Cosponsored the ban on members buying stocks. His trust bought five two days after he voted for it.

The Action

His trust bought individual stocks 19 times after the vote, across five reports to the Clerk of the House. The first came two days later, on Jul 24: Broadcom, Kroger twice and Microsoft twice. The most recent report, filed Oct 1, records Amgen and Home Depot twice on Sep 22. In between are Alphabet, Procter and Gamble, Installed Building Products, American Electric Power and Fifth Third. Every purchase is in the $1,001 to $15,000 band. The same five reports show 11 sales.

The Gap

Two days from the vote to the first purchase. The bill he cosponsored sets a fee of $2,000 or 10 percent of the trade, whichever is greater, and makes the member sell. On its own terms, nineteen purchases comes to at least $38,000.

The Read

He did more than vote for it. His own release calls him an original cosponsor, and it explains the bill in his office's words: members, spouses and dependents may not buy securities issued by a publicly traded company, sales need a week's public notice, and a breach costs $2,000 or a tenth of the trade.

Two days after that release his trust bought Broadcom, Kroger and Microsoft. It has bought individual stocks nineteen times since, in five filings, the last of them on Oct 1.

His next report, filed on Oct 15, adds three more purchases, AT&T, Fifth Third Bancorp and RPM International, all made on Oct 9 in the same trust account and each between $1,001 and $15,000, and one sale. That brings the purchases since the vote to 22.

None of it breaks a rule. The bill is not law. The Senate refused to take it up on Sep 30, 53 to 47, and even if it had passed, it would not have taken effect for 180 days. Every trade here was legal and every one was reported inside the deadline. The amounts are small. Nineteen purchases in the lowest band the form has could add up to as little as $19,000.

There is also a fair answer he could give, and it is worth putting in his mouth before anyone else does: a member can want a rule for all 535 and decline to disarm alone until it binds. That is a position. It is not the one in his release. The release does not say the rules should change. It says officials took an oath "not to financially profit from their position", in the present tense, about people like him.

Two things we do not know. The purchases sit in a trust in his name, split between a company 401(k) and a joint brokerage account, and the filings do not say who places the orders. The bill has an exception for a trust nobody in the family controls, and nothing in the record shows whether his would qualify. If an adviser trades these accounts without him, the receipt should say so, and we would add it the day he says it.

And one thing next to it. On Aug 26 the trust bought American Electric Power. On Sep 16 he voted for the Ratepayer Protection Act, which changes what utilities can recover from data centres, and on Sep 30 he posted about it. That vote was 417 to 3 and tells you nothing about him. It is on the record, so it is here.

We put these questions to his office on Oct 7, 2026, and said when this would be published. No reply had come by then. If one does, it goes here in full.

His page calls him the control case: the picture of ordinary, heavy congressional trading, kept so that a normal pattern is not mistaken for a scandal on someone famous. That is still what the trades are. What changed in July is that he put his name on the bill and a sentence beside it.