On Tuesday, July 21, an official email from Congresswoman April McClain Delaney arrived in my inbox. Dear Sixth District Neighbor, it read.
It made a simple argument. Members of Congress should be held to a high ethical standard. Our job is to serve our constituents, not ourselves. That is why she supports bipartisan legislation banning members of Congress and their families from trading stocks while in office.¹
Then it asked me a question. Should Members of Congress be banned from trading stocks? There was a button to click. Underneath the button, in smaller type, sat a line explaining that by participating in the survey I agreed to receive communications from Rep. McClain Delaney.
Before I go further, you should know who is writing this. I ran against her in the June 23 Democratic primary and finished fourth. That gives me a reason to want this story to be true, and you are right to weigh it. So I have linked every document below. Clerk of the House filings, roll call records, discharge petition signatures, bill text. Check my work instead of taking my word.
Now the part where she is right.
The Bill
The vote she was writing about in her newsletter was H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed the House 232 to 198 on Wednesday, July 22. Every Republican voted for it, along with thirteen Democrats and one independent.²
She voted no.³
The way she explains it in her newsletter is accurate. House Republicans took a stock trading bill and bolted the Voter ID Act onto it, importing the photo identification requirements from the SAVE America Act into a bill about congressional ethics.⁴
But watch what happened in the Rules Committee. Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican, wrote an amendment extending the trading restrictions to the President, the Vice President, cabinet secretaries and every political appointee. Democrats moved to make it in order. Defeated four to eight. They moved to substitute the text of a stronger bill. Defeated four to eight. They moved to restore grants to states that offer voter ID without charge. Defeated four to seven.⁵
A Republican wrote the amendment that would have covered the President but it never reached the floor.
The underlying stock provisions were thin on their own. Members could keep every share they already owned. They could keep collecting dividends. The ban reached new purchases only, and it stopped at the edge of the executive branch.⁶
So the vote was a trap, and she said so, and she was right. I would have voted no on that bill as well. That is the argument her office will make, and it holds.
But her email did not stop at explaining a vote. It made a claim about what she believes, and it asked me to agree with her about it. Which raised a question I could answer without asking anyone. When a member of Congress tells her district that she supports banning members of Congress and their families from trading stocks, what are her own filings doing?
August 5, 2025
On August 5, 2025, Rep. McClain Delaney added her name as a cosponsor to H.R. 396, the TRUST in Congress Act. That bill requires a member of Congress, along with any spouse or dependent child, to place covered investments into a qualified blind trust for the duration of the member’s tenure.⁷
On August 5, 2025, she also digitally signed a Periodic Transaction Report. It disclosed stock activity from the previous month in accounts belonging to her dependent children, including purchases of Brown & Brown and CDW Corporation.⁸
The same day. One signature putting her name on a bill to stop the practice. One signature reporting the same practice she said she wants to stop.
Two days later, on August 7, the accounts bought Jones Lang LaSalle and Markel Group. On August 21, Markel again, this time between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars. On August 25, BJ’s Wholesale.⁹ Four purchases in the three weeks after she signed.
Five months later, on January 14, 2026, she cosponsored H.R. 5106, the Restore Trust in Congress Act.¹⁰ That bill goes further than blind trusts. It prohibits covered individuals from owning or trading covered investments at all, and requires sitting members to divest within 180 days of enactment.¹¹
Both bills reach dependent children by design. That is the point of them. Wealthy families have routed market exposure through children’s trusts for as long as the STOCK Act has existed, because the STOCK Act required disclosure and nothing else.
She knows this, because she explained it herself. Asked during the primary about congressional stock trading, she told the Baltimore Banner she was a proud cosponsor of the TRUST in Congress Act, legislation that “effectively bans members, their spouses, and dependent children from trading individual stocks” by requiring blind trusts.¹²
She wrote the description of what the bill would do to her family’s accounts. This is not me taking something she said out of context. She put it in context for us.
The Record
Here is what those accounts did after August 5, 2025.
September: five purchases, including Nasdaq between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars.¹³ October: eleven, including Nasdaq again in the same range.¹⁴ November: three.¹⁵ December: nine.¹⁶ January: one.¹⁷
February 2026: sixteen purchases and twenty-nine sales, forty-five transactions in a single month. C.H. Robinson four times. Rollins three times, one between fifteen and fifty thousand. EMCOR twice. Labcorp twice.¹⁸
March: twenty-two purchases. Nasdaq six separate times. Somnigroup four times. EMCOR three times. Tractor Supply three times.¹⁹
April: eleven purchases. TransDigm Group five separate times.²⁰
May, the month before the primary, is the largest in the record. Fifty-three transactions. Twenty-three purchases. BWX Technologies four times, two of them between fifteen and fifty thousand dollars. TransDigm five more times. Hubbell five times. Entegris three times.²¹
June: eight purchases. Hubbell six times. Two of those on June 16 and June 17.²²
The primary was June 23. Six days later.
While she was asking voters in Frederick and Hagerstown and Cumberland to send her back to Washington, somebody was buying industrial electrical equipment in a dependent child’s brokerage account. That report was filed with the Clerk of the House on July 7. Fourteen days later she emailed me to ask whether I thought members of Congress should be allowed to trade stocks.
Add the eleven reports together. Between August 5, 2025 and the end of June 2026, these accounts recorded 113 purchases of individual stocks and 238 transactions in all.
Now compare that to the six months before she signed anything. From February through July 2025, the accounts averaged just over ten purchases of individual stocks per month.²³ From August 2025 through June 2026, after she cosponsored the blind trust bill and then the divestment bill, they averaged just over ten purchases of individual stocks per month.
Eleven months of cosponsorship changed the number by a fraction of one trade.
The Petition
There is a difference between signing your name to a bill and doing something that costs you.
On December 2, 2025, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed a discharge petition to force the Restore Trust in Congress Act onto the House floor over the objections of leadership. A discharge petition is the tool that exists precisely because bills like this one get referred to committee and left there.
It needs 218 signatures. As of this writing it has 84.²⁴ Rep. McClain Delaney is not among them.
She cosponsored the underlying bill on January 14, 2026. The next day, January 15, Rep. Johnny Olszewski of Maryland’s second district signed the petition.²⁴ Same week. Same caucus. Same state delegation. One of them added a name to a cosponsor list, which requires nothing and forces nothing. The other signed the document that would actually drag the bill to a vote.
Sixty-nine of the signatures belong to Democrats, and many of them cosponsored the same bill she did. Joe Neguse. Mike Levin. Josh Riley. Betty McCollum. Diana DeGette. Jason Crow. Brittany Pettersen. Dave Min. Ami Bera. Darren Soto. Maxine Dexter. Joe Courtney. They signed. She did not.
In fairness, only one member of the Maryland delegation signed that petition, so she is not alone among her colleagues here. But the rest of them did not send me an email in July asking whether I thought stock trading should be banned.
The Committees
Rep. McClain Delaney sits on the House Agriculture Committee, including its Subcommittee on Commodity Markets, Digital Assets, and Rural Development. She also sits on Science, Space and Technology.²⁵
Nasdaq operates securities exchanges and has built a substantial digital assets business. It was purchased in these accounts in September, twice in October, once in February, six times in March, again in April.
Tractor Supply is farm and rural retail. It was purchased twelve times across her tenure, most recently three times in March 2026.
Entegris makes semiconductor materials. It was purchased in March, April, three times in May, twice in June.
I’ll be incredibly careful with what I’m writing here, because the careless version of this argument is worse than if I said nothing at all. I found nothing in these filings suggesting trades timed to legislative action, and I read every one of the seventeen. Nothing here establishes that anyone used nonpublic information. What these filings establish is overlap, repeatedly, between a family’s disclosed purchases and the jurisdiction of the committees the member sits on.
Overlap is the entire reason these bills exist. A conflict of interest is not a crime — even if we think it should be. You do not have to prove somebody acted on it to argue it should not be permitted, and Rep. McClain Delaney has already agreed with that argument twice, in writing, on the House cosponsor rolls.
The Extension
There is one more filing worth your attention, and it is the one that is not there.
Members of Congress file an annual financial disclosure every May 15. It is the document that shows the whole picture: what the household owns, what it is worth, where the income comes from. The Ethics Committee grants extensions of up to ninety days on request.²⁶
On April 1, 2026, Rep. McClain Delaney requested a ninety day extension on her annual report covering calendar year 2025. It was granted. The new due date is August 13, 2026.²⁷
The primary was June 23. The original deadline would have put that document in front of voters thirty-nine days before they voted. The extension pushed it to fifty-one days after.
So when this district went to the polls, the most recent complete accounting of her household’s finances was a report filed in August 2025 covering the year 2024.²⁸ The disclosure covering the year she spent cosponsoring stock trading bans was not available to them, and it still is not available when this was published.
Taking the extension is legal, ordinary, and common. Plenty of members do it every year, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or say it’s deceitful.
What I will say is this. In 2024, when she was a challenger without a seat, she filed candidate financial disclosure reports and candidate extension requests, because candidates operate under a harder rule: their extensions must leave a due date at least thirty days before the election they are running in.²⁹ In 2026, as the incumbent, she filed on the member form, which carries no such limit.²⁷
Same person. Same seat. Two sets of rules, depending on which side of the incumbency line she was standing on when the deadline came.
She did not write those rules. She benefits from them, just like every member of the House who runs for re-election. Notice how they’re not advocating for change.
What Her Office Will Say
Let me put the strongest version of the defense on the table, because it deserves one.
These are trusts benefiting her children. The holdings sit inside the SBLG Delaney Family Trusts, in which each dependent child holds a twenty-five percent interest, held through Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo brokerage accounts. Both children’s portfolios contain nearly identical positions in nearly identical sizes.²⁸ That is the signature of a financial advisor running one model portfolio across two sibling accounts, not a member of Congress placing trades between votes. Her disclosure lists her positions in five organizations, and trustee of her children’s trusts is not among them.²⁸ Nothing shows she directs a single transaction. And neither bill she cosponsored is law, so she is under no legal obligation to do anything at all.
Every piece of that is true. Nearly all of the individual stock trading in this household runs through the children’s accounts. The one publicly traded stock I found held directly by an adult in the family is a PacWest Bancorp position in her husband’s brokerage — and PacWest was absorbed by another bank in 2023, so that entry may simply be stale.²⁸
Here is why none of that answers the question.
Both bills reach dependent children by design, and she said so herself to the Banner. H.R. 396 requires a qualified blind trust as federal law defines one, which means an independent trustee and a filer who does not know what the trust holds.⁷H.R. 5106 permits a family trust exemption only at the discretion of an ethics office, and only where no covered individual holds authority over the trustee.¹¹
Look at what she files. Every position in these accounts appears on her disclosure, itemized by ticker, by value range, by brokerage, certified true and complete under her own signature.²⁸ A qualified blind trust does not work that way. The disclosure form says so on its face: details of an approved blind trust need not be reported. The existence of the itemization is the proof that this is not one.
She knows exactly what is in those accounts. I am not accusing her of anything she has not certified herself.
As for the law not being passed yet: Rep. Morgan McGarvey cosponsored the same two bills. He and his wife liquidated their individual stock holdings in November 2024, before the end of his first term, and he said so publicly the following spring while the legislation sat in committee going nowhere.³¹ Nobody made him. As of their 2024 disclosures, not one member of Colorado’s House delegation held publicly traded stock, and four of them cosponsored the same bill she did.³²
That is what it looks like when a member of Congress means it.
What the Bill Would Actually Cost Her
I want to show you something in the text of the bill she signed in January, because it changes how you should read everything above.
H.R. 5106 defines a covered investment as an investment in a security, a commodity, a future, or any comparable economic interest acquired through synthetic means, including options and warrants. Then it lists what does not count. Widely held investment funds that are both diversified and publicly traded on an exchange. Treasury bills. State and municipal bonds. An employer’s paycheck. An LLC that exists to hold your house. Alaska Native settlement stock.¹¹
That is the entire list of exclusions. Read it against her disclosure and the scope becomes clear.
The children’s Schwab accounts would go, obviously. So would the hedge fund partnerships, because a limited partnership interest is not publicly traded on an exchange. Acacia Partners, five to twenty-five million dollars, jointly held. American Steadfast, five to twenty-five million, jointly held. Farallon Capital Partners, five to twenty-five million, jointly held. The private equity funds would go: Hellman & Friedman, the HCP funds, Enlightenment Capital, Galvanize, Revolution Growth. The Forbright call option would go, because the bill names options specifically.
And so would Forbright itself. Twenty-five to fifty million dollars of jointly held stock in a privately held bank — the company where her husband draws his salary.²⁸ Private stock is still a security — and privately held companies are nowhere on that list of exclusions.
Now hold on, because this is where I have to be fair to her.
That is an enormous thing to ask of a person. Not a gesture, not a symbol. Sell your stake in the bank your spouse runs — at whatever price you can get inside a hundred and eighty days — because you won an election. Anyone would hesitate. But this is precisely why the reform has never passed and never will pass on cosponsorships alone: the people who would have to vote for it are the same people who would have to pay for it, and the bill costs the wealthiest members the most.
She could have just said that. It would have been an honest and defensible thing to say — and while I still would’ve said it’s wrong, at least it’s transparent.
She could have said the bill goes too far for my circumstances and here is the version I can support. I would’ve respected that because it shows calculated decision making, even if I may have disagreed with the end result.
She could have also said the bill is right and the price is worth it, and so here is my plan. That’s what I would do and that’s what I would expect of any public servant.
She said none of these things. She put her name on it — which cost nothing — and then sent me a survey asking whether I agree with her.
So when Anna Paulina Luna filed the one document that could have forced that bill to a vote, her name was not on it. That says more than anything else.
What This Is Actually About
For the purposes of this conversation, I do not care that April McClain Delaney is a Democrat. If a Republican in this district sent me that email while filing those reports, I would have written the same piece, and anyone who has read something I’ve written before knows that is a truthful statement.
Congressional stock trading is one of the few things in American politics with real consensus. A 2023 survey by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation found eighty-six percent of Americans want it banned, including eighty-seven percent of Republicans and eighty-eight percent of Democrats.³³ That is one of the last places where the public agrees with itself, and it stays unresolved anyway, year after year, for exactly the reason her own disclosure makes visible.
Eleven months. Two bills. One hundred and thirteen purchases of individual stocks in accounts both bills were written to reach. A discharge petition she did not sign. A ninety day extension that carried the full accounting past the election. And then, on July 21, a survey asking me whether I think any of this should be allowed.
I already know what I think. She sent me a form to collect my data.
Two of the things she could do about this would cost her nothing at all. Sign the discharge petition. File the annual report on time instead of in August. Neither requires anyone’s permission and neither costs a dollar.
The other two would cost her a great deal — and she should say so out loud if she is not going to do them. That would be worth more to this district than another survey.
Until then, the email in my inbox is a press release.
Sources
Rep. April McClain Delaney, constituent newsletter, July 21, 2026.
Roll Call 280, House of Representatives, July 22, 2026, party breakdown. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2026280
H.R. 7008, Stop Insider Trading Act, 119th Congress. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7008
Roll Call, “Congressional stock-trading bill passes the House,” July 22, 2026. https://rollcall.com/2026/07/22/congressional-stock-trading-bill-passes-the-house/
House Committee on Rules, H.R. 7008 amendment record. https://rules.house.gov/bill/119/hr-7008
Congressional Research Service summary, H.R. 7008. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7008
H.R. 396, TRUST in Congress Act, bill status and cosponsor record. https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/119/hr/BILLSTATUS-119hr396.xml
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20030832, signed August 5, 2025, covering July 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20030832.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20031013, filed September 2, 2025, covering August 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20031013.pdf
H.R. 5106, Restore Trust in Congress Act, bill status and cosponsor record. https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/119/hr/BILLSTATUS-119hr5106.xml
H.R. 5106 full text: definition of covered investment, exclusions, divestment deadlines, family trust exemption. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106/text
Baltimore Banner, 2026 Maryland Voter Guide, Maryland’s 6th Congressional District. https://www.thebanner.com/voter-guide/2026/us-house/md-6/us-congressional-district-6-QM5Q4OAG3NBKBCRJ5UM4GT5JPE/
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20032233, filed October 6, 2025, covering September 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20032233.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20033408, filed November 4, 2025, covering October 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20033408.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20033604, filed December 8, 2025, covering November 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20033604.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20033737, filed January 5, 2026, covering December 2025. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20033737.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20033921, filed February 2, 2026, covering January 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20033921.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20034159, filed March 10, 2026, covering February 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20034159.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20034299, filed April 6, 2026, covering March 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20034299.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20034487, filed May 6, 2026, covering April 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20034487.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20034718, filed June 5, 2026, covering May 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20034718.pdf
Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID 20034932, filed July 7, 2026, covering June 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2026/20034932.pdf
Periodic Transaction Reports covering February through June 2025, Filing IDs 20027975, 20029059, 20030265, 20030442, and 20030592. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20027975.pdf · https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20029059.pdf · https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20030265.pdf · https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20030442.pdf · https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/ptr-pdfs/2025/20030592.pdf
Discharge Petition No. 11, H.Res. 725, filed December 2, 2025, with full signature list. https://clerk.house.gov/DischargePetition/2025120211
Office of Rep. April McClain Delaney, Committees and Caucuses. https://mcclaindelaney.house.gov/about/committees-and-caucuses
House Committee on Ethics, FAQs About Financial Disclosure. https://ethics.house.gov/faqs-about-financial-disclosure/
Financial Disclosure Extension Request, Filing ID 30026747, requested April 1, 2026. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/2025/30026747.pdf
Financial Disclosure Report, Filing ID 10066122, filed August 13, 2025, covering filing year 2024. https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/public_disc/financial-pdfs/2024/10066122.pdf
House Committee on Ethics, Candidate Financial Disclosure Extension Request Form. https://ethics.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Final-CY-2025-Extension-Request-for-Candidates-1.pdf
Financial disclosure guidance on the incumbent-candidate exemption. https://www.ethics.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/financialdisclosure
Office of Rep. Morgan McGarvey, “Congressman Morgan McGarvey Cosponsors Legislation to Promote Public Trust, Ban Congressional Stock Trading,” April 30, 2025. https://mcgarvey.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-morgan-mcgarvey-cosponsors-legislation-to-promote-public-trust-ban-congressional-stock-trading
Colorado Public Radio, “Good faith effort or ploy? U.S. House expected to vote on stock trading ban,” July 22, 2026. https://www.cpr.org/2026/07/22/congress-stock-trading-ban-bill/
Program for Public Consultation, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, “Ban on Stock Trading for Members of Congress Favored by Overwhelming Bipartisan Majority,” 2023. https://publicconsultation.org/united-states/stock-trading-by-members-of-congress/
