Rep. Matt Cartwright has spent years sponsoring truck insurance legislation that would directly benefit his family’s law firm, in which he owns a multimillion dollar stake, according to financial and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

In June and July, the Pennsylvania Democrat introduced two bills that would require commercial truck drivers to purchase insurance liability coverage at a minimum of $4.5 million, a 600% hike from the current $750,000 minimum. Cartwright previously introduced a similar proposal just months after joining Congress in 2013.

Higher insurance liability coverage can allow law firms representing a victim suing truckers to collect greater sums.

Trucking industry advocates claim the bills would be devastating to small shipping companies and independent drivers who can’t afford to pay the higher premiums. They also say Cartwright stands to benefit directly from the legislation due to his wife’s work as an attorney who specializes in truck accident lawsuits and his own profit-sharing agreement with his family’s Pennsylvania-based personal injury law firm, Munley Law.

“From our perspective, it's blatantly obvious the motives behind the legislation are to economically improve the bottom line for attorneys that specialize in suing truckers,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. “Should there be any integrity in our system at all, [Cartwright] should be recusing himself from involvement.”

The National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group, said Cartwright’s involvement in the legislation posed an overt conflict of interest.

“Usually when House members try to push legislation from which they would benefit personally, they are a little more creative,” said Peter Flaherty, chairman of the NLPC. “Did Rep. Cartwright think no one would notice that before he entered Congress he sued trucking companies for a living? This is pretty clumsy.”

Cartwright and his wife have profit-sharing agreements with Munley Law valued at between $2 million and $10 million, according to Cartwright’s 2018 financial disclosure report. The firm was founded by Cartwright’s father-in-law, and the congressman worked at the company from 1988 until he was elected to Congress in 2012.

Cartwright’s wife, Marion Munley, works as an attorney for the firm, where she specializes in commercial truck accident-related injury lawsuits. The legal group’s website currently displays a front-page banner touting a “record-breaking $26 million settlement” that Munley obtained in a “landmark truck accident case" in 2018.

Until July, Munley also served as chair of the Trucking Litigation Group of the American Association for Justice, a trial attorney trade group that has been lobbying for Cartwright’s bill, according to lobbying disclosure records. Munley sits on the organization’s board of governors and its executive committee, according to the association’s website. In 2018, the AAJ praised Munley in a press release, calling her a “titan of trucking litigation” who has helped “shape new laws.”

The organization applauded Cartwright’s bill in July, arguing that the existing required insurance minimums are outdated and don’t fairly compensate victims of truck accidents.

"Trucking companies carry inadequate 1980s level of insurance, which means thousands of crash victims are left without the financial resources to pay medical bills or restore the quality of life that they enjoyed before the crash," said AAJ CEO Linda Lipsen. "In many cases, the burden of health care costs are passed on to taxpayers as Medicare and Medicaid shoulder millions of dollars of medical care each year due to inadequately insured carriers.”

Spencer disagreed, claiming that the current $750,000 insurance minimum is “adequate to fully cover over 99% of crashes that involve big trucks” and arguing that the independent commercial truck drivers who would be negatively impacted by the legislation also have safer driving records than large trucking companies. “Many many small business truckers would no longer be able to afford or have that coverage. It would actually put them out of business,” said Spencer. He added that more than 96% of trucking companies in the United States are small businesses with fleets of 20 or fewer trucks.