Every Single One

On Wednesday, the Senate voted on a bill that would have barred members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from buying new individual stock while in office. The Stop Insider Trading Act already passed the House in July. It needed 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate.

It got 53.

Every single Senate Democrat voted no. Not most. Not the usual handful of holdouts you can point to and call outliers. All of them.

I want to be fair about the stated reasons, because Democrats do have one, and it deserves a hearing before I tell you why I don't buy it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the bill "a permission slip for corruption, not a stock-trading ban," arguing it still allows members to own and sell stock, just not buy new shares — and he's not wrong about that limitation. He also objected to a voter ID provision House Republicans attached to the bill, calling it a poison pill designed to make Democrats choose between two things they claim to support and torpedo both at once. Schumer further noted that Trump's own investment managers reportedly made more individual securities trades between January 2025 and this summer than the entirety of Congress combined — a fair point, and one that deserves its own column, because a president trading at that volume raises exactly the kind of conflict-of-interest questions this debate is supposed to be about.

None of that explains the vote.

Here's what "not perfect enough to support" actually means in practice: when you're handed a chance to close even part of a loophole that lets members of Congress get richer off information the rest of us will never see, and your answer is to kill the whole bill rather than vote yes and keep pushing for more, you haven't taken the principled stand. You've taken the comfortable one. Every Democrat who voted no on Wednesday had the option to vote yes and spend the next campaign cycle demanding the Senate finish the job. Not one of them chose that. They chose zero progress over partial progress, and they're hoping the voter ID objection does enough work in the retelling that nobody asks the obvious follow-up question: would you have voted yes if it hadn't been attached?

Polling says 86 percent of the country wants congressional stock trading banned outright. Eighty-six percent. That's not a partisan number. That's as close to unanimous as this country gets on anything in 2026, and the Senate just produced a 53-47 vote that fell seven short of even a modest, incomplete first step toward it.

Look at who sponsored this bill in the first place. Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican facing a competitive race in Nebraska, put his name on it and took it to the floor knowing full well it would become a campaign issue either way. If Democrats actually believed their own talking point — that this reform doesn't go far enough — the honest move was to vote yes, bank the partial win, and introduce something stronger next session with the momentum of having just passed something. Instead, they let the perfect become the enemy of the actual, and in the process let every member currently trading on information the rest of us don't have keep right on doing it, unrestricted, indefinitely.

That's the part that should bother you regardless of party. This isn't really a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. It's a Washington issue — a bipartisan class of people who've figured out that the rules protecting the rest of us from insider trading apparently don't apply once you're the one writing the legislation that moves markets. Nancy Pelosi's stock trades have made headlines for years. So have plenty of Republicans', which is exactly why Ricketts and others keep bringing these bills forward in the first place — they know their own side isn't clean on this either. The difference on Wednesday wasn't which party has dirtier hands. It's which party had the chance to start cleaning them and declined, unanimously, in a recorded vote with their names attached.

So no, I won't pretend this bill was flawless, because it wasn't, and Schumer's criticism of its gaps wasn't invented out of nowhere. But flawed and worth passing are not mutually exclusive, and 47 senators who claim to care about this issue just proved, with their own votes, that getting to campaign on the grievance matters more to them than actually closing it. The next time one of them tells you they support ending congressional insider trading, ask them where they were on September 30.

They were all in the same place. Voting no.

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

Help Townhall continue to report on the Democrats’ radicalism and inform voters as our nation faces a crossroads. Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.