198 House Democrats Just Voted Against Banning Their Own Stock Trades — Zero Republicans Joined Them.
The House voted 232-198 on July 22, 2026, to pass H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act — the first bill banning members of Congress from buying individual stocks to ever reach a floor vote. Every Republican who voted said yes. Every single no vote — all 198 of them — came from Democrats.
Thirteen Democrats crossed over to join the Republican majority. The other 198 did not — and their stated reason wasn’t that they oppose restricting stock trades. It was that House GOP leadership tied floor consideration of the bill to a separate voter-ID measure Democrats call a poison pill, giving members a chance to vote no on the whole package while still saying, out loud, that they support the underlying idea.
Whatever the excuse, the vote count is the vote count. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) sponsored the bill; the Democratic conference, minus thirteen members, voted it down anyway — on a measure aimed squarely at practices that have made members like Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) a national symbol of the problem it claims to fix.
- 232–198 — final House vote on H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act — Roll Call 280, July 22, 2026
- 198 — House Democrats who voted no; not one Republican joined them
- 13 — Democrats who crossed over to vote yes with every voting Republican
- $2,000 or 10% — the new penalty for a violation, up from a flat $200 under current law
H.R. 7008, introduced January 12, 2026, by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), chairman of the House Administration Committee, would bar members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from buying new individual stocks while in office. It requires seven to fourteen days of public notice before selling any stock a member already owns, raises the penalty for a late or missing disclosure from a flat $200 to whichever is greater — $2,000 or 10% of the transaction’s value — and takes effect 180 days after enactment. It does not force anyone to sell what they already hold, and it exempts diversified mutual funds, blind trusts, and small-business interests.
The bill cleared the House Administration Committee 7-4, and the Rules Committee reported the floor rule 8-4 on July 20. The House adopted that rule 214-211 on July 21 — a near party-line vote in its own right — and final passage came the next afternoon on Roll Call 280: 232 yea, 198 nay. “This is the first congressional stock trading ban to receive a vote on the floor of the House,” Steil said after the vote, framing it as an overdue step toward “remov[ing] even the appearance of impropriety.”
That “first ever” distinction matters. Congress has floated a stock-trading crackdown for years — the TRUST in Congress Act, the ETHICS Act, a 2022 discharge-petition push — and every one of them died without a floor vote. The current disclosure regime still traces back to the 2012 STOCK Act, which requires members to report a trade within 45 days but never stopped them from making one. H.R. 7008 is the first bill actually built to close that gap that a chamber of Congress has allowed its own members to vote on, up or down, in the open.
Republican leadership paired floor time for H.R. 7008 with a companion voter-ID measure under the same rule — and that pairing is what most Democrats who voted no pointed to. House Administration Committee ranking member Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) called the underlying bill itself a “sham” that “allows members of Congress to continue owning and trading stocks,” while Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) summed it up as “a stock trading ban that still allows stock trading” — a real critique, since existing holdings can be sold on notice rather than forced out.
Congressional Black Caucus chair Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY) made the objection explicit in a caucus statement: “House Republicans are not serious about enacting a meaningful congressional stock trading ban,” she said, calling the combined package “voter-suppressive.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) labeled the whole package a “bait-and-switch.” On the Republican side, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) conceded that bundling the two measures made the vote “partisan” and said he’d have preferred a standalone vote applying trading restrictions across all three branches of government — but he voted yes anyway, as did every other Republican who cast a vote.
Steil, who chairs House Administration, framed the vote as overdue in his own official statement: “This bill is the first ban on Members of Congress trading individual stocks to ever get a floor vote. It’s time to end the appearance of impropriety in Washington.”
The House passed H.R. 7008 by a vote of 232-198.
No lawmaker’s trading record has drawn more national attention than Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA). Her husband, Paul Pelosi, manages a family stock portfolio disclosed at roughly $30,600,000, against a total family net worth reported near $278,000,000 once real estate and other holdings are included. Financial media have tracked a cumulative return of roughly 16,930% on the family’s disclosed stock positions over the years it has been followed, including a 70.9% gain in 2024 against the S&P 500’s 24.9% — driven in part by well-timed options positions in Nvidia that drew a following of retail copycat traders.
Pelosi, who announced her retirement in November 2025 and whose current term runs through January 3, 2027, spent years opposing legislation like this. Ahead of Wednesday’s vote she reversed that position and publicly endorsed a congressional stock-trading ban — a notable turnabout after years of bipartisan criticism of her family’s trades, even as the underlying bill would not have forced any existing holdings, hers included, to be sold.
Ranking member on the underlying bill — Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), House Administration Committee, called it a “sham.”
Congressional Black Caucus chair — Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), objected to the voter-ID pairing.
Progressive floor objection — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), called the package a “bait-and-switch.”
198 Democrats voted no in total; 13 Democrats voted yes; every voting Republican, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who publicly disliked how the vote was structured, voted yes.
House Republicans just passed a real ban on stock trading by Members of Congress. Every Republican voted yes. 198 Democrats voted no. Let that sink in.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrased from public remarks following passage of H.R. 7008.
H.R. 7008 now faces long odds in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to clear a filibuster — and Democrats there have less reason to swallow a voter-ID rider than House Democrats did. A genuinely bipartisan alternative already exists: the HONEST Act, led by Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) signed on, has already advanced out of committee without a voter-ID fight attached to it.
That contrast cuts against the easiest excuse for Wednesday’s vote. Senate Democrats have shown they will co-sponsor a clean stock-trading ban when one is offered without a rider attached. In the House, 198 members of the same party had a bill built almost entirely around that idea in front of them and voted no anyway — leaving the yes column to nearly the entire Republican conference and thirteen Democrats willing to cross over regardless of how leadership structured the rule. With House control on the ballot again in November, expect Roll Call 280 to follow every one of those 198 members into their next re-election race.
232-198. Every single Republican voted to ban Members of Congress from trading stocks. 198 Democrats voted no. Voters should ask their Representative which side they were on.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrased from the House GOP Conference's public statement after passage.
Morelle made the same case on the House floor ahead of the vote: “This bill, quite simply, is a sham,” he said, calling the voter-ID rider a “poison pill” designed to sink legislation he says still lets members keep trading — and pointing out the bill exempts the president from its own ban.
House Roll Call 280 is unambiguous: 232 members voted to ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks, 198 voted against it, and every one of those 198 no votes was a Democrat. Democrats say the reason was a voter-ID rider they wouldn’t accept, not the trading ban itself — but a genuinely bipartisan Senate version, the HONEST Act, already exists without that rider, and it hasn’t gotten Democrats in the House to write a companion bill of their own. Until that changes, the House’s only floor-tested stock-trading ban carries zero Republican no votes and 198 Democratic ones.
