The Senate has decided to push the CLARITY Act to September and it wasn't because of a scheduling problem. It was a stalemate over one clause, ‘what happens to Donald Trump's crypto holdings while he's in office’.
Thune confirmed that lawmakers won’t vote on it before the recess, blaming Democrats for holding things up. But behind the scenes, the real work has been happening between Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego, who have spent the last two weeks trying to come up with ethics rules the White House can actually accept.
Their latest draft would move enforcement of the token ban from the Justice Department to state attorneys general. That’s basically a compromise for Democrats who didn’t trust Trump’s own DOJ to investigate or police Trump.
There’s another interesting catch, though. Multiple crypto outlets pointed out that the forced-divestiture setup could allow Trump to delay paying capital gains tax on the assets he sells. So a rule that was supposed to make the arrangement costly for him might not hurt quite as much as originally intended.
Elizabeth Warren on the other hand isn’t waiting around for the bill to catch up. She’s already asked the SEC to investigate the $TRUMP memecoin, saying it’s basically the kind of conflict the CLARITY Act is supposed to stop in the first place.
On the Republican side, Josh Hawley has been one of the biggest holdouts. His concern is that some parts of the bill could leave community banks exposed. So the pushback isn’t just Democrats fighting Republicans. There are problems on both sides.
And the markets noticed the delay. XRP fell about 2% within a few hours, while Bitcoin hovered around $64,000. Polymarket’s odds of the bill passing in 2026 also dropped toward 30%.
But Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan pushed back on the idea that the bill is suddenly in trouble. His argument is pretty simple, he said missing an August vote doesn’t mean the whole thing is dead. In fact, getting the uncertainty sorted out later this year could be more important for institutional investors than rushing a vote now.
The delay was first reported on X by Bitcoin Magazine late Thursday, before most major outlets had officially picked it up. That’s becoming pretty normal for crypto news these days — social feeds often break the story before the press releases even land.
The bill already passed the House 294-134 last July. So the basic framework isn’t really the problem anymore. The bigger question is whether Congress can actually agree on an ethics rule for a president who is, at the same time, a crypto issuer.