Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti stated that members of Congress and their staff informed him in Washington that the CLARITY Act is dead and that Congress is entering a post-CLARITY era. Mariotti's assessment follows a week of meetings in D.C., arriving just ahead of the Senate's scheduled cloture vote.
Senator Cynthia Lummis reiterated her warning on social media regarding the timeline for the legislation. According to Lummis, if the Clarity Act fails to pass during the current Congress, the next realistic opportunity to enact market-structure legislation will be in 2030, resulting in delayed jobs, investment, and tax revenue.
Negotiations surrounding the bill previously stalled when Senator Bernie Moreno declared talks officially ended on August 8. Additionally, White House official Patrick Witt stated that if the parties could not reach an agreement by September 15, an agreement would not be reached.
The upcoming September 15 vote is a cloture motion on the motion to proceed requiring 60 votes. With Republicans holding 53 seats and needing seven Democratic votes to reach the threshold, analysts and prediction markets have adjusted their expectations downward. Polymarket contracts for the bill becoming law have traded between 13% and 18%, down from 82% in February, on over $11.5 million in volume. Kalshi's market on whether more than 58 senators will vote yes sits at 19%, and Galaxy Research has estimated enactment at 10%.
Even if the cloture motion succeeds, the Senate would only begin debating a package that still contains three major unresolved issues: ethics rules for officials holding cryptocurrency, stablecoin rewards opposed by banks as deposit competition, and protections for decentralized finance (DeFi) developers.
