Retiring senators Lummis and Tillis leave crypto's Clarity Act to the next Congress

Ryan Chan-Wei, a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives ^[11], wanted the bill passed. His column also makes two claims that pull against each other. "The fundamental questions concerning market structure had largely been resolved," he wrote ^[13]. He also wrote that "what ultimately held the bill up was ethics, specifically the risk of conflicts of interest at the highest levels of government" ^[3].

His case for a reset is about people. The senators who quarterbacked the bill will not be on the ballot again, so progress starts over when the new Congress is sworn in, he wrote ^[6]. Losing the people who brokered a committee deal is a real cost. By his own description, though, the conflict-of-interest risk sits at the highest levels of government ^[3], and a new Senate roster does not change who sits there.

The next Congress has three options. The first is to reintroduce, quickly, a text whose substance Chan-Wei calls largely settled. The second is to deal with ethics first, in a bill of its own. Chan-Wei wrote that "it was a mistake to sacrifice the Clarity Act on the altar of ethics, because other legislative avenues for addressing such concerns would have stayed open even if the bill had passed" ^[14]. By the same logic, a standalone conflicts measure could clear the way for a successor. The third is a rerun, with new sponsors meeting the old objection.

I think the rerun is the likeliest. It is the only path that works with the ethics dispute still open, and Chan-Wei names that dispute as what stopped the bill. The counter-case is his own. If market structure really was settled, a new sponsor inherits 635 pages of finished text ^[4] and the delay is mostly a matter of the calendar. The rerun view would be wrong if a standalone ethics bill moved early in the new Congress, or if a successor cleared committee with conflict rules attached.

For anyone putting money into US crypto businesses, the date to plan around is the start of the new Congress, since Chan-Wei sees no realistic path to reviving the bill before the end of the year ^[1]. He did not put a date on a restart. The account of the bill's fate comes from a single opinion column by one of its advocates ^[11].