In 62 B.C., Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia after a political scandal led some to insinuate that she’d been having an affair. The future dictator didn’t actually care if the allegations were true. “Caesar’s wife,” he told Pompeia, “must be above suspicion.”
President Donald Trump’s recent call for a ban on congressional stock trading relies on the same principle.
Sure, it’s possible that senators and congressmen are just really good at picking stocks and would never act on non-public information. But even if that were the case, shouldn’t our elected representatives be eager to avoid even a whiff of impropriety?
The American people certainly think so. A 2025 poll indicated that 86% of voters, across party lines, support banning members of Congress from trading and owning stocks. Nobody sends their representative to Washington so he or she can become a day trader.
Trump is tapping into a real populist frustration with the political class: they make the rules, then profit from them, while average Americans get left behind. Once again, Trump is showing that he's not afraid to take on the swamp—even if it includes members of his own party.
This isn’t a partisan issue. In 2024, the top ten list of congressional stock traders (by number of trades) was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and they always beat the market.
For decades, lawmakers’ investments have faced little scrutiny or regulation. The 2012 STOCK Act imposes a fine of just $200 on first-time offenders, which isn’t much considering that some of these transactions are worth thousands or even millions. Beyond that, the penalties are practically nonexistent. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the STOCK Act for insider trading.
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Meanwhile, politicians from both parties continue to trade defense stocks while sitting on armed services committees, buy shares in medical device makers while setting healthcare regulations, and even invest in social media companies while Congress debated a TikTok ban.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has become the poster child for these behaviors. Her net worth currently sits at around $260 million despite an annual salary of just $174,000. Some investment apps even offer “Pelosi Trackers” to help individuals mirror her lucrative trades.
Most of these stock transactions are carried out in her husband Paul’s name, and Pelosi has repeatedly insisted that she plays no part in his investment decisions. If that were true, it would be awfully convenient for him to make a huge investment in Nvidia just before his wife helped pass massive semiconductor subsidies. Or that he sold 30,000 shares of Alphabet just before the Justice Department announced an antitrust lawsuit against Google. Or that he sold half a million dollars worth of Visa stock a few months before the DOJ sued the company over spurious allegations that it was monopolizing the debit transaction market.
Never mind the fact that this case has zero legs to stand on. As The Federalist Society put it, “In order for the Biden Administration to see Visa’s strong market position as anti-competitive, it must have a very narrow and static view of the market. It must believe that peer-to-peer payment systems and Visa’s debit business don’t compete with each other,” not to mention the many other debit card companies it faces off against. When it came to this ridiculous DOJ suit, the Pelosis still had something to cheer about because, like most regulations in Washington, D.C., there was money to be made off it.
No wonder Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) named his bill to ban congressional stock trading the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act.
He previously introduced the legislation in 2023, but it failed to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate. This time, though, even Democrats seem to realize that America has entered a new era of populism, and that lawmakers can’t get away with acting like out-of-touch oligarchs anymore. That’s why Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is co-sponsoring Hawley’s bill. It’s also why even House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries supports a proposal named after the woman he once called “the most accomplished Speaker in American history.”
Caesar’s wife might not be cheating, but she doesn’t seem to mind if it looks like she is, which suggests a certain degree of contempt toward her husband. Like the wife of a prominent public figure, our elected representatives must be above suspicion. If the only way to remove that suspicion and restore trust in government is to restrict lawmakers’ investments to bonds and index funds, then so be it. The only thing more fatal to a republic than being governed by crooks is most voters thinking crooks govern it.
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