Sixteen senators backed a disastrous invoice that enshrines the crypto {industry}’s flagrant abuses into regulation.
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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand speaks through the DC Blockchain Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, March 26, 2025.
(Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg by way of Getty Photos)
When President Donald Trump convenes his non-public dinner to reward backers of his private cryptocurrency this week, the celebrants will enjoy extra than simply their corrupt entry to the best workplace within the land. They’ll even be cheering the truth that, on Monday night time, the US Senate overwhelmingly endorsed a procedural measure to advance the disastrous Guiding and Establishing Nationwide Innovation for US Stablecoins Act, which regardless of its leaden and content-challenged title, is called the GENIUS Act.
The vote got here simply 11 days after Senate Democrats, in a uncommon outbreak of vertebrate-adjacent conduct, voted down an identical invoice, citing its failure to rein within the form of brazen corruption exemplified by Trump’s crypto banquet. But anybody supposing that the Democratic caucus then persuaded the invoice’s GOP sponsors to undertake new language to stop crypto transactions from doubling as govt department bribes would after all be mistaken. The revised GENIUS Act does comprise new provisions to bolster shopper safeguards, restrict the flexibility of tech corporations to situation proprietary stablecoins, and prolong new ethics for “particular authorities workers” akin to clueless DOGE thug Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s personal crypto and AI czar David Sacks.
Critics referred to as tweaks beauty at finest, with Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts warning that the invoice’s “fundamental flaws stay unaddressed.” However they had been sufficient to swing 16 Democratic senators over to help the invoice—together with marquee recipients of crypto marketing campaign donations akin to Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, Corey Booker of New Jersey, and Mark Warner of Virginia. The Senate’s ultimate invoice is now on target to cross someday across the Memorial Day vacation. Tellingly, the caucus’s prime two Democrats, minority chief Chuck Schumer of New York and whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, voted towards the cloture movement—underlining how fully the GENIUS Act is a product of moneyed affect. As Jacob Silverman reported in his latest Nation characteristic on crypto’s takeover of US politics, the {industry} was the biggest single supply of marketing campaign donations through the 2024 marketing campaign cycle, with greater than $197 million in contributions.
Previous to Monday’s vote, the {industry} advocacy group Stand With Crypto introduced that it will depend the continuing as a “key vote” for its legislative scorecard—a removed from delicate sign to lawmakers that marketing campaign money can be contingent on their votes. Per Bloomberg reporter Steve DennisDemocrats in Congress landed $10 million in donations from crypto sources throughout final yr’s marketing campaign cycle, however the extra eye-popping determine is what the {industry} spent to defeat critics of the rip-off forex: In Ohio’s Senate race, the {industry} devoted $40 million to defeating Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown and changing him with enthusiastic crypto tout Bernie Moreno. Crypto donors additionally bragged about their decisive function in serving to to unseat Home detractors akin to New York Consultant Jamaal Bowman and California Consultant Katie Porter. As Illinois Democratic Consultant Sean Casten advised Silverman in regard to an earlier Home vote on a nasty crypto invoice, “I didn’t discover a single Democrat who disagreed with me that this CRA (Congressional Evaluate Act vote) was horrible coverage. Nobody pushed again on it. However I heard a number of them saying, ‘Look, you already know I’m in a weak seat. I don’t need to have a bunch of crypto cash (donated to my opponent). That’s actually scary.”
There’s little question that the crypto sector’s outsize donor profile concentrates the thoughts of a timorous Democratic senator splendidly. And it’s equally clear that the {industry} is getting its cash’s value. The revised GENIUS Act, regardless of the symbolic (and principally laughable) effort to deliver particular authorities workers below the attain of fundamental ethics requirements in crypto transactions, endorses a shocking new degree of economic corruption within the Oval Workplace, principally empowering a sitting president with the authority to grant favors to an {industry} he’s lavishly cashing in on. The stablecoin USD1, marketed by the Trump-aligned crypto concern World Liberty, has reached a $2 billion valuation because it was launched in March, totally on the help of a crypto agency primarily based in Abu Dhabi. On the heels of widespread congressional criticism of Trump’s shady settlement to let Qatar grant him a brand new luxe plane to function Air Power One, the caving of Senate Democrats on the GENIUS Act as soon as extra renders the get together’s ethical posturing on problems with moneyed corruption an absurdist pantomime.
Neither is the auctioning of presidential entry the one obvious weak spot of the GENIUS Act. Since its founding, the crypto {industry} has been a prepared outlet for overseas cash laundering, terrorist funding, and common illegality. The Senate invoice gives no useful curbs on these abuses. As Warren, the rating member on the Senate Banking Committee, stated throughout flooring debate over the GENIUS Act, “A invoice that turbocharges the stablecoin market, whereas facilitating the president’s corruption and undermining nationwide safety, monetary stability, and shopper safety is worse than no invoice in any respect.”
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Senate Democratic supporters principally parried such complaints with rote invocations of crypto’s progressive prowess and historic inevitability. Warner delivered a Susan Collins–esque chorus about his “very actual issues” over rampant Trumpian corruption within the crypto sphere, however briskly segued into this refrain of industry-sponsored mush: “However we can’t enable that corruption to blind us to the broader actuality: Blockchain expertise is right here to remain.” “I’m assured that we’ve got produced a powerful regulatory framework that can place our nation for the long run,” Gillibrand, the invoice’s Democratic cosponsor, likewise burbled.
However as Warren additionally famous in her flooring speech, we’ve heard this sort of speak earlier than from the monetary {industry}’s leased courtiers on Capitol Hill. Again in 1999, one other bipartisan coalition endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned baseline protections towards banking-sector hypothesis enacted through the New Deal, unleashing derivatives buying and selling on Wall Avenue on an unprecedented scale. Lower than a decade later, the worldwide financial system crashed in a riot of worthless asset swaps. “This isn’t the primary time Congress listened to the monetary {industry} and created a weak regulatory regime for a brand new, progressive monetary product,” Warren introduced. “We’ve seen this story earlier than, and we all know the way it ends.” That lamentable little bit of bipartisan legislative handiwork glided by the identify of the Monetary Providers Modernization Act. All that’s actually modified since then is that the Senate’s lickspittle servants of capital have, towards all odds, grown boastful sufficient to type themselves geniuses.
Chris Lehmann
Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He was previously editor of The Baffler and The New Republic, and is the writer, most just lately, of The Cash Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville Home, 2016).
