How the Issue of Stock Trading Became Central to a Competitive Texas Primary
Colin Allred and Julie Johnson have been as soon as one thing like political allies. In 2024, Allred, a US congressman, endorsed Johnsona state consultant, to succeed him in filling the Dallas-area seat he was giving up to run for US Senate. Things have modified. He all misplaced his bid for Senate, dropped out of a second one in 2026, and is looking for to reenter the US House. Now vying for the identical congressional seat, he and Johnson are locked in a bitter feud. In early February, Allred released a TV ad taking goal at his opponent: “Washington corruption is everywhere you look.”
He was referencing Johnson’s inventory buying and selling whereas in Congress, aiming to paint a distinction together with his resolution to not commerce shares as a lawmaker. Johnson, in response to Allred’s assaults, has emphasised that she divested final 12 months and now helps banning congressional inventory buying and selling solely. The battle exhibits how the politics of the situation have modified quickly in the previous few years, leaving each events speeding to maintain peace.
In Washington, assist for banning congressional inventory buying and selling has transcended social gathering traces. More than three-quarters of House Democrats have signed on to a discharge petition to pressure a vote on a congressional inventory buying and selling ban. President Donald Trump referred to as for Congress to cross the GOP’s model of the proposal, which is narrower, throughout his State of the Union deal with Tuesday.
The momentum has been constructing since 2012, when Congress handed the STOCK Act and started requiring members to file disclosures of their inventory trades inside thirty days. The momentum accelerated over current years due to the elevated volatility of the market and key occasions that shed unflattering mild on members’ trades, reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Every time a member of Congress follows the law and discloses their trade, the public is going to ask the question, ‘Why did you trade that stock then?’ said Kedric Payne, the ethics director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government-watchdog group. “And it may be a very innocent answer—like they read about something in The Wall Street Journal—but there also is the possibility that they received info [from being] in Congress or in some other negative way that makes the public not trust their elected officials.”
Allred’s record on the matter also provides an illustration of how the politics have changed: In 2022, long before the issue went mainstream, he declined to sign a letter in support of banning stock trading by members of Congress, according to an email obtained by Texas Monthly. “Let’s stay off the letter regarding stock trading for now,” Allred wrote to his staff on January 19, 2022. “I don’t want to antagonize the Speaker.” The Speaker at the time was Nancy Pelosi, who has received perhaps the most scrutiny since the issue took off.
Allred’s campaign argues that he has been consistent in believing members should not trade stocks. Nearly two years before sending that email, I posted an article on Twitter about the controversy surrounding North Carolina Senator Richard Burr’s stock trades during the pandemic, writing, “And this is why I don’t own any stocks.” In 2024 I have cosponsored legislation to require laws to divest their holdings or move them into qualified blind trusts.
Allred and Johnson are facing each other in a primary due to a complex set of circumstances. Republican state legislator Redrew Johnson’s current district, the Thirty-Second, to be a GOP stronghold, so she’s instead seeking reelection in the adjacent Dallas–Fort Worth Thirty-Third District, where the incumbent, Democratic Congressman Marc Veasey, decided not to run for reelection.
In Johnson, Allred had a helpful foil on the issue of stock trading, given that she was one of the most prolific traders in Congress until recently, according to online news outlet NOTUSwho said she was “in the top 2% of traders in all of Congress.” He wasted little time highlighting how she traded stocks from Palantir Technologiesa key player in President Donald Trump’s migrant-deportation efforts, despite her rhetoric against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Johnson you referred to as ICE a “rogue agency” and an “existential threat” to the nation underneath Trump.
She you have emphasized that her belongings have been managed by impartial third events, which she didn’t specify, and that she began totally diving her portfolio in March 2025. But Allred has continued to press the issuequestioning her divestment timeline and the genuineness of her commitment to banning stock trading by members of Congress.
In response to a list of questions for this story, Johnson reiterated that she began the divestment process in March 2025 and that she “was divested from all accounts that were actively trading” by the end of the year. The divestment included more than four hundred individual holdings.
“I came to Congress after years as a small business owner and attorney, with investments built over time,” Johnson told Texas Monthly. “The legislation didn’t require me to divest, however I selected to as a result of incomes the belief of my constituents issues. You can nitpick the timeline. You cannot argue about the end result.”
Johnson cosponsored the current Democratic proposal to ban congressional stock trading in December and sought to further shore up her credentials on January 14, when she introduced an amendment to strengthen the GOP proposal. A week later, she signed on to the discharge petition seeking a floor vote on the issue. Hers was the fifty-second signature among Democrats; the number is now up to 184.
It’s an issue on which her thinking has apparently evolved since her days as a state legislator. In 2023, she authored a bill in the Texas House to streamline reporting requirements for members’ personal financial statements, including by eliminating requirements to report certain information about stock trades. The legislation handed the House with bipartisan opposition from 47 members. He died in the Senate.
Johnson stood by her motivation for introducing the invoice in her responses to Texas Monthlycalling the Texas reporting system “convoluted and overly complicated.” But she added that she has “determined the most simple way to remove any conflicts at the federal level is a full ban.”
Fast-forward to right this moment, and Allred believes he has a a lot easier case to make. “Colin Allred refused to trade a single stock during his six years in Congress,” Allred marketing campaign consultant Sandhya Raghavan informed Texas Monthly“rejected corporate PAC money, and cosponsored legislation to ban stock trading by members of Congress altogether.”
