On Wednesday, the Senate voted on a bill that would have barred members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependent children from buying new individual stock while in office. The Stop Insider Trading Act already passed the House in July. It needed 60 votes to break a filibuster in the Senate.

Every single Senate Democrat voted no. Not most. Not the usual handful of holdouts you can point to and call outliers. All of them.

I want to be fair about the stated reasons, because Democrats do have one, and it deserves a hearing before I tell you why I don't buy it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the bill "a permission slip for corruption, not a stock-trading ban," arguing it still allows members to own and sell stock, just not buy new shares — and he's not wrong about that limitation. He also objected to a voter ID provision House Republicans attached to the bill, calling it a poison pill designed to make Democrats choose between two things they claim to support and torpedo both at once. Schumer further noted that Trump's own investment managers reportedly made more individual securities trades between January 2025 and this summer than the entirety of Congress combined — a fair point, and one........

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