A question for Pelosi: Why are members of Congress allowed to trade stocks?

In the world many of us would like to see, we’d admire public servants of all kinds for their dedication to the country. Yet we’d also acknowledge that having a government that operates smoothly and free of corruption requires those public servants to accept some conditions on their employment they might not tolerate if they were in the private sector.

Most of the time, that’s how things do work. Members of Congress, for instance, have to file financial disclosures that are made public, which you don’t have to do if you work at a hardware store.

Which is why it was so striking when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended the right of those members and their staffers to trade individual stocks.

Pelosi was asked Wednesday about a report in Insider that showed 49 members of Congress and 182 staffers in violation of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012, or Stock Act — which requires them to report any stock trades they make in a timely fashion — since 2020. She said that if people aren’t reporting as the law requires, then they should. Which is unobjectionable.