(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is slow-rolling legislation to regulate congressional stock trading, announcing that the House and Senate in September will consider the issue, but refusing to offer details, the New York Post reported.
For months Pelosi has remained non-committal about banning Congress members from trading stocks despite promising action on insider trading, from which she and her husband, financier and drunk driver Paul Pelosi, have reaped millions.
“We believe we have a product that we can bring to the floor this month,” she said, adding in response to a journalist’s request for more details: “You know what? When the bill comes out, you’ll see what it is.”
Some commentators have speculated that Pelosi will present a several-hundred page bill with conflicting requirements and obscure regulations, all with the intended effect that she can take credit for an anti-insider trading bill while continuing to amass huge profits.
Even Democrats, like Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., recognize that Pelosi has stalled legislation on congressional stock trading while speaking as if she plans to act on it, according to the Post.
In a new report, the New York Times perhaps understated the insider-trading problem when it claimed that about 100 representatives and senators bought or sold stock that conflicted with their legislative and oversight duties from 2019 to 2021.
Other members on the list, like Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., also yell and tweet about the need to ban congressional stock trading, as they text their financial gurus to purchase stock in the companies that Congress will prop up in the next appropriation’s bill.
Khanna, who received huge donations from finance companies to get elected, traded stocks from 900 companies about 10,500 times. The NYT report found that 149 trades may conflict with his congressional duties.
Pelosi may take the heat for stalling the bill, but few members have a real desire to pass it.
As an anonymous Washington insider explained: “You’re not getting members of Congress to self-regulate the money they can or can’t make. Why would they do something that doesn’t benefit them?”
