On Second Thought: Congress didn't save democracy again

Did you hear the story about Pramila Jayapal and Matt Rosendale, in the U.S. House, and Elizabeth Warren and Steve Daines, in the Senate, joining forces to get their congressional colleagues to give up insider trading on the stock market?

At the beginning of September, Jayapal, a House Democrat from Washington, and Montana's Rep. Rosendale announced their Bipartisan Ban Stock Ownership Act, which would require members of Congress, along with their spouses, to sell any investments (such as individually owned stocks and bonds) that an owner is likely to be actively involved in buying and selling. Montana's Republican Sen. Daines and Massachusetts' Democratic Sen. Warren, joined by Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., introduced a matching bill in the Senate.

If what the voters want matters, this bill was a winner. In polls this year, close to 80 percent of voters, Republican as well as Democrat, agreed that members of Congress have no business playing the stock market. Voters may have been bothered by reports that some members of Congress see no reason to refrain from betting on businesses their own committees oversee, as in the case of a senator on the armed services submarine subcommittee putting his money on the submarine making business, or the senators who got out of risky travel businesses right after a January 2020 briefing on business implications of the new coronavirus.

If bipartisan cooperation is a critical ingredient for successful legislation, a bill like this one was even more certain to be on the fast track. Congress doesn't get any more bipartisan than Build-that-Border-Wall Rosendale working with Build-Back-Better Jayapal, or super-conservative Daines with super-progressive Warren.

While the pairing of Montana conservatives with coastal progressives may have created the oddest couples, the stock trading scandal actually inspired multiple bi-partisan bills. Suddenly, everybody — even sometime skeptics like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — was ready for action. In Montana, for example, with Sen. Jon Tester announcing his support for a trading ban, the congressional delegation was 100 percent pro-reform.

Despite all the support, no new bill on congressional stock trading has become law, and now that Congress is on break for midterm elections, the chance that any bill on the issue will even get a hearing any time soon is fading. Pelosi announced a bill in early October, but withdrew it after multiple objections from members of her own party. In the Senate, no bill even made it to the floor.

Why? Everyone in Congress has to know that one sentiment Americans of every political persuasion share is distrust of Congress. How did Congress manage to pass up an obvious chance to buff up its own rep, to say to the people, “We are not as bad as you think?”

Some Democratic lawmakers who had been advocating legislation to ban trading are (politely) blaming their own leaders. Senate leaders say the issue is complicated. Warren and others say legislation could have been voted through during this session. While it is true some recent proposals called for members to put their assets into blind trusts while others called for divestiture, some included spouses and dependent children in the ownership ban while others did not, and proposed financial penalties varied, none of the differences seemed beyond compromise.

Pelosi's Democratic colleagues have been slightly less restrained, perhaps because some hoped to claim a win on new anti-corruption legislation in their own election contests. Jayapal has said that the bill House leaders brought to the floor departed in significant ways from member proposals, that she and others who made proposals were not consulted, and that the last-minute introduction assured failure.

One surprising implication of this particular failure to act is that something must be more important than just winning the next election. Otherwise, at least House Democrats, would have found a way to push through legislation sure to boost the chances for any House candidate running on the Democratic ticket.

Maybe that more important thing is that a lot of members of Congress, of both parties, don't want anybody telling them what financial games they can play. A Business Insider series starting last December found that 72 current members of Congress were lackadaisical about even reporting their trading activities, as required by the existing 2012 Stock Act. The backsliders included members of both parties: Colorado Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper, over a year late reporting up to $1.3 million in trades for himself and his wife; Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, 16 months late reporting his wife bought stock in a pharmaceutical company manufacturing COVID-19 antivirals.

A New York Times analysis found that from 2019 to 2021, 97 members of Congress or their spouses or dependent children reported trades that might have been influenced by a committee the member served on.

Or maybe Congress simply has more important concerns. The Defense Appropriation bill, for example. Even though some people question the need for the United States to pump more money into the defense industry than the next dozen big spender nations combined, Congress always has to pass a defense bill bigger than the last defense bill. After all, the arms business is big; lots of lobbying and lots of campaign contributions.

Or what about legislation to cut your medical expenses? Even though Americans spend way more on medical care than people elsewhere in the world, Congress has to work hard not to pass legislation that could cut that spending too much because health care is a huge industry — lots of lobbying, lots of campaign dollars.

A law to make sure people in Congress are focused on the public good, not on getting rich playing the market? Just because you and a lot of other Americans want it? What's the name of your lobby? Do you even have a PAC?

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Will Rawn of Havre is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor