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Floor Speech

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Mr. PADILLA. Mr. President, I want to make a few things very clear, and I hope that we can actually come to a bipartisan agreement on the issue that the title of the bill says this bill is about because I agree, Democrats and Republicans and Independents alike across the country are concerned.

To put it simply, Americans don't like the idea of their elected leaders trading individual stocks while making decisions impacting those very companies and industries in their portfolios, but I am glad my colleagues, the Senator from Ohio and the Senator from Florida, have laid out what this bill is truly about.

Now, the title of the bill makes reference to insider trading, but there is a lot of passion about the SAVE Act which has been shoved into this bill as it has come over from the House.

Back to the stock trading piece, this is something that we absolutely ought to be addressing. But there are two obvious reasons why this bill from the Republican House is nothing more than a political gimmick that was never truly intended to become law.

First, it exempts the President--the President, who without a doubt is the person with the single greatest ability to impact a company or an entire industry on any given day. It also exempts the Vice President. Why not include them? Why should they be exempt? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that President Donald Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, has made over 21,000 stock trades across 8 separate accounts, and if you do the math, that amounts to 85 trades per day--85 trades per day. That is not normal. And it is certainly not indicative of somebody focused on the cost of living for hard-working Americans.

No, Donald Trump has earned the title of ``Trader in Chief.'' His portfolio is not only constantly trading stock, he is reaping huge profits and trading stocks of companies that he is actively promoting.

If you think that sounds bad, it gets much worse. We all know that President Trump owns his own social media company, right? It is the platform that he uses to post his announcements on, and now it has been reported that his company is planning to sell early access to those Presidential statements to hedge funds, to Wall Street, for $100,000 a month.

That is right, the price of inside information is now $100,000 per month to be paid to President Donald Trump. Could there be any clearer sign of corruption?

The American people see right through this bill. They see it for what it is. But that is not the only reason. If the House Republicans really do want this measure to become law, they wouldn't have tucked the so- called SAVE Act into it.

Now, let me remind you, we have been debating the SAVE Act here off and on for, what, about 4 months now? This is the same SAVE Act that, in practice--in practice--would make it harder for eligible voters to register to vote, to stay registered to vote, to actually cast their ballot by imposing these standards across all 50 States. It would ban student IDs, certain Tribal IDs, other forms of government ID that in some States that do have their own voter ID law, people count on to be able to participate in our elections.

The SAVE Act would also devastate mail and absentee voting across the country by requiring photocopies of your ID to be included along with your mail ballot something that the Republican Lieutenant Governor of Utah has pointed out would violate their State's constitution, their constitution that requires an opportunity for a secret ballot, the same requirement for secret ballots that States across the country also share.

This is the same element, by the way, that the Ohio Legislature passed in the form of State legislation, a similar mail voter ID requirement that the Republican Governor of Ohio vetoed because it significantly burdened those who choose to vote by mail.

But, of course, that is this bill's intent. For all the talk about stock trading--and there is a way to address that, I will get to that in a minute--the true goal here is to somehow pass the SAVE Act, which, by the way, not only are you not going to get unanimous consent today, the Republican caucus in the Senate isn't even unified around it.

It has come up for votes, procedural and otherwise. It keeps falling short. So why are we here?

I believe if the proponents of the stock trading measure were sincere about wanting to ban stock trading by Members of Congress, then they would sit down with Democrats and negotiate or, better yet, let's take up and pass the measure that would achieve just that that came out of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee about a year ago, a bipartisan measure by Senators Ossoff, Merkley, Peters, Cortez Masto, Hawley, and Moreno.

So why don't we try to do that?

Mr. President, I ask that the Senator modify her request to instead proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 294, S. 1498; that the committee-reported substitute amendment be agreed to; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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