Eighteen state attorneys general take action to block CLARITY Act before vote

Senate votes on Tuesday to debate the CLARITY bill

The U.S. Senate will vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarification Act (H.R.) on Tuesday afternoon. 3633, CLARITY Bill for short) whether to open the debate process for the first plenary vote. This is a key procedural test that will determine whether the digital asset market structure bill enters formal debate or stagnates until next year. Majority Leader John Thun has filed a motion to close the debate, and the vote is scheduled to take place at 2:15 p.m. EST.

Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to end debate. The Republican Party currently holds 53 seats, so at least seven more Democrats or independents need to vote in favor to move forward. As of Sunday night, Democratic Caucus had not yet reached an agreement on a position after Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convened members to review the revised text. The vote only involved debating whether to accept the bill, rather than directly passing the bill itself. If passed, senators will get up to 30 hours of debate time, after which Republicans will propose a rewritten bill as an alternative amendment. Final passage requires a simple majority (51 votes). If it is not passed, the motion will expire and the leadership will need to resubmit or restart negotiations.

Critical Time Points and Legislative Process

• July 17, 2025: The House of Representatives voted 294-134 to approve H.R. 3633, of which 78 Democrats voted in favor.
• May 14, 2026: The Senate Banking Committee voted 15-9 to advance its jurisdictional portion.
• July 22, 2026:Loomis merged the banking and agriculture tracks into a single text.
• August 8, 2026: Thun submitted a motion to close the debate before the recess, setting September as the floor date.
• September 14, 2026: Republicans release final 635-page draft;18 state attorneys general send letters of objection.
• September 15, 2026: The closing debate vote will be held at 2:15 p.m., 60 votes are needed to continue.

126 changes Republicans made to win the support of seven Democrats

Senators Cynthia Loomis, Tim Scott and John Buzman released a 635-page rewrite on Sunday and called it the "last, best and final" plan. This version incorporates 126 substantive changes proposed by Democratic diplomatic relations over more than a year of negotiations, drawing heavily on the cross-party framework established by Republican Tom Tillis and Democrat Ruben Gallego. The concessions were not evenly distributed across the text, but focused on four areas that had previously blocked Senate support.

Areas of controversy Contents of the final draft Government ethics Regulated federal officials, their spouses, and federal judges must divest significant cryptocurrency positions or transfer them to qualified opaque trusts. Trump accepted about 80% of Tills-Gallego's moral code language. stablecoin rewards Ban interest income on idle balances, allow transaction-based incentives, and give the Ministry of Finance the power of a circuit breaker mechanism for 18 months when payment type stablecoins cause the loss of community bank deposits. Developer Responsibility Narrow the scope of currency transfer registrations for specific software developers and provide civil safe harbor protection. Market conflicts of interest Limit vertical integration of digital commodity exchanges, brokers and dealers, related trade and conflicts of interest under the agriculture heading.

Trump's opaque trust fund concession breaks the moral deadlock

The ethics clause was the main obstacle that prevented the CLARITY bill from reaching a vote throughout the summer. Democrats argue that without strict guardrails, the framework would allow public officials to profit from the policies they have helped shape, an objection exacerbated by scrutiny surrounding President Trump's own digital asset business. Sunday's text is the first to include a revised ethics code approved by the White House that requires regulated officials to divest assets or create opaque trusts. Loomis portrayed the negative vote as a negation of these moral rules and favoring foreign competitors. This is the propaganda line of the sponsors, not the established interpretation of the bill.

18 state attorneys general say SEC will override state fraud cases

Hours before the final draft was released, Lydia James sent a letter to Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren on behalf of 18 state attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Colombia. It's a bipartisan group that includes Republican Chris Korbach of Kansas and Republican Andy Wilson of Ohio. Their core complaint is jurisdiction. Even with amendments, the bill would still allow the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to pre-empt the state registration system and weaken the ability of state prosecutors to file fraud and anti-fraud cases against digital asset platforms, the Alliance said. The letter acknowledges that the draft gives states a role, but the state attorney general believes the language about state powers is too vague to rely on, especially in the context of accelerating online scams. They point to the scale of the problem: FBI records show cryptocurrency-related losses reached $11.4 billion in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 22%, and states have filed more than 330 anti-fraud lawsuits in the cryptocurrency space since 2017. The sponsors and most industries believe the same terms are workable, and that is the gap that Tuesday's debate will test.

BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Coinbase all support the same bill

Support forces spanned the financial and law enforcement sectors, and multiple organizations made public statements after the final text was released. BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, Goldman Sachs, Schwab and SoFi all support the framework. The National Brotherhood Police Association and other law enforcement organizations also signed statements of support. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the amendment addressed the company's main concerns about the legislation.

October calendar is more important than Tuesday's vote count

Predicting market pricing tells its story. The price of contracts promulgated in 2026 has been hovering around 15%, meaning traders believe the bill has a 15% chance of becoming law this year, and after the final text was released, that probability jumped to just over 30%. History provides supporters with a second data point: The GENIUS bill failed in the first closing debate vote but passed a few weeks later, so stumbling would not automatically kill the measure on Tuesday.

The more difficult constraint is time. The Senate is expected to enter state working hours around October 5, the House has canceled meeting weeks on September 21 and 28, and midterm elections are scheduled for November 3. Even if a vote to end the debate is successfully passed, only a maximum of 30 hours of debate, alternative amendments, and 51 votes for final passage will be open, after which the Senate and House will still have to coordinate their respective versions to form the same text before it can be delivered to the president's desk. The sequence was carried out under an almost empty agenda, and that was the real issue hanging above the 2:15 p.m. vote count on Tuesday.