The same man who wrote the insider-trading bill is the man whose family fortune came from high-speed brokerage, and the bill he wrote happens to protect every dollar he already owns. Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska laid out his solution last week in It’s Time to Ban Congressional Insider Trading — a bill that would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from buying new stock, with fines of $2,000 or ten percent of the transaction and forfeiture of profits on illegal sales. Let’s take the man at his word and see what his word is worth.
The problem his bill solves is real. In 2020 the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee sold $1.5 million in stock days before the pandemic crash. A select group of senators beat the market consistently enough that imitating their trades became a published investment strategy. The public knows this and polls accordingly. Eighty percent of Americans think their representatives are running a side business with the information they get at work. The number is so high it is almost a standing admission.
Now here is the trouble with Senator Ricketts’ solution. His legislation prohibits buying new stock. The fine for a violation is $2,000 or ten percent of the transaction, whichever is greater. The profit from an illegal sale is forfeited. The bill lets him keep every share he already owns. It lets his spouse keep every share. It lets his dependent children keep every share. It merely stops him from adding more. The profession he wishes to protect from “unintended consequences” is his own.
Senator Ricketts’ father founded the company that became TD Ameritrade. When the senator says forced divestiture would “discourage Americans with successful private sector careers from serving in Congress,” he is not making an abstract argument about talent acquisition. He is explaining why his own portfolio should stay exactly where it is.
This is the old, patient machinery of regulatory capture, and it works the same way in every jurisdiction. The industry writes the rulebook so the worst practices are visible and punished while the underlying pattern of advantage survives intact. The rule says no new purchases. The portfolio the sitting senator accumulated with the information advantage of his office — that portfolio is grandfather-claused, protected, not even acknowledged as a problem. The appearance of impropriety is addressed; the substance of accumulated advantage is preserved.
And the mechanism that produces this as a predictable output is the same one that has operated since the first member of Congress figured out that a committee hearing on Tuesday could pay for a house by Friday. The person writing the rule is the person the rule governs. No independent ethics body enforces it. No criminal penalty attaches to the trade that was legal the day before the bill passed. The fine is calibrated to be large enough to signal seriousness and small enough to be a rounding error on a seven-figure portfolio — and the rule is enforced by the same chamber that would have to expel one of its own.
The serial catalogue writes itself, as it always does. In 2012 the STOCK Act made insider trading by members of Congress explicitly illegal and required timely disclosure of stock transactions. Compliance was immediate for about six months; by 2014 reporting compliance had collapsed to fewer than half of lawmakers, as news reports documented at the time. In 2018 the president who promised to “drain the swamp” signed a bill weakening the disclosure requirements the STOCK Act had created. In 2020 senators sold stock on pandemic intelligence and faced no consequences. In 2021 services began tracking and publishing congressional trading performance as a market signal. The same pattern repeated every year a committee calendar existed. And now — 2026 — a billionaire senator proposes a bill that protects his own accumulated holdings while the press release says the problem is solved.
The smallest, hardest fact is the one the senator’s bill never mentions. There is no requirement that a lawmaker report what they know at the time of a trade — just an advance notice of the intent to sell. The notice goes to the public, not to an agency that could investigate. And the penalty for violating the rule is a fine paid to the Treasury, not a forfeiture of the person’s seat. A senator who trades on privileged information, gets caught, pays the statutory hundred-thousand-dollar fine, and keeps serving is a senator who has been given a price list.
Senator Ricketts says Democrats had their chance and did not act. The STOCK Act was a Democratic bill, and its authors watched it rot. But the principle of symmetric standards applies here as everywhere. A law that lets the sitting member keep every advantage he already holds, extract the penalty from his own pocket, and report to the same colleagues who will judge him is not a reform. It is a price list.
A hundred-thousand-dollar fine on a million-dollar trade is ten percent. Ten percent is the cost of doing business.