A third of the House trades individual stocks. The Journal wants it to stay that way. That is the operative purpose of the Wall Street Journal editorial board’s July 23 piece, “The Congressional Stock Trading Meme”, which tells the public that popular outrage over legislative stock trading is a “meme,” that the 2012 STOCK Act already covers it, that academic data acquit the body, and that the House’s new bill banning new purchases is the responsible middle path — the only thing standing between the Republic and a chamber of nonprofit lawyers. The board wants you to understand: the outrage is superstition, the data exonerate, and if you press the point you’ll get AOC’s caucus. The principal the board is paid to protect is the legislator whose diversified portfolio moves with every vote his committee casts. I won’t pretend to be surprised.
The board’s chosen exhibit is Pennsylvania Rep. Rob Bresnahan, who sold six figures’ worth of stock in four Medicaid-managed-care companies a week before voting for the One Big Beautiful Bill, which reformed Medicaid. CVS Health, the board notes, is up 68% since May 2025. Therefore the trades were harmless, the pattern illusory, the journalism hysterical. The board does not mention that Bresnahan sits in the body whose votes determine the fate of the companies in his portfolio. The board invites you to find this innocent. The board does not mention that the people writing the tax code, the antitrust statutes, the defense authorization, and the Medicare physician-fee schedule are the same people owning the equities those laws move. The board prefers you look at the average.
The data. The board quotes a single study with a 2012-to-2020 window — lawmakers’ returns “consistent with random stock picking.” I have watched this move since the S&L collapse: pick a benchmark, choose the window, and the metric performs as advertised. The board does not mention that the STOCK Act exists because the prior ethics rule was so roundly ignored that a 2012 60 Minutes investigation had to enumerate, by name, the trading patterns of a dozen members whose portfolios beat the S&P 500 with margins no honest eye would call random. The board does not mention a New York Times investigation finding that, from 2019 to 2021, eighteen percent of members traded stocks in sectors their own committees oversaw — or Business Insider’s documentation of seventy-eight members who violated the STOCK Act’s disclosure requirements — or the 2020 DOJ investigations into Senate trades executed after classified COVID briefings, which yielded not a single prosecution, a result the Dow’s defense counsel calls vindication and any sentient observer calls a department that knew where its next appropriation came from. The board finds the average exonerating. The board would not apply the same dispensation to a federal judge.
The board’s structural argument — incumbents can be fired, the market for accountability operates — is the oldest song in the editor’s hymnal. The board does not mention that the median challenger to a sitting House member is outspent by better than two to one, that the prior cycle’s median incumbent victory margin was nineteen points, that the post-Citizens United and post-Rucho environment has produced a House in which fewer than one in ten seats is genuinely competitive in any given cycle. The board does not explain why, if accountability is the answer, it argues against the reforms that would make accountability real. The board does not mention that the “good potential candidate whose husband works in finance” is, in the data, exactly the legislator most likely to return to that finance job the day after the next election — and the one whose portfolio most requires the delicacy of a blind trust the board finds unnecessary.
So the board tells you the populists want a Congress of nonprofit lawyers and community activists, and asks, by hissy wit, why the GOP should help. I have watched this movie since Nixon. The board is not arguing for the country-club Congress. The board is arguing for the country-club Congress to stay the country-club Congress. The board is not worried about AOC. The board is worried about the polling — worried that the financing of the modern legislative career, the weekends in Aspen, the seed round for the spouse’s consultancy, the post-retirement sinecure at the firm that lobbied the committee, depends on a quiet equities market and a quiescent public. The board is paid to keep the market quiet and the public quiescent. The board is doing its job.
The House passed the bill 232 to 198. The Journal’s editorial board called a comprehensive ban “populist nonsense.” The board would have called a clean ban the same thing, and the absence of one the same thing, because the board’s actual position is not about the merits of any bill. The board’s position is that the people who already have the portfolios should keep them. The board will write the same column against the next ban, and the one after that, and the one after that, until the public forgets it was angry. The board is not wrong about the popularity of the meme. The board is wrong about the underlying offense. Don’t change the subject, dear. The members are still trading. The Journal will write the fifth defense the next time a bill surfaces.