Senators propose law that bans members of Congress from trading stocks

If they do this, we will lose the smartest members of congress. Hear me out via an example:

Consider Nancy Pelosi, who made $20M via trading in 2020. To have predicted the market would crash during otherwise good times and then rise during otherwise hard times, you would have had to be an economic genius. If we had banned our senators from trading, Pelosi would probably choose trading over guiding our nation, essentially employing her 200+ IQ to making money instead of making our nation great.

I say that instead of banning congress from trading, we should give them more power the better they are at trading, as doing so would ensure that the smartest congress members have their decisions more fairly weighted.

I don't see anything wrong with them owning total (US) market indices.

This is a much better idea than the STOCK Act. It’s much less risky to separation of powers to have a bright line rule banning stock trading than to have prosecutions of members of the legislative branch by the machinery of the executive branch involving nebulous insider trading allegations.

For the federal government doesn’t work that way Constitutionally: the question is “what part of the Constitution authorizes it?”

(Arguably the answer is “the interstate commerce clause”, but its important to ask the right question.)

> One class of Congress cannot arbitrarily impose restrictions on future classes of Congress without an amendment.

No such rule exists. The closest is that an act of Congress can’t limit Congress ability to exercise its Constitutional powers in the future (e.g., a past Congress could not limit a future Congress’ ability to set its own rules), but there is nothing that prevents a Congress from passing laws which regulate the behavior of future members of Congress, as individuals, so long as it is otherwise authorized by the Constitution (i.e., like any other law it must exercise a Constitutional grant of power; here, probably, the interstate commerce clause) and does not violate any of the express immunities of members of Congress (e.g., the Speech and Debate clause), which a blanket regulation like this does not.