Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, and Jeff Merkley have collectively conditioned their support for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on the inclusion of a crypto ethics provision that would make it illegal for sitting presidents, members of Congress, and their spouses to issue, sponsor, own, or profit from digital assets.
This demand shaped by President Trump’s disclosures showing the crypto sector increased his wealth by about $1.4 billion, with his largest single 2025 income stream coming from issuing the TRUMP memecoin and totaling $636 million.
This is not simply a procedural dispute over bill language. It is a structural confrontation over whether the federal government can credibly regulate an industry from which the sitting president extracted his single largest income stream in the preceding year, with no enforceable restrictions on continued participation.
Clarity Act News: The Ethics Provision Impasse and the 60-Vote Problem
The Senate has a 60-vote threshold for Senate passage, which means Republicans are seeking enough votes to clear cloture while Democrats raise leverage over the ethics language. That arithmetic gives the Gillibrand-Murphy bloc leverage, and they are deploying it. A new draft of the bill is expected within days of the July 13 publication date, but sources familiar with the negotiations told CoinDesk it will not contain finalized language on the ethics section or two other contested points.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has signaled he will push for a floor vote this month regardless, with the Senate having only a few weeks before its summer recess and the legislative calendar tilting toward midterm positioning. That timeline pressure is acute: industry participants expecting regulatory certainty are watching the calendar as closely as the negotiating room.
In a Senate Democrats briefing organized by Murphy last week, ethics and anti-corruption advocates argued the crypto ethics provision must extend to officials’ family members and include both outright ownership bans and enhanced disclosure requirements.
Earlier bipartisan talks had floated a delayed implementation timeline, one that would not immediately disrupt Trump’s existing holdings, and had proposed limiting restrictions to officials rather than their families. Those concessions have since been walked back, and negotiations have hit a wall, per persons briefed on the talks and cited by CoinDesk.
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