Dem senators working on bill that would force Trump to divest from digital assets

Democrats are pushing to add language to a cryptocurrency bill that would crack down on President Trump’s ability to profit from his digital assets, forcing him to either divest or place them into a blind trust. 

Democrats in a bipartisan group of senators are working on a counterproposal to a White House-approved ethics provision unveiled by GOP senators this week as part of a new draft of the Clarity Act. 

The bill states states, “to provide for a system of regulation of the offer and sale of digital commodities by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, to amend the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit the Federal reserve banks from offering certain products or services directly to an individual, to prohibit the use of central bank digital currency for monetary policy, and for other purposes.”

Democrats have said that they will not accept language that the bill is solely enforceable by the Department of Justice, Politico reported. In an interview, Senator Ruben Gallego said the GOP-led proposal is “not a serious effort.”

“Whatever piece of sh*t they sent back to us, that was not a serious effort. I can’t imagine that that’s a serious effort — after all the work that we’ve done with our Republican colleagues, that they would take the months and months of work and somehow interpret that and turn around and think what they offered was even remotely close,” he said. 

The latest proposal from the GOP came from an agreement between GOP Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno. Gallego and other Democrats have been negotiating for months with Lummis, Moreno and the White House on an ethics provision, however, talks stalled over the role state attorneys general should play in enforcing the bill. 

Gallego said he was working with Senator Thom Tillis and other Republicans on a counteroffer. “We are still in this fight. We are going to send back language.” 

Tillis said that while the White House-approved language “was good,” it still needed to get 60 votes in the chamber. “The baseline, I think, falls short of what some of the Democrats want. We have to have one final discussion with the White House to see if a couple of other things that look reasonable to me are acceptable to the president.” 

Lummis said on Friday, “This bill literally requires President Trump to divest his digital asset holdings or put them in a blind trust. It's becoming painfully clear some of my Democrat colleagues would rather let consumers lose everything if a crypto exchange fails and posture for the midterms than pass market structure legislation with unprecedented ethics standards covering the President, VP, Congress, and the Federal Judiciary.”