Pelosi's No Vote on Stock Ban That Protects Her Intel Calls

Nancy Pelosi voted against a House bill that would ban lawmakers from buying individual stocks. The same bill would have let her keep every position she already owns.

Former Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.) was one of 198 votes against the Stop Insider Trading Act on July 22. The measure passed 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining every Republican, according to the House Clerk. Her office did not respond to a request for comment on the vote.

The legislation tells you more about what it leaves untouched than what it prohibits. H.R. 7008 would bar members, spouses and dependent children from purchasing individual stocks, and it would require seven to 14 days of public notice before any sale, according to Congress.gov. Existing holdings stay exactly where they are.

That grandfather clause matters because Pelosi disclosed up to $6 million in Intel (INTC) and Uber call options bought May 29, according to her Periodic Transaction Report. The Intel calls expire in March 2027. Under the bill, those positions would survive the ban without a forced sale.

Republicans added two wrinkles that turned the ethics vote into a partisan fight. The bill exempts the president from the trading restriction, and House leadership attached an unrelated voter identification measure to the package before the floor vote.

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) called the voter identification provision a "poison pill" during floor debate, according to the Associated Press. Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.), who co-leads a bipartisan divestiture bill, argued the package amounts to a "voter suppression bill" dressed up as ethics reform, he told CNN.

Republicans framed the outcome differently. Bill sponsor Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) said lawmakers who want to day trade already have somewhere to do it, and that "It's called Wall Street," according to Roll Call.

Ethics groups were not satisfied either. The Campaign Legal Center urged Congress to reject the measure on the grounds that letting members keep existing stock leaves both the appearance of insider trading and the ability to profit from official position fully intact.

Pelosi has been the face of this issue for years, and not by choice. She spent the early 2020s defending the status quo before reversing herself in 2022, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent singled her out by name last year while pushing for a single-stock trading ban, TheStreet reported. Her most recent filing showed seven-figure bets on Intel and Uber calls expiring in March 2027, as seen in TheStreet's coverage.

Roughly 32% of 311 disclosed congressional portfolios beat the S&P 500 in 2025, according to Unusual Whales. Pelosi's portfolio gained 20.1% and ranked 28th in Congress, per Unusual Whales data compiled by Benzinga. Some 86% of registered voters back barring lawmakers from trading individual stocks, according to the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland.

The current disclosure framework dates to 2012 and the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, better known as the STOCK Act, which requires lawmakers to report trades above $1,000 within 45 days. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the statute despite documented violations, according to CBS News.

That gap turned congressional portfolios into a spectator sport, then into an investable product. Two exchange-traded funds now exist for the express purpose of mirroring what lawmakers buy. The Democratic-tracking fund NANC returned 20.8% in 2025 against 16.6% for the S&P 500, per Unusual Whales.

The measure faces long odds in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes and where Republican leadership has shown little appetite for taking it up, according to NOTUS. So the 45-day disclosure window survives, and so does the copy-trading trade built on top of it.

The proposals that would actually change lawmaker behavior are the divestiture bills, including the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which would require members to sell individual holdings or move them into a blind trust. That measure had 126 House cosponsors as of January, along with a bipartisan Senate companion from Sens. Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), according to Gillibrand's office. None of that reached the floor Wednesday.

Pelosi leaves Congress in January 2027, so whatever passes next will barely touch her remaining tenure. The campaign season starting now is where the rest of the members get asked to explain a vote that reads one way on a scorecard and another way in the statute.

Watch the discharge petition rather than the press releases. That is the mechanism that can force a floor vote on the divestiture version over leadership objections.