Rep. Abigail Spanberger says the Democratic party needs 'new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill' after stock trade ban stalls again
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
- House Democrats punted a vote on banning lawmakers from trading stocks until after the midterms.
- Now, Spanberger is lighting into Democratic leadership for producing a bill "designed to fail."
- She's also reiterating her call for "new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill" for her party.
Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia is calling for a new set of congressional leaders for her party after leadership delayed a potential vote this week on banning lawmakers from owning and trading stocks.
"This moment marks a failure of House leadership — and it's yet another example of why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill, as I have long made known," the congresswoman said in a statement released Friday morning.
Late Tuesday night, the Committee on House Administration released the text of the "Combatting Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act," a bill that was much broader and more far-reaching than most of the proposals put forward by other lawmakers in the last year and was written without their consultation.
Ethics experts quickly identified a major blind-trust loophole with the legislation, which was sponsored by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, a close ally of Pelosi.
"Rather than bring Members of Congress together who are passionate about this issue, leadership chose to ignore these voices, push them aside, and look for new ways they could string the media and the public along — and evade public criticism," she continued, accusing the committee of producing a "kitchen-sink package that they knew would immediately crash upon arrival, with only days remaining before the end of the legislative session and no time to fix it."
"The package released earlier this week was designed to fail. It was written to create confusion surrounding reform efforts and complicate a straightforward reform priority," she said, "all while creating the appearance that House Leadership wanted to take action."
Pelosi, for her part, refused to say earlier this month when asked by Insider whether she would seek to stay in leadership in the next Congress.
The Virginia congresswoman has not supported Pelosi's speakership since she was elected to Congress. In 2019, Spanberger voted for fellow Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois for speaker, while in 2021, she was one of a handful who voted "present."
Spanberger and Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas first introduced their own bipartisan bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks in 2020.
But after Insider's Conflicted Congress investigation in December 2021 revealed dozens of STOCK Act violations, numerous potential conflicts of interests driven by lawmakers' stock holdings, and paltry enforcement of anti-insider trading rules, Pelosi initially balked at a stock trading ban.
Pelosi later reversed course when met with public outrage and a slew of other new stock-ban bills, but after an April hearing on the subject, leadership waited nearly six months to introduce a bill.
Pelosi's office didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
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