Rep. Anna Paulina Luna said she will work next week to secure a House vote on an expanded stock trading ban that would include the executive branch, after a smaller ban for members of Congress got stuck in the Senate in September.
Luna noted that she has already filed the rule needed to pass a discharge petition, which allows lawmakers to sidestep House leadership and force a floor vote if 218 members of the House sign it. That follows Luna’s discharge petition, filed in December 2025, to force a vote on a ban for members of Congress, with about five weeks left in the 119th Congress.
“So all that to say, we still have discharge petitions,” Luna said in an interview. “To that exact fact, I’m actually going to be bringing one up on the executive branch being included in the insider trading ban next week. Actually, I have the rule filed for that discharge petition. So maybe we can get everyone to do something before this Congress ends.”
The House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, H.R. 7008, 232-198 in July. The bill, sponsored by Republican Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, would prohibit members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children from purchasing individual stocks and require them to give advance notice before selling them. The legislation would not apply to the president and vice president, and House Republicans added federal voter ID requirements. The bill failed to advance in the Senate on September 30th, when every Republican voted for it, and every Democrat voted against it.
Luna said she was concerned that the Democrats who won control of both the House and Senate in the November 3rd midterms will focus only on investigations and inquiries, not on affordability, among other issues Democrats also campaigned on.
“Well, look, I think in general, the American people, I’ve been leading the charge on this for a long time,” Luna said. “We don’t want government corruption anywhere, right? Left, right, center, wherever it is.”
She said that she would have wished that more lawmakers who are always talking about affordability were helping in the past.
“Obviously, I would have liked, in general, think more people that have been so vocal on affordability issues to help, for example, get us across the line on the discharge petitions we had for student loan interest at 2.5%,” she said. “Or actually take seriously what we were trying to do with the banning insider trading, which by the way, I’d like to remind people that when we actually had a very good bill, it was Hakeem Jeffries that told the Democrats not to sign on to that bill.”
“So then we had the watered-down version that passed and then died in the Senate,” Luna added.
Jeffries, the House Democratic leader who may soon be the speaker, argued in December 2025 that any ban should cover the executive branch, including President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Punchbowl News and The American Prospect reported at the time that his team discouraged Democrats from signing Luna’s petition and promoted a Democratic bill that would cover the president and vice president in the ban. Jeffries filed a more comprehensive discharge petition in January. Luna’s petition had 74 signatures as of December 24th, 2025: 15 Republicans and 59 Democrats.
Luna’s new petition will cover the same provision Democrats advocated for last year. She had been avoiding a competing bill that covers the executive branch. Trump said he supports the stock trading ban for members of Congress. Still, he criticized Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri for advocating for the version that would cover the executive branch in 2025.
The issue of congressional stock trading has been under scrutiny for years. The 2012 STOCK Act prohibits members of Congress, executive branch officials, and other federal employees from profiting off of their knowledge of nonpublic information and forces them to disclose their trades, but does not ban them. Critics argue that it leaves room for conflicts of interest when people trade stocks using the information that is not available to the public. A University of Maryland survey conducted in 2025 found that 86 percent of Americans support a ban.
The calendar is tight. Under House rules, the resolution like Luna’s must spend seven legislative days in the Rules Committee before members can start signing the petition. And the bill that passes the House will also have to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by Trump before the 120th Congress, which will have Democrats in charge of both chambers, is sworn in on January 3rd.
Luna said that she stopped accepting money from corporate PACs.
“But again, I mean, there’s been so many issues,” she said. “And this is why I decided that I’m not taking any more of the corporate PAC money. I’m going to go hard for these causes. And if they want to campaign on stuff, they can join my crusade on that. But I’m just tired of people talking and not actually doing things.”
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