With 20 Days Left Congress Makes A Cryptocurrency Legislation Push

This last week has been pretty chaotic both in the markets and in my life as someone who works on Capital Hill. It was not until halfway through my day at work today that I stumbled across the latest attempt by Congress to get crypto legislation across the finish line. Last week I posted about the huge Congressional hearing that the Senate Agriculture Committee had which focused on proposed legislation to make the Commodities Futures Trading Commission the leading agency overseeing digital assets trading and granting them the authority over crypto spot markets.

Many were quick to downplay and shrug off this hearing however I do not think they fully grasped what this hearing accomplished. When a piece of legislation is introduced in either the House or the Senate that legislation is sent to the committees that handle the topic. From there, committees will schedule hearings about different things and after a few of these hearings will markup or advance legislation the committee thinks is good to either the House or Senate floor for a full vote. Most legislation dies in committees as thousands of pieces of legislation are proposed each Congress. This hearing over a specific piece of legislation S.4760 was the first time this was done for a bill about cryptocurrency itself making this a huge accomplishment.

Where I was still hesitant about this legislation was that this was only a bill in the Senate and was not on the House side. Given that it would have to pass both sides and that time was running out it was something I did not necessarily see progressing much further. That changed yesterday though when Representative Sean Patrick Maloney introduced H.R. 8950 which is the exact same bill as S.4760. This means that if the Senate passes S.4760 and the House passes H.R. 8950 then the text will go to the President to be signed into law and dramatically speeds up the legislative process.

Even with the monumental gains, there are still a ton of obstacles that need to be navigated for this process to be completed on both sides of Congress. The most pressing of these is one that I have mentioned several times before and that is that currently the House only meets for votes 20 more times the rest of the year. This includes the three days next week to fund the government so time is really running out for these votes to not already be on the calendar. For once though it would appear that the Senate is in a good place to advance this legislation as it was crafted and released bipartisanly something that could really help it hit that 60+ vote threshold. Sadly though the same cannot be said for the House side where it was introduced by Democratic Representative Sean Patrick Maloney.

Representative Maloney is the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee which funds the Democrats in House of Representatives races. He is running for reelection in a district that while Democratic leaning is labeled as a tossup district so it would be very difficult for Republicans to swallow him getting this legislation passed before the midterm elections. On the upside the House only meets 3 more times before the midterm elections so there would still be 17 additional days for this legislation to possibly be passed. It would require two days at a minimum to pass the House though so that needs to also be taken into consideration.

Many people have asked me if I think any crypto legislation will be passed this year and honestly anytime something appears to be getting close to being introduced or voted upon it falls apart. Both sides have said that with brand new legislation like this they would like to move slow rather than cram through some half baked legislation. Unless something crazy happens the odds are really against it. Having the House and Senate pass the same piece of legislation the first go around is a hard thing to do and often deals have to be struck for this to happen. Could a deal happen? Yes but before the midterms it would be very very unlikely.