Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood before reporters last week and did something that doesn’t often happen in Washington: she praised Republicans and Democrats alike for coming together to tackle a problem the public has long fumed about. At issue is the Restore Trust in Congress Act, a bipartisan effort that would ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks.
AOC recalled that when she and Representative Chip Roy of Texas first arrived on Capitol Hill six years ago, one of their first conversations was about money in politics. That conversation, she suggested, planted the seeds for the bill that’s now poised to move forward.
“This issue has brought so many of us across the political spectrum together,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We are united by the value that people should feel their elected representative puts them and their interests first.”
The legislation has been years in the making, shaped through negotiations that Ocasio-Cortez said didn’t just water down competing proposals but instead created something stronger. She noted how rare it felt to walk away from a compromise in Washington with a bill that seemed “better than the sum of its parts.” For her, it was a rare glimpse of government functioning as citizens would hope.
“It feels foreign and it feels alien,” she said. “But I also think it is proof that things can work here.”
She pointed to Roy and Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania as key partners in moving the measure forward. All three, despite stark ideological differences, argued that public trust in Congress has eroded partly because of the perception that lawmakers profit from insider knowledge. Banning stock trades, they said, would help repair that breach.
Reports in recent years have detailed instances of members buying and selling stocks in industries they oversee, fueling suspicions of conflicts of interest. Polling consistently shows that voters across party lines support banning the practice.
For Ocasio-Cortez, the bill is both a policy fix and a chance to rebuild faith in democratic institutions. She cast it as an opportunity to show that Congress can still respond to public demands, even if doing so means standing up to entrenched interests in both parties.
“This requires standing up against the powers that be,” she told reporters. “But because of the support of the American people on this issue, you all have generated the momentum necessary to give us the power to be able to do this.”
The New York Democrat, often cast as one of the most polarizing figures in Congress, framed the issue instead as a rare point of common ground. “When we put our disagreements aside,” she said, “we can make our country better, we can make this institution better, and we can increase and earn the faith of the American people.”
The Restore Trust in Congress Act still faces hurdles before becoming law, but AOC thinks she can get it done. And if it passes this could be one of those rare occasions when Washington actually does something that’s both both practical and popular.
