WASHINGTON — Some lawmakers sounded optimistic on Wednesday that their colleagues may soon be willing to curb their own stock trading, as they unveiled bipartisan legislation they had hammered out.

The measure is the latest in a series of efforts to bring a bill to the floor that would address the perception that members are trading on inside information gleaned from their work in Congress.

“Members of Congress have access to inside information. Period, end of story,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who has long pushed for action on the issue.

Introduced by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, the new bill would ban members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Unlike some other proposals, it does not allow blind trusts, and it applies only to lawmakers, their spouses and dependent children — not to the president or vice president.

At Wednesday’s news conference, members described how Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., approached a wide range of members and asked them to work on a compromise effort. The working group included Roy; Fitzpatrick; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., along with others who have taken stabs at banning congressional stock trading.

One sticking point in previous efforts was the issue of penalties and enforcement. The new proposal would allow the House and Senate Ethics committees to identify offenders and direct them to pay a fee of 10 percent of the investment. It would require the Ethics panels to track those fees on a public website.

The legislation would require current members of Congress to offload stocks within 180 days of enactment, and new members to divest within 90 days of taking office. Like most other bills on the topic, this one would still allow diversified investment funds and U.S. Treasury bonds.

While momentum appears to be building in Congress, the path forward is uncertain. Another bill, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., advanced out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in July but faces strong opposition from Republicans in that chamber.

On the House side, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has floated using a discharge petition to force a vote on stock ban legislation, an option that members of the working group appeared open to on Wednesday, though they urged Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to bring it to the floor via regular order. Luna said she’d give House leaders, who are also working this month to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown, until the end of September.

“There are multiple pathways to get a vote on the floor. We are not going to let another Congress pass without getting this done,” Fitzpatrick said.

A discharge petition could allow rank-and-file members to sidestep leadership and the Rules Committee and force votes if the petition gets 218 signatures, but the prospect has rankled House leadership.

“It is long past time that we move,” said Roy. “The House Committee on Administration should consider this bill, move the bill forward, amend it, go to regular order, but deliver it quickly to the floor of the House. But we’re going to get a vote on it. This is a non-debatable proposition.”

House Administration Chair Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., on Wednesday said he wasn’t sure whether the parliamentarian would assign the bill to his committee and said he didn’t have any immediate plans to hold a hearing.

“I think there’s ways we can always look to avoid the appearance of impropriety,” Steil said.

Johnson, meanwhile, signaled tepid support for some kind of solution.

“There’s a couple of different ideas on the table and we have to build consensus on that,” Johnson said, adding that he was “not in love with the details” of some of the ideas.

Anger over stock trading by members of Congress continued to grow this year after some “bought the dip” before President Donald Trump announced a pause on tariffs. A 2012 law already bars members from trading on inside information. But it is rarely enforced, and lawmakers regularly flout its reporting requirements.

A ban has broad support from voters in public polling, particularly after a flurry of trades at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic raised eyebrows, though no wrongdoing was found. Banning congressional stock trading altogether is the only way to earn the public’s trust, proponents say, and both Trump and Johnson have backed the idea in theory. Still, neither Johnson nor Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has publicly committed to bringing any of the proposals to the floor.

The House consensus bill seeks to sidestep some of the controversy generated by the Hawley proposal in the Senate, which extends not only to Congress, but also to the president and vice president.

Trump came out against Hawley’s proposal, which originally would have required the president to divest from assets but was amended to take effect at the beginning of an official’s next term.

Some have argued that a congressional ban could deter potential members of Congress from running for office. Ocasio-Cortez, who was a waitress before she joined the House in 2019, said that argument misses the point of public service.

“Plenty of people have to make a ton of sacrifices to run for office,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The idea that this is some undue burden is outrageous.”

“Millionaires are very overrepresented in Congress,” she continued. “If we want a Congress that reflects the actual country … we need to have working-class people who work here.”

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David Lerman contributed to this report.

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