A bill that would have prohibited lawmakers and their family members from buying publicly-traded stocks was blocked by Senate Democrats on Wednesday over an attached rider on voter ID laws. CBS News' Taurean Small reports.
Page F3From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 1 October 2026
Senate comes seven votes short of opening debate on whether to stop trading companies it regulates
You will have read that the Senate blocked a ban on members trading stocks, that Democrats did the blocking, and settled the blame. Hold on. The vote was not on the ban. It was cloture — the motion that opens debate, and cloture wants sixty hands before a word of the bill is spoken aloud. Fifty-three arrived. Fifty-three, seven short, and the Stop Insider Trading Act, passed by the House in July, sits ... where it sat. Every Democrat and independent voted no. Attached, a rider on voter identification; Democrats called it a "poison pill", and said the measure would let members keep their portfolios. Both can be true. Both were. And what did the chamber spend for that, five weeks before the third of November? Nothing whatever. The permission holds: a member may trade the stock of companies that member regulates. Wednesday did not write that permission. Wednesday renewed it.
Around the hens, a fence the fox built. The gate, not yet hung.
“Read the vote again — it wasn't even on the ban, it was on whether to talk about the ban, and it died seven short of sixty. Republicans stapled voter ID onto a bill about their own brokerage accounts, Democrats called it a poison pill and walked away, and the permission to trade the companies they regulate is still sitting there on the books five weeks before an election. Your kid's school budget doesn't get a committee seat and a trading account.”
“The bill banned stock trading, Democrats voted against the bill, end of story. The voter ID language is a footnote, a technicality — did I say footnote? That doesn't sound like me. Look, they could have advanced it in July and fixed it later, and yes, I understand what cloture is, I'm just saying somebody here voted no and it wasn't us.”
The receipts
A Republican-led effort to approve a House-passed stock trading bill fell short in the Senate, with Democrats saying the restrictions don't go far enough and pushing back against a voter ID provision.
Democrats block measure they say didn’t go far enough – and was bundled with ‘poison pill’ voter ID rules The US Senate on Wednesday blocked a Republican bill restricting stock trading by members of Congress, after Democrats refused to advance a measure they said would let lawmakers keep their portfolios and was bundled with voter ID…
· Trump-affiliated ‘No Going Back PAC’ makes first ad buy in NY-03 bashing Suozzi over stock trading from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.