Congress from using the privileged information they regularly receive to make outsized gains playing the market. Pelosi, whose husband’s trades in tech stocks have earned their family millions and who has long been reluctant to move forward these kinds of reforms, was the perfect vessel to spark public outrage at the perfect time.

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