Elizabeth Warren Rallies Democrats Against Crypto In Senate Showdown
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WASHINGTON — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is pushing cryptocurrency-friendly Democrats to vote against a bill that would entrench “digital assets” in the U.S. financial system, arguing ahead of a critical vote on Tuesday it would amount to a massive giveaway to an industry that has facilitated President Donald Trump’s corruption.
Tuesday’s procedural vote could be the crypto industry’s last chance to get its return on investment after dumping hundreds of millions into elections since 2024. It’s a clash of progressives against the industry, Republicans and much of the Democratic establishment.
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Plenty of Senate Democrats have previously carried water for cryptocurrency, and several have been involved in writing the so-called Clarity Act. But they hesitated to vote for an earlier version of the bill over the summer, and Warren has argued forcefully the new version has the same problem: It won’t stop President Donald Trump from making his next billion on crypto while in office.
“It’s a bill that would juice the value of President Trump’s crypto empire, and reward the crypto billionaires who have facilitated his corruption,” Warren said Monday evening.
Republicans released a revised version of the 600-page bill on Monday in hopes of winning Democratic votes, including by beefing up an ethics provision that after one year would ban the president from sponsoring digital assets and require him to divest or place digital assets in a blind trust.
“Having the president of the United States for the first time in the history of this country abide and put himself and the vice president under the federal laws of this country, that is a remarkable shift in the right direction,” Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said Tuesday on Fox Business.
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Warren and her staff have argued the new ethics provision is full of loopholes and would allow Trump’s family to continue profiting from his crypto empire. And the bill text puts the U.S. attorney general in charge of enforcement, meaning it would be up to Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche to sue the president for an ethics violation — an unlikely prospect. Earlier this year, Blanche issued an order freeing Trump and his family from ongoing IRS enforcement.
Trump has earned more than $1 billion from crypto since taking office last year, and Senate Democrats balked at an earlier version of the bill because it would essentially put the president in charge of regulating an industry that’s making him richer than ever. (Some lawmakers in both parties also have qualms about how the bill could benefit crypto firms at the expense of the banking industry.)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), chair of Senate Democrats’ main campaign committee and a top ally of the cryptocurrency industry, said last month that “any market structure bill that leaves enforcement solely in the hands of the president’s own Justice Department and allows him to profit from crypto isn’t a reform. It’s a permission slip.”
Nevertheless, Gillibrand reportedly has been urging her colleagues to vote to advance the bill. A spokesperson for Gillibrand did not respond to requests for comment.
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Warren suggested Tuesday the bill’s potential failure on a procedural vote could create a chance for “meaningful” regulation of crypto.
“We need a crypto law — one that doesn’t let Iran use crypto to finance terrorism or let drug traffickers use crypto to move their products around faster and make it harder for the police to catch them,” Warren told HuffPost. “We need a crypto law that makes sure that the president of the United States is not enriching himself instead of watching out for the people of this country.”
