House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is demanding that any legislation that bans members of Congress from trading stocks be “government-wide,” Fox Business reports.  

Pelosi made the demand at a news conference held at the Capitol on Wednesday. There, she indicated that the House was making progress towards passing a piece of legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks.

Pelosi suggested that she would only support the legislation if it applied to all branches of government, including the judiciary.

“The third branch of government, the judiciary, has no reporting. The Supreme Court has no disclosure. It has no reporting of stock transactions. And it makes important decisions every day,” she said.

Background

There has been a bipartisan push to pass legislation banning members of Congress from trading stocks. This push has been driven by what happened in the early days of the pandemic when several U.S. lawmakers traded health-related stocks after seemingly receiving insider information during non-public briefings on the coronavirus.

There is already a piece of legislation that is supposed to prevent this sort of thing from happening. It is called the STOCK Act, and it was passed in 2012.

One of the problems with the STOCK Act, however, was recently raised by a bipartisan group of House members in a letter calling upon Pelosi to pass legislation to fix it. The group wrote:

The law prohibits only those stock trades that members of Congress make or direct because of their nonpublic knowledge. But, it can be nearly impossible to determine what counts as ‘nonpublic knowledge’ or how personally involved members are in their stock trades.

To highlight this problem, a report from Business Insider found that 55 members of Congress have violated the STOCK Act. Yet, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has found no wrongdoing.

Several members of Congress, from both parties, have proposed legislation to fix this problem. Now, the House is looking to see if it can put together a piece of legislation that most would agree on.

Pelosi’s reversal

Initially, Pelosi was firmly against the idea of banning members of Congress from trading stocks. It is well-known that Pelosi’s husband has been extremely successful at stock trading.

More recently, however, Pelosi has exhibited a willingness to at least consider such legislation. However, it looks as though the only way she is going to go along with it is if it applies to all members of the government.

It appears that if Pelosi can’t make money trading stocks, she doesn’t want anyone else in the federal government doing so either.