Members of Congress can legally trade stocks in the industries they regulate.

The honest situation

The current rules are a license to do it.

The STOCK Act of 2012 requires members of Congress to disclose individual trades within 45 days. The penalty for filing late is a $200 fine that members routinely pay and move on. That is not a deterrent. That is a parking ticket on insider trading.

The volume tells the story. A 2022 New York Times investigation reviewed trades by members of Congress and their immediate families and found that roughly one in five were in industries the member’s committee directly oversaw. Groups including the Brennan Center and Campaign Legal Center have pointed to the same pattern. The people writing the rules for an industry are buying and selling shares in that industry while they write them.

This is not a partisan complaint. It is a structural one. The fix has to come from the people doing it, and they keep refusing to vote on it.

My pledge

A promise without a consequence is a press release.

Most candidates make pledges that cost them nothing if they break them. This one has teeth. The resignation clause is the teeth.

This is one of six planks in the pledge. Every federal candidate in the country gets asked, on the record, whether they’ll sign the full document.

Operationally, that means a few specific things voters can verify. Every household transaction above $1,000 gets published on the campaign and office website within 48 hours - not the 45 days federal law allows. An annual third-party accountant verification of compliance goes up publicly. The financial disclosure that members file in legalese gets republished in plain language on this site so a voter in Lake County can read it without a law degree.

What I’ll do federally

The bills already exist. The job is forcing the vote.

This is the rare disruption fight where the legislative work is mostly done. Multiple bills have already been drafted and introduced. The question is whether leadership in either chamber will let them reach the floor.

• Cosponsor the Restore Trust in Congress Act (Roy-Magaziner) in the House. Bans members and their spouses and dependent children from trading individual stocks. The bill has had broad bipartisan cosponsorship, and Tennessee’s own Tim Burchett is among its Republican supporters.
• Sign the Luna discharge petition. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed it in late 2025 to force a House floor vote over Speaker Johnson’s objections. It sits well short of the 218 signatures needed. Every member who refuses to sign is making a choice voters can see.
• Support the HONEST Act in the Senate (Hawley, originally the PELOSI Act). The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed it 8-7 on July 30, 2025. Hawley was the only Republican who voted yes. It is waiting on a floor vote that Majority Leadership has not scheduled.
• Refuse to defer to seniority when leadership stalls. Make it a public fight. Name the members slow-walking it. The shadow vote in House leadership against this bill is the actual story, and the press will cover it if a member of Congress is willing to point at it.

What I’ll do at the state and local level

If the law won’t make them stop, the daylight will.

Even with strong federal bills moving, the political pressure is still what gets them across the finish line. That pressure is built locally, candidate by candidate, county by county.

• A public trade tracker on this site. Every Periodic Transaction Report filed by every member of Congress, cross-referenced with that member’s committee assignments and recent votes. The federal filings are already public, just buried in PDFs in a hard-to-search system. Tools like House Stock Watcher, Capitol Trades, and Quiver Quantitative already do parts of this. A campaign tracker pulls the data into one place, names the committees, and makes the conflicts visible without a research subscription.
• A candidate sign-on pledge. Every Tennessee federal candidate gets asked, on the record, whether they will commit to no individual stock trading while in office. The answers go on this site. Refusal to sign is itself the answer, and voters can use it.
• A state-legislator version. Tennessee state legislators are not under the STOCK Act. There is currently no requirement for them to disclose individual trades at the speed federal members do. That is a state-law gap a freshman member of Congress can’t close alone, but can absolutely make a public argument about while running.
• An office-level disclosure standard. Senior staff in my office sign the same pledge. Chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and committee staff are routinely in the room when nonpublic information moves. The pledge applies to them too.

What I’ll push at the party level

Endorsement is a rule the party already gets to write.

The Tennessee Democratic Party doesn’t need state or federal legislation to act on this. Party rules already govern endorsements, and endorsements already function as a credibility marker voters can track. TNDP could require every endorsed federal candidate to sign the same no-trade pledge as a condition of endorsement. The endorsement gets pulled if the pledge gets broken.

That is a single decision by one state party committee. It does not need to pass a chamber, survive a filibuster, or wait on leadership. It is the kind of lever a state party can pull tomorrow if it chooses to.

The pushback I’m ready for

“A ban is unfair to members of modest means who need to manage their own investments.”

This pushback comes up at every committee hearing on every version of this bill. It deserves a real answer.

Index funds and diversified mutual funds outperform individual stock-picking over the long run for almost everyone who isn’t a full-time professional trader. That is not a campaign talking point. It is the consensus position of almost every reputable personal-finance advisor in the country. Anyone telling you they need to trade individual stocks to build retirement wealth is selling you something.

Congressional salary is $174,000 a year. That is more than double the U.S. median household income and well into the top ten percent of individual earners nationally. Members also get a federal pension and federal health benefits. The members who say they can’t do the job without the option to trade individual stocks are not describing a financial hardship. They are describing the loss of an upside that nobody outside Congress has access to with the same information advantages.

The blind trust argument has the same problem. Hawley said it plainly in committee in July - the rules on qualified blind trusts are loose enough that policing them is difficult. That is the Republican author of the leading bill describing the loophole his own bill closes. Diversified funds are how almost everyone outside Congress is already advised to build wealth. They are not a sacrifice. They are the baseline.

The other pushback

“A ban will discourage talented people from running for Congress.”

The premise of this argument is that talented people will only run for federal office if the option to trade on inside information stays available to them. Once you say the premise out loud, it answers itself.

Public service is a job with a public salary, public benefits, and a public obligation. Anyone who would refuse the job because they can’t personally profit off the information that comes with it is telling you what they would have done with that information. The argument also assumes that talent and access to nonpublic financial information are somehow connected, which they aren’t. The talents Congress needs are legislative skill, constituent service, and the willingness to do hard work in public. None of those require a brokerage account.

If a candidate can’t imagine doing the job without the trading upside, that candidate is describing exactly why the ban is needed.