House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hemmed and hawed again last week about the House plan to rein in sketchy trades by members of Congress and their families, making empty noises about getting it done in the wake of a brutal New York Times report ID’ing almost 100 members — nearly 20%! — who reported trades in apparent conflict with their duties as overseers of laws and regulations around American industry in 2019-’21.
She’s plainly stalling, and for obvious reasons: Pelosi’s a byword for such trades with her husband — financier Paul Pelosi — making moves that regularly beat the market, often in sectors highly vulnerable to legislation the speaker can advance or kill.
Indeed, she’s long blocked real action on this problem, saying she’s open to considering the various bills now proposed in the House but doing nothing.
Yet the Times report shows she’s far from the only legislator with a vested interested in stifling such bills.
Consider California’s shouty progressive Rep. Ro Khanna. He loves to chastise Wall Street on Twitter. But that sure didn’t stop him from reporting an eye-popping 10,500 stock trades involving nearly 900 companies via trusts under his wife and kids’ names — of which a staggering 149 may be conflicted, including moves in companies under investigation by committees he sat on. Typical hypocrisy from Khanna, who also enjoyed massive donations from the financial industry during his 2016 campaign.
Congress needs to get rid of her and replace her with a SPEAKER of the HOUSE that will move BILLS and get something done instead of traveling the world. Then intrduce a BILL to be retro active for the last 10 years with penalties for illegal insider trading. Then that money with interest to be used only for paying off the NATIONAL DEBT. NOT NEW DEBT