Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia excoriated her party leadership including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer for delaying a potential vote this week meant to ban lawmakers from holding and trading in stocks. Spanberger even called for new leadership in the Democrat Party.
Spanberger had partnered with Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) to introduce
the Transparent
Representation Upholding Service and Trust in Congress Act on
Jan. 15, 2021. The legislation has 71 co-sponsors,
ranging from Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida to squad member Ilhan Omar
of Minnesota.
The
legislation would require lawmakers and immediate family members to place
stocks in a blind trust.
Business Insider magazine’s Conflicted Congress investigation in
December 2021 revealed dozens of STOCK Act
violations, numerous potential conflicts of interests driven
by lawmakers' stock
holdings, and paltry enforcement of
anti-insider trading rules. 49 members of Congress and 182
senior congressional staffers violated laws aimed at preventing insider
trading.
The reports
obviously caused outrage among the public.
Consequently,
Pelosi, who initially rejected the idea of a stock trading ban summarily
changed her course.
But instead of
supporting Spanberger’s bill, Pelosi directed the House
Administration Committee to develop their own legislation without holding consultations with lawmakers.
This package
would ban not only lawmakers, their spouses, and dependent children, and their
senior staff but also Supreme Court justices and members of the executive
branch, the following groups from owning or trading stocks. They would have to
place stocks in other types of investments such as a diversified mutual fund,
or a qualified blind trust.
Ethics experts
at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight discovered a loophole
in the bill. They say the bill allows for the creation of blind trusts
that aren’t compliant with existing regulations in the Ethics in Government
Act.
The House Administration released the text of the "Combatting Financial
Conflicts of Interest in Government Act," on Tuesday night.
Next House Majority Leader Hoyer who schedules floor votes, claimed that lawmakers needed more time to study the bill before they could vote on it. The bill in question was a 26-pages long.
The same House easily passed a bill of over 2,700 pages that dispatched billion to Ukraine, merely 12 hours after its release.
The House
leaves Washington on Friday and is not scheduled to return until after the
midterms. The TRUST in Congress Act will not come up for a vote until
after Election Day.
An outraged
Spanberger released the following scathing statement
"This
moment marks a failure of House leadership — and it's yet another example of
why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of
Capitol Hill, as I have long made known," the congresswoman said in a
statement released Friday morning.
The two-term
congresswoman said that support for her bill has grown in recent months — but
party leadership engaged in “repeated delay tactics” to avoid a vote.
Obviously, the
was an act of sabotage, led by Pelosi.
The new package
was purposefully released a few days before the recess. Critics pointed out that
the package was too broad and unnecessarily complicated for what was a simple
reform.
The goal
behind the charade was to deceive the public into thinking they were that their
intentions were honorable but they failed due to time constraints.
Spanberger
herself may be engaging
in theatre. She is currently involved in a close midterm race against her GOP challenger Yesli
Vega
So why did Pelosi and others sabotage The TRUST in Congress Act?
A House speaker's disclosure
report released in July revealed that speaker Pelosi's husband Paul
invested $5 million in 20,000 shares of NVIDIA.
The Daily Caller reported
that Paul's stock purchase was prior to a vote on a
bill that would grant massive grants, subsidies, and tax credits to
chip manufacturing
Obviously,
only a select few, such as Speaker Pelosi, were aware of the contents of the
bill and the fact that it was heading for a vote in the Senate.
This is too
much of a coincidence and presents a case of conflict of interest for Pelosi.
Paul is known
to be an avid investor
in the stock market. The Pelosi couple is believed to be worth at least $46,123,051.
Last
year, Paul made over $5 million after
trading stocks in Google parent company Alphabet Inc, Amazon, and Apple,
just ahead of the House Judiciary Committee's vote to advance five antitrust
bills targeting major tech giants.
Paul is not
the only offender.
Myriad other
lawmakers invested
in sectors whose relevance was elevated owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. They
also sold investments from sectors adversely affected by the lockdowns
following the pandemic.
What happens
beyond Washington?
A Netflix
employee was sentenced to 14 months in prison and
$10,000 in fines for insider trading.
The husband of
a former Amazon employee was sentenced
to 26 months in prison for earning $1.4 million by using inside
trading information
Back in 2004, Martha Stewart
suffered after being accused of charges related to insider trading.
There are
numerous other cases of people serving jail time for questionable stock
trading.
But Washington
is, as always, immune from any consequences.
Last
September, during her visit to the U.K., Nancy Pelosi said that in
America, capitalism "has not served the economy as well as it should"
because "the success of some springs from the exploitation of the workers
and springs from the exploitation of the environment and the rest."
Pelosi was
unknowingly describing her circumstances, where her husband could be exploiting
his access to information to reap profits while regular people struggle to keep
their heads above the water despite doing two jobs.
However same
anti-capitalist Pelosi became a huge
proponent of the free-market economy in response to the idea of
barring lawmakers and their close family members from holding or trading
individual stocks while in office.
A free-works
economy when there is fairness.
The stock
markets can only be regarded as fair when all investors have identical access
to information. Yet a few use their experience and acumen to reap profits.
The lawmakers
with access to information that is restricted from the general public obviously
have an unfair advantage. It hence makes sense for all public
servants to refrain from using their position in government to reap profits in
the stock market.
This is an
essential sacrifice that they need to make for choosing a career in government.
If they feel this is unfair, they are more than welcome to quit their jobs and
dedicate their lives to trading in the stock.
There are two
major challenges here.
The first is to
pass comprehensive laws that ban lawmakers from holding and trading in stocks.
The second and
most important challenge is to ensure that these laws and other existing laws are
enforced such that offenders are punished.
The GOP has a sterling opportunity after the mid-terms.
Also appears on American Thinker
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