Senate Majority Leader John Thune filed a motion to proceed on the Clarity Act early Saturday, scheduling an initial procedural vote for September 15 at 2:15 p.m. ET and keeping alive what negotiators call the last realistic window for the crypto market structure bill to become law this year. The move follows weeks of Democratic resistance that pushed the legislation past the Senate's August recess.
The Clarity Act, formally H.R. 3633, would divide regulatory jurisdiction over digital assets between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with the CFTC taking the lead on most day-to-day industry oversight. The bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May, but only two Democrats crossed the aisle to support it.
Republicans Still Short on Votes
Passage requires roughly 60 votes under Senate rules, meaning Republicans need about six Democratic votes they don't currently have. Thune's office confirmed through a spokesperson that no vote would happen in August, but reaffirmed a September floor push once the chamber reconvenes.
Related: Senate Opens Clarity Act Procedural Vote, Sets Up September Fight
Two of the more consequential Democratic holdouts, Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Ruben Gallego, have tied their support to stronger government ethics language. Their central demand is a provision that would explicitly bar senior officials, including President Trump, from personally profiting off the digital-asset industry while in office — a sticking point that has proven harder to resolve than the technical jurisdictional questions in the bill.
What's Still Unresolved
Beyond ethics rules, negotiators are still working through illicit-finance and law-enforcement protections, stablecoin yield and rewards provisions, and how to staff vacancies at the SEC and CFTC that would be responsible for implementing the law. None of those questions is expected to be fully settled before the September 15 procedural vote.
If the bill clears the Senate, it must return to the House for another vote on any changes before reaching the president's desk — a sequence that leaves little room for delay given the approaching midterm campaign calendar. Industry groups that have lobbied for a federal market-structure framework since the FTX collapse are treating September as a binary outcome: either the bill advances now, or the effort likely slips into 2027.
