When we elect our representatives and send them to the U.S. Congress (assuming you aren't a resident of Washington, D.C. and don’t have full congressional representation but should!), we want them to make decisions in our best interest — the public interest.
After all, that’s what we are paying them to do. If we wanted someone to make decisions for the benefit of their own stock portfolio, we might prefer to send them to a stockbroker or financial adviser, not Congress.
Yet, members of Congress continue to hold and trade stocks while placing few restrictions on themselves, and members’ behavior continues to undermine our public trust. Members make trillion-dollar decisions that affect our economy and our everyday lives; we shouldn’t have to worry about whether members are being unduly influenced by their stock portfolios or taking inappropriate advantage of their knowledge in Washington to line their pockets at the expense of the public good.
In President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech tomorrow night, one of the things I'll be listening for is whether President Biden asks Congress to pass solutions to address congressional stock trading. President Barack Obama made a similar ask to Congress 10 years ago during his State of the Union address, in response to criticism about congressional stock trades surrounding the late-2000s financial crisis. Congress responded by passing the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012.
CLC has been calling attention to problematic stock trading and apparent lawbreaking by members of Congress since the beginning of the pandemic. In early 2020, we reviewed financial disclosure reports of congressional stock transactions and found that, as COVID-19 cases began to increase throughout the country, Senators and Representatives from both sides of the aisle traded securities — many related to the pandemic itself, such as those tied to remote work technologies, telemedicine companies and car manufacturers that were shifting their production to ventilators.
In the months that followed, CLC filed numerous complaints against members of both parties alleging violations of the STOCK Act, which is supposed to help guarantee voters’ right to know what financial transactions their elected representatives are making and how these might be influencing members.
However, it has become clear that the STOCK Act is not working as Congress intended it to and is not addressing the appearance of corruption in Congress. This month, CLC’s ethics team published a three-part explainer about the STOCK Act, its history, its shortcomings and solutions that could help address the problems. I highly recommend you check out Part 1,Part 2 and Part 3 linked here. Our attorneys will help catch you up on this law, why we care about it and why it's not working as well as we’d hoped.
It’s clear that we need solutions to restore public confidence in members of Congress, and thankfully, we are not the only ones who think so!
In November, CLC commissioned a poll and found that 67% of voters favor banning Congress members from owning stock in specific companies, and nearly all agree about the importance of ethics enforcement. Additionally, in the past few weeks, we've seen exciting, bipartisan movement on this issue. New bills have been introduced by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. The media is paying attention, and CLC is playing a leading role in educating the press and the public about the need for solutions.
CLC will continue to push Congress on solutions, and we hope to see this through to the finish line. We are increasingly optimistic that members of Congress, and leadership, will act on the enormous pressure being placed on them to fix this problem.
Voters have a right to know that their representatives are fulfilling their obligations to public service and not using their position in a way that fosters the appearance of corruption. Our hope at CLC is that Congress will finally enact changes to address this problem for good.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center is dedicated to advancing democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
