Let Our Leaders Participate in the American Economy

The Framers’ ideal of the citizen-lawmaker faces a renewed threat on Capitol Hill, with an unlikely champion — Senator Hawley of Missouri — leading the charge. He’s flogging legislation that would bar elected officials from trading in the stock market. Yet what’s the logic in the populist’s push to prevent members of Congress, and even the president and vice president, from investing in America’s capitalist economy?A Senate committee has advanced a bill to do just that, with Mr. Hawley joining Democrats to move the measure. That aligns the Show-Me State solon with, say, Senator Slotkin of Michigan. She frets that “the American people think that all of us, Democrats and Republicans, are using our positions and our access to enrich ourselves.” That’s a flawed rationale, we have said, for efforts “to curb the bets our legislators are placing on American capitalism.”Feature, say, the investing prowess of one of the most liberal members of Congress, Speaker Pelosi, the so-called Queen of Stonks. That, at least, is the moniker our columnist Larry Kudlow bestowed on her when he scored the contradictions of the drive to keep lawmakers out of the market. Mr. Kudlow marveled that Mrs. Pelosi and her husband had “traded over $50 million in assets over the past year with annualized returns at 69 percent.”Mr. Kudlow was pointing to estimates from the Nancy Pelosi portfolio tracker. Yet far from suggesting that the former speaker surrender the profits she and her husband had generated or be subjected to some other penalty, Mr. Kudlow touted Mrs. Pelosi’s “trading acumen.” He called her the “Gordon Gekko of the New York Stock Exchange” and compared her record to the “Oracle of Omaha,” Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman.Yet Mrs. Pelosi’s appraisal of the situation, it turns out, is less sanguine than Mr. Kudlow’s. Even though she had in prior years touted the merits of a “free-market economy” and insisted that lawmakers “should be able to participate in that,” she now says she favors the stock trading ban. “I welcome any serious effort to raise ethical standards in public service,” she simpers. The Queen of Stonks, seems, alas, all too willing to renounce her crown. Mr. Kudlow’s quibble with Mrs. Pelosi at the time centered on her enthusiasm for high taxes and regulations that stifle growth and prevent others from making the kinds of gains she and her husband made by betting on the success of America’s publicly traded companies. Similarly, one can see today’s push to bar lawmakers from investing as a gift to leftists, keeping the solons isolated from, and in effect ignorant of, critical developments in the economy.Scalawags of either party may yet lurk in the Congress. Nor is there any reason to bar authorities from enforcing the laws on the books on, say, insider trading, which already apply to elected officials. Because those laws are in place, Senator Johnson of Wisconsin explains, the proposed trading ban is a “completely unnecessary piece of legislation.” The bill, he says, should be called the “Career Politician Protection Act” because it makes it “unattractive for people to step up to the plate and run for office.” This is the context in which President Trump yesterday lashed out at Mr. Hawley — derided by the commander in chief as a “second-tier Senator” — for his support of the stock trading bill. “He is playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” Mr. Trump contended. Messrs. Hawley and Trump later mended fences, per the Independent, and the Missouri senator suggests that the president now backs the bill. We’ll see about that.Mr. Hawley avers that his Capitol Hill colleagues “are privy to information that the normal person just is not,” and he doesn’t want “people getting rich while they’re here, trading stock.” That hardly justifies a measure that would crimp the rights of honest lawmakers — and impugn their presumption of innocence, not to mention their ability to participate in America’s thriving economy. As Mr. Kudlow puts it, “Long live the Queen of Stonks.”

Let Our Leaders Participate in the American Economy

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