Lord Do Nothings

The Senate’s unofficial mascot wears a crown, holds a sword labeled Legislative Inaction, and somehow still can’t find time for the two things America already agrees on.

Nov 08, 2026

Meet Lord Do Nothing, Security n Cigars’ new anti-mascot. Gerald the guard goose keeps watch. This guy keeps the calendar clear.

Roughly 8 in 10 Americans want a photo ID to vote, and about the same share want proof of citizenship when you register for the first time. That’s the core of the SAVE America Act, and majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all say yes. About 3 in 4 Americans also want members of Congress out of individual stock trading. Same story across party lines.

Now look at the Senate’s own 2026 calendar. Five weeks of August and early September were pro forma sessions where “no business was conducted.” Then October 5 through November 6 was blocked off as a “State Work Period,” a month off that ran straight through Election Day. Last Tuesday’s midterms came and went. Both reforms died in the meantime.

The House of Lords at least admits it’s hereditary.

I’d like you to meet the Senate’s unofficial mascot. Call him Lord Do Nothing. Crown on his head, ermine on his shoulders, a sword etched with “Legislative Inaction,” and a desk plaque that reads “A More Perfect Union Still Pending.” Gerald the guard goose is the one who shows up. Lord Do Nothing is the one who doesn’t.

Peers of the realm

The 17th Amendment (1913) took Senate selection away from state legislatures and gave it to the voters. On paper, senators answer to us. In practice, six-year terms, safe seats, and a club that guards its customs over results look a lot more like a peerage than a job.

They have the majority. They have the polls. They still won’t make either reform happen. The votes are there in the country. The will isn’t there in the club.

What the voters actually want

On photo ID and proof of citizenship, the numbers don’t leave much room:

Pew Research (August 2025): 83% favor requiring government-issued photo ID to vote, including 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats.
Gallup (October 2024): 84% favor photo ID; 83% favor proof of citizenship the first time you register.
Fox News (September 2025): 84% favor a valid photo ID to vote.

On congressional stock trading:

Economist/YouGov (May 2026): 76% say members of Congress and other elected officials should not be allowed to trade individual stocks. Only 6% say they should.
Fox News (September 2025 and again January 2026): 75% favor a ban. In the January poll, that included 83% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats.
Survey 160 (March 2026): 83% approve of a ban bill. Even Data for Progress, a progressive firm, found 60% support in April 2025. That’s the low end, and it’s still a majority.

I’ve written before about why trust in voting is the foundation, not a side issue. When eight in ten Americans agree on the basics and Congress still shrugs, the problem isn’t the public.

The calendar of a gentleman’s club

The Senate’s 2026 tentative schedule is a work of art, if your art is not working. Non-legislative periods include stretches in January, February, March/April, May, late June into July, then the big ones: August 10 through September 11, and October 5 through November 6. Roll Call noted the Senate wouldn’t return until mid-September after that summer break, while the House at least planned a one-week return at the end of August.

August’s “sessions” were pro forma. August 10, 13, 17, 20, 24, 27, 31, September 1, 4, 8, 10. The daily notices said it plainly: no business conducted.

Five weeks off in late summer. A month off into Election Day. Priorities sitting unpassed. That’s not governing. That’s a club that already knows when dinner is served.

The filibuster: custom over the voters’ agenda

The SAVE America Act passed the House in February 2026 and stalled in the Senate. Majority Leader John Thune’s answer is the 53-seat math: you need 60 to clear a filibuster, and they don’t have 60. He’s been blunt about it. Nuke the legislative filibuster? “Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”

Fair enough on the arithmetic. Acknowledge it. Then watch what they refused to do next.

Even a talking filibuster (make the other side actually hold the floor and work through dinner) was treated as beneath them. Sen. John Cornyn warned the process “could go on for literally weeks, if not months.” Sen. Thom Tillis called it a “goat rodeo.” Thune told Mike Lee that sometimes when something hasn’t been done in 100 years, there’s a reason. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito summed up the mood: “The will is not there.”

The filibuster can stay. What they refused was the work: hold the floor, skip dinner, and make the other side talk until the votes are there. Treating that like a personal insult is the Do Nothing part. Making senators stay late is somehow more offensive than telling 8 in 10 Americans to wait.

Blue slips: a gentlemen’s agreement against your own President

Blue slips let home-state senators effectively block district-judge and U.S. attorney nominees. Sen. Chuck Grassley refused Trump’s push to drop the practice. He said he was offended and disappointed by the posts. Trump called blue slips what they are: “a gentlemen’s agreement that’s about 100 years old.”

Then came Grassley’s own June 10, 2026 statement. Two nominees, Pozos and Martin, were “the first judicial nominees this Congress who’ve received blue slips from Democratic senators.” Seventeen-plus months in. Later he admitted the practice is “becoming more untenable,” cited Schumer sitting on the SDNY U.S. attorney “for more than a year,” and noted Democrats hadn’t allowed a single civilian nominee by voice vote or unanimous consent.

He kept the custom anyway.

Club courtesy over the voters’ mandate. The Lords would recognize the move immediately.

Stocks: the Sept. 30 show vote

On July 22, 2026, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act (H.R. 7008) by 232-198. Read the fine print. It bars new buys of individual stocks. It does not force anyone to sell what they already own. Existing holdings can be sold with public notice. That’s a purchase pause, not a clean break.

The real ban never got a floor vote. Rep. Chip Roy’s Restore Trust in Congress Act (H.R. 5106), backed by Rep. Tim Burchett and pushed with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s December 2025 discharge petition, was the version that actually forced members out of individual stocks. Leadership never brought it up.

On September 30, five weeks before the midterms, the Senate tried cloture on the weak House bill. Thune had bundled it with voter-ID provisions and called the pairing “two commonsense measures.” Sen. Chuck Schumer called it “a permission slip for corruption, not a stock trading ban,” said Republicans “designed the bill to fail” with “poison pills,” and noted he’d “supported those efforts for years.” Cloture failed 53-47 on a party-line vote. All Republicans yes. All Democrats and independents no. Even the weak bill never got a Senate debate.

Be careful with the two leaders. Neither Thune nor Schumer looks like an active stock trader on the disclosures. Thune’s recent filings are mostly mutual funds and ETFs, with no reported 2023-2026 trades I can find. Schumer has zero periodic transaction reports on the trackers. Don’t read that as a gotcha about their personal portfolios. Look at the institution. Both leaders turned a roughly 75%-popular reform into staged theater five weeks before an election. Thune bundled it to fail. Schumer used that as cover to vote no. The ban still isn’t law.

The day after the midterms, Burchett posted an X video and said the quiet part out loud. The bill he and Luna pushed “never got any traction. It was a real ban on stock trading.” The one the House passed “was very weak. It wasn’t going anywhere in the Senate anyway. And we touted it as if it was going to do something, and it didn’t.” Then the line that should be carved on Lord Do Nothing’s desk: “We are crooked as a dog’s leg.” And: “We just didn’t keep our word, and that’s what got us.” He also called Congress “infinitely broken and crooked, both parties.”

The traders keep trading

The heavy traders sit in both parties. Disclosures report holdings and trades in ranges, so the dollar figures below are tracker estimates from range midpoints, not exact bank balances. Trading activity alone is not proof of a crime. It is proof of a conflict the public already rejected.

On the Republican side, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has disclosed roughly 1,500 trades on the trackers, with hundreds filed late. In 2021 he failed to disclose about 130 trades on time, a STOCK Act violation. He’s sat on Armed Services while trading defense names. His office says advisers manage the portfolio without his day-to-day involvement. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is the Senate’s heavyweight by disclosed trade value. He ended his blind trust in 2019 with a clean sentence: “I’m not going to have a blind trust.” (Ignore the viral “$26 million disclosed a year late” rumor. Snopes rated it false. Those were amendments to on-time filings, mostly municipal bonds.)

On the Democratic side, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has more than a thousand disclosed trades. About 57% of them were in spouse, joint, or household accounts. Recent activity has been mostly sales of big names. I found no sourced reporting tying a specific trade to his committee work, so don’t invent one. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, Vice Chair of Intelligence, shows up near the top by disclosed dollar value. A lot of his recent volume is large municipal-bond purchases, not stock picks. Again: no sourced committee-tied scandal in what I checked. The point is volume and the conflict, not a courtroom charge.

How did the four vote on September 30? Tuberville and Scott: yes, for a bill that wouldn’t have forced them to sell anything. Whitehouse and Warner: no, calling the bill a sham. Either way, both sides’ traders still trade. That’s the Lords point.

Perks, trips, and dinners

While the calendar stays clear and the stock rules stay soft, the Senate’s own ethics rules keep the lifestyle comfortable. “Free attendance” at widely attended events covers food, refreshments, and entertainment. Privately sponsored travel is allowed with Ethics Committee approval, including from entities that employ lobbyists (with a one-day limit) and up to seven days internationally from others. Campaign-paid travel doesn’t even require Senate reporting.

A 2024 POLITICO / Howard Center investigation found lobbyist-tied nonprofits blowing “a hole through” the 2007 travel reforms. That dataset covered more than 17,000 House trips since 2012. Flag that clearly: House disclosures, not Senate. Senate rules leave the same lobbyist-nonprofit and campaign-travel doors open. I won’t name a senator on a trip without a rock-solid primary source in hand. The structure is the story. The perks survive. The reforms don’t.

The fix: the Benchmark Rule

A trading ban runs straight into their self-interest, so they’ll always find a way to kill it. September 30 proved it. One side wrote a bill built to fail. The other voted it down. It failed 53-47.

Blind trusts aren’t the answer either. Hired trustees get captured, or the senator just dissolves the trust. Rick Scott already showed you how: “I’m not going to have a blind trust.”

So here’s a rule that costs an honest senator nothing.

The Benchmark Rule. While in office, every marketable security a senator holds (stocks, bonds, Treasuries, options, the works) must sit in a broad, passive benchmark index fund of the senator’s choosing, from any low-cost provider. Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, whoever. The fund has to track a published broad index: the S&P 500, the total U.S. stock market, the aggregate bond market, that kind of thing. Zero sector bets. Zero discretionary stock-picking. No defense ETF. No tech bet. No “my guy knows a stock.”

They keep every dime of their wealth. They ride the exact same American market as everyone else’s 401(k). Nothing to time, nothing to hide, no trades to disclose, no trades to defend.

Better yet, look at what it does to their incentives. Right now a member of Congress can profit when a single contractor wins a contract, when a regulator crushes a competitor, or even when a sector tanks and they saw it coming in a briefing. Put their money in a broad benchmark index and there’s only one way their portfolio goes up: the American economy as a whole does well. What’s good for regular Americans’ 401(k)s is good for theirs. If they wreck the economy, they take the hit right alongside the rest of us.

What about capital gains on the conversion? Congress already answered this in 1989. Under 26 U.S.C. § 1043, from the Ethics Reform Act, executive-branch officials (and later judicial officers) who are forced to divest for conflicts can get a Certificate of Divestiture and roll the proceeds, tax-deferred, into Treasuries or diversified funds within 60 days. Cabinet nominees already get that break. Apply the same rollover to Congress. They wrote the tax relief for other people. They can live under it themselves.

Private family businesses, actual operating farms, and non-public real estate stay disclosed as usual. Those aren’t marketable securities and can’t go into an index fund. Everything that trades on a market (stocks, bonds, Treasuries, sector ETFs, options) goes into the broad passive benchmark.

Cui bono. The rule covers anyone who benefits. Spouses for sure. Dependents. And probably mistresses too. If that joke makes somebody nervous, good. Fifty-seven percent of Whitehouse’s disclosed trades were in household accounts. Close the household door or don’t bother writing the rule.

Enforcement has to be real. The STOCK Act’s standard late-filing fee is $200. That’s a parking ticket for people who trade in six- and seven-figure bands. A Benchmark Rule without real penalties is cosplay.

Anyone who fights a rule that lets them keep their wealth and grow with America is telling on themselves.

Use the ballot box like you mean it

I’ve written about this before in The Ballot Box Problem: the Founders gave us the boxes for a reason, and the ballot box is supposed to be the first and peaceful one. The 17th Amendment made senators ours. Six-year terms bank on voter amnesia. Lords count on that.

Last Tuesday’s midterms are over. The next Senate class is already on the clock. Eight in ten voters on ID. Three in four on stocks. A majority party that still wouldn’t stay late, wouldn’t force a talking filibuster, wouldn’t pass a real trading rule, and blocked out August and October while both sat unfinished.

Look up your senators’ votes. Call their offices. Ask one question: “What did you do with August and October?”

Then use the ballot box in the primaries and the generals like you mean it. Every two years. So we never need the other boxes.

Lord Do Nothing has a nice robe. He doesn’t get a free pass.

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