Members of Congress can legally trade stocks in the industries they regulate.

The honest situation

The rules basically allow it.

A 2012 law says members of Congress have to report their stock trades within 45 days. The fine for filing late is $200.¹ They pay it and move on. That’s not a deterrent. It’s a parking ticket on insider trading.

And they trade a lot. A 2022 New York Times investigation found that about one in five trades by members and their families were in industries that member’s own committee oversees.² The people writing the rules for an industry are buying and selling shares in it while they write them.

This isn’t a left or right thing. It’s a fox-guarding-the-henhouse thing. The only people who can fix it are the people doing it, and they keep refusing to vote.

My pledge

A promise with no consequence is worthless.

Most candidates make promises that cost them nothing if they break them. This one has a real consequence: I resign.

Here’s what that looks like, and what you can check yourself:

• Any buy or sale over $1,000 by anyone in my household gets posted here within 48 hours. The law gives members 45 days. I’m giving myself two.
• Once a year, an outside accountant checks my household’s finances and that report goes up publicly.
• The yearly disclosure every member files is written in dense legalese. I’ll republish mine here in plain English so anyone can actually read it.

What I’ll do in Washington

The bills already exist. The job is forcing the vote.

This is the rare fight where the hard part is mostly done - the bills are written and introduced. The only question is whether leadership will let them reach the floor.

• Cosponsor the Restore Trust in Congress Act in the House. It bans members, spouses, and kids from trading individual stocks. It has bipartisan support - Tennessee’s own Tim Burchett, a Republican, is one of them.
• Sign the discharge petition Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed in late 2025 to force a House floor vote over the Speaker’s objection.³ It’s short of the 218 signatures needed. Every member who won’t sign is making a choice you can see.
• Support the HONEST Act in the Senate. The committee passed it 8-7 in July 2025;⁴ it’s waiting on a floor vote leadership hasn’t scheduled.
• Make it a public fight. Name the members slow-walking it. The quiet vote against this bill inside leadership is the real story, and the press will cover it if someone points at it.

What I’ll do here at home

If the law won’t make them stop, daylight will.

Even with good bills moving, public pressure is what gets them over the line - and that’s built locally, candidate by candidate.

• A public trade tracker on this site. Every member’s trades, lined up next to their committee assignments and recent votes. The filings are already public - just buried in PDFs nobody can search. I’ll pull them into one place and make the conflicts easy to see, no paid subscription needed.
• A candidate pledge. Every Tennessee candidate for Congress gets asked, on the record, if they’ll stop trading individual stocks in office. The answers go here. Refusing to answer is the answer.
• Make the case for the states too. Tennessee’s own legislators aren’t even under the federal trade-disclosure law. A freshman in Congress can’t close that gap alone, but I can keep saying out loud that it’s there.
• My own staff signs the same pledge. Senior staff are in the room when nonpublic information moves. The rule applies to them too.

What I’ll push my own party to do

Endorsement is a rule the party already gets to write.

The Tennessee Democratic Party doesn’t need a new law for this. It could make signing the no-trade pledge a condition of getting the party’s endorsement - and pull the endorsement if anyone breaks it. That’s one decision by one committee. No floor vote, no filibuster, no waiting on leadership. A lever the party can pull tomorrow.

The pushback I’m ready for

“A ban is unfair to members who aren’t rich and need to manage their own money.”

This one comes up at every hearing, so it deserves a real answer.

For almost everyone who isn’t a full-time professional trader, plain index and mutual funds beat stock-picking over time. That’s not my talking point - it’s what nearly every honest financial advisor in the country says. Anyone who claims they need to trade individual stocks to save for retirement is selling you something.

A member of Congress makes $174,000 a year, plus a pension and health benefits - more than double the typical American household. The ones who say they can’t do the job without trading individual stocks aren’t describing hardship. They’re describing the loss of an edge nobody outside Congress gets. Even the Republican author of the leading bill admitted in committee that blind-trust rules are loose enough to be hard to police. Boring diversified funds aren’t a sacrifice. They’re the baseline everyone else already lives with.

The other pushback

“A ban will scare talented people away from running.”

The whole premise is that talented people will only run if they get to trade on inside information. Say that out loud and it answers itself.

This is a public job, with a public salary and a public duty. Anyone who’d turn it down because they can’t personally cash in on what they learn is telling you exactly what they’d have done with it. The skills Congress needs - writing law, serving constituents, doing hard work in public - have nothing to do with a brokerage account. If a candidate can’t picture the job without the trading upside, that’s the best argument for the ban.