A presidential election year is upon us yet again, and the Iowa caucuses are freshly over, moving us one step closer to the rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump that nobody’s looking forward to. Yet no matter the groaning and griping, there’s really no better time than right now to refocus our attention onto the policy issues at stake rather than the polling numbers. 

To start us off right, I’d like to tell you about an issue a shocking number of us agree on. It’s consistently pushed off the agenda, hard to enforce with today’s regulations and yet supported by 86% of Americans: banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

The same thing that sent Martha Stewart to prison faster than she could frost a sugar cookie is what the public sees their elected officials very likely doing year after year, recession after recession. While the public at large (even myself, the one time I made a “decent guess” buying a single share of Pfizer) uses news headlines, current global conflicts and advice to profit from their investments, the insider knowledge Congress members are privy to gives them a criminally unfair advantage.

Where the line gets blurred, however, is how a member of Congress can differentiate between the public information we all get and what they become aware of through closed-door congressional committee meetings and dialogues with other financial and government officials, well before it reaches the public. We will never know for sure — and the uncertainty alone has left plenty of us uncomfortable with the notion of our leaders trading stocks while in office at all. 

Democrat, Republican, representative, senator — some of our most well-known and highest- ranking names in politics have been publicly scrutinized for suspicious stock transactions during financial crises. Former speakers of the House John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi were even confronted directly about it during press briefings as part of a penetrating “60 Minutes” exposé. 

It’s one of these actions that killed former Senator Kelly Loeffler’s Georgia runoff campaign in 2020. There’s not too many ways to spin attending a closed-door hearing on the coronavirus pandemic one day, and then just “happening” to sell millions of dollars of shares the next, no matter how exactly the money is exchanged.

“I do not make investment decisions for my portfolio,” the Senator said in a statement during her campaign. “Investment decisions are made by multiple third-party advisors without my or my husband’s knowledge or involvement … As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16, 2020 — three weeks after they were made.”

These “periodic transaction reports” are partly the byproduct of the 2012 STOCK Act, passed with significant bipartisan support (96-3 Senate, 417-2 House) and signed into law by President Obama. It mandates all securities transactions valued over $1,000 to be disclosed to the public within 45 days of the transaction, but as of now, there is no information in the current law about an outright ban on trading, no matter what committee a senator or representative might sit on. 

Is this enough? Does it erase culpability, even if we can see what members of Congress are doing every month?

According to an editorial written by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, “In the decade since [the STOCK Act] was passed, it has provided greater transparency into the stock trading activities of our elected officials, yet it has also highlighted why transparency alone is not enough to prevent the appearance of corruption – or the actual occurrence of corruption.”

By the sheer amount of money being traded alone, it’s fair to say we have a right to be angry if our elected officials are profiting off of sensitive information that the rest of us don’t have. Whether an illegal act was explicitly committed or not, it’s hard to deny the potential is sitting right there to use financially helpful information to their own advantage, and that it’s a safe bet to assume humans, especially those we give our highest political power to, will act in their self-interest.

We also have to recognize and make peace with the fact that classified and non-public information is a part of our representatives’ job descriptions, as it is for officials at all levels of government — effective governance and crisis management has to involve private meetings within tight-knit committees.

Both these truths should be acknowledged in tandem; together, they spell out a compelling argument for outright bans on congressional trading at all.

Difficult is an understatement when we consider that the only way to pass laws and ethics regulations surrounding congressional stock trading is for the alleged “culprits” to do it themselves. 

Georgians did a great job of holding Loeffler accountable for the suspicious trading activity during the last presidential election year — but they had the help of an advertising campaign that eventually cemented their 2020 runoffs as the most expensive in the history of the entire Senate. But for the time being, we need to keep reviewing the new options on the table and mobilize support for them, even if it’s as simple as calling your congressional representatives, reposting a press release or talking about it at the dinner table.

A fantastic place to start would be with another Georgian’s efforts; Senator Jon Ossoff, with Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, introduced the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act in September 2023, “which will require all members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to place their stocks into a blind trust or divest the holding — ensuring they cannot use inside information to influence their stock trades and make a profit,” according to its press release.

It’s up to us to keep congressional trading on the policy agenda — and that obligation doubles when so many of us agree on where to go next. 

CJ Haddad is a junior writing about local, state and federal laws we use in our daily lives. She is also the managing editor at the Daily Trojan. Her column, “Public Disclosure,” runs every other Thursday.