Ethics

The problem

Federal ethics law is strictest at the bottom and absent at the top. The criminal conflict-of-interest statute binds every executive-branch employee, on pain of prison — except the President and Vice President, whom Congress expressly excluded, and it has never applied to members of Congress or federal judges at all.¹ What covers those offices instead is disclosure and self-policing, and both have failed measurably. The penalty for filing a late trade report under the STOCK Act is $200; dozens of members of both parties violate the Act every Congress, and no one has ever been prosecuted under it.²³ In 2024, members’ stock portfolios in both parties beat the S&P 500 — returns of 31% among Democrats and 26% among Republicans, against the index’s 24.9% — often in sectors their own committees oversee.⁴

Self-policing performs the way its design predicts. The Senate’s ethics committee has found evidence of a violation in 3% of its investigations; the independent congressional ethics office, in 43%⁵ — and that office has been repeatedly curtailed by chamber rules votes.⁶ The Supreme Court adopted a code of conduct in 2023 with no complaint process and no sanctions;⁷ every state supreme court in America answers to a judicial conduct commission, and the U.S. Supreme Court is the only court of last resort in the country that answers to none.⁸ This is amendment territory for a structural reason: every one of these rules is written and enforced by the people it governs. Chamber ethics rules can be rewritten by simple majority on the first day of any Congress, the justices themselves publicly disagree over whether Congress may regulate the Court’s ethics by statute at all,⁹ and fourteen years of 85%+ polling have produced no statutory trading ban.¹⁰ Constitutional text has historically been the only way to bind officials who otherwise write their own rules.

The principle

Five parts, each doing a specific job:

A trading ban on the offices where power concentrates. The President, Vice President, members of Congress, and federal judges may not buy, sell, or hold individual securities, digital assets, or speculative contracts whose value their official conduct can affect. The definition is functional rather than a list of instruments — Canada has defined covered assets this way for two decades¹¹ — so it reaches whatever replaces today’s assets. Diversified funds and qualified blind trusts remain open in the constitutional text itself: the target is self-dealing, not ownership.

An end to the chief-executive exemption. The President and Vice President become subject to conflict-of-interest and disclosure law to the same extent as every other civil officer. The one legitimate reason for the current carve-out — a President cannot recuse from being President — is preserved as a narrow exception for recusal only.¹² Divestment and disclosure rules apply in full, as they do for every other democratic chief executive among our peers.¹³

Enforceable ethics for the judiciary. Congress gains express power to prescribe a code of conduct binding all federal judges, including the justices, with a complaint process in which no judge finally judges their own cause. This settles in constitutional text a question the justices publicly dispute⁹ — and brings the federal judiciary in line with all fifty states and every peer democracy, whose decades of enforceable judicial ethics show no measurable loss of judicial independence.⁸¹⁴

An independence rule for enforcement. No chamber, court, or officer may be the final judge of their own compliance. The clause deliberately does not create a single national ethics commission; it requires independence and leaves each branch’s machinery to law. Rhode Island has run a constitutionally independent ethics commission since 1986¹⁵ — the principle has a working record, and the amendment adopts the principle without the fourth-branch architecture.

A disclosure floor. Financial and gift disclosure gains constitutional status, so no future Congress, chamber rule, or court decision can narrow or repeal it — and willful concealment becomes punishable by law, replacing a regime whose routine penalty is $200.²

The draft text

Why it can pass

Ethics is the broadest full-spectrum consensus we have measured — the only category in this platform where every component polls above 70% with both parties, and one where Republican support sometimes runs ahead of Democratic support:

Extending the congressional trading ban upward does not cost support: a ban covering the President, Vice President, and Supreme Court justices held at 87% (87% of Republicans, 90% of Democrats, 82% of independents) in the same University of Maryland survey, where 92% of respondents found the conflict-of-interest argument convincing after hearing both sides (no party breakdown published).¹⁰ Wording moves the Republican number, and that is a finding, not a trick: “enforcing a strict ethics code” for the justices drew 88% of Republicans (Marquette, 2024),¹⁶ while “a binding code of ethics” drew 62% (YouGov, 2024).¹⁷ The draft language follows the enforcement framing because that is the version both parties support.

The precedents run in one direction:

• The 27th Amendment (ratified 1992) — the most recently ratified amendment — is exactly this species of rule: no congressional pay raise takes effect until after an election. The last time Americans amended the Constitution, it was to limit Congress’s control over its own pay.
• The statutory route keeps almost passing. A trading ban advanced out of a Senate committee for the first time in history, cosponsored by senators from both parties’ ideological wings;¹⁸ the House passed a trading restriction in July 2026 — but only after it was narrowed to new purchases and burdened with an unrelated rider that sharply reduced the bipartisan vote.¹⁹ Fourteen years after the STOCK Act, no ban has become law. The near-misses are evidence of demand; the failures are evidence that Congress has not been able to bind itself by statute.
• States have already ratified the idea by wide margins. Rhode Island (1986), Oklahoma (1990, by 2-to-1), and Florida (1976) wrote ethics commissions or disclosure mandates into their constitutions by popular vote¹⁵²⁰ — and every state, whatever its politics, stands a judicial conduct commission behind its highest court.⁸
• No prior attempt has been defeated. No ethics-enforcement or trading-ban amendment has ever advanced out of committee²¹ — unlike proposals in areas with long records of failure, this amendment carries no record of defeat.

If it passes: the law today and the day after

What the five sections would change in existing law, what they would leave standing, and what Congress would still have to write. (How ratified amendments interact with existing law in general is covered in After ratification.)

Federal law today

No federal law bars the covered officers from owning individual securities; the Congressional Research Service told a House hearing in 2025 that “neither current law nor House or Senate rules” prohibit members from owning or trading specific assets.²² The STOCK Act requires transaction reports within 30 to 45 days and affirms that insider-trading law applies to Congress.²³ The conflict-of-interest statute’s exclusion of the President and Vice President is one sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 202(c).¹²⁴ The Judicial Conduct and Disability Act defines “judge” as circuit, district, bankruptcy, and magistrate judges, leaving the justices outside its complaint process.²⁵⁷ Financial disclosure already covers every office the draft names, and its gift threshold is a statutory “minimal value” — the draft’s own term.²⁶

State law today

The draft names only federal officers, so no state law conflicts with it. States supply the working models: 49 states require legislators to file financial disclosures,²⁷ 45 have a state ethics commission,²⁸ and every state has a judicial conduct commission for its highest court.⁸

The day after

Sections 2 and 4 contain no “by law” provision and operate on ratification: the statutory exclusion of the President and Vice President becomes inoperative until Congress strikes it, and an ethics process that ends with a chamber or the Court judging its own compliance no longer satisfies the Constitution.²⁴²⁹ Section 1’s prohibition takes effect one year after ratification, and each later officeholder gets a year to comply (Section 6) — the divestment window — but its safe harbor exists “as Congress shall by law provide,” so whether existing statutory definitions of “qualified blind trust” and “diversified” fund suffice is a first-day question.²⁶³⁰ Section 3 gives Congress power, not a duty, to prescribe a judicial code, and requires a complaint process “established by law”; Section 5’s penalties are “punishable by law.” Bills exist for each piece: the HONEST Act, reported by a Senate committee in 2025, covers the President, Vice President, and members, permitting diversified funds and Treasury securities but not blind trusts;¹⁸³¹ a Supreme Court ethics bill would require a code within 180 days and a five-judge complaint panel.³² The disclosure statute stands and becomes a floor. Left to the courts: the reach of “whose value their official conduct may affect,” coverage of spouses, who may sue to enforce Sections 1, 2, and 4, sanctions on justices short of impeachment, and how Section 4 reconciles with each House’s power to punish its members.²⁹

What we left out

What we considered and set aside, and why:

• An enforceable emoluments clause. The Constitution’s existing bans on foreign payments were dismissed in court on procedure, not merits,³³ and adding a remedy is structurally sound. But every real-world polling framing of foreign gifts splits by forty points or more between the parties,³⁴ and no neutral polling on emoluments enforcement exists. It fails our full-spectrum gate today; it returns if neutral polling clears the bar.
• Covering all federal employees. Extending the trading ban from elected and appointed constitutional officers to the civil service drops support from 86% to 40% (University of Maryland, 2023), and it drops in both parties alike — 42% of Republicans, 37% of Democrats.¹⁰ The public’s theory of this problem is self-dealing by the powerful, not stock ownership by government workers, and the amendment is scoped to that concern.
• Forced sale of existing holdings. In the one direct measurement, 69% said mandating the sale of an incoming President’s businesses “goes too far” (Bloomberg, 2016; no party breakdown published).³⁵ The blind-trust and diversified-fund path achieves the separation without penalizing people for what they built before office — and without deterring candidates whose wealth is a business rather than a portfolio.
• A single national ethics commission. One body policing the President, Congress, and the Court would maximize both separation-of-powers objections and the fear of a politicized enforcer. The amendment constitutionalizes the independence principle and leaves each branch’s enforcement machinery to law.
• Lobbying and revolving-door restrictions. They poll well,³⁶ but they are a different problem with their own design questions, covered as a separate category of this platform.
• Details that belong in statute: dollar thresholds, penalty schedules, blind-trust mechanics and divestment clocks, asset taxonomies, and gift-valuation rules. The STOCK Act’s $200 fine is the standing lesson against writing numbers into durable law.²

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