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Clarity Act draft advances, Senate ethics dispute tightens timeline
A new merged draft adds an ethics provision, but Democrats remain split over how binding it is, leaving passage before the Senate leaves in two weeks uncertain.
CoinDesk reports that the Senate has released new merged text for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, combining versions advanced by the Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees and adding, for the first time, an ethics provision framework.
The updated draft would bar senior government officials from sponsoring or issuing their own cryptocurrencies in response to President Donald Trump. The bill is not yet at the finish line, and CoinDesk notes that the window for passage is shrinking as the Senate is set to leave town in two weeks.
According to CoinDesk, the biggest remaining dispute is not how regulators and jurisdictions would be defined, but the ethics provision’s strength and enforcement. Democrats want a more binding ethics provision that they can use to affect Trump and the $1.4 billion he earned off crypto last year, while Trump and Republicans do not.
CoinDesk adds that the ethics provision currently in the bill, agreed to by the White House but not Senate Democrats, would give Trump a year to divest or place his businesses into a blind trust and would direct the Department of Justice to enforce it. Democrats object that they do not trust the DOJ to pursue the matter while Trump is in office, and they argue the provision sunsets when the next president is inaugurated and prevents future administrations from retroactively going after Trump, while also allowing continued benefit from existing tokens with his name and a name, image, likeness clause.