(The Center Square) – More people are asking more questions about how Wisconsin’s public school managers handle investigations into teachers accused of grooming or sexual misconduct.
The Institute for Reforming Government announced that it has filed a public records request with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction “seeking to uncover details surrounding the Department’s handling of teacher licenses for educators accused of misconduct and
grooming.”
IRG is just the latest to press DPI for answers about The Cap Times investigation and The Center Square’s follow up stories into teacher grooming. That investigation found that 200 teachers over a five-year period were allowed to walk away from a grooming or sexual misconduct investigation by simply resigning.
Some of those teachers found their way back to classrooms and schools.
“Every parent in Wisconsin places enormous trust in our schools and educators, and that trust is broken when misconduct is swept under the rug,” Jake Curtis, director of IRG’s Center for Investigative Oversight, said. “Our request demands transparency and oversight. The public has the right to know whether DPI’s leadership intentionally allowed abusers to remain in classrooms or turned a blind eye when they were quietly shuffled to other districts.”
Curtis said Wisconsin’s state superintendent, Jill Underly, needs to answer questions about DPI’s investigations as soon as possible.
She won’t be answering those questions today.
Underly has committed to a celebration at her alma mater Indiana University today, instead of attending the Wisconsin Assembly’s hearing on the investigation, DPI’s failures, and three pieces of legislation aimed at protecting students from predatory teachers.

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Jill Underly will not attend hearing this morning on how her department investigates sexual misconduct and grooming allegations against teachers and school staff, according to Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie.
Underly will instead be at Indiana University to receive a distinguished alumni award from Indiana’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Nedweski scheduled the hearing to obtain information after a series of stories from Madison’s Capital Times showed flaws in the DPI’s process of investigating sexual misconduct and grooming cases.
“Parents deserve transparency from Wisconsin’s top education official,” Nedweski wrote. “The @CapTimes report is deeply unsettling — families deserve to know their kids are safe in school.
“At no point did Underly or her team even try to reschedule the hearing date with my office.”
DPI responded Friday in a letter claiming the Capital Times should correct its story related to 200 investigations from 2018 to 2023 into teachers for sexual misconduct and grooming were shielded from the public.
Nedweski announced she will introduce three bills related to protecting students from grooming and sexual misconduct since the report, including a specific grooming law modeled after laws from Illinois and Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s Senate Committee on Education also requested answers from Underly in a letter, along with her presence at a committee hearing.
Five Wisconsin U.S. Congress members sent a letter to Underly requesting a thorough investigation into DPI’s process.
“Rather than covering up these allegations, each incident should be thoroughly investigated and, if verified, the public and the student’s parents should be informed,” the congressmen wrote. “We echo many of the same questions that members of Wisconsin State Legislature have asked in a recent letter to Superintendent Jill Underly and request that you and the Superintendent hastily answer the letter in its entirety.”

(The Center Square) – The definition of grooming in a new law being proposed in Wisconsin will include influence from a 2021 Illinois law and a 2024 law passed in Florida, according to the bill’s sponsor.
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, spoke with News Talk 1130-WISN on Wednesday, asking questions on behalf of The Center Square about Nedweski’s proposal, which she has begun pushing after a series of stories from Madison’s Capital Times showed flaws in the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s process of investigating sexual misconduct and grooming cases.
DPI said in a Friday statement that grooming and professional boundary violations aren’t included in current statute in the definition of immoral conduct, “limiting our agency’s ability to obtain critical pieces of information.”
But the statutory definition of immoral conduct is “conduct or behavior that is contrary to commonly accepted moral or ethical standards and that endangers the health, safety, welfare, or education of any pupil.”
“I would beg to differ,” Nedweski said in her Wednesday radio interview. “I might say ‘Gee, I think grooming and professional boundary violations certainly are contrary to commonly accepted moral and ethical standards.’
“I’m concerned that the state’s superintendent of schools is saying maybe they don’t fall under that standard. It’s very concerning and I’m hoping to get an answer on that tomorrow.”
The Illinois grooming law, dubbed Faith’s Law, passed the Legislature unanimously in 2021 before being signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker.
That law requires school districts to create a code of conduct for teachers to protect students from misconduct and also includes the requirement of a resource guide for parents that must be posted on the school’s website and listed in the school’s handbooks.
The definition is “when he or she knowingly uses a computer online service, Internet service, local bulletin board service, or any other device capable of electronic data storage or transmission, performs an act in person or by conduct through a third party, or uses written communication to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, or attempt to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, a child, a child’s guardian, or another person believed by the person to be a child or a child’s guardian, to commit any sex offense … to distribute photographs depicting the sex organs of the child, or to otherwise engage in any unlawful sexual conduct with a child or with another person believed by the person to be a child.”
The Florida law passed the House unanimously, the Florida Senate amended it and it passed unanimously and then 11 representatives voted against the final bill because it changed the word “grooming” to “harmful communication to a minor.”
“We’re going to do the best we can to have a comprehensive definition of what grooming is in the statute once we introduce the bill and then we will have different levels of penalty for different types of interactions,” Nedweski said, noting that seven or eight states already have “good laws” on the topic that Wisconsin can learn from.
She said there are multiple advocacy groups that can conduct professional development for teachers are the correct professional boundaries.
Attempts by The Center Square to reach DPI the Wisconsin Education Association Council were unsuccessful.

(The Center Square) – The expectations are not high headed into the Wisconsin Assembly hearing on teachers grooming students, and the state’s response.
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, told News Talk 1130 WISN on Wednesday that she has not heard from State Superintendent Jill Underly, who has been invited to headline the hearing, and hasn’t heard much more from the state’s Department of Public Instruction.
“We got some answers. I think we’ll hear them again in the hearing,” Nedweski said of her discussions with DPI managers. “[They were] not necessarily acceptable answers.”
Nedweski is holding an informational hearing Thursday to get answers about the number of teachers who have voluntarily surrendered their teaching licenses to avoid DPI investigations into grooming or sexual misconduct charges.
The Cap Times recently broke a story that 200 teachers over five years were allowed to walk away, while sometimes being able to return to teaching a few years later.
Nedweski said that news made it clear that there is something wrong in how the Department of Public Instruction handled those cases and how it informed parents.
“I think that there is a complete and total lack of accountability on [DPI’s] part to explain why they haven’t been straightforward with the public as to what they’ve been doing with these cases,” Nedweski explained.
Underly’s only comments on the grooming investigation came Friday in an open letter. In it, she complained that The Cap Times piece ignored the limits DPI faced, but Underly said she supports any effort to update DPI’s “legal framework.”
“I welcome a long overdue discussion about the need to both modernize our licensing systems, and update existing statutes to clarify, broaden and deepen the limited statutory authority the DPI has in these serious matters,” Underly wrote.
Nedweski said that’s too little, too late.
“Where were these calls for updates to laws and systems long ago?” Nedweski asked. “Why all of a sudden now because there was a report by The Cap Times? That’ll be a question. If this was such a problem for you all along, why didn’t you ask for help before? If you needed money in the budget for updating systems for teacher licensure and to fund investigators for teacher misconduct, why didn’t you ask for it in your budget request earlier this year?”
Nedweski’s hearing before the Assembly Committee on Government Operations, Accountability, and Transparency is set to begin at 11am on Thursday.

(The Center Square) – If Wisconsin Democrats want to avoid having kings, one Republican senator thinks they should be big proponents of a constitutional amendment to limit the power of a governor.
A joint resolution to limit Wisconsin’s governors from using their veto power to delete words, letters or characters from appropriations will be heard next Wednesday in the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development.
Senate Joint Resolution 11 would need to be approved in two separate legislative sessions before reaching the ballot statewide as early as 2017.
The proposed constitutional amendment comes after Gov. Tony Evers used the current veto power to erase numbers and a hyphen to change the year “2024-25” to “2425” in a school appropriation in the budget bill.
That meant a $325 per student per year funding increase for the next 400 years was allowed and later upheld in a 4-3 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
“For a guy who’s popular with the ‘No Kings’ crowd, Gov. Evers sure loves playing monarch,” Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, told The Center Square. “With one royal flick of his veto pen, he taxed homeowners for the next 400 years.
“This amendment restores the balance our founders intended: government of the people, not by decree.”
The constitutional amendment would limit the veto power to sections of an appropriations bill rather than allowing for words and numbers to be deleted individually.
The amendment was originally introduced in February in both the Senate and Assembly but is now seeing its first committee action in the Senate with the scheduled public hearing. A public hearing was held in the Assembly Committee on State Affairs in June.
Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, described the proposal as a “once and for all” measure to rein in the powers of a governor in the state and “restore balance.”
He explained that the current veto power can allow a governor to write laws that the public never had a voice in creating and the Legislature didn’t have a say in allowing, calling the current veto power a “quirk that makes our state an outlier in America.”
Allen said that both Evers and former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, stretched the veto power beyond what he believes the public would approve, citing Walker ending a levy limit exemption for school energy efficient projects.

(The Center Square) — Wisconsin’s race for attorney general could end up being a rematch.
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney on Tuesday launched another bid to become the state’s attorney general.
“After seven years of broken promises and political spin in the Attorney General’s office, it’s time for change,” Toney said in his announcement.
Toney ran against current Attorney General Josh Kaul in 2020, losing by about 35,000 votes.
Kaul announced his re-election bid earlier this month.
In that 2020 race, Toney made an issue of what he called Kaul’s mismanagement of the state’s crime labs. He is going back to message this year as well.
“As your Top Cop, I will stand up for every Wisconsinite, enforce the law, and bring conservative, common-sense leadership back to the DOJ,” Toney added. “That’s what Wisconsinites expect and deserve.”
In fact, his first priority is “fixing misguided policies, providing transparency and leadership, with clear timelines, and public metrics to cut backlogs and delays.”
Toney also says he wants to deal with Wisconsin’s “drug crisis,” and “target violent crime in Milwaukee.”
“Wisconsin needs an Attorney General who protects our people, not our politics,” Toney said. “Let’s put public safety first, restore competence to the labs, take on crime in Milwaukee, and protect all of Wisconsin.”
As of now, there are no other Republicans in the race. If Toney does draw an opponent, voters will have until August before they’d have to decide in the 2026 primary.

(The Center Square) – Milwaukee voters would rather consolidate schools in the district than see a future referendum for additional property taxes, according to a new poll.
The voters, across parties and demographics, also preferred the state opt in to a $1,700-per-person school choice federal tax credit that Gov. Tony Evers has said that he will reject.
Embold Research asked 535 likely Milwaukee voters in 2026 the questions between Oct. 6-10 on behalf of City Forward Collective and CFC Action Fund.
“We at City Forward Collective have been on the record for some time that right-sizing is inevitable, it’s necessary and it’s part of the reason that we opposed the 2024 referendum,” CFC Executive Director Colleston Morgan Jr. told The Center Square. “We said the district didn’t have a financial plan or an academic plan.”
Morgan said that “affordability” showed up as a large concern for voters in the poll.
Milwaukee schools will receive $105 million more in state aid this year than last despite having 1,700 less students all while property taxes went up nearly 30% last year, Morgan said. Milwaukee public schools saw a total enrollment drop of nearly 30,000 students (32.8%) between 2006 and 2024.
Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius has said that the school will need to close “more than five” schools in the coming years. The district is currently working on that consolidation plan.
Milwaukee passed a $252 million referendum in April 2024 and it was later revealed that Milwaukee Public Schools had not filed the paperwork with the Department of Public Instruction. The district missed the deadlines by eight months and had $42 million withheld.
Legislators are currently discussing a bill that would require districts to file the required paperwork before being eligible for a referendum.
The poll first asked voters if they supported consolidating schools in the district, with 58% for and 27% against. After hearing the pro and con arguments on the topic, voters then were 68% in favor and 22% against consolidation.
They were then asked if they would prefer consolidation or a funding measure in a future referendum and 57% favored consolidation over another referendum.
“This question of MPS living within its means absolutely matters for taxpayers in Milwaukee, families in Milwaukee, for the broader community in Milwaukee,” Morgan said. “But it’s also a question of statewide concern. I think you’ve seen a number of state legislators and now you start to hear some districts talk about this sort of cumulative impact. Milwaukee is obviously the sort of 600-pound gorilla in the conversation.”

(The Center Square) – A pair of Wisconsin lawmakers have introduced a bill to create a $25 per diem payment to nonprofits or non-governmental entities that house homeless veterans.
Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, said the bills are in response to Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers electing to close veterans homes in Chippewa Falls and Green Bay, citing budgetary issues.
But Wimberger said that Evers chose to not use $1.9 million in appropriated funds, what he said was a 15% increase in funding for the Veterans Housing and Recovery Program.
Wimberger and Rep. Benjamin Franklin, R-De Pere, are looking for co-sponsors for the legislation through Friday afternoon.
“This legislation will do what Governor Evers has failed to do: spend the money we already set aside to house homeless veterans,” Wimberger said in a statement. “Increased funding was appropriated in the budget to support the Veterans Housing and Recovery Program, yet Gov. Evers chose to shutter these facilities.
“If the Governor’s Administration won’t do this work, the Legislature will move to do what’s right and work with nonprofits and other organizations to house veterans in need across our state.”
The VHRP recipients are also receiving federal per diem payments for homeless veterans.
“I am proud to introduce this legislation,” Franklin said in a statement. “This proposal works, and will support our homeless veterans and those at risk of homelessness. Earlier this year, the bipartisan budget included a 15 percent increase to the VHRP program, and this legislation takes that commitment a step further.”

(The Center Square) – A bill looking to assure free speech is upheld at campus in the University of Wisconsin system and Wisconsin Technical Colleges would carry a punishment of two academic years of frozen tuition if a school violates any of the requirements of the bill multiple times in a five-year period.
The UW system said that its largest issue with Senate Bill 498 is the potential financial penalties for not following the rules.
“We have a concern with SB 498 and it really centers around some of the penalties prescribed in the bill that we believe would adversely impact our universities financially,” UW Vice President for University Relations Chris Patton told the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges. “Freezing state funding to our universities that put our financially health potentially at risk and really compromise the very mission and the efforts that we’re all attempting to undertake.
Lawmakers, however, are looking to have important enforcement behind the bill rather than having the bill pass and be only aspirational.
“It’s not to punish any of our institutions,” said Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Fox Crossing. “It’s to ensure that they’re following what’s already in the Bill of Rights.”
Rep. Amanda Nedweski, R-Pleasant Prairie, cited several studies and surveys including a UW System survey showing that UW Madison students and students across the country felt less comfortable speaking out if they are conservative, a Foundation for Individual Rights in Education survey showing that 35% of UW-Madison students believe it’s acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker on campus and data from The College Fix showing that more than 99% of donations from UW system professors went to Democrats, not Republicans.
“That (FIRE) number is disturbing on its own but it’s clearly even more chilling in light of the recent political assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus,” Nedweski said. “When we accept the false premise that speech is equivalent to violence, we allow violence to replace speech as a means of debate.”
Nedweski also cited UW-Eau Claire professor José Felipe Alvergue for throwing a table of the College Republicans on its side and storming off.
The bill requires that the colleges not restrict free speech if the speaker is lawful or restict the time, place or manner of free speech on campus. The school cannot create a “free speech zone” and limit speech to that area, require a permit to limit expression or require a security fee be paid.
The school also cannot “sanction individuals or groups for discriminatory harassment unless the speech targets its victim on the basis of a protected class under law, and is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars a student from receiving equal access to educational opportunities or benefits,” the bill states.
There are exceptions for the permit and security but “if a permit is required, the permitting process and any security fee must be content and viewpoint neutral.”

(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. Senator says there’s no need to continue the government shutdown, but he’s not predicting a quick end.
Sen. Ron Johnson told News Talk 1130 WISN’s Jay Weber that Democrats have “had plenty of time to do what makes sense.”
“This is spending a Biden-levels, this is what they voted for. Chuck Schumer has voted for continuing resolutions all the time,” Johnson.
Johnson said the Senate will vote again on a “clean CR” on Monday. The shutdown is now in its third week, and no one is guessing when it may end.
But Johnson said Democrats continue to believe they are winning.
“They think they’ve got the high ground because premiums because of Obamacare are going to continue to sky rocket,” Johnson said.
“They’re trying to [mislead] the American public that the reason premiums are sky rocketing is because [the Democrats’] temporary enhanced subsidies are expiring.”
Johnson said Congress can deal with the rising costs of health insurance, but not until after Democrats vote to reopen the government.
He also said he hopes that any deal on health care will not simply continue the unaffordable subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.
“We’ll talk about how to fix your horribly broken Obamacare,” Johnson added. “We’re happy to do that. We’ll fix the damage that’s already been done.”
Democrats in Congress continue to say the end of COVID-era Affordable Care Act subsidies will spike health care costs and could potentially leave hundreds of thousands of people in Wisconsin without access to care.
Wisconsin Democratic Ssen. Tammy Baldwin on Sunday put the blame for the shutdown on Johnson and the Republicans.
“The only way to get us out of this mess is for Democrats and Republicans to sit down together and negotiate a solution. So why, on Day #19 of Trump’s shutdown, are Republicans still refusing to do that?” Baldwin wrote on X.

(The Center Square) — Washington has become synonymous with polarization between Republicans and Democrats.Yet, legislation that would bar elected officials from owning stocks reveals an additional fault line: supporters tend to be affluent white-collar professionals, while opponents made their millions by founding businesses and/or making investments on Wall Street, an investigation by The Center Square found.
The divide contrasts with near uniformity among ordinary Americans for a ban on politicians trading stocks. They believe lawmakers use information gleaned behind closed doors to enrich themselves, such as members of Congress who bought or sold stock at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020 or before President Donald Trump’s announcement about the putative risk for pregnant mothers to take Tylenol.Capitol Hill lawmakers are required to report their trades within 30- or 45 days. As The Center Square has reported, many violate the deadline with little if any fine or punishment.This summer, 16 House members signed up as co-sponsors of draft legislation to ban lawmakers from trading stock. Half were Republicans. Half were Democrats. While their partisan affiliations differed, their income status did not. All but one were in the bottom half of the economic scale among 535 lawmakers, according to Quiver Quantitative, a website that tracks lawmaker’s wealth. U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, the bill’s lead sponsor, is a former attorney, investment banking analyst, and congressional staffer. Despite his white-collar credentials, the 53-year-old has a net worth of $1.3 million, a figure that puts him as the 300th wealthiest lawmaker.
Roy’s main Democratic co-sponsor, U.S. Rep. Seth Magaziner, of Rhode Island, has a similar professional background. Forty-two, Magaziner has a lower net worth, $651,000, a sum that puts him as Congress’ 373rd richest member.
Other notable co-sponsors include U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a New York Democrat, whose net worth of $49,000 makes her the 475th wealthiest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, while Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, is worth $41,500, a sum that puts him at the 477th wealthiest.
U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, said the bill would reign in wealthy investors on Capitol Hill. “No one sent to Congress should be enriching themselves through Wall Street while writing the very laws that regulates our markets,” Paulina Luna said at a press conference on Sept. 4. Her net worth, at $590,000, puts her as Congress’ 384th wealthiest member.In July 30, the 15 members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs met to vote on legislation to ban the President, Vice President, and members of Congress from owning stock. The outcome was partisan. Only the bill’s sponsor, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, joined all seven Democrats on the panel to vote to advance the legislation. Yet the bill’s most outspoken opponents were among Congress’ richest members.
One was U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican. A former co-founder of a plastics manufacturing firm, the 70-year-old Johnson has a net worth of $67.3 million, a figure good enough for 22nd place in Congress. At the committee hearing on July 30, Johnson said the legislation should be re-named “the career politician-protection act because it would make it so unattractive for people … to run for office and … give up their business and sell it unless some ethics committee said it won’t be a conflict of interest.”Another opponent was U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican. Scott, 72, is the third wealthiest member of Congress, with an estimated net worth of $507.1 million.
At the July 30 hearing, he suggested his route to riches was different from white-collar professionals on the committee. Instead of attending “some elite university,” he worked his way up from growing up in public housing to founding and running businesses, including HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s largest hospital chains. He was then elected governor of Florida and then Congress.
“Somehow, I’m suspect because I made money. Do any of you want to be poor?” Scott asked. “I don’t…It’s disgusting what’s going on here.”
By contrast, U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, graduated from an elite university, Harvard, and after serving in the Iraq War, was a political aide and state lawmaker. Gallego noted, correctly, he is one of the Senate’s poorest members, with a net worth of $121,500. “If we don’t put guardrails in,” Gallego, 45, said at the July 30 committee hearing, “there will be members of Congress that are going to benefit from this, without a doubt, and there will be a further erosion in trust, among Democrats and Republicans, in government.”
Craig Holman, lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, told The Center Square he was not surprised by a class divide over the stock ban. “Wealthier members of Congress are the ones who would make the most by exploiting stock trading and have the wealth to take those types of risks,” he told The Center Square. “Less wealthy members invest their savings in something more long-term.”
Calls to restrict lawmakers from owning stock began as least as far back as 2012 when President Obama in his State of the Union Address said, “Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact.” No members of Congress stood up or applauded Obama’s plan, but lawmakers have warmed to proposals in the face of overwhelming public support for a stock ban.According to a 2023 University of Maryland poll, 86 percent of registered voters said they supported prohibiting members of Congress from trading stocks.
Lawmakers have sponsored numerous legislative proposals since 2020. Democrats have been more likely than Republicans to sign on as co-sponsors. But getting a true reading on the partisan divide has not been possible. Neither the House nor the Senate has ever voted on legislation to prohibit or restrict lawmakers from buying and selling stock.
In 2022, stock ban proponents thought their time had come. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and a former opponent of a stock ban, expressed openness to scheduling a vote on the bill. But six weeks away from the congressional mid-term elections, a time when Democrats could have sought to protect their majority by voting on a strongly popular bill, Pelosi scuttled the measure.
Pelosi, 85, is among Capitol Hill’s wealthiest lawmakers. According to Quiver Quantitative, her net worth, at $269.6 million, ranked fifth. Her husband, Paul, is a venture capitalist who invests in real estate and technology stocks.
One issue does unite many elected officials regardless of their economic circumstances: They show few if any signs of wanting a stock ban applied to them.
Three years ago, President Trump announced his support for a ban on lawmakers buying and selling stocks. “We want a ban on members of Congress getting rich by trading stocks with insider information,” he said at the announcement for his third presidential bid at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “And many of our great members agree with that.”
One member who did was U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican. Hawley is the main legislative sponsor of a measure that would ban stock trades not only by lawmakers but also the President and Vice President. When Trump learned that the bill would apply to him, he denounced Hawley as a “pawn” of Democrats and “a second-tier senator.” After Hawley amended the bill to exclude Trump, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt clarified that the President “supports the idea of ensuring that members of Congress and United States senators who are here for public service cannot enrich themselves.”
Members of Congress who support a ban would likely not be subject to one for more subtle reasons. They are running for statewide office.
The month before his press conference at the Capitol on Sept. 3, Roy, the bill’s sponsor, announced he was running for Attorney General of Texas next year. U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican and the bill’s wealthiest original co-sponsor, had also announced, in July, he was running for governor of the Palmetto State.
Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat, sponsored a House version of the bill from 2020 until she stepped down from Congress in January. Now she is the Democrats’ nominee for governor of the Old Dominion State.
John Feehery, a lobbyist, columnist, and former spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican, said lawmakers’ runs for higher office show that a stock ban is a bad idea.
“It’s popular and populist, but it reinforces the idea that members are corrupt,” Feehery told The Center Square. “How much do they want to prostrate themselves at the altar of the American people? It hurts the institution.”
Then again, Feehery said a ban could become law. “Some of these populist bills take on a life of their own, and they could pass.”