House Republican lashes out at stock trading ban watered down by her own party

A meeting about a proposed ban on stock trading for members of Congress got heated on Wednesday, as some are accusing the bill of being watered down by changes.

The meeting of House members was to focus on new developments for a stock trading ban first introduced in September, according to a report from NOTUS. Ahead of time, Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, said that the bill would receive a markup, a process in which bills are debated and amended before being brought forward for a vote.

News of the changes that emerged out of this meeting, however, have not gone down well with everyone. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who did not attend the meeting in-person, attacked the markup on social media and claimed that the proposal was now too watered down.

“We got news that they are marking up and bring to the floor a [watered] down version with no teeth,” Luna wrote in a post on X. “Unacceptable.”

However the proposal proceeds, Luna has previously pledged to file a discharge petition to force a vote on the ban if House Speaker Mike Johnson does not bring it forward soon himself.

Despite Luna’s objections, other lawmakers remain committed to getting the proposal through.

“In this moment, confidence in our government is abysmally low,” Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, said. “Fostering public trust in our institutions is the absolute bedrock of the American experiment. It is what gives our government legitimacy. But that trust must be earned and kept, by holding ourselves to the highest standard of conduct possible.”

Members of Congress are currently required to file financial disclosure relating to their stock trading activity, to ensure that they are not engaged in illegal insider trading based on information they become privy too thanks to their position in government.

Even with that requirement in place, public trust that lawmakers are not just doing it anyway is low. This perception is not helped by the comparatively minor penalties for lawmakers caught engaging in insider trading.

Many have called for an outright ban on stock trading for elected officials and their families. Some lawmakers have pushed back on a complete ban, noting that the salaries for members of Congress have been frozen at around $174,000 since 2009 and stocks are a method left for them to bolster their income.