Leader Schumer Floor Remarks Exposing Republians’ Stock Trading Bill As A Theatrical Farce

Washington, D.C. - Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) spoke on the Senate floor unmasking Senate Republicans' stock trading bill as a performative piece of legislation that is not intended to stop corruption. Below are Senator Schumer's remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Senate Republicans continue to show the country they care more about playing partisan political games than stopping corruption.

The Senate GOP has bucked a longstanding, bipartisan effort to ban stock trading in Congress, which is what Congress should do. Last July-July-the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced a strong, commonsense, bipartisan bill to ban congressional stock trading. But Senate Republicans abandoned this serious effort. Too many of their members didn't want to do it.

If Senate Republicans truly cared about banning stock trading in Congress, they wouldn't have let the House Republicans GOP water down the ban. The bill Republicans are offering today is swiss-cheese legislating, creating loophole after loophole after loophole. And it's a step backwards to solving this critical problem.

This bill even lets members continue to own and sell stocks. The Republican bill even lets members continue to own and sell stocks. This is the Republican M.O. The public is mad about a problem. The public wants something done, and what they do is put in a bill that does virtually nothing, because they want to try to assuage the public but not solve the problem because it affects them.

The Republican bill also explicitly allows members to trade stocks in privately held companies to profit off their insider knowledge. So, the bill makes things worse than present law, because it would simply hide insider trading-it would not stop it.

And if Senate Republicans cared about reining in stock trading, they would advance a bill that prohibits the president from trading stocks-we know that Trump has traded more stocks than all of Congress combined. But this bill does no such thing.

The worst part of this bill is that Republicans know it will never pass. They designed it that way. They don't want this bill to become law. So they put in a poison pill that they know would tank it. It's really trickery, skullduggery.

If Senate Republicans really cared about stopping stock trading by members, they wouldn't have loaded it up with a poison pill voter ID bill-which Senate Democrats have defeated already twice.

Republicans know that no one in their right mind would ever go along with the draconian voting restrictions they attached to their stock trading bill.

The voting restriction provisions in this bill are more severe than any law in any state. You hear that? More severe than any law in any state. They're designed to kill the bill.

So this bill is just another desperate Republican attempt to pretend they're fighting corruption when all they really want is to score political points before they head home to campaign.

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