By voicing her opposition to a ban on stock trading by members of Congress, despite a recent report showing that nearly 50 senators and representatives have recently violated the weak existing laws around stock disclosures, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of our current political crisis and a troubling vision for the Democratic Party. After a Trump presidency in which corruption and self-dealing replaced any sense of the public interest, the logical, ethical, and indeed self-interested path for Democrats would be to ensure their party promoted and lived by the highest ethical standards possible, so as to draw the greatest possible contrast with a GOP that objected not at all to the former president’s betrayals of the public trust. After witnessing a four-year plundering of the public purse (think of all the Secret Service and other funds spent at Trump properties during his many, many visits to them) and foreign policy subordinated to Trump’s re-election strategy (think the Ukraine quid pro quo demand that led to his first impeachment), you would think that Democratic leaders would see rooting out and preventing corruption as a winning strategy for the party — an issue that ties together both financial shenanigans and acts of political malpractice.
Apparently, though, the virtues of clean government and drawing a razor-sharp contrast with the Republican Party are not so clear to Speaker Pelosi. While opposition to stricter laws on stock trading on congresspeople appears to be shared by a strong majority of House Democrats, and a charitable read on Pelosi’s position would be that she is simply voicing the sentiment of this majority, such abject surrender to a self-defeating position is the opposite of actual leadership. Banning stock trading by congresspeople is, simply put, the lowest of low-hanging fruit. The idea that members of Congress can buy and sell stocks in companies whose fortunes could be affected by the legislation they themselves pass sounds like a textbook definition of corruption. I would frankly be shocked if a majority of Americans would even believe that this is currently legal.
The STOCK Act, in place since 2012 and under which members of Congress are required to report the trades of themselves and family members within a certain time period, is obviously not working, if so many are failing to comply with it, and this lack of compliance with laughably lax requirements feeds the public’s fears of politicians not bound by the same rules as everyone else. But you could make the case that even if the STOCK Act were fully adhered to, it would actually still represent a form of legalized corruption — a flimsy substitute for truly ethically-minded laws that would protect voters from the risk that their representatives might confuse personal gain with public purpose.
Pelosi also told reporters that, “We’re a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that.” Ironically, this comment captures the scale of the corruption at the heart of the current arrangement. As Pelosi well knows, many aspects of our free-market economy are in fact governed by laws that Congress passes, whether they affect individual companies (as with spending bills) or whether they address the actual structure of the overall economy. The idea that politicians are free agents able to enjoy the fruits of a free economy, rather than stewards of this economy and working to make sure their constituents are the ones who benefit from it, inverts the way things are supposed to work in a democratic society.
Pelosi’s comments couldn’t come at a worse possible time, but at least they have the virtue of being clarifying. With the Democrats apparently shelving the Build Back Better act after it had dominated their agenda through much of the last year, the idea that the leader of the House Democrats has decided to emphatically embrace a corrupt stock trading setup for members of Congress strikes me, at least, as profoundly demoralizing. I guess it’s OK if Democrats don’t pass any laws to help the American people, as long as they can make money on the stock market based on their insider knowledge of rules, regulations, and pending legislation? That does not sound like a winning midterm strategy to me, and the fact that Democrats might feel insulated from GOP attacks on this front because Republicans, too, benefit from this unethical arrangement only highlights the Speaker’s breathtaking cynicism and failure to grasp the political moment. Pelosi’s statements yesterday are deeply offensive and troubling for anyone who supports a Democratic Party that fights for the common man, not the uncommonly lucky legislator.