Nearly 200 Democrats Voted Against Voter ID Even When Packaged With Stock Trading Ban

Here’s what you need to know about what just happened in the House of Representatives. Nearly 200 Democrats, including their entire leadership team, voted against a bill that would’ve stopped members of Congress from gaming the stock market while simultaneously requiring voter ID at the federal level. Let that sink in for a moment.

The vote was 231 to 198. Only 13 Democrats broke ranks to support it. The bill passed anyway, but the spectacle of watching Democrats oppose something tells you everything about where their priorities actually lie.

For months we’ve heard Democratic politicians pontificate about the evils of congressional stock trading. They’ve given impassioned speeches about how it’s corrupt, how it undermines public trust, how members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to profit from insider knowledge while regular Americans play by different rules. The public agrees overwhelmingly. Poll after poll shows massive bipartisan support for banning this practice. Same goes for voter ID, which enjoys support numbers that most politicians would kill for.

So what happened when Republicans bundled these two wildly popular measures together? Democrats ran for the hills.

You know what’s fascinating about this? The stock trading ban wasn’t some Republican trap. There were actual bipartisan negotiations on this thing. Democrats participated. They helped shape the language. And yet when it came time to vote, when they had to choose between giving Republicans a win on election integrity and following through on their own rhetoric about stock trading, they chose politics over principle.

The voter ID portion is what spooked them. Never mind that virtually every other developed democracy requires some form of identification to vote. Never mind that Americans use ID for everything from buying cold medicine to entering a federal building. The Democratic position has calcified into treating any election security measure as voter suppression, evidence be damned.

Think about the political calculation here. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his team looked at a bill that combined two things the American people desperately want and said no. They decided that opposing voter ID was more important than delivering on years of promises to clean up congressional stock trading. That’s not principle. That’s partisanship in its purest, most cynical form.

The irony is delicious. Democrats have spent years trying to position themselves as the party that cares about corruption, about getting money out of politics, about restoring faith in institutions. But when push came to shove, they couldn’t bring themselves to support a measure that would’ve actually accomplished one of those goals because it was attached to something that might make elections slightly more secure.

Republicans, whatever their flaws, at least had the courage to address both issues. They recognized that the American people are tired of watching their representatives get rich off information the rest of us don’t have access to. They also recognized that election integrity isn’t some fringe concern but a foundational requirement for democracy.

The 13 Democrats who voted yes deserve credit for breaking with their leadership. That takes guts in today’s political climate where party loyalty often trumps common sense.

This vote revealed something important about the current Democratic Party. When forced to choose between popular policy and partisan positioning, they’ll pick the latter every single time. The American people are watching, and they’re taking notes.