Senate Blocks CLARITY Act 49-50 With No Democratic Votes to Proceed

The Senate voted 49-50 on Tuesday afternoon against taking up the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, blocking the crypto market structure bill a day after Republicans released what they called its final text.

Cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633 needed 60 votes under a unanimous consent agreement entered Aug. 8. Voting began at 2:18 p.m. and the result was announced at 3:00 p.m., according to the Senate Daily Press floor log. Senator Chris Coons did not vote.

Republicans hold 53 seats. Four of them voted no: Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis. That leaves 49 Republican yes votes, the full tally for the motion. No Democrat or independent voted to take the bill up.

The House passed H.R. 3633 by 294-134 in July 2025. The Senate text that failed Tuesday was an amendment in the nature of a substitute to that bill.

Tillis Preserves A Rerun

Tillis voted no in order to make a motion to reconsider, the floor log states, and made the motion at 3:01 p.m. A senator who voted on the prevailing side can move to reconsider, which keeps a second cloture vote on the same motion available without a new filing.

The Senate moved on to S. 4668 immediately afterward, with a cloture vote on that measure set for about 4:15 p.m.

The Ethics Counterproposal

Seven Senate Democrats who negotiated the bill for a year — Mark Warner, Angela Alsobrooks, Cory Booker, Catherine Cortez Masto, Ruben Gallego, John Hickenlooper and Raphael Warnock — said in July that the Republican text "falls short" and named ethics for elected officials first among the areas needing work. None withdrew that statement before Tuesday's vote.

Senators Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman and Tim Scott released the final text on Monday. The release lists 126 changes Democrats requested, five of them in the ethics division, and says the ethics language reflects "substantially all of the Tillis-Gallego ethics proposal." The Defiant reported on that ethics division Monday: it drops the Jan. 20, 2029 sunset, reverses the July text's bar on state attorney general enforcement, and raises civil penalties to 20% of the take or $500,000, whichever is greater.

"After a year of intense daily bipartisan negotiations, this bill is ready," Lummis said in the release. "Democrats got what they wanted; now they need to take yes for an answer."

Democrats sent back a counterproposal on Monday night out of a meeting in Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's office, first reported by Politico. Lummis spokesperson Katie Warbinton told The Block that "if Democrats are serious about reaching a deal, they need to actually start negotiating instead of resubmitting the same demands and calling it progress." Warner told Semafor the language Democrats sought had been on the table for about a year. The counterproposal has not been published.

Gallego, one of the seven, told reporters before the vote that "the compromise we had was a good ethics compromise that would have bought a lot of Dem votes," according to CNBC.

Eighteen Attorneys General Against

Eighteen state attorneys general asked the Senate on Monday to reject the bill as written. In a letter to Scott and Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren, they asked Congress to preserve state enforcement over tokenized and non-tokenized securities and to codify state registration regimes for digital assets.

"As written, the Clarity Act would embolden scammers and potentially strip attorneys general of our authority to protect our states' investors and their wallets," New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement accompanying the letter. Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia signed alongside New York.

The letter landed the same week the ethics division was rewritten to give state attorneys general enforcement standing the July text denied them.

Bitcoin Drops To $75,900

Polymarket priced the CLARITY Act being signed into law in 2026 at 6.5% after the vote, on $19.8 million of cumulative volume, down 22 points over 24 hours. The market read 19.5% on Tuesday morning, 29.5% on Monday afternoon and 18% on Friday.

Bitcoin traded at $75,901, down 4.1% over 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows. Coinbase recorded a 24-hour low of $74,887.50 against an open of $78,982.77. Ether was at $2,403, down 5.5%. XRP fell 11.1% to $1.30, Solana 5.3% to $97.70 and BNB 0.9% to $719.44.

The Federal Open Market Committee opened a two-day meeting on Tuesday and releases its decision Wednesday afternoon.

Seven Weeks To The Midterms

The Senate's 2026 legislative calendar sets a state work period from Oct. 5 to Nov. 6, with the chamber returning Nov. 11, after the Nov. 3 election. That leaves under three weeks of scheduled session for a second cloture vote on the motion Tillis moved to reconsider.

Traders had pushed passage odds into 2027 in early August, when Majority Leader John Thune let a first cloture filing pass. He filed on Aug. 8 with 16 Republican co-signers.