27 lawmakers ask Pelosi, McCarthy to bring stock-trading ban to floor

Malinowski, whom the Committee on House Ethics is investigating in the matter, has since placed his stock assets in a qualified blind trust and cosponsored bills that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks.Golden's letter implicitly references Insider's Conflicted Congress investigation, which has found that dozens of members of Congress and nearly 200 senior congressional staffers have failed to comply with the STOCK Act, a 2012 law designed to combat insider trading by requiring timely disclosure of stock transactions.In an interview with Insider, Golden described the letter as an effort to further pressure leadership to act, building on existing momentum driven by a spate of new proposals to ban stock trading by lawmakers and backlash to Pelosi's dismissal of the idea last month."While this is still something that people are really talking about, we want to make sure that we're pushing for legislative action," Golden said.According to the letter's signatories, the existing disclosure-based approach to ethics in Congress has not been sufficient in preventing improper behavior, including a spate of pandemic-related stock-trading scandals by several senators in 2020.That episode "demonstrates how shamefully narrow the current law is," the letter said, adding that while insider trading is already explicitly illegal, "it can be nearly impossible to determine what counts as 'nonpublic knowledge' or how personally involved members are in their stock trades."While Golden's letter explicitly mentions two long-standing bills that have seen growing numbers of cosponsors in recent weeks — the Ban Conflicted Trading Act and the TRUST in Congress Act — lawmakers have put several other versions of the idea forward.