WASHINGTON — Wednesday’s House Administration hearing on congressional insider trading is in one sense a win for the bipartisan cadre of lawmakers who have pushed on the issue for years.

But it’s far from the end of the road, and some of them still believe leadership is slow-walking a proposed ban on stock trading.

“Make no mistake, if this is not a step in the right direction, but a delaying tactic, then other options will be on the table for how to get this bill to the floor,” Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., said outside the committee room ahead of the hearing. “We have one bill, we have one strategy, and now it is on leadership to get this done and to give us a vote.”

Magaziner was joined by Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., all part of a working group that helped draft consensus legislation, dubbed the Restore Trust in Congress Act, which was unveiled in September. The bill, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, would ban members from owning or trading individual stocks and, unlike some other proposals, does not allow blind trusts.

The House Administration hearing comes amid months of pressure and on the heels of a partial government shutdown that lasted more than a month. And it’s the first time in more than three years a House panel has taken up the issue.

The stock issue is a sore spot for the lawmakers who had requested a markup and floor vote on the consensus bill this fall and who feel they’ve been repeatedly rebuffed. And it’s another potential cleavage point for Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who was dealt a loss at the hands of Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and other rank-and-file members earlier this week when the House advanced with near unanimous support a bill aimed at compelling the release of the Epstein files.

Johnson, along with President Donald Trump, initially opposed the Epstein bill but relented when a discharge petition circulated by Massie reached 218 signatures, meaning he could circumvent House leadership to bring it to the floor.

Failure to move on the stock issue could result in another embarrassing discharge petition showdown. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., also a supporter of the effort to ban members from trading stocks, threatened to file a discharge petition to force a vote if no stock trading markup was noticed on Wednesday, Politico reported.

House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., would not commit to a markup after the hearing, deferring to the speaker.

“Stay tuned. We had a great hearing today and we’re going to continue to build,” Steil said to a group of reporters as he exited the committee room.

Failure to self-police

A 2012 law, known as the STOCK Act, already bars members from trading on inside information. But the law is rarely enforced and lawmakers regularly flout its reporting requirements.

“Substantial evidence may suggest that Congress may not have been adequately self-policing under the STOCK Act,” James R. Copland, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, testified at Wednesday’s hearing. “Despite allegations of improper conduct, no member of Congress has ever been prosecuted under the act. Nor do any public records exist indicating whether officials have ever paid fines for STOCK Act disclosure errors.”

This failure to self-police, coupled with a series of dubious trades over the years, contributes to negative public sentiment about Congress, proponents of the stock trading ban argue.

But the path forward remains murky. While many members — including Johnson — have publicly disavowed the appearance of insider trading, Burchett alluded to behind-the-scenes machinations to gum up the stock ban effort. He credited Steil for holding the hearing at all.

“It’s a gutsy move by him to do, because obviously behind the scenes… [lawmakers] are saying, ‘We don’t want this.’ But when it gets to the floor they’re going to be our biggest cheerleader. So it’s definitely a gutsy move to get it into committee,” Burchett said.

A stock-trading ban bill advanced out of a Senate committee in July, but so far has not gotten a vote on the floor. That bill generated controversy because of a provision that would have required the president and vice president to divest. President Donald Trump, who has been supportive of a congressional ban on trading, came out against the proposal, which was backed by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

The consensus bill in the House does not include the executive and judicial branches, and instead would apply just to members, their spouses and dependents, an omission that should be corrected, according to some on the House Administration panel.

Ranking member Joseph D. Morelle, D-N.Y., said corruption and self-dealing are problems that extend beyond Congress to the other branches of government.

“Any policy solution should seek to address the outrageous behavior we are seeing at the Supreme Court and in the executive branch,” Morelle said at the hearing.

Magaziner said many in the working group are open to including the president and vice president and that the provision could be added via amendment if there’s sufficient support.

“But rather than delay the process of introducing the reworked bill while we figure that out, we decided to go ahead, introduce the bill, keep the momentum going,” he said. “That’s still an open question.”

Whether those questions are ironed out in a markup remains to be seen, though Burchett, Fitzpatrick, Jayapal and Magaziner all projected confidence that the bill would eventually get a floor vote in the House.

Burchett, however, took a fatalistic view of the endeavor.

“This thing ain’t going to pass,” he said ahead of the hearing, advancing a theory that the bill would get sent to the Senate and stall. “This is a scam that’s being played on the American public, and it needs to stop. Let’s quit with this nonsense.”

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