A new bill to ban senators and their spouses from buying individual stocks that Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) touts in a new ad wouldn’t apply to Baldwin’s partner because the couple is not married, Daniel Lippman reports.

There’s a cost to not putting a ring on that, too.

Her opponent Eric Hovde has called on Baldwin to disclose her partner’s assets. And after a super PAC ad attacked her for not reporting jointly held assets with partner Maria Brisbane, a wealth adviser at Morgan Stanley, Baldwin responded with her own ad saying that she was “leading the fight to ban senators from purchasing any individual stocks.”

The lady’s lady is a wealth advisor, a fancy term for a stock tout. She’d not have been pleased had she been limited to recommending plain vanilla index funds to her terribly sophisticated clients.

But if the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act passed, the law would not apply to relationships like Baldwin and Brisbane, even though in 2021 the couple bought a $1.3 million home together in Washington, splitting the cost of the property. As written, the law would prohibit senators, their spouses and their dependant children from trading stocks but not apply to less official relationships. The Baldwin campign noted that the bill uses the same standard for spousal and child reporting that has been in place since the passage of the Ethics in Government Act in the 1970s.