Majority Forward, the issue-advocacy arm tied to the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, sunk more than $628,000 into a Maine ad campaign accusing Sen. Susan Collins of thinking insider trading “should be illegal”—sorry, “shouldn’t be illegal.” The ad is so far off the mark that FactCheck.org called it out directly: Collins didn’t just vote for the 2012 STOCK Act; she helped write it and steer it through the Senate, and it explicitly said members of Congress are not exempt from insider-trading law.
Read more The DSA Takes Over the Democrat Party
What Collins actually opposes is a blanket ban on lawmakers owning individual stocks—she’d rather see existing law enforced and require an independent, arm’s-length outside manager. That may not be as strong a position as some on both sides would like, but it is certainly not “insider trading should be legal.” Majority Forward knows the difference; it just doesn’t care.
But set aside the specific falsehood for a second, because the bigger problem is the selective memory behind it.
Where was Majority Forward—or virtually any Democratic group or politician—when it came to Nancy Pelosi’s husband?
Paul Pelosi has racked up a remarkable string of “lucky” trades over the years, but the one that should embarrass anyone now lecturing Republicans on stock timing is Visa. On July 1, 2024, Paul Pelosi sold 2,000 shares of Visa stock, worth somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million. Less than three months later, on September 24, 2024, the Biden Justice Department filed a sweeping civil antitrust lawsuit accusing Visa of monopolizing the U.S. debit card market—and the stock promptly slumped. There was no public sign beforehand that the suit was coming. It wasn’t even Paul Pelosi’s first eyebrow-raising exit: he’d sold 30,000 shares of Google just a month before the DOJ sued that company over antitrust violations in December 2022.
The Visa suit was never a good one. Everyone knows there is no payment monopoly, as there are plenty of ways to pay for goods today. This case has a lot more in common with the Biden administration’s broader habit of pinning inflation on private companies than with a standard monopoly case.
When grocery prices, rent, and everything else got more expensive on their watch, it was a lot easier politically to point at “shrinkflation” from food manufacturers, “rent gouging” from landlords, and “swipe fees” from card companies than to own the inflation that their own spending helped create. Suing Visa over debit “monopoly” power fits that same playbook.
Read more Standing Athwart Despair: The Case for Cheerful Conservatism
But at least it made the Pelosi family, with an estimated net worth of $250 million, some money!
Nancy Pelosi’s office has repeated the same line every time this comes up—she “does not own any stocks” and has “no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement” in her husband’s trades. Maybe that’s true. But that is precisely the kind of surrounding-circumstance defense Republicans get mocked for offering when their own trades look suspiciously well-timed. If Collins deserves a $628,000 ad campaign over a policy disagreement about how to enforce insider trading rules, then Pelosi deserves something similar. She is, after all, one of the most powerful members of Congress and has been for two decades. She’s married to a man whose portfolio outperformed the market by absurd margins. At the very least, she deserves at least a fraction of that scrutiny from her own party’s allied groups. It never came. Not from Majority Forward, not from Senate Majority PAC, not from most of the Democratic apparatus that otherwise made congressional stock trading a signature issue.
That silence isn’t an accident. It’s the tell. This was never really about insider trading as a principle—it’s a weapon pointed in one direction only, deployed against Collins in a competitive Maine Senate race while Pelosi and any number of Democratic members get a pass.
None of this means Collins is above criticism or that Congress’s stock-trading rules are fine as they are—the STOCK Act’s toothless penalties and the lack of insider-trading prosecutions since 2012 are a legitimate scandal on their own. But if a Democratic-aligned super PAC wants to run ads about lawmakers “getting rich playing the stock market,” consistency would require pointing that same camera at Paul Pelosi’s trading record first. Instead, Majority Forward picked a target, invented a claim that FactCheck.org had to knock down within a day, and skipped over the Democratic Party’s most obvious case study.
That’s not a real anti-corruption campaign. It’s just opposition research dressed up to look like one.
Read more Restoring Obscenity Regulation: Lessons From America’s Founding Era