Corruption is rampant in Washington, and Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Gary Peters (D-MI) want to do something about it. They introduced legislation that would prohibit members of Congress, the president, and the vice president from trading stock.

The bill, which cleared the congressional committee of jurisdiction on Wednesday, has a real shot at passing. It initially drew skepticism from President Donald Trump, but after some tweaks that made it clear the initiative wasn’t targeting him, Hawley says Trump is fully onboard.

The bill has scrambled partisan lines, with Hawley and Trump joining many Democrats in support while some Republicans line up against it. But if Democrats think this is a slam dunk against the finance-class GOP, they’re in for a rude awakening.

It’s the Democrats who appear to be the real profiteers now. Just ask their last Speaker of the House.

While most Americans spent last week enjoying summer’s dog days, Nancy Pelosi spent it defending herself against insider trading allegations (again). Specifically, that her husband, Paul Pelosi, keeps coming out “lucky” when it comes to his stocks.

Last year, Paul and Nancy raked in anywhere from $7.8 million to $42.5 million, most of it thanks to his investments. The Pelosis, who are worth as much as $413 million, saw their stock portfolio in 2024 outperform every hedge fund in America.

This has led news outlets to openly speculate that Paul is using his wife as a source for inside information, pulling his money from stocks right before the government takes actions that cause them to lose value.

Examples abound, but among the most egregious was when Paul Pelosi suddenly dumped 2,000 shares of Visa, which made him at least half a million dollars. Just weeks later, Visa was sued by Joe Biden’s Department of Justice for supposedly wielding a monopoly over the nation’s debit markets.

The antitrust suit was nonsense. Even the Biden administration admitted that around 40 percent of the debit transactions in the United States don’t use Visa’s networks, not exactly a monopoly. But the suspicious timing of Pelosi’s sudden selloff raised questions about whether he’d been tipped off by his well-connected wife.

It wasn’t just Visa. That same month, Pelosi also dumped 5,000 shares of Microsoft stock worth more than $2.1 million, his largest selloff in two years.

Not long afterward, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft, yet another Biden antitrust suit that the Trump administration promptly dropped upon taking office.

On New Year’s Eve 2024, Mr. Pelosi suddenly sold $5 million in shares of the AI tech company Nvidia. Less than a month later, Nvidia was blown apart by a Chinese startup and lost more than half a trillion in market value.

When asked about these… fortunate investment moves, Nancy Pelosi likes to claim her husband makes all the investments and that she doesn’t own any stock.

That’s when she addresses the issue at all. Asked on CNN last week about insider trading suspicions, Pelosi became indignant. “We’re here to talk about the 60th anniversary of Medicaid. That’s what I agreed to come to talk about,” she snapped, adding, “That’s ridiculous.”

Thankfully, Senator Hawley isn’t exactly being subtle. His bill banning members of Congress from owning stock was originally called the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act, the PELOSI Act.

For pragmatic political reasons, it was recently renamed the HONEST Act and now even bans stock trading for the president, vice president, and their families starting next term (once the Trump administration departs).

In fairness to the Pelosis, they’re just the most egregious example of lawmakers whose stocks appear to be benefiting from insider information. An investigation by the New York Times in 2022 found that nearly a fifth of members of Congress had bought or sold financial assets that overlapped with work they did in their congressional committees.

Legislation passed in 2012, called the STOCK Act, allows members of Congress to own stock so long as the transactions are disclosed and they don’t trade on insider information. But in practice, such a ban has proven difficult to enforce. No one has ever been prosecuted under the STOCK Act.

Hawley’s solution is elegantly simple: stop insider trading by banning elected officials from trading. These people are supposed to be public servants; they can wait until they’re out of office to make their private fortunes.

Hawley’s bill will go a long way towards draining the swamp, which is why Trump was right to back it. As for the Democrats, they may soon find the HONEST Act causes them more trouble than they anticipated.

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Kevin Mooney (@KevinMooneyDC) is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., who writes for several national publications.