Over the last week, the makeup of a tiny portion of the nucleotides spiraling around in Elizabeth Warren’s DNA strands has been made into a major national issue. It doesn’t matter. The job of a policymaker is to make policy. Whether or not Elizabeth Warren has a Native American ancestor, or can legitimately claim some form of Native American identity, does not have policy implications.

Unfortunately, policies do not get as much attention as Maury Povich-style DNA test bombshells. One of Elizabeth Warren’s policy proposals is to prohibit members of Congress from owning individual stocks, and it would be great if we could analyze that instead of her genetics. Unlike Elizabeth Warren’s DNA, this policy is, in fact, a policy, and actually has something to do with our financial system.

On August 21, Elizabeth Warren introduced her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act. This proposed piece of legislation has zero chance of becoming law under the Trump administration, but it is worth paying attention to. Looking at anti-corruption legislation offers insight into Warren’s policy goals as well as likely components of the overall Democratic platform in 2020. There are many components to the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act, but the first substantive provision described in Warren’s own summary materials would serve to “[b]an individual stock ownership by Members of Congress, Cabinet Secretaries, senior congressional staff, federal judges, White House staff and other senior agency officials while in office.” The bill would also “[p]rohibit all government officials from holding or trading stock where its value might be influenced by their agency, department, or actions.”

But wait, you might be asking, aren’t members of Congress already prohibited from using their positions to unfairly profit from stocks? Well, sort of. Prior to 2012, it was perfectly legal for lawmakers to use non-public information gained from their political positions to game the stock market. Then came the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, signed into law by President Obama on April 4, 2012. The STOCK Act finally expressly stated that members of Congress and staff are not excluded from insider trading provisions of federal securities laws. The STOCK Act officially banned Congresspeople from trading stocks based on nonpublic information gained on Capitol Hill. Yes, it really was not until 2012 that a law was passed against overt self-dealing in the stock market by members of Congress.

Even though it has been watered down since it was initially passed, the STOCK Act has been somewhat successful in reducing shady stock trading among Congresspeople. A 2017 investigation by Politico found that since the passage of the STOCK Act, the “clear majority” of lawmakers have opted to avoid potential conflicts of interest by avoiding individual stock trading — by putting their holdings in blind trusts, buying mutual funds instead of individual stocks, or just staying out of the stock market entirely. However, while 384 senators and House members made no stock trades in the two years preceding the investigation, some of their colleagues were prolific traders, making a combined total of more than 21,300 stock trades over the same period of time.

Some senators apparently have no qualms about trading stocks in businesses they directly oversee. Republican Senator Bob Corker, for instance, sits on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee while trading stocks in infrastructure businesses. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s positions on the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security and the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law sure don’t stop him from trading tech and healthcare stocks. While these Senators have certainly not been charged with violating the law, their positions do afford at least the opportunity for impropriety, and don’t do much for public perceptions about fair play in the financial markets.

So, while things have certainly improved since the pre-2012 Wild West, when members of Congress could pretty much freely use their positions of power to personally enrich themselves in the stock market, Warren’s proposed policy of banning individual stock ownership by members of Congress could still move the needle further. Members of Congress aren’t really required to give much up by eschewing ownership of individual stocks either. Most of them already avoid individual stocks, and owning an individual stock is frighteningly risky anyway for those who aren’t trading on insider knowledge. If you’re not intending to use a position of power in sketchy ways, there are better investment vehicles than individual stocks, like mutual funds.

Elizabeth Warren’s proposed policy of banning members of Congress from owning individual stocks is not earth-shattering, or as dramatic a deviation from the status quo as it may seem at first glance. But the thrust seems to be making the stock market fairer for average Americans, and preventing our leaders from robbing us blind. As long as she maintains similarly high-minded goals in her role as a lawmaker, I don’t really care if Warren has recombinant frog DNA like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I can sympathize with anyone who feels as though she has unfairly usurped their heritage, and that is a totally legitimate reason not to like the woman. But if we’re talking about voting for her or not, understanding Elizabeth Warren’s policies seems far more important than understanding her family history. I can’t think of much that’s more fundamentally American than judging someone’s actions rather than her ancestry.

Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.