Then there is Rep. Fred Upton R-Mich. In case you were wondering, his niece is superstar swimsuit model Kate Upton. Marrying rich Several members of Congress simply married their way into wealth. Richard Blumenthal D-Conn.
His net worth? Other members of Congress who took very lucrative vows on their wedding day: Democrats Rep. Claire McCaskill D-Mo. Riding the tech boom One day, we'll be saluting President Zuckerberg.
Until then, we have plenty of tech millionaires working in Washington, including Rep. Jared Polis D-Colo. His colleague, Rep. Suzan DelBene D-Wash. Mark Warner D-Va. Making money off cars Meet the richest man in Congress: Rep. Congressmen can get away with "the type of insider trading that would send Martha Stewart to prison," Holman said.
So, for instance, if a lawmaker learns an upcoming bill will grant a company a large government contract, which could boost that company's stock, he or she is free to buy that stock ahead of the bill's public introduction. A report released last month by four universities found that on average, stock portfolios held by House members from to beat the market average by approximately 6 percent annually. In , the same group of professors found that the average stock portfolios held by members of the Senate beat the market average by about 10 percent.
Officially, House ethics rules say it would "impractical or unreasonable" to ask members of Congress to divest from industries over which they have jurisdiction, in part because a congressman may have been elected to represent a "common interest" he shares with his constituents.
Thus, the rules say, if asked to divest in that industry, the member of Congress may be "ineffective in representing the real interests of the constituents.
House ethics rules dictate that a lawmaker should "never use any information coming to him confidentially in the performance of governmental duties as a means for making a private profit. Democratic Reps. But the bill, which has been introduced before, has never had more than 14 congressional sponsors. It's not just the lawmakers themselves who exist in this ethical grey space -- sometimes a congressman's spouse or family member is in a position to profit from congressional actions, raising questions about how far to extend conflict of interest rules.
Democratic Rep. Barney Frank recently acknowledged that in the s he helped his then-partner get a lucrative job with Fannie Mae, though he said he did nothing wrong. New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgensen, who reported the detail in a new book, said in an interview that Fannie Mae "rolled out the red carpet" for Frank's partner to try to win him over, since he was a member of the Financial Services Committee.
Before Democratic Sen. Bayh said his wife's business interests didn't influence his votes on policy that impacted those sectors. Once a member leaves office, even more opportunities for financial gain present themselves. While there's room for debate as to whether Congress should adopt more rules to avoid conflicts of interest, it's clear that the more transparency there is, the better.
When it comes to the disclosure of lawmakers' personal assets, however, there is certainly room for improvement -- starting with putting the information online, said Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics.
We would hope members of Congress would see the wisdom in making this information accessible to the public. Below this rung of the phenomenally prosperous is a thicker belt of the merely flush — the House members 13 more than in the previous Congress and 50 senators who are millionaires, at least on paper.
This stands in contrast to the 7. By coincidence, 38 percent of the women in Congress are millionaires — identical to the share of millionaires in the total membership.
But among the quarter of the membership from Generation X and the handful of millennials, only one in five is a millionaire. At the other end of the spectrum are nearly a quarter of the members whose disclosures reflect a negative net worth. For many this is true only on paper, because they owe plenty on their home mortgages, which must be reported while the value of their real estate is not.
And 10 of the 50 richest, six of them majority Republicans, sit on House Ways and Means or Senate Finance, the committees in charge of drafting the package of tax cuts and tax code changes that were enacted at the end of last year and targeted to benefit the richest Americans most of all.
Not only will the freshman class elected in November surely include some very wealthy people, but also nine of the richest current members have decided they are not staying in Congress beyond this fall. Underscoring how much wealth is concentrated in a tiny pinnacle of the population, in Congress as well as the country, these voluntary departures include four of the six richest members , all from the House, whose immense fortunes combine for an astonishing one-quarter of the entire net worth of Congress.
All four are self-made, which is the most typical route for joining the 50 richest. Almost three-fifths of them 22 Republicans and 7 Democrats are multimillionaires thanks to their own business acumen, in a wide array of industries including software development, banking, telecommunications, health care, insurance, real estate, litigation, plastics and car dealerships.
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