In a rare show of bipartisan unity, House members from opposite ends of the political spectrum are forcing a vote on legislation to prohibit Congress from trading stocks.
In a moment that prompted one Republican to declare that hell had frozen over, a coalition of House Republicans and Democrats has deployed a procedural maneuver to force a vote on banning members of Congress from trading stocks. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida filed a discharge petition, a tactic that bypasses the Speaker and requires only enough signatures from colleagues to trigger a floor vote.
The unlikely alliance includes progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alongside archconservatives like Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, a pairing that underscores how frustrated members have become with the current legislative gridlock. The discharge petition strategy is not new, but its frequency has increased under Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership.
Members have grown weary of what they see as an overly restrictive approach to floor votes and a reluctance to challenge the White House agenda. This effort to ban congressional stock trading has languished for years, having stalled under previous Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with some observers noting that her husband’s trading activities may have shaped leadership’s reluctance to move a bill.
The urgency intensified after President Joe Biden, in his final year in office, renewed calls for such a ban and public anger grew over whether lawmakers were using privileged information for personal financial gain. And even Republican lawmakers seem to support this effort.
The path forward for the legislation remains uncertain. Even if the measure passes the House, it faces potential obstacles in the Senate, where Sen. Josh Hawley has pushed similar proposals while others quietly resist. The legislative landscape has become unpredictable, with members increasingly using procedural tools to fight leadership bottlenecks. Whether this coalition can sustain its momentum through both chambers remains to be seen, but the fact that such an unusual alliance has formed is a sign that frustration with the status quo has reached a critical point.
The stock trading ban represents something rare in modern politics, a topic where there is genuine common ground across ideological lines. If you care about that debate, you do not have to wait for Congress to fix itself. The raw material you need to analyze how lawmakers trade already exists. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requires members of Congress and senior staff to publicly report most securities transactions over $1,000 within a short window, currently 30 to 45 days, using Periodic Transaction Reports that are posted online.
As always, we’re interested in the data. That tells the story of who wins (and by how much), when members of Congress trade stocks.
For primary data, you can go straight to official sources. The House Ethics Committee publishes financial disclosure instructions and links to filed reports on its website, and the Senate maintains an electronic financial disclosure system where you can search and download reports from senators and certain staff. Those reports list positions, purchases, sales, and amount ranges. They are not user-friendly, but they are the legal record of what was traded and when it was reported.
If you prefer cleaner data, several third-party projects already scrape and standardize these reports. Sites like Quiver Quantitative and Capitol Trades maintain dashboards of congressional stock trades, with filters for individual lawmakers, tickers, sectors, and dates. In many cases, you can sort by most recent transactions, click into a specific trade, and sometimes export a CSV that drops directly into your spreadsheet. These tools sit on top of the same STOCK Act disclosures but remove a lot of the manual parsing work.
Once you have picked a data source, the spreadsheet work is straightforward. Start a Google Sheet or Excel file and dedicate one tab to congressional trades. Create columns for fields such as Date, Member, Chamber, Party, Ticker, Company, Transaction type, Reported amount range, Committee assignments, and Source link.
When you export a CSV from a site like Quiver Quantitative, you can paste or import the data into this tab, then normalize the values so the tickers, dates, and amount ranges follow a consistent format. If you are comfortable with Google Sheets formulas, you can even use functions like IMPORTHTML or IMPORTXML to pull tables of recent trades directly from a public page and refresh them automatically.
From there, you can treat Congress like a portfolio. Use a dedicated investment tracking template to compare what lawmakers are buying and selling with what you own. An investment tracking spreadsheet gives you a ready-made structure for positions, weights, and performance, and you can add a separate tab for “Congress Trades” that references the data you pulled from official disclosures or third-party dashboards. That lets you see at a glance where your holdings overlap with heavily traded names on Capitol Hill.
For readers who like to see everything in one place, you can go a step further and build a dashboard. A Google Sheets dashboard template can serve as the front page for your project. Pull in summary metrics, such as the number of trades per month, the most traded sectors, and the lawmakers with the highest reported transaction volume. Add charts that show congressional trading activity over time and compare it to index returns. If you prefer Excel, you can model the same idea with an Excel stock portfolio tracker that includes a separate table for congressional trades.
Data-focused investors should see this as more than political drama. A simple spreadsheet turns the stock trading ban debate into something measurable. You can quantify how often members trade, which sectors they favor, how long they take to file after a trade, and whether their reported activity clusters around major policy announcements. Whether or not Congress ever bans its own members from trading, the tools already exist for the public to watch them much more closely.
