In a dramatic push to address what many see as a longstanding ethical problem in Congress, U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna has launched a discharge petition aimed at forcing a House vote on banning stock trading by sitting lawmakers. The move, announced on December 2, 2025, has reignited a heated debate in Washington about whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks while having access to privileged, non-public information.
Luna’s petition targets House Resolution 1908, a bill originally filed by Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee back in March 2025. The legislation, which has been languishing in committee, would prohibit members of Congress from trading individual company stocks and require lawmakers and their families to divest any current holdings. According to Reuters, the bill has garnered bipartisan support, with over 100 lawmakers from both parties signing on as co-sponsors. But despite this broad backing, House leadership—particularly Speaker Mike Johnson—has refused to bring the measure to a vote.
“We have decided, because of a lack of movement in the House of Representatives, to initiate the discharge petition on banning insider trading, meaning it is live now,” Luna declared in a video posted to social media shortly after filing the petition. Standing beside her was Burchett, who didn’t mince words about the state of the chamber: “This place is broken. It is a complete open sewer.”
The discharge petition process is a rare but powerful parliamentary maneuver. If Luna can rally the signatures of 218 House members—a simple majority—she can force the bill onto the House floor for a vote, bypassing the usual gatekeeping of party leadership. The tactic has gained traction in recent years; just last year, Representative Greg Steube of Florida successfully used a similar petition to force a vote on tax relief for disaster victims, a bill that ultimately became law after being signed by President Joe Biden.
Steube wasted no time in voicing his support for Luna’s latest effort. On December 4, he publicly backed the petition, stating, “Count me in. It’s no secret that House leadership is refusing to do anything about congressional insider trading. Lawmakers have no business making bank off their access to privileged information. If the Speaker and Majority Leader won’t step up and do the right thing, we will.”
According to The Asia Business Daily, Luna’s initiative is just the latest in a series of bipartisan attempts to clamp down on what critics call a “moral hazard” in Congress. The “Restore Trust in Congress Act,” introduced in September 2025 by Republican Chip Roy of Texas and Democrat Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island, mirrors Luna’s goals: it would ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks and require divestment of holdings by both lawmakers and their families. Roy and Magaziner have both appeared at press conferences alongside Luna and other supporters, emphasizing the urgent need for reform.
Despite the groundswell of support, Speaker Mike Johnson has remained a significant roadblock. While he has expressed support for the idea of banning stock trades by lawmakers, he has strongly opposed the use of discharge petitions to circumvent party leadership. “Some members have raised concern that congressional raises haven’t changed since 2009,” Johnson has said, suggesting that financial concerns might be at play. After the discharge process was used to force a vote on the release of documents tied to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, Johnson even considered changing the rules to make such petitions harder to use, according to Axios.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise echoed those sentiments, telling reporters, “I’d like to see a higher threshold for a lot of these motions. You know, privileged motions, discharge petitions.” The leadership’s resistance has only fueled frustration among rank-and-file members from both sides of the aisle.
Controversy over congressional stock trading is nothing new, but recent events have brought the issue into sharper focus. At the CNBC CFO Council Summit on December 3, Democratic Congressman Mike Levin of California lambasted the practice as “outrageous,” recalling how, in early 2020, he witnessed colleagues allegedly using non-public information about the COVID-19 pandemic to make lucrative trades. “I told my wife to go to Costco and buy hand sanitizer and disinfecting wipes. But some lawmakers called their stockbrokers to short cruise line stocks or buy Pfizer. That is wrong, and fundamentally so,” Levin said. Pfizer, of course, would go on to develop one of the world’s first COVID-19 vaccines.
Congress has tried to address the problem before. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, enacted in 2012, was supposed to ban lawmakers from using inside information for personal gain and strengthen disclosure requirements. But critics say the law is riddled with loopholes and lacks teeth. According to data from Congressman Roy’s office, 113 lawmakers made a staggering 9,261 stock trades last year alone, buying and selling approximately 706 million shares. Levin criticized the STOCK Act as “too weak and ineffective,” pointing out that “the exact time of purchase or sale is not specified, and only a range of the amount is disclosed, making it difficult to know exactly who did what.”
With the House now at a crossroads, the fate of the ban remains uncertain. Even if Luna’s discharge petition succeeds and the bill passes the House, its prospects in the Senate are far from assured. In July, a similar bill passed the Senate Homeland Security Committee, but only one Republican, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, supported it. The upper chamber’s reluctance underscores the deep-seated resistance to change within Congress itself.
Still, the sponsors of the House bill—Roy and Magaziner—have made it clear that they won’t back down. “If the leadership does not promptly introduce strong measures to ban congressional stock trading, lawmakers themselves will take action,” they said in a joint statement. The message is clear: the pressure is mounting, and the old ways of doing business may not hold much longer.
Luna, for her part, is no stranger to using the discharge process to shake things up. Earlier this year, she tried to force a vote on allowing new parents in Congress to vote by proxy during short leaves. Though she ultimately reached an agreement with Speaker Johnson not to bring that measure to a vote, her willingness to challenge the status quo remains undiminished. “Now if leadership wants to put forward a bill that would actually do that and end the corruption, we’re all for it. But we’re tired of the partisan games,” Luna said in her video announcement.
As the debate rages on, one thing is clear: the push to ban congressional stock trading has become a rare point of bipartisan agreement in an otherwise deeply divided Congress. Whether this latest effort will finally break the legislative logjam remains to be seen, but the spotlight on lawmakers’ financial dealings has never been brighter.
With mounting public scrutiny and a growing coalition of lawmakers demanding action, the coming weeks may well determine whether Congress is willing to police its own or remain, as Burchett put it, “a complete open sewer.”
