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PELOSI Act takes new form

A wild week for the PELOSI Act.

Senator Josh Hawley’s bill to ban federal officials from trading stocks, previously “the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments (PELOSI) Act,” advanced out of committee this week but faces a steep uphill battle with growing bipartisan backlash.

Hawley has been crusading against what he sees as insider trading within the federal government for years. “Members of Congress should be fighting for the people they were elected to serve—not day trading at the expense of their constituents,” he explained when he introduced the PELOSI Act earlier this year.

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, whose stock tracker outperformed nearly every hedge fund in 2024, is commonly viewed as, in Hawley’s words, “the poster child for this kind of behavior.” However, in order to attract bipartisan support for the bill, Hawley renamed it the HONEST Act. It passed out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

But, in an unexpected turn of events, Pelosi revealed this week that she supported the bill, despite it originally targeting her.

“If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it — no matter what they decide to name it,” she said in a statement. “While I appreciate the creativity of my Republican colleagues in drafting legislative acronyms, I welcome any serious effort to raise ethical standards in public service.”

This resulted in consternation on the part of the president, who tore into Hawley for supporting the legislation.

“I wonder why Hawley would pass a Bill that Nancy Pelosi is in absolute love with — He is playing right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” Donald Trump wrote on social media. “It’s a great Bill for her, and her ‘husband,’ but so bad for our Country! I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED, because of the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator named Josh Hawley!”

Trump’s attack appears to have stemmed from his belief that the ban on stock trading would affect him, which Hawley has denied.

“What the White House wanted was that the president, the vice president not be covered,” the senator from Missouri told reporters, “they’re not, their offices are, but it will be the next office holders.”

“I proactively said, ‘Let’s just make the effective date the date at the beginning of the next term for everybody,’ members of Congress and the president, vice president,” he added.

Despite the bill’s new name (and surprising new endorser), Hawley and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made it clear that any effort to crack down on government stock trading should continue to focus on Pelosi.

“Pelosi shouldn’t just be investigated, she should be prosecuted,” Hawley told Jesse Watters in an interview with Fox News. “And we need to make what she is doing and what other members of Congress [are] doing illegal. I mean, you shouldn’t be able to go up to Congress and get rich by trading on information that only you have and not members of the public. Right now, lots of members of Congress are getting by with it. We need to make the whole thing illegal.”

“I think the president stands with the American people on this,” Leavitt clarified on Thursday. “He doesn’t want to see people like Nancy Pelosi enriching themselves off of public service and ripping off their constituents in the process.”

For her part, Pelosi denied the accusations in a testy interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

We might as well admit it now: it seems unlikely these people will ever limit themselves.

But here’s the good news: we don’t have to wait. By calling an Article V convention, we can limit federal spending, power, and terms of office. The Founding Fathers knew we couldn’t entrust federal reform to Congress. That’s why they gave us this workaround. With 19 states onboard, we are well on our way to reining in the federal government, restoring fiscal sanity to Washington, and sending career politicians into a long-overdue retirement. Sign the COS petition below to show your support.

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Created:	2025-08-01 17:07 GMT
Updated:	2025-08-08 07:00 GMT
Published:	2025-08-01 17:00 GMT
Converted:	2025-11-11 12:06 GMT
Change Author:	Jakob Fay
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