The 120th Congress is setting up for a collision course on how far to push an ethics agenda meant to signal to voters that lawmakers heard their concerns about corruption in Washington.
On one side of the debate will be longtime members of Congress who will try to placate the hunger for so-called reform with proposals that would limit the owning or trading of stocks by lawmakers, or outright ban the practices.
But on the other side will be the dozens and dozens of new members who have aggressively campaigned on a more sweeping agenda and argue a stock ban should merely be an opening act early next year.
They are pushing for additional measures, including a lifetime ban on members becoming lobbyists after leaving Congress, tougher criminal sentences for lawmakers found violating public trust, a ban on joining corporate boards after leaving office, and even the adoption of term limits.
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“Going to Congress should be sort of the pinnacle of what you do in your life as a public servant. You know, it shouldn’t be a stepping stone to getting a job somewhere else,” Bob Harvie, a Democrat running against a 10-year incumbent in the Philadelphia suburbs, told The Washington Sun last month.
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Even Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat trying to return to the Senate after a 32-year run in Congress ended in defeat in 2024, has made bashing today’s lawmakers on Capitol Hill a central plank of his stump speeches, promising to limit their financial opportunities.
“They’re betting on those stocks going up and down as they vote for legislation on the Senate and House floor. And then many of them, after they quit, they become lobbyists,” Brown told a couple hundred carpenters at a rally outside Toledo two weeks ago. “So here’s the thing: If you run for office and you can’t promise you won’t trade stocks, if you can’t promise you won’t be a lobbyist, you’ve got no business holding public office.”
Brown drew a 15-second ovation from the union workers, the longest of his 17-minute speech.
Promising to change Washington is not new. In 1994, then-Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia drew up the “Contract with America,” vowing to end Congress’ “cycle of scandal and disgrace.” In 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) promised ethics changes to “drain the swamp” and end a “culture of corruption.” Democrats made the same promises in 2018.
But those were agenda proposals drawn up in Washington by teams advising the speaker-in-waiting, leading to extensive proposals and legislative debates in early 1995, 2007 and 2019, respectively.
This year, Democrats have not embraced a national agenda, and ethics proposals have ranged all over the map. Should they win the majority, most Democratic leaders are focused on trying to change some provisions governing the House that will pass in a rules package on the first or second day of the new Congress. Work on a broader ethics overhaul would come later in the spring.
“I don’t think final decisions are made, but we’re working to ensure that we can do the most possible. But people should be prepared for us to address these issues,” California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the No. 3 Democratic leader, told The Washington Sun’s Daniella Diaz during a campaign swing in Texas this week.
Aguilar, likely to become majority whip if Democrats win, called a stock ban a “big piece” of the ethics proposals to be considered.
But voters want a lot more on corruption issues, and Democratic candidates have heard that at rallies and seen it vividly in their focus groups and internal polling of swing voters.
Over two months last winter, House Majority PAC, a super PAC aligned with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, conducted surveys about inflation and corruption. Global Strategy Group, the Democratic polling firm, asked voters who was to blame for high costs: “out of touch politicians” or corporations that “continued to jack up prices.”
By a 2-to-1 margin, voters blamed politicians.
There was statistically almost no difference in blame laid on politicians by Democratic voters (70%), independents (68%) and Republicans (63%), according to an HMP memo.
The PAC’s opposition researchers used the data to rework the files on incumbent Republicans who had won close races before, and they shaped messages to take advantage of the sentiment about dirty politicians. Over the next few months, Democratic challengers began running ads against incumbents tying everything from stock trades to donations from companies tied to data centers to corruption and higher prices.
Democrats like Shannon Taylor placed her ethics agenda at the top of her website, bringing back the old promise to end the “culture of corruption.” She’s campaigning against Rep. Rob Wittman, a Virginia Republican with no scandals in nearly 20 years in office.
In addition to a stock ban, Taylor wants more punitive sentencing guidelines for lawmakers caught corruptly spending federal dollars and a 12-year limit on serving in each chamber of Congress.
“We’ve got corruption in D.C. that is directly related to why costs keep going up, because politicians are thinking about themselves,” she told The Sun in late September.
The most radical proposal would be the lifetime ban on leaving Congress for K Street, which is a bipartisan tradition that has gone on for decades.
A 2023 study found that more than 460 former members of Congress were actively employed by lobbying firms. Another study found that last year, 872 former members, ex-staff and other government officials, almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, registered to lobby the federal government for the first time, the leading edge of a record number of new lobbyists.
Current laws require a one-year cooling-off period for former House members and two years for ex-senators before they are allowed to lobby their old colleagues on behalf of corporations, associations and other special interests.
Eliminating that revolving door, even if the ban applied only to members and not staff, would be the most significant ethics change on Capitol Hill since the post-Watergate era.
The lobbying community has regularly cited First Amendment rights to petition the government whenever restrictions are imposed, setting up a possible legal battle if the next Congress does impose a wide ban.
“Lobbying is a legitimate and essential part of our democracy. We understand the negative perceptions of our profession that have resulted from some unethical practices by a very few within our profession,” Paul Miller, chair of the National Institute for Lobbying and Ethics, wrote during one such dispute in 2020.
But new majorities can bring in new members who push more aggressively, as was the case with the Democratic majority-making House class of 2018.
“We introduced the idea of the stock trading ban, which at the time, I’ll be honest, congressional leaders were very angry at us. A lot of people opposed it,” Sen. Andy Kim (D-New Jersey) said in an interview with 535 this month.
Kim offered legislation in September 2025 to ban stock trades by congressmen and senior members of the executive and judicial branches, as well as impose a lifetime ban on lawmakers becoming lobbyists. His bill has yet to secure a co-sponsor.
In the House, Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado led a group of eight Democrats in a series of expansive ethics reforms, including a ban on members serving on corporate boards and tightening bribery rules to make it easier to prosecute members of Congress. Neguse’s legislation to prohibit lawmakers from becoming lobbyists has just seven co-sponsors.
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who will likely become the No. 2 Democratic leader next year, noted that leaders in both parties have forced stock-trading votes but added extraneous, highly partisan proposals, leading to deadlock in the Senate.
Schatz suggested Democrats should offer the stock ban without any other proposals, possibly creating a path for it and other ethics ideas to pass.
“If you want to pass a stock-trading ban, just put the damn thing clean on the floor and it’ll pass both chambers with flying colors,” he told The Sun’s Igor Bobic on a podcast this month.
But that’s just the easy first step. Kim described the stock ban as something that is now a “mainstay which pretty much every candidate has to give their position on” — and Democrats out on the campaign trail are using their ads and rallies to drive up expectations of a much bolder agenda.
In a swing district in northeast Pennsylvania, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti rolled out a final ad this week that defined her congressional race almost entirely around bold, ethical change that sounds bigger than just a stock ban.
“Here’s what this campaign is about: ending the corruption that hurts our families. Together, we stood up to the machine in Scranton, and together we will take on a corrupt Washington,” she said.
If they don’t take on corruption, Democrats could have a very brief time holding the majority.
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