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# Crypto companies spent hundreds of millions on a US bill the Senate refused to debate
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/senate-blocks-clarity-act-crypto-market-structure-bill/
- Published: 2026-09-18T03:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-18T02:59:59.000Z
- Description: The Senate refused to open debate on the Clarity Act on Tuesday, leaving the crypto industry without the federal rulebook it has spent the election cycle paying for.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Policy, Business Bagel News

Crypto companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars asking the United States government to regulate them. On Tuesday the Senate would not even start the conversation.

The vote was not on the Clarity Act itself. It was on cloture, the procedural step that decides whether a bill gets debated at all, and it needs 60 votes. The official roll call records 49 in favour, 50 against, one senator not voting.

Four Republicans voted with every Democrat: Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis. Tillis is also the reason the wires and the record disagree. He voted yes and then switched to no, a move that preserves his right to bring the measure back later, so the live count during the vote ran the other way round.

Bitcoin fell more than 5% during the session on Reuters' measure, its steepest daily drop since June, and Coinbase and Circle shares went with it.

## What the industry was buying

The bill, formally H.R. 3633, would have split oversight of digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, set registration requirements for the firms in the middle and tightened protections against money laundering. President Donald Trump, whose family's crypto ventures have earned him more than $1.4 billion, urged Congress to pass it.

Republican leaders put out revised text on the Sunday night, adding ethics restrictions aimed squarely at Democratic objections to public officials profiting from crypto ventures. It moved nobody. Senator Ruben Gallego, one of the Democrats those changes were written for, said the compromise was a good one that would have bought a lot of Democratic votes, and accused Republicans of caring more about the president's earnings than about getting rules written.

## Who writes the rules now

Nobody in Congress, for a while. Senators leave Washington in early October and do not return until after the November midterms, and the House goes even earlier. Senator Cynthia Lummis, asked before the vote what a failed procedural vote would mean, told reporters “it's over”.

That leaves the two regulators to fill the gap using powers they already have, which they have started doing. The Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed letting startups sell as much as $75 million of tokens without registering, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has approved the first bitcoin perpetual futures in the country. Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong called the vote a disappointment and said the two agencies have the tools they need.

Rules made that way can be unmade. Executives and analysts say only Congress can build a framework that survives a change of administration or a court challenge, which is what the industry was paying for and did not get. It still has the money: Fairshake, its political action committee, is now free to fund challengers to the senators who blocked the bill.