House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as House Democrats plan to introduce a bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
During his weekly press conference Friday, McCarthy blasted Pelosi for waiting until the end of the term of Congress to roll out a framework for a bill that would ban members of Congress and their spouses from trading stocks. McCarthy said that Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, made a number of stock trades around the times of key Congressional actions, and said that he may have gotten that knowledge from conversations they had with each other.
“I think it’s ironic that the Speaker of the House now talks about bringing up a bill at the very end of the term of Congress,” McCarthy told reporters. “So her husband could trade all the way through, but now it becomes a crisis? Look, I think the Speaker of the House has greater determination of what comes to the floor, what gets out of committee. And her husband didn’t just trade stock, he traded options. I think what her husband did was wrong.”
“When she said she never told him anything, I know they spent their time together overseas and when they’re coming back, I’m sure she had conversations on the phone about what was gonna be on the floor,” McCarthy continued. “I’m sure she had conversations about what the chip version finally looked at. I’m sure she had those conversation; I don’t know if he was able to hear them or not. But I think we need to bring trust back to this institution, and I think we have to do a thorough investigation and look at what is the proper role for members of Congress and what influence they have, and I don’t think the proper way to do this is Nancy Pelosi writing the bill because we have proven that she can’t do that.”
McCarthy then said that if Republicans take back the majority after the midterms, they will introduce a bipartisan bill that will go through the committee process.
“It should be in a bipartisan manner, and we should look at it through committee, and this is something that we will do in the majority, bringing new rules forward to make sure that you have trust in this House, and the ability — that you know that people [are] not investing in a place that they have influence,” McCarthy said. “What I’ve told everybody, we will come back and we will not only investigate this, we will come back with a proposal to change the current behavior.”
Punchbowl News reported Thursday that Democrats in the House are planning to introduce a bill next month to ban lawmakers, their spouses, and members of their senior staff from holding shares in individual stocks. The proposal would force lawmakers, their spouses, and their senior staff to either put their investments in a blind trust or completely divest from their portfolios. They would, however, be able to hold mutual funds.
Democrats said the framework would be introduced by August, and hoped that the bill itself would be introduced in September, and passed by the end of the month.
Source: Dailywire
