Representatives Abigail Spanberger and Chip Roy don’t often find themselves fighting on the same side.
Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, and Roy, a conservative Republican from Texas, support a bill that would ban legislators from trading stocks in public companies to keep them from profiting from the insider knowledge they're privy to on Capitol Hill.
Both are lining up behind legislation proposed by freshman Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., which would require lawmakers and their immediate family members to put any stocks they own in blind trusts, eliminating any perceived conflicts of interest.
“When we’re going to briefings about issues that might be percolating in the world or when we’re voting on legislation that could potentially move markets, it just seems inappropriate to me that we currently have the ability to be able to buy or sell stocks that may or may not be associated with those decisions,” Spanberger told NBC News in an interview.
Spanberger introduced similar legislation in the House last year, called the Trust in Congress Act, which Roy cosponsored.
Congress tried to regulate stock trading by its members nearly a decade ago when the Stock Act became law to combat insider trading. But lawmakers still buy and sell hundreds of millions in stocks every single year, including at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when they received detailed closed-door briefings before the rest of the country understood the scope of the disease.
“We’re voting on this stuff every single day. And yet people are buying and selling stocks or buying and selling Pfizer while we’re in the middle of the pandemic, like, how is that OK?” Roy said during an interview with NBC News.
A typical Stock Act violation rarely exceeds a fine of a few hundred dollars.
The FBI investigated Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., for stock trades made in February 2020 at the start of the Covid pandemic. The Department of Justice declined to press charges. Burr claimed he made the stock trades based on public information available from media reports.
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