By Annie Grayer, CNN
(CNN) — The House narrowly passed a bill to add new restrictions on lawmakers trading stocks after a partisan dispute resulted in a narrower proposal that stops short of an outright ban.
The bill passed 232 to 198 on Wednesday, with only 13 Democrats joining Republicans in support. It is unclear when or if it will be taken up in the Senate.
The measure prevents lawmakers, their spouses, and dependent children from buying new stocks of publicly traded companies while serving in Congress, which adds a new restriction on a highly controversial practice.
Under the legislation, lawmakers can still buy private stocks, keep stocks they already owned prior to entering Congress and maintain certain investment funds. Selling stock would require a seven-to-14-day advance notice. If the new rules are violated, the lawmaker would have to pay a fee of $2,000 or 10% of the value of the transaction, whichever is greater, and forfeit the profit from the trade.
In the days leading up to the vote, a separate voter ID measure that would also add new restrictions on mail-in voting was added to the bill, further complicating the push to pass the bill.
While the bill – led by Bryan Steil, the GOP chairman of the House Administration Committee – adds more constraints on lawmaker stock trading than what exists under the current law, most Democrats opposed it, saying it did not go far enough to end the practice and they disapproved of the Republican decision to attach changes to voting measures to the legislation.
“House Republicans are pushing (a) voter suppression bill that will upend mail-in-voting and throw the elections into chaos, and are trying to trick members into supporting it by linking it to a partial stock trading ban that falls short of the full Congressional stock trading ban that the American people want,” Democratic Rep. Seth Magaziner, who co-led a bipartisan bill to ban stock trading that has stalled, told CNN.
Steil said on Monday that the legislation “is critical to restoring public trust in this institution.”
“I believe it is time we just stop allowing members to buy new stock. Doing so removes the appearance of impropriety altogether. Americans should be confident that lawmakers are working for them, not for their stock portfolios.”
GOP Rep. Chip Roy, who has for years pushed for a ban on lawmaker stock trading, called Wednesday’s vote “a major step toward holding members accountable and restoring trust in government.”
“For too long, Americans have watched politicians enrich themselves while asking the public to trust them. That has to end. I’ve fought since my first term in Congress to ban congressional stock trading because serving in Congress should never be a path to personal profit,” Roy said.
The question of whether lawmakers should be allowed to trade stocks has sparked contentious debate in the halls of Congress for years.
At one point last year, there was a glimmer of hope that permanently banning lawmaker stock trading in its entirety would become law with strong bipartisan support.
A bipartisan bill was introduced in September 2025 and in December 2025, GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna tried to circumvent House GOP leadership to bring a bill banning lawmaker stock trading to the floor.
Initial support for the goal of restricting lawmaker stock trading from President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also generated fresh momentum. Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley even voted with Democrats in July 2025 to advance a bill to ban lawmakers from stock trading, over the opposition of other Republicans on the panel and drawing the ire of Trump about whether the ban should include the executive branch.
But then proposals started to diverge and talks began to stall. Some Democrats pushed to expand the effort to include banning the president, vice president and their spouses from trading stocks as well, losing Republican support in the process.
Lawmaker stock trading has not been reformed since the STOCK Act was passed in 2012. That bill created requirements for lawmakers to disclose their stock trades but has done little to curb the practice.
Polls have consistently found widespread support for banning members of Congress from trading stocks. The issue has received national attention and alarmed nonpartisan ethics experts about whether lawmakers are using their positions of power for personal enrichment.
CNN has reported on instances where senator stock purchases or sales involved companies in industries overseen by the committees they serve on as well as how lawmaker stock trading spiked in the days around President Donald Trump’s trade war announcements.
Under current law, lawmakers, their spouses, and children are permitted to make trades, but they are mandated to report any activity done on their behalf within 45 days. They are only required to disclose a monetary value range for trades.
Ahead of the vote, GOP Rep. Thomas Massie said he would support the legislation but offered a warning.
“I don’t think it’s going to solve problems up here, but I’ll vote for it,” Massie said Tuesday.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
CNN’s Ellis Kim, Alison Main and Trinity Kinslow contributed
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