Tlaib’s objections outlined
In her op-ed, Tlaib writes that she finds it “incredibly disturbing” there are children in the U.S. who are drinking lead-contaminated water while, at the same time, Congress passed a record-breaking $895.2 billion defense budget.
But, more troubling, she says, is the fact that many of the lawmakers who voted on that near-trillion-dollar budget own stock in the very war manufacturers that stand to benefit financially from this decision.
“Year after year, members of Congress continue to funnel billions of our tax dollars to the same defense contractors that some of them are invested in and take campaign donations from — while our communities are neglected,” she wrote.
She points to analysis done by Sludge, which identified more than 50 members of Congress who own stock in defense contractors that are benefiting from the increased Pentagon spending. The total value of these stock holdings could be as much as $10.9 million as of 2023, according to Sludge analysis.
“Our elected officials should not be able to profit off death,” Tlaib concluded. “They should not be able to use their positions of power to get rich from defense contractors while voting to pass more funding to bomb people. The American people deserve better.”
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Learn MoreCongressional stock pickers
Lawmakers and watchdogs have been debating the issue of whether Washington insiders (and their families) should be allowed to trade stocks for over a decade. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act was signed by President Barack Obama on April 4, 2012.
However, as Sludge’s investigation found, several lawmakers have violated this act in recent years. Some critics argue the $200 penalty fee for violating the act is simply too low to deter stock trading based on privileged information.
And it’s not just defense spending that concerns watchdogs. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, an investment banker, came under sharp criticism for his sale of shares of tech company NVIDIA just weeks before a Chinese rival caused a blowout. Meanwhile, Rep. Michael McCaul has been pushing for a new cybersecurity bill called the PIVOTT Act while recently purchasing shares of Fortinet, a cybersecurity firm that lobbied for the bill, according to Quiver Quantitative.
These conflicts of interest were recently highlighted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who called congressional stock trading a glaring and “insane” problem on an episode of “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart.”
Meanwhile, 67% of Americans support a ban on stock trading from members of Congress, according to Data for Progress. With this in mind, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Rep. Zach Nunn, introduced the bipartisan No Corruption in Government Act to block members of Congress and their spouses from holding or trading individual stocks.
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