We demand statesmen, not stock traders
Politics has always made strange bedfellows. Even so, the coalition pushing to ban congressional stock trading is a mix bound to draw attention.
When our own super-centrist U.S. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-01) and a rock-ribbed Texas conservative Chip Roy find themselves on a press stage with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), it’s a sign of one of two things: the apocalypse, or a problem so glaringly obvious, so deeply destructive, that even Washington partisans can no longer publicly ignore it.
The problem, of course, is the pervasive rot of self-enrichment that has turned the Capitol into little more than a high-stakes hedge fund with a flag on top. Public service, once envisioned as a temporary duty for citizen-legislators, has become a permanent career path culminating in a gilded portfolio. It’s a swamp of insiderism where the line between constituent interest, personal interest, and interest interest have been fully blurred.
One need only look at the recent, jaw-dropping financial disclosures of the “Squad” member missing from the podium with Fitzpatrick, et al: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Just months after dismissing claims she was a millionaire as a “ridiculous” and “categorically false” right-wing smear, her publicly available paperwork showed her net worth skyrocketed to as much as $30 million. The source? Her husband’s ventures, including a D.C. political consultancy and a California winery for the champagne socialist set. While railing against the evils of capitalism, she and her husband were becoming fabulously wealthy in a system they publicly condemn.
If you think this is an isolated incident or confined to one side of the political aisle or the other, think again. A recent New York Times investigation revealed that nearly a fifth of Congress members were trading stocks in industries directly related to their committee assignments, where their legislative actions can move markets. This is the culture of Washington: a quiet, bipartisan consensus that the rules are for thee, not for me.
The German historian and theorist Oswald Spengler diagnosed this pervasive illness a century ago in his work, The Decline of the West. He argued that great civilizations enter a decadent “winter” phase where the traditional values of duty, honor, and nation are replaced by the cold, empty calculus of money. In this final stage, patriotism gives way to cosmopolitanism, faith to cynicism, and statesmanship to finance. Democracy becomes a hollowed-out shell, and the state succumbs to a “dictatorship of money,” where private wealth dictates public policy and the political class exists merely to facilitate its own enrichment.
Does that not sound precisely like the Washington, D.C. of 2025? A place where policy is crafted not for the good of the nation but for the benefit of K Street lobbyists and their international clients? A place where the revolving door spins endlessly between Capitol Hill, regulatory agencies, and lucrative board seats? A place where lawmakers with access to privileged information can legally trade stocks, essentially front-running the very laws they create? Get out your parka, because this is Spengler’s “winter” in real time.
It is in this cold and gray landscape that Fitzpatrick’s Restore Trust in Congress Act has appeared as a necessary, commonsense response. The idea that members of Congress, their spouses, and their dependents should be barred from playing the market while in office isn’t a radical proposal; it’s basic ethics.
But let’s call it what it is: This bill, while necessary, is a bandage on a bazooka wound. It addresses a single, flagrant mechanism of corruption, but does not — and cannot — address the underlying democratic decay that makes such a rule necessary in the first place. The problem isn’t just that lawmakers can trade stocks; it’s that so many of them want to… even knowing that what often awaits them post-politics are seven-figure book deals, TV news contributorships, and Beltway-based careers lobbying friends and former foes for astronomical sums.
Spengler was a pessimist (as to be expected of a German thinker). But, as Americans and conservatives, we have the responsibility to avoid fatalism. We believe in the power of renewal.
So while Fitzpatrick’s bill might be a drop in the bucket of a response to D.C. duplicity, it is a welcome step toward preventing the legitimacy of the republic from being traded away for another percentage point of return. It is on us — the voters — to ensure that what follows is a restoration of the idea that public service is a sacred duty, a temporary sacrifice for the common good, not a lucrative career path.
Until we can replace the mindset of the stock trader with that of the statesman, we are merely managing the decline that Spengler foresaw and from which those like Omar profit.
Publius Pax is a tenth-generation Bucks Countian, political consultant and author.
