If you or I had access to private or confidential information that we then used to buy or sell stocks, we would be engaged in insider trading. This week news broke that Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), Representative Susan Davis (D-CA), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Senator David Perdue (R-GA), and Representative Scott Peters (D-CA) all sold off a large volume of stock in the months leading up to the COVID-19 scare. Privy to private and/or confidential information (and while some of the offenders were publicly reassuring the American public), these Congressional members sold off stock while the market was still at a high point, in anticipation of intense market volatility as COVID-19 began to reach US shores.

In 2012, President Obama signed the STOCK Act, which sought to ban Members of Congress from trading stocks based on nonpublic information they gleaned on Capitol Hill. The STOCK Act expressly affirmed that Members of Congress and staff were not exempt from the insider trading prohibitions of federal securities laws and gave House and Senate ethics committees authority to implement additional ethics rules.

Our founding was rooted in a representative republic, with House Representatives being elected by the people and Senators being selected by State governments (eventually superseded by the 17th Amendment, making Senators directly elected by the people). At its foundation, a federalist republic relies on the duly elected members of Congress working for the people. Therefore, it is very difficult to look at this situation as anything other than insider trading. Members of Congress have clearly participated in the stock market to either realize a personal financial gain or mitigate a probable upcoming loss using information they have access to by virtue of their position in Congress while denying that information to the American people.