faryarshirzad@faryarshirzad19h ago

Tomorrow, the Senate will consider the CLARITY Act. A year ago, a group of Democratic senators put out their own framework for what serious market structure legislation needed to accomplish. They identified seven pillars: closing the regulatory gap, clarifying the status of digital assets, bringing issuers and platforms into the regulatory framework, combating illicit finance, preventing corruption and abuse, and ensuring fair and effective regulation. Every one of those seven pillars is addressed in the legislation before the Senate tomorrow. And that’s only part of the story. The final text incorporates 126 additional substantive changes requested by Democrats. It includes a historic ethics framework, stronger enforcement — including a role for state attorneys general — new protections around conflicts and insider abuse, stronger consumer and customer-property protections, tougher illicit-finance rules, and greater accountability for the regulators charged with overseeing these markets. None of that happened by accident. It is the product of more than a year of members raising hard questions, negotiating difficult issues and materially reshaping the legislation. Congress rarely gets the opportunity to write the rules for an entirely new financial market from the ground up. This is one of those moments. The bill before the Senate tomorrow is fundamentally different from where this process began. Democratic negotiators played a major role in getting it here. They should vote for it tomorrow. Let’s pass CLARITY.