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Congress Keeps The Trading Desk Open: Senate Dems Sink Lawmaker Trading Ban 53-47

Zero Rss
1 week 1 day ago
Congress Keeps The Trading Desk Open: Senate Dems Sink Lawmaker Trading Ban 53-47

A midterm messaging bill that was never going to become law just confirmed the only bipartisan consensus that matters: members of Congress still get to play the tape.

Senate Democrats just blocked cloture on a bill that would have stopped lawmakers from buying new publicly traded stocks. The vote was 53-47. Sixty were required. But guess what happened? Republicans dropped Voter ID into it so the Dems would nuke it. 

The measure was H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act. House Republicans shoved it through on July 22 by 232-198, with 13 Democrats peeling off. Senate Majority Leader John Thune teed it up this week as a pre-recess vote for vulnerable incumbents, with Nebraska Republican Pete Ricketts as the face of the Senate version.

🇺🇸 BREAKING: Senate Democrats voted 53-47 against a bill that would have mandated photo voter ID and prohibited stock trading by members of Congress, with all Democrats voting against it.

The proposal would have restricted certain stock purchases by lawmakers, their spouses and… pic.twitter.com/CFLVlbf05v

— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) September 30, 2026

It was not a vote on final passage. It was a vote on whether the Senate would even begin debate. Every Democrat lined up against it. Republicans got their campaign tape. The public got another press release about "integrity."

What The Bill Actually Did

This was not a ban on congressional stock ownership. It was a ban on new purchases of publicly listed names by members, spouses, and dependent children, plus a 7-to-14-day public notice before a sale.

Stop Insider Trading Act - the fine print

  • Banned: new buys of publicly traded stocks and equivalent economic exposure.
  • Allowed: keeping existing portfolios; selling after advance notice; widely held funds/ETFs.
  • Penalty: greater of $2,000 or 10% of the trade, plus forfeiture of profits.
  • Not covered: the president and vice president; private companies; commodities; forced divestiture.
  • Bolted on: national photo-ID language lifted from the SAVE America Act.

Ricketts has been selling the companion as commonsense. In a July op-ed he said members could keep existing stock but had to telegraph sales so "the market" could get ahead of them. Violating a $1 million sale without notice would cost $100,000 plus profits. That is a parking ticket in a town where a well-timed options lot can clear that before lunch.

The 2012 STOCK Act already pretends to police this. It does not ban trades. It requires delayed disclosure and affirms that insider-trading law applies to Congress. The new bill would have gone further on purchases. It still left the core conflict intact: lawmakers can hold the names they regulate, vote the names they hold, and sell when the calendar is convenient.

The "Poison Pill" Was The Point

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer did not hide the strategy. On Tuesday, in floor remarks his office billed as exposing a "theatrical farce," he accused Republicans of "skullduggery" for wiring a voter-ID mandate into an ethics bill.

There’s been a real effort to ban members of Congress from trading stocks and profiting off insider information—which I’ve supported for years.

This Republican bill, however, has no reform, no accountability, and no substance, and STILL allows members to own and sell stocks. pic.twitter.com/NL9i0ybWrK

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) September 30, 2026

He is not wrong about the mechanics. Democrats have already killed standalone voter-ID vehicles. Attach the same language to a popular ethics bill and you force the minority to vote against "banning insider trading" on camera. That is a super PAC ad in search of a roll call.

Schumer's other complaint echoes the one House Democrats have made since January: the bill is "not a ban." Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) called it "weak sauce." House Democrats spent the January markup trying to force full divestiture and to rope in the executive branch. Republicans voted those amendments down.

The GOP bill was thinner than the bipartisan drafts that have been rotting in committee for years. And Democrats just used that gap, plus a voting rider they were never going to accept, to keep the status quo.

A Lifeline Vote, Not A Law

Thune scheduled this next to a data-center ratepayer bill as a political life raft for three incumbents getting worked over on affordability and self-dealing: Ricketts in Nebraska, Jon Husted in Ohio, Dan Sullivan in Alaska. The Hill reported Thune's theory in plain English: it becomes "pretty hard" for Democrats to hammer those senators for trading or data-center politics if Democrats are the ones who killed the bills.

Ricketts needs the tape. He is running for a full term against independent Dan Osborn, who has hit him over an estimated $10 million stock-market haul around last year's tariff chaos. A failed 60-vote test lets Ricketts say he tried. It lets Osborn say Congress protected itself.

Bloomberg Government flagged the outcome a day early. Democrats said a stock bill with voter ID would "never pass." The Washington Examiner called the whole exercise "built to fail" before the first vote was cast. CNBC framed it as a vote before the election recess.

The Real Ban Is Still In Committee Hell

A stricter bipartisan model - full divestiture of individual names, sometimes covering the executive branch, sometimes not - polls through the roof and dies in the cloakroom. House Democrats wanted Trump and Vance in the net. Republicans would not put a sitting Republican president in a trading cage while leaving Congress a blind-trust fig leaf. The coalition that could pass a real ban split on who had to sell.

So leadership reached for the version that lets members keep their books. Then they stapled on photo ID. The STOCK Act's 30-to-45-day disclosure lag remains the law of the land.

If Congress wanted this fixed, the fix is not complicated: no individual names, no sector toys dressed up as "diversified" products, no spouse carve-outs for people who sit in the room, and the same rule for anyone who can move a sector with a speech. That bill does not get 60 votes because too many people in the chamber like the current return profile.

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 13:40
Tyler Durden

It's Time For The Right To Return Fire

Zero Rss
1 week 1 day ago
It's Time For The Right To Return Fire

Authored by Tom Klingenstein via TomKlingenstein.com,

In this essay, Thomas Klingenstein argues that the Right has made a category error: treating lawfare as a series of discrete legal disputes when it is better understood as a system of political power. His answer isn't simply better defense, but counterpressure - a new public-interest law firm, led by Jeff Clark, meant to defend conservative lawyers and make lawfare more costly to practice.

The deeper question, however, is whether an adversarial legal order can remain genuinely adversarial when one side commands the institutions, money, and professional machinery of enforcement. Klingenstein's argument is that formal neutrality is not enough; power also depends on whether institutions exist that are willing and able to contest it.

Lawfare is the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate, distract, defame, or destroy an opponent. Over the past decade, the Left has built a powerful, well-funded network that is carrying out Lawfare against our advocate class. The Left raised at least $183 million last year.

(Jemie Hecker/Shutterstock)

To examine lawfare, we must consider the current context, which is this: we are at war, a cold civil war, against a domestic regime which wants to overthrow America. It is correct to call it a "war," and not just an unusually wide divide, because the contest is between two moral orders. From a given moral order there flows a given set of laws, values, customs, and other aspects of culture. Obviously, a society can have only one of each. The moral order of the enemy regime rests on group outcome equality. The moral order of our regime, on the other hand, rests on individual merit. These two moral orders - individual merit versus group quotas - are utterly irreconcilable. You can't admit people to college (or anything else) based on both merit and group quotas. It's one or the other. This is why today the two political parties can agree on almost nothing. The Left knows that because it knows that it is at war. Thus, it plays by wartime rules. The Right, on the other hand, does not know it and so continues to play by peacetime rules, which include trying to reach across the aisle, a sucker's game in a war.

One of the most powerful weapons in the Left's arsenal is Lawfare. But we on the Right don't understand this; we don't understand either the nature or power of the Left's Lawfare.

It's time we learn.

The 65 Project is the best example of leftist Lawfare. Devised by Melissa Moss and David Brock, two Democrat operatives with ties to Hillary Clinton, the Project has sought "not only [to] bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame [Right-wing lawyers] and make them toxic."

Elsewhere, David Brock says the central aim of the Project is to "threat[en] the livelihood[s]" of Republican and conservative lawyers, noting that the power of Lawfare comes from its "deterrent effect." The goal, Brock underscores, is to "kill the pool of legal talent" on the Right.

The Project's Advisory Board consists of high-powered Democrat operatives, including former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham, former American Bar Association (ABA) President Roberta Ramo, and Paul Rosenzweig, a member of the Federalist Society who had worked for Ken Starr on Whitewater.

When it was first announced, the 65 Project set out to target 65 lawyers (hence the name), but it has now grown to target 111 lawyers in 26 states and the District of Columbia. Since then, at least 86 bar complaints have been filed. The Project has not won all its cases, but a loss can be just as successful as a "win." A lawsuit can cost a single defendant hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in legal fees, as well as damage his reputation and even split up his family. Trump's former Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, paid many millions to defend himself against the J6 Committee, Jack Smith, Fani Willis, and likely others.

As I noted, the Left's lawfare effort raised at least $183.2 million in 2025 alone. This effort is not only well-funded; it is well-organized and coordinated. For example, thousands of people have been mobilized across the country to sign ethics complaints against Right-wing lawyers. In New York alone, 7,200 individuals were mobilized to support the ethics complaint against Rudy Giuliani. The groups are coordinating filings across jurisdictions and pursuing individual lawyers through multiple disciplinary proceedings. Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, and John Eastman have each been disbarred. Jenna Ellis received a three-year suspension. Jeff Clark's proceeding reached a recommendation for disbarment.

John Eastman's disbarment is the most well-known shot across the bow. So far, it has cost him $3 million to defend himself against disbarment and Lawfare. And like virtually all our defendants, he could not get legal representation from "white shoe" law firms. Further, his disbarment is just a piece of the Left's attack: court orders have restricted his travel, his ability to carry a gun, his ability to get his TSA ID renewed, and more - essentially stripping away his rights and imposing as many inconveniences as possible.

If they can disbar Eastman, then they can disbar you. And make no mistake, they want to.

Eastman has appealed the disbarment decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, some of the most prestigious lawyers on the Right would not take Eastman's case, perhaps because of concerns about financial or reputational consequences. I get it. I know that getting involved would require sacrifices, but I also know our best and brightest lawyers love their country. Let me say to them what they already know: Their country needs them.

Leaving Lawfare to the Left has been a big mistake. It's time to return fire.

Finally, there is good news. Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice have, to their great credit, stepped up and are now representing John. The Department of Justice should file an amicus brief in support of Eastman. Although the Supreme Court does not normally take state disbarment cases, under its discretionary cert review, it can. The primary justification for taking John's case is that partisan disbarment undermines the rule of law. Lawyers must not be systematically discouraged from taking difficult and controversial cases, such as ones that defend the Presidency, election integrity, and other Right-wing causes.

Judicial resolution depends on fearless advocates on both sides meeting on an equal playing field. Today, it is not a fair fight. Let's not sugarcoat it: the proponents of Lawfare on the Left seek to establish a one-party monopoly. And since much of America's policy development today occurs in the courts, it is evenhanded court advocacy that the Left must destroy.

As I said, we must counterattack. To begin, I'm funding a new, offensive-oriented public interest law firm, which will be led by Jeff Clark. He knows Lawfare from the inside. Jeff had the same concerns about the 2020 election that millions of Americans had: members of the executive branch in many states made unilateral, last-minute changes to properly enacted election laws; the widespread use of mail-in balloting, the lack of signature verification, and a host of other problems. Jeff wanted DOJ and the battleground states to investigate those irregularities aggressively, and so he drafted a letter addressed to Georgia's legislators that expressed his concerns. The letter was never sent because others at DOJ threatened to resign if it were. The matter should have died, as it was protected by executive, attorney-client, and other privileges. But it didn't. The letter was leaked by Jeff's enemies to try to destroy him and pressure him to attack President Trump, which Jeff refused to do.

For this supposed offense - a letter never sent - Jeff was arrested and prosecuted by Fani Willis. And Jack Smith targeted Jeff for years, claiming that he was unindicted co-conspirator number four in a criminal case relating to January 6 in Washington, D.C. What's more, Jeff had to fend off three separate congressional investigations, and for five years and counting, Jeff has been defending his bar license in D.C. Jeff's case is so meritorious that the current DOJ sued all of the judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals, two bar quasi-prosecutors, and the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, arguing that they have no authority to prosecute or harass Jeff in any way.

But instead of retreating, Jeff has chosen to fight. He has had a very successful legal career both in private practice and at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the White House. As a leader of the Trump Administration's DOJ Environment Division, Jeff won 80% of his cases, including stopping the attempted takeover of U.S. energy policy by a federal judge in Oregon. And Jeff won two-thirds of the cases he personally argued when he later took over the 1,000-lawyer Civil Division at DOJ starting in September 2020.

It would be imprudent to reveal our plans to the enemy, but at minimum, the newly minted Project Oversight Law Firm will pursue damages, fees, and other remedies that make the Left's Lawfare too costly to continue. When necessary, this new firm will bring into question the careers and reputations of those who are committing Lawfare against us. It's time to turn the tables.

The conservative Lawfare effort has been much less effective than it could have been because it has focused entirely on defending our lawyers who have been attacked by the Left. And even then, our efforts have been woefully inadequate. For the most part, we have left our lawyers to fend for themselves. This must change. We need to meaningfully support our lawyers and, at the same time, go on offense. Playing defense is an honorable task, but as any good strategist knows, the best defense is a good offense.

Furthermore, at present, the conservative public interest movement is hampered by the fact that it is operating like a business that bills its clients at extraordinary hourly rates; instead, we need to develop our own purpose-built law firm (specializing in multiple legal disciplines) that can go on offense. As a movement, we have shown we are capable of identifying what we need to resist, but we are much less clear about what we need to recover, which institutions we need to recapture, and how we aim to eliminate, reduce, or make more expensive future assaults from the Left.

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 13:20
Tyler Durden

Gulf Exports Roar Back To Pre-War Levels, Goldman Says; Blas Sees "Trump Has Advantage" On Hormuz

Zero Rss
1 week 1 day ago
Gulf Exports Roar Back To Pre-War Levels, Goldman Says; Blas Sees "Trump Has Advantage" On Hormuz

The US conflict with Iran has been ongoing for seven months and will soon enter its eighth month. Diplomatic signals this week, along with another request for a US SPR dump and reports of Gulf oil export flows improving toward prewar levels, have sent Brent crude futures down to around $103 a barrel.

Goldman analysts Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby, Alexandra Paulus and Daan Struyven have penned a new note explaining that estimated "dark exports" have helped boost Persian Gulf oil exports to 23.3 million barrels a day over the past week, back to prewar levels and an encouraging development ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

"We estimate that Persian Gulf oil exports, including estimated "dark exports", have recovered to 23.3mb/d over the last week, in line with their 2025 average, as exports doubled in September," the analysts wrote. 

They said, "The remarkable adaptation of both Middle East supply and China import demand supports our base case that Brent prices moderate to $85/bbl by year-end and to $80 in 2027." 

Grigsby attributed much of the export-bound surge to increased Hormuz shipments, including ship-to-ship transfers. Those flows have offset a drone attack that paralyzed Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline, but the most recent reports say the pipeline has restarted. 

Crude accounted for nearly 90% of September's export recovery in the Gulf area, reaching 19 million barrels a day over the past week, or 108% of its 2025 average.

But the analysts warned that exports of diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel remained at just half their 2025 average.

Saudis led the recovery. 

They also pointed out "a divergence between the fall of Iranian exports and the rise of exports of other Persian Gulf producers."

Taken together, what does this mean for the Trump administration? 

Well, Bloomberg commodities expert Javier Blas wrote in an opinion piece that President Trump has gained the upper hand in the battle over the maritime chokepoint, with crude exports from US allies through Hormuz and bypass routes recovering toward prewar levels.

Blas wrote:

I don't know who will win the US-Iran war. But if you ask me who's prevailing in the battle over the Strait of Hormuz, it's clear US President Donald Trump has the advantage. As much as Tehran says the opposite, the strait is effectively wide open. Crude oil exports from regional US allies via the waterway, plus bypass routes, have risen to about 80% of prewar levels. Iran, meanwhile, has seen its own oil exports plunge to zero.

A couple of months ago, the surge in oil shipments would have been seen as a major American victory. Yet Brent crude, the oil price benchmark, remains above $100 a barrel. Inside the White House, some must be asking themselves: If this is winning, what would losing look like?

Yet restoring crude flows addresses only one part of the global energy shock. Goldman energy analyst Nikhil Bhandari warned last week that the global refining crisis could extend well into 2027. Russia still has a refinery crisis and export halts of crude products were just extended into fall. 

Blas' view is that Trump is gaining control of Hormuz while Tehran's leverage has eroded. But whether that translates into lower fuel bills depends on the refining crisis Bhandari described: fuel prices will remain elevated into next year (read the report here).

The blockade and US sanctions are nearing maximum impact. The power of these things is that Iran's regime can obviously roll the clock forward. The devastation to the economy will now get much worse quickly. Imaginations will be running wild in Tehran...https://t.co/INXSZye8Hd pic.twitter.com/hyQXFFit7x

— Robin Brooks (@robin_j_brooks) September 30, 2026

Professional subscribers can read the full note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/30/2026 - 13:00
Tyler Durden

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