The Senate must reject the Clarity Act’s ethics charade

The day before a cloture vote scheduled for Tuesday, September 15, Senate Republicans have released a final draft of the Clarity Act cryptocurrency market structure bill: an industry-drafted attempt to deregulate the sector even further and strip away what little oversight existed. One of the biggest sticking points throughout negotiations has been an ethics regime meant to rein in President Trump’s personal crypto ventures, which brought in $1.4 billion last year alone. Senators should vote no on cloture tomorrow: the supposedly “unprecedented” ethics restrictions, tacked on at the last minute, are riddled with loopholes to protect Trump’s grift.

Republicans tried and failed to pass off weak ethics language as a meaningful concession back in July [I107], with laughable provisions including prohibitions on officeholders issuing tokens with enforcement left only to a Department of Justice staffed by Trump-appointed loyalists. Under that revision, any violations would have resulted in a fine capped at $500,000 — less than 0.04% of Trump’s crypto income last year — and the ethics language was set to expire upon Trump’s exit from office in 2029, preventing any future, less-captured DOJ from prosecuting him.