Following years of demands that members of Congress limit their stock trading, the House passed a bill Wednesday that would bar lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children from buying individual stocks but allow them to keep and sell stocks they already own.
Read more House passes $1.15 trillion defense bill, tees up billions more for Iran war
The measure passed 232-198.
But the legislation is probably dead-on-arrival in the Senate because House GOP leadership inserted into it an unrelated requirement that voters present photo identification in federal elections, a proposal that is unlikely to gain the needed votes from Senate Democrats.
The photo ID language came from a separate measure known as the Voter ID Act and also appears in the broader Save America Act — proposed Republican legislation that seeks to enact stricter election laws nationwide.
Because the GOP-led Senate has repeatedly said that the Save America Act stands no chance in the chamber, House Republicans have sought ways to include key provisions of it in other pieces of legislation — even though Senate Democrats are not likely to advance any legislation that includes voter ID requirements.
The stock-trade bill, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, would prevent members of Congress, their spouses and dependent children from buying individual publicly traded stocks. It also would require lawmakers to disclose plans to sell covered investments at least seven and no more than 14 days before the transaction. Currently, lawmakers are required to disclose their sales only after the fact.
The measure, however, would not require lawmakers to sell stocks they already own, and it wouldn’t ban them from selling individual stocks, as many Democrats and other critics have pointed out.
House Republicans have also sought to send the full Save America Act to the Senate alongside the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Under a House rule adopted Tuesday, the chamber’s clerk would append the House-passed election measure to the defense bill after its passage — an unusual procedural maneuver known on Capitol Hill as “MIRVing.”
Republicans used the same maneuver last week to append the full Save America Act to a State Department spending bill, which passed the House largely along party lines.
The photo ID language added to the stock-trading bill would require voters to present specified identification when casting ballots in federal elections. The broader Save America Act would also require applicants to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.
The NDAA passed on the House floor Wednesday afternoon.
House Democrats and some Republicans criticized GOP leadership’s move to throw the voter ID component into the stock-trade bill.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Tuesday blasted GOP leaders for tucking the voter ID provision into the broader bill, saying the ID measure “ought to be a single-subject vote” and warning that Republicans will “lose the leverage to try to make it law” if it gets only a symbolic vote.
Roy said more Democrats would have voted for the stock-trade legislation had the Save Act provisions not been added to it.
Read more Editor’s note
“I’m going to end up voting for this because I support both measures,” Roy said on the House floor. “But I’m not done this year demanding that we have a straight up-or-down vote on stock trade because you can’t, whether on this side of the aisle or that side of the aisle, hide behind the Save Act for your opposition to what we need to do to change the culture of this institution.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pennsylvania) said on the House floor that although she supports requiring voter identification and barring members of Congress from trading stocks, she opposed the bill because “it is not an honest attempt to do either.” The stock-trade measures, she said, “do not go nearly far enough,” while the voter ID provisions attach “new barriers for Americans to vote,” requiring a narrow set of acceptable IDs.
“So narrow that a very similar bill was beat down by a Republican governor in the state of Ohio,” she noted, referring to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto last month of a GOP-backed measure requiring photo identification for absentee voting.
But GOP leaders were confident Tuesday that Republicans would support the combined measure, arguing that a majority of Americans support both voter ID laws and stock-trading restrictions for lawmakers.
“It’s a very logical thing to do,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters Tuesday.
An August 2025 Pew Research poll found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats support legislation requiring all voters to show government-issued photo ID to vote, while a July 2023 University of Maryland survey found that 86 percent of Americans support barring members of Congress from trading individual stocks. Neither poll tested combining the two measures.
In communications to House members, pro-transparency organizations like Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Campaign Legal Center have said that the bill “purports to address congressional stock trading without actually preventing members of Congress from profiting off of their offices.”
“Some of the most notable and valuable trades by members of Congress and their families have been sales, not purchases, such as those made during the 2020 pandemic and 2023 banking collapse,” CREW said in a statement.
“Sales during times of volatility create the appearance that officials are prioritizing their investments over resolving the crisis, prompting public outcry,” the organization wrote.
The organizations instead encouraged the House to pass legislation that would either require lawmakers to divest from their stocks or place their assets in blind trusts.
The Campaign Legal Center also said the bill’s requirement for voter ID would exclude widely used forms of identification, including student and employee IDs, and argued that the bill would provide insufficient safeguards for eligible voters who lack an accepted ID.
Read more Republican blocks bill to halt retrofit of Qatari-gifted Air Force One
