Moderate House Dem. Demolishes Her Own Leadership For Failure to Bring Stock Trading Ban to a Vote: ‘Party Needs New Leaders’
Kevin Dietsch, Getty
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) openly called for new leadership in her party after top House Democrats failed to bring her bill banning members of Congress from owning and trading stocks to a vote this week, as was expected.
Spanberger’s TRUST in Congress Act is a rare bill that is wildly popular n both sides of the aisle in the House and has 71 cosponsors ranging the ideological spectrum from hardline MAGA Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) to progressive Squad member Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY)
Spanberger, a former CIA operative who represents a swing district, has never won her district by more than 2 percentage points and is in a fierce reelection battle to keep her seat.
The Virginia Democrat released a brutal statement on Friday eviscerating her party’s leadership for delaying the vote on her bill.
“For months, momentum grew in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate to finally take a step towards prohibiting Members of Congress from day trading while on the job. We saw remarkable progress towards rectifying glaring examples of conflicts of interest,” she wrote in a lengthy statement.
“And after first signaling her opposition to these reforms, the Speaker purportedly reversed her position. However, our bipartisan reform coalition was then subjected to repeated delay tactics, hand-waving gestures, and blatant instances of Lucy pulling the football,” she continued, noting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) initially opposed the measure before embracing it. Pelosi has been at the center of criticism over her husband’s well-timed and lucrative stock trades – although no official allegations of wrongdoing have been leveraged against Pelosi.
“This moment marks a failure of House leadership — and it’s yet another example of why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill, as I have long made known,” added Spanberger taking aim at both Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD).
“Rather than bring Members of Congress together who are passionate about this issue, leadership chose to ignore these voices, push them aside, and look for new ways they could string the media and the public along — and evade public criticism,” she continued, adding:
As part of their diversionary tactics, the House Administration Committee was tasked with creating a new piece of legislation — and they ultimately introduced a kitchen-sink package that they knew would immediately crash upon arrival, with only days remaining before the end of the legislative session and no time to fix it.
It’s apparent that House leadership does not have its heart in this effort, because the package released earlier this week was designed to fail. It was written to create confusion surrounding reform efforts and complicate a straightforward reform priority — banning Members of Congress from buying and selling individual stocks — all while creating the appearance that House Leadership wanted to take action.
