Hours before the Senate's first floor test on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, Democratic negotiators delivered a counterproposal to their Republican counterparts, Politico reported. The handoff came overnight into Tuesday, September 15, after a meeting in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office, and it did not break the deadlock: Republicans insisted the text released late on Sunday remains their "last, best and final" offer. The cloture vote on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 is set for 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, 8:15 p.m. in continental Europe. It is not a final passage vote: 60 senators must agree to close debate and open floor consideration. If the motion fails, the most sweeping digital asset bill ever to reach the Senate floor stalls, in all likelihood, until after November's midterm elections.
The sticking point is once again the ethics title. The Republican text incorporates 126 substantive changes requested by Democrats over more than a year of talks and imposes restrictions on the president, the vice president, members of Congress, federal judges and their spouses: covered officials cannot issue or sponsor digital assets and must divest significant holdings or place them in a qualified blind trust, while state attorneys general gain a role in enforcing the rules. Democratic Senator Mark Warner said the ethics safeguards were not "near enough", and Raphael Warnock argued Democrats should not advance a bill that fails to address "opportunities for corruption that we are seeing in real time". Ruben Gallego called the offer one that leaves "much to be desired". On the Republican side, Cynthia Lummis countered that President Donald Trump had already accepted two significant ethics concessions and that there is "nothing left to give", adding that "Democrats got what they wanted; now they need to take yes for an answer". White House digital assets adviser Patrick Witt dismissed the remaining edits as "punctuation". A technical objection raised by staff for Senator Elizabeth Warren on the Banking Committee argues the state attorney general enforcement mechanism could be overridden by a determination from White House ethics officials, undercutting the very concession Republicans present as a good-faith gesture. Not every Democrat is dug in: Kirsten Gillibrand has privately encouraged colleagues to back the procedural motion.
Opposition has widened beyond the Democratic caucus. A coalition of 18 state attorneys general objects to limits the text would place on their authority to pursue crypto fraud, and the Indian Gaming Association has urged tribes to press senators to vote against the bill over its prediction market provisions. Banking groups, for their part, say the final text leaves loopholes on stablecoin rewards paid to customers.
