When Self-Dealing Is A Job Description: Trump, Rick Scott, & The GOP Standing Up For Insider Trading

Ethics Are For Suckers? Public Office, Private Profit

Yesterday Haley Fuchs reported that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to advance a bill that would ban stock trading by lawmakers, presidents and vice presidents— over objections from most Republicans and with a limited carve-out for Senor Trumpanzee, who took the whole effort as an attack on him personally, seemingly unaware that reforms have been trying to pass a bill like this for many years. Take a look at this utterly unhingled, self-absorbed response:

As you can see, he completely flipped out at Missouri Republican Josh Hawley for voting with the Democrats. Hawley had originally introduced the bill naming it for Nancy Pelosi, notorious for her husband’s extensive trading and for her efforts to shoot this kind of legislation down over the years. Eventually Hawley turned in a more bipartisan direction, co-sponsoring the bill with Gary Peters (R-MI) ditching the contentious name and expand the prohibitions to the president and vice president— but only for future administrations, something that apparently went over Trump’s head.

“We have an opportunity here today to do something that the public has wanted us to do for decades, and that is to ban members of Congress from profiting on information that, frankly, only members of Congress have,” Hawley said.

The committee voted 8-7 with all Republicans on the panel save Hawley voting against proceeding with the bill. The GOP detractors argued it would unfairly punish the wealthy and disincentivize some from serving in Congress. Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, one of the Republican nays, is chair of the Senate Ethics Committee and noted he would be responsible for enforcing the bill should it become law.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) called the effort a “publicity show” and said the committee was moving too hastily to approve the altered legislation. Moreno noted he had co-sponsored the original PELOSI Act with Hawley.

“It is important for us to restore faith in our institutions, but to just put a vote out there, when we have literally no idea what we’re voting for, is gross incompetence,” Moreno said. “This is the most absurd process I’ve ever seen.”

Lawmakers have kept calls to ban member stock trading at bay for years. But pressure is increasingly mounting on congressional leaders to move on the issue. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), for instance, told Politico Tuesday she intends to force a floor vote on a member trading ban when the House returns in September.

The debate over the bills also comes less than a week after the House Ethics Committee released a report that called for Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) and his wife, Victoria Kelly, to divest from a steel manufacturer, citing the appearance of impropriety.

The panel probed whether Victoria Kelly’s purchase of the holdings was the result of nonpublic information from her husband’s official duties, but the investigation did not yield conclusive evidence that she purchased stock based on her husband’s insider knowledge as a lawmaker.

Several Republicans argued the legislation before the panel was flawed. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said he did not see the need for new legislation given the existing rules around insider trading, and he warned it would have unintended consequences. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), meanwhile, accused Hawley of reneging on a promise to work with him to improve the bill.

“I don’t know when in this country it became a negative to make money,” Scott said, describing his own rags-to-riches story. He asked the attendees in the hearing room, “How many of you don’t want to make money? Anybody want to be poor?”

In an apparent attempt to sink the bill among Democrats, Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-KY) argued the legislation should apply to Trump— not just future presidents— and suggested his Democratic colleagues would be voting to protect the incumbent if they supported the revised bill. Paul later called it the “exemption for Donald Trump substitute.”

Democrats ultimately voted to alter the bill in a way that would allow Trump to maintain his holdings during his term, an apparent concession to appease Hawley and secure the measure’s approval in committee. If signed into law, it still would prohibit Trump and Vice President JD Vance from buying stock.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said she would have preferred not to have the exception for Trump and Vance but added she was “willing to make the good work instead of waiting for the perfect.”

“We all saw Vance and Trump come out against this publicly, but I think it’s important that we at least make a start,” she said.

Trump’s beserk tirade and the near-unanimous Republican opposition to this bill make one thing crystal clear, namely that the people screaming loudest about “draining the swamp” are the ones feeding deepest at the trough. Take Rick Scott— a man who oversaw the largest Medicare fraud in American history, whose company was fined $1.7 billion for defrauding taxpayers. He didn’t go to prison; he went to the governor’s mansion and then the Senate. And now he’s pearl-clutching over the idea that members of Congress should be banned from trading stocks while shaping policy. Of course he is. A man like that doesn’t see public office as public service. Like many— most?— Republicans, he sees it as a racket.

Or look at Ron Johnson, another multimillionaire who insists we don’t need new laws because “rules already exist.” Please. That’s like a bank robber arguing we don’t need locks because theft is already illegal. These guys don’t want real accountability; they want plausible deniability. And Trump? He’s so narcissistically deranged he thinks the bill is about him, as if banning self-dealing and corruption is some personal vendetta. The bill doesn’t target Trump, although it should. If anyone’s turned grift into a governing philosophy, it’s the man who’s spent his entire adult life treating other people’s money like a personal piggy bank. This isn't all that complicated… public servants should not be allowed to get rich off information the public doesn't have. Period. Any lawmaker— Democrat or Republican— who can't get behind that basic principle isn't protecting your freedom; they're protecting their portfolio and they shouldn’t be holding public office.