Zach Nunn’s name is already on a bill that bans members of Congress from trading stocks. His Democratic opponent says that stock trading bill leaves the profitable part of the arrangement fully intact.
State Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, running against Nunn in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, released a 10-point “Higher Standard” agenda this week aimed at congressional corruption.
“It’s getting so much harder to get by. And at the root of all of that, what’s causing all of that dysfunction in Washington is the corruption,” Trone Garriott said. “It’s the money. It’s the self-dealing. It’s the self-serving. And we need to bring it to an end.”
A marquee piece of Trone Garriott’s proposal is a stock trading ban. That is a move to limit how members of Congress with access to insider information can cash in through the stock market. In Congress, there is mounting pressure to prevent trading among members.
For example, the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would ban members from buying or selling stocks and force full divestment within 180 days, was introduced a year ago. Nunn is a cosponsor of the bill. However, it stalled out due to opposition from congressional leadership, concerns over financial burdens for candidates, and preference for weaker alternative measures.
Over the summer, Nunn celebrated the passage of the Stop Insider Trading Act in the House. The bill prohibits members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from buying individual stocks while in office. The bill requires advance notice before members of Congress sell existing holdings, imposes transaction penalties for violations, and mandates divestment of any stock purchased in violation of the law.
The bill has come under fire by critics who say the bill still permits the sale of stocks members of Congress already have and only penalizes those who break the law to make the transaction.
Democrats who voted against the bill called it toothless. Rep. Joe Neguse said the version that passed had “massive loopholes for members of Congress to still sell stocks at a profit,” and Republican leadership had bundled it with an unrelated voter ID provision — which Neguse argued turned the whole vote into campaign-ad material rather than real reform.
Trone Garriott’s plan is to deal with the RTCA’s shortcomings. Her proposal wouldn’t just stop new purchases, it would ban stock trading outright for members of Congress, the White House and their staff, with jail time on the table when fines don’t work.
“They see Congresspeople getting rich off insider trading, politicians spending decades in the same seat cashing checks from the corporations and special interests they’re supposed to keep an eye on,” Trone Garriott said. “It’s wrong, and it needs to stop.”
The rest of Trone-Garriott’s Higher Standard agenda includes the following:
- 12-year term limits on members of Congress — six terms in the House, two in the Senate;
- a binding ethics code for the Supreme Court, including recusal rules and full disclosure of gifts and trips;
- ending partisan gerrymandering nationwide using Iowa’s nonpartisan redistricting process as the template;
- banning corporate PAC money in congressional races and eliminating super PACs;
- overturning Citizens United;
- a lifetime lobbying ban for former members of Congress;
- mandatory public town halls every year, with pay withheld from members who skip them;
- published public schedules for every member;
- regular independent audits of how federal agencies spend taxpayer money.
