The Senate Agriculture Committee voted along party lines Thursday to advance a landmark cryptocurrency bill, sending the measure to the Senate floor without bipartisan backing.
The committee voted 12-11 to advance so-called crypto market structure legislation, which would create new rules governing how digital tokens are regulated. The bill that the Ag panel approved Thursday, which would grant new crypto regulatory authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, would need to eventually be merged with a second part of the bill dealing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that falls under the Senate Banking Committee’s jurisdiction.
The party-line vote came after months of negotiations between Ag Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) failed to yield a bipartisan deal. Boozman plowed ahead with a GOP-only bill, saying “there were fundamental policy disagreements” between the two sides and it is now “time to move this process forward.”
“The CFTC is the right agency to regulate the spot trading of digital commodities,” he said in an opening statement. “At a high level, this bill provides a clear definition of a digital commodity, protects innovation and technology, establishes consumer protection safeguards, and equips the agency with the necessary resources to take on this new responsibility.”
Booker, who is a member of a Senate Democratic working group that is negotiating with Republicans on the market structure bill, said Republicans were “walking away from the bipartisan process that produced” a Boozman-Booker discussion draft last year.
“That frustrates me because I see a bipartisan glide path to land this plane, to punch through the end zone,” Booker said.
Boozman said that he remains “committed to continue working with” Democrats on the bill as it moves toward the floor, adding that “what we want is a bipartisan bill.”
The panel voted down several amendments offered by Democrats along party lines, including a provision from Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) that would ban federal officials and their families from issuing or endorsing digital assets. Ethics issues have been a major sticking point in market structure negotiations, as Democrats have pressed for language targeting the Trump family’s crypto businesses.
Republicans also voted to reject a pair of amendments from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that would seek to crack down on crypto ATM fraud and ban some crypto firms from receiving a federal bailout, respectively.