A colossal crypto regulatory package backed by President Donald Trump stumbled in the Senate, and another shot is unlikely.
The Clarity Act failed to move through a key procedural hurdle on Tuesday, serving proponents of the bill, including major players in the cryptocurrency industry and the White House, a major blow in their pursuit of folding the novel currency into the nation’s web of financial regulations.
Democrats dealt the bill a mortal blow, but a handful of Republicans with outstanding concerns, including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., were not assuaged, either. And with little time left on the Senate’s calendar and major bills piling up ahead of the midterm elections, the bill’s biggest backers believed that the Clarity Act might end up back on the shelf.
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“I think we’re done. It’s over,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., the bill’s primary architect, said. “Because we’ve been working on this bill for over a year. And we’ve given them over 120 of their requests and that’s enough.”
When asked if the bill would come back to the floor, Lummis said, “Nope.”
A midnight hour update was made to the bill to try and pull anyone on the fence off to at least let the package move forward. But it wasn’t enough. And negotiations ran until the very end, just before the vote opened.
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The issues with the package were many and varying among Democrats and Republicans. Several Senate Democrats were not satisfied with the ethics language baked into the Clarity Act that sought to slow the Trump family’s rapidly growing crypto empire.
That’s because Trump’s income between 2024 and 2025 erupted by about 250% — from just over $620 million to about $2.2 billion.
And much of that increase is attributed to his various holdings and ventures in crypto, which are run by his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, according to the president’s financial disclosure forms reviewed by Fox News Digital.
“We could talk a lot about it,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said of his vote against the bill. “But the simple thing is, it allows the corruption of the president to continue.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who was working with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., to strengthen the ethics provision in the package, told Fox News Digital, “We were actually getting very, very close, and at the last minute, the banking staffer from [Sen. Tim] Scott’s office came in and just said, ‘negotiations are over.’”
“And so, I don’t know what happened. You know, we were getting to the point where we were probably going to be able to pass, at least get the motion to proceed, move forward, and then, again, an ethics amendment vote,” Gallego said.
“But I think they got scared with the fact that they had to take an ethics amendment vote. And that’s why they killed it. They pulled it at that last minute, so it’s bulls—. We were negotiating at the end. At the end of the day, they cared more about protecting the president’s right to grift than trying to get a good bill on digital currency.”
Others didn’t believe that the language dealing with foreign money laundering had enough teeth.
“I have not seen the kind of engagement yet from the Republican side when it comes to countering terrorist financing and cartel financing that would get me to a yes,” Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., said. “I’m still engaged. I didn’t get on board with the GENIUS Act till the very last vote.”
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Still, some lawmakers argued they should at least move forward with the bill to tweak it as needed.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was still undecided before the vote. He was worried about how bringing crypto into the fold could affect deposit yields at community banks and guardrails on the currency being “diverted for criminal purposes,” but he argued the bill could be strengthened if they moved forward.
“What we used to do around here is something called legislate,” Cornyn said. “You know where you’d actually vote to get on the bill, but then you amend it, and then you decide whether you’re going to support it on the back end.”
The bill’s failure does open up the Senate to speedily move to other legislative priorities, like Sen. Ted Cruz’s, R-Texas, college sports bill to add protections to student-athletes and slow the big money train ripping through collegiate athletics.
“We committed to ensure that we got a vote on college sports,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said. “So we’ll see if we have 60 [votes]. I don’t know the answer for sure to that yet. I hope we do.”