Last year, the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission investigated North Carolina’s long-serving senior senator, Richard Burr, for potential insider trading when he offloaded a bunch of stock related to the hospitality industry for $1.25 million at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year, Google searches for U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stock trades hit record highs, driven by a Reddit thread detailing buying and selling by Pelosi and her husband, venture capitalist Paul Pelosi.
Members of Congress—who have access to troves of confidential information, craft federal policy, and are charged with regulating publicly traded companies—are enriching themselves while they’re serving in office. That bad taste you have in your mouth? Yeah, it’s nonpartisan. But here’s a proposal we can all get behind, and that is just not letting members of Congress trade stocks while they’re serving in office any more.
In a new ad that will air statewide today, U.S. Senate candidate Cheri Beasley discusses her commitment to backing a new policy that would ban congressional stock trading. While there are rules designed to prevent congressional insider trading through mandated reporting, elected officials on both sides of the aisle routinely flout them.
“Sixty-four members of Congress—Republicans and Democrats—have broken a law to stop insider stock trading, yet Washington refused to do anything about it,” Beasley says in the ad. “Let’s ban members of congress from buying stocks all together. Senators should be working for you, not themselves.”
There’s already a bill, sponsored by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly, in the U.S. Senate that would ban congressional stock trading. The House reportedly is planning to introduce its own version this month.
Beasley’s ad is the latest in a series coinciding with her campaign’s Stand Up for North Carolina tour detailing how she plans to “hold politicians and the corporate interests in Washington accountable and put North Carolina first,” according to a campaign release.
On her tour of the state, Beasley is meeting with small business owners, farmers, vocational education leaders, and other community members and focusing on lowering costs and a “Made in America” economy. The former NC Supreme Court chief justice is emphasizing her support for policies that will cap insulin at $35 per month for 1.3 million North Carolinians with diabetes and force drug companies to negotiate drug prices with Medicare to lower costs.
On the other hand, Beasley’s opponent, Republican congressman Ted Budd, voted against a 2019 bill that would lower drug costs. At the same time, he took special interest money from large pharmaceutical companies. Swampy!
You can watch Beasley’s new ad below.
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