The No Rich Politician Act
While you hold elected office, the taxpayer is your only employer. Money from anyone else is not a disclosure problem or an ethics letter. It is a felony.
Almost nobody arrives in Congress rich and almost nobody leaves poor. That is not a coincidence and it is not a conspiracy theory. It is what happens when you let a person write the rules an industry lives under while that industry is allowed to pay them.
We have tried asking nicely. We have disclosure forms, filing deadlines, ethics committees and a stock trading law with a penalty smaller than a parking ticket in most cities. The result is a system where the conflict is documented, published, indexed, searchable, and completely undisturbed.
So this bill stops managing the conflict and removes it.
You cannot serve two masters. One of them is always money.
Who it covers
Every person holding elected office at the federal level, and every person holding elected state office. It applies the day you are sworn in and ends the day you leave, with a two-year tail on anything you were regulating.
It covers the officeholder. It does not confiscate a spouse's career, and the reason why is in the questions at the bottom of this page.
What becomes a felony
Receiving, or arranging to later receive, anything of value from any source other than your government salary. In particular:
- Consulting fees, retainers, honoraria and speaking fees
- Board seats, advisory seats, and equity or options granted while in office
- Book advances, media contracts and licensing deals signed while in office
- Buying or selling individual stocks, bonds or crypto
- Real estate or business transactions with any party that has business before your office
- A job offer, or a wink about a job offer, from anyone you are currently regulating
- Any of the above routed through a family member, a friend, a foundation or a shell
The last line is the one that does the work. Every scheme worth prosecuting is a payment wearing a costume, so the offense is defined by who benefits, not by whose name is on the check.
What is still allowed, because this is not a poverty vow
- Your government salary, and a pension you already earned
- Retirement accounts, index funds and broad-market holdings, placed in a qualified blind trust you cannot direct
- Interest on ordinary savings
- Your primary residence, and the sale of it
- A business or farm you owned before taking office, provided it goes into the same blind trust or is sold
- Military reserve pay, and income your household earned before you took office
You are allowed to be comfortable. You are allowed to have saved. What you are not allowed to do is make a single new decision about your own money while you are making decisions about everyone else's.
The penalty
A felony, with prison exposure that scales to the amount taken. Full forfeiture of the money, plus the same amount again. Loss of the federal pension. Payer liability, so the company that wrote the check is in the same courtroom as the official who cashed it.
Enforced by a prosecutor with tenure protection, because an anti-corruption law that the corrupt can fire their way out of is decoration.
The part nobody likes: raise the pay
If you close every side door, you have to make sure the front door still fits an ordinary person. Otherwise this bill quietly becomes a rule that only the already wealthy can afford to serve, which is the exact disease it is meant to cure.
So the salary goes up, it is set by a formula rather than by a vote of the people receiving it, and the office covers the second household that the job actually requires. Pay them properly and then hold them to it. That is how you hire for any other job where the temptation is money.
What you get to see
One public ledger. Salary in, blind trust confirmed, and every meeting with anyone paid to change a policy, filed within seventy-two hours in a format a normal person can read without a subscription and a law degree.
This bill would cost me my company. I run a small business I built from nothing, and under § 3 I would have to sell it or hand it to a trustee I cannot instruct. I wrote it that way on purpose. A rule that has a carve-out shaped exactly like the author is not a rule.
The fair questions
Doesn't this guarantee that only rich people can serve?
It would, if it were only § 2. That is why § 5 exists and why I put it in the bill instead of leaving it for later. A schoolteacher and a plumber have to be able to take this job, serve a term, and go home no poorer than they arrived. Anything less and you have simply narrowed the club.
What about their husband or wife?
A spouse did not run for anything, and taking away their career because of who they married is a punishment aimed at the wrong person. So a spouse keeps their job and their income.
What a spouse cannot do is be a lobbyist, take money from a party with business before the office, or hold assets outside the household blind trust. That closes the loophole without asking someone to quit their job for a marriage vow.
Can Washington really do this to state legislators?
Honestly, not cleanly. Federal criminal law reaching into state offices is contested ground, and a version that overreaches gets struck down and accomplishes nothing. The realistic path is federal officials by statute, state officials through the conditions attached to federal money and through the states adopting it themselves.
I would rather tell you that up front than promise you something that dies in a courtroom eighteen months in.
Won't good people just refuse to run?
Some will. The ones who refuse because they cannot serve without also earning from the industries they oversee are exactly the applicants this is designed to screen out. That is not a side effect. That is the product.
Why not just do term limits instead?
Because term limits need a constitutional amendment, which is a decade-long project, and because the evidence from states that have them is not encouraging: when every member is a rookie, the only people in the room with any institutional memory are the lobbyists and the permanent staff. You would be handing more leverage to exactly the people you were trying to disarm.
The reason anyone wants term limits is that staying in office is profitable. This bill makes it unprofitable. Fix the incentive and you do not need the blunt instrument.
Isn't a felony extreme for a speaking fee?
We have spent thirty years trying the reasonable version. Disclosure, delay, censure, a fine. Every one of them prices corruption as a cost of doing business, and businesses pay costs. A felony is the only penalty that does not have a line item on somebody's budget.