Virginia Democrat Spanberger calls for 'new House leadership' after Dems quash insider-trading bill

Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger on Friday issued a scathing rebuke of current Democratic House of Representative leadership, criticizing her party's leaders for this week scuttling an insider-trading bill indefinitely.

Spanberger in a statement on her website noted that for the last roughly two years she has been working to pass the "TRUST in Congress Act," which she said would "require individual stock holdings be divested or placed in a qualified blind trust while in office."

In what many commentators saw as a backhanded rebuke of those efforts, the Committee on House Administration on Tuesday put forth the "Combatting Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act," a law that ostensibly sought the same goals as Spanberger's legislation but was far broader than the measure she had proposed earlier. 

House Majority Leader Rep .Steny Hoyer on Thursday said lawmakers would not have enough time to read the bill and vote on it before House members depart Washington on Friday for the midterm recess. 

Spanberger in her statement said the bipartisan efforts to bring the insider-trading bill to a vote were "subjected to repeated delay tactics, hand-waving gestures, and blatant instances of Lucy pulling the football."

"This moment marks a failure of House leadership — and it’s yet another example of why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill, as I have long made known," she argued further.

"Rather than bring Members of Congress together who are passionate about this issue, leadership chose to ignore these voices, push them aside, and look for new ways they could string the media and the public along — and evade public criticism," she added.