Colin Allred and Julie Johnson were once something like political allies. In 2024, Allred, a U.S. congressman, endorsed Johnson, a state representative, to succeed him in filling the Dallas-area seat he was giving up to run for U.S. Senate. Things have changed. Allred lost his bid for Senate, dropped out of a second one in 2026, and is seeking to reenter the U.S. House. Now vying for the same congressional seat, he and Johnson are locked in a bitter feud. In early February, Allred released a TV ad taking aim at his opponent: “Washington corruption is everywhere you look.”
He was referencing Johnson’s stock trading while in Congress. Johnson, in response to Allred’s attacks, has emphasized that she divested last year and now supports banning congressional stock trading entirely. The conflict shows how the politics of the issue have shifted rapidly in the past few years, leaving both parties rushing to keep pace.
In Washington, support for banning congressional stock trading has transcended party lines. More than three-quarters of House Democrats have signed on to a discharge petition to force a vote on a congressional stock trading ban. President Donald Trump called for Congress to pass the GOP’s version of the proposal, which is narrower, during his State of the Union address Tuesday.
The momentum has been building since 2012, when Congress passed the STOCK Act and began requiring members to file disclosures of their stock trades within thirty days. The momentum accelerated over recent years due to the increased volatility of the market and key events that shed unflattering light on members’ trades, such as 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, he 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 he cosponsored legislation to require lawmakers 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 lawmakers 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 NOTUS, which said she was “in the top 2% of traders in all of Congress.” He wasted little time highlighting how she traded stocks from Palantir Technologies, a key player in President Donald Trump’s migrant-deportation efforts, despite her rhetoric against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Johnson has called ICE a “rogue agency” and an “existential threat” to the country under Trump.
She has emphasized that her assets were managed by independent third parties and that she started fully divesting her portfolio in March 2025. But Allred has continued to press the issue, questioning 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 law did not require me to divest, but I chose to because earning the trust of my constituents matters. You can nitpick the timeline. You can’t argue about the 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 passed the House with bipartisan opposition from 47 members. It died in the Senate.
Johnson stood by her motivation for introducing the bill in her responses to Texas Monthly, calling the Texas reporting system “convoluted and overly complicated.” But she added that she has “determined the most straightforward way to remove any conflicts at the federal level is a full ban.”
Fast-forward to today, and Allred believes he has a much simpler case to make. “Colin Allred refused to trade a single stock during his six years in Congress,” Allred campaign spokeswoman Sandhya Raghavan told Texas Monthly, “rejected corporate PAC money, and cosponsored legislation to ban stock trading by members of Congress altogether.”
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