Lawmakers make another run at banning their colleagues from trading stocks

After an anticlimactic end to the issue in 2022, Congress is again setting up another debate over policing stock trading among lawmakers.

So far this year, three bills have been formally introduced to ban lawmakers from trading as the headlines keep coming. This week, it was the news that Paul Pelosi, husband of Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sold 30,000 shares of Google just weeks before the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the company.

So far, the efforts on the bill range from a partisan effort designed to provoke Pelosi to another proposing broad ethics reforms. But it's the reintroduction of a bipartisan effort that could be the most likely way to actually address the issue.

“I think their cynicism is well founded because Congress doesn't like to police itself," said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), one the lead co-sponsors of the bipartisan effort, about Americans' skepticism. She sat down with Yahoo Finance Friday morning in her Capitol Hill office to discuss the campaign to get it enacted.

In conversations with her colleagues, she tells them: “I'm not impugning your integrity, I'm recognizing that the American people question our integrity."

This is a third go-around on the issue for Spanberger and her co-sponsor Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX). Their bill is called The TRUST in Congress Act that would require members of Congress as well as their family members to put their investments into a qualified blind trust during their time in Congress.

As of Friday, the bill had signed on nearly 50 lawmakers, including eight Republicans and 39 Democrats. Their approach is similar to a bill from Sens. Jon Ossof (D-GA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) that was introduced last year in the Senate.

Three efforts from across the ideological spectrum

In addition to the Spanberger/Roy effort, there’s also a bill from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that seems more focused on the former House Speaker than on finding bipartisan support. His bill is called the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act — the PELOSI act, for short.