President Joe Biden this week announced an endorsement of a stock-trading ban for US lawmakers, making a last-minute entry into an issue that has bedeviled Capitol Hill for years.
“Nobody in the Congress should be able to make money in the stock market while they’re in the Congress,” Biden said in an interview with A More Perfect Union, a left-leaning advocacy group.
The comments represent a clear, if belated, boon to what is now a years-long efforts on Capitol Hill to get lawmakers to police themselves.
But the outgoing president's comments come with only a few days left in the 118th Congress and only hours before lawmakers are set to head home for the year — making it unlikely to herald a marked increase in the chances of passage, at least during Biden’s last few weeks in office.
President-elect Donald Trump's position on the issue is somewhat less clear.
He surprised many observers in 2024 when he announced his support for a ban during a speech where he announced his 2024 presidential run.
"We want a ban on members of Congress getting rich by trading stocks on insider information," Trump said at the time, but he doesn't appear to have brought up the issue since.
Biden's comments this week marked a sharp turn for the president. He said he didn’t own stock when he served in Congress but declined to take a position on the issue until now during his years in the White House.
His aides often deflected, saying it was something for lawmakers themselves to decide.
“I don’t know how you look your constituents in the eye and know because the job they gave you, gave you an inside track to make more money,” Biden said in this week's wide-ranging conversation with Faiz Shakir, an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The state of play in Congress
Lawmaker stock trading burst to the forefront as a top issue in 2020.
That was when high-profile lawmakers Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) sat in closed-door briefings on the emerging threat of COVID-19 and then allegedly used that information to sell stocks before the wider public knew of the virus's dangers.
Both lawmakers escaped formal repercussions for their actions. Burr is now retired and Loeffler lost her bid for reelection but was recently announced as Trump’s pick to lead the Small Business Administration in his second term.
In the years since that COVID-era scandal, an array of efforts in Congress have been launched to make a ban a reality.
One of the most bipartisan efforts is called the TRUST in Congress Act , which would require all lawmakers, and their spouses and dependent children, to put certain investments into a qualified blind trust. It has been championed for years by Reps. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, and Chip Roy, a Texas Republican.
Spanberger is leaving Congress in 2025 to run for governor and her side will be taken up by Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat.
That joint effort has been reintroduced again and again since 2021 and is now up to 79 cosponsors but has again and again failed to rise to the top of the congressional agenda.
Another effort in the Senate, called the ETHICS Act, would go a step further and add a ban on presidents and vice presidents. It cleared a hurdle this summer when it passed out of a Senate committee but hasn’t yet made it to the full floor.
For now, advocates of a ban are likely to keep waiting.
On Tuesday evening — about the same time that Biden’s interview was published — lawmakers unveiled what is likely the last bill of the year, a 1,500+ page bill to avert a government shutdown , and enacted a range of other priorities like hurricane relief.
Lawmaker stock trading was not addressed.
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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