A bipartisan group of U.S. senators have resurrected a bill that would ban stock trades by federal lawmakers and their families in what could be a blow to an Alabama’s senator long criticized over his prolific portfolio.
Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jon Ossoff of Georgia and Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri crafted a new iteration of the Ending Trading and Holdings in Congressional Stocks, or ETHICS, Act, NPR reported Wednesday.
While past efforts to pass a congressional stock trading ban have failed, Merkley tweeted there is “bipartisan momentum” for the new proposal.
“Members of Congress are elected to serve the public—not our stock portfolios,” Merkley said on his X account. “We have bipartisan momentum behind the ETHICS Act to ban lawmakers from buying and trading stocks. It erodes public trust and invites corruption—let’s get this bill passed!”
Should the ETHICS Act pass Congress, members would have to stop buying individual stocks immediately. When the next Congress convenes in 2027, members would be forced to divest from any individual assets, according to NPR.
Previous versions of the bill would have made lawmakers transfer their assets into blind trusts. The current version would have members transfer their assets to mutual funds.
The ETHICS Act would also apply to lawmakers’ spouses and their dependent children but not congressional staffers.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who has long been criticized over his stock trades, would likely be among the lawmakers most impacted by a potential ban.
A Tuberville spokeswoman could not immediately be reached on whether the senator supports the ETHICS Act or would try to block the legislation should it come to the Senate floor.
Unusual Whales, a startup that helps investors track market activity, found that Tuberville made the fourth-largest amount of stock trades -- 389 -- of any member of Congress in 2023. That figure does not include complicated options trading, which makes up a significant portion of Tuberville’s activity.
In 2022, AL.com reported Tuberville and his wife made a profit of between $50,000 and $127,000 by trading ChannelAdvisor Corp. stock.
At the lower end of that estimate, Tuberville and his wife earned about the same as Alabama’s median income of $52,000 in less than two months of owning ChannelAdvisor Corp. Stock.
There was no evidence suggesting Tuberville had any inside information gleaned from his work in the Senate that spurred the stock purchase, and the senator has long said his financial advisors manage his day-to-day portfolio.
Trading on inside information is illegal, although legislators are allowed to trade stocks, even if policies they make through various committees they sit on or information they learn by sitting on those committees could affect their financial portfolios and entire industries.
Also in 2022, a New York Times analysis of the Alabama senator’s transactions found 20 “possible conflicts” of interest between companies and commodities Tuberville traded and his official Senate business.
Of 101 companies or commodities Tuberville traded and reported to the Senate Ethics Committee, about one in five were deemed by the Times’ analysis as being a possible conflict for the senator because of policy he could influence or information he could learn as a member of certain Senate committees.
For instance, Tuberville sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee and is a member of the panel’s Subcomittee on Commodities, Risk Management and Trade.
Meanwhile, the senator’s financial portfolio included trades of cattle, corn and red wheat futures as well as Hershey stock, according to the Times.
The report did not indicate whether Tuberville and other elected officials mentioned in the analysis profited from the trades.