The House broke a nearly 10-hour standoff over crypto policy late Wednesday night. Crypto Week lives on!
It only took the longest House vote in history, but 10 conservatives flipped to “yes” to allow a trio of major crypto bills to proceed to the floor, along with the FY2026 Defense appropriations package.
Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters on Wednesday night that the House would vote on the GENIUS Act today, while the CLARITY Act could get bumped to next week.
This is ultimately a win for the leaders of the House Financial Services and Agriculture committees. Reps. French Hill (R-Ark.) and Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), who chair those panels respectively, argued fiercely against attaching the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act to the CLARITY Act, which would introduce market structure reforms for crypto.
To maximize the leverage with the Senate, Thompson, Hill and their committees want CLARITY to get as big a bipartisan vote as it can. The CBDC prohibition is mostly a Republican priority.
The deal. Conservatives — minus Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — voted to advance the rule after agreeing to a deal with the House GOP leadership. The agreement would have Republicans attach language to the annual defense reauthorization bill that would prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC.
House GOP leaders plus Republicans from the Financial Services and Agriculture committees met multiple times with House Freedom Caucus hardliners on Wednesday to discuss the best way to enact the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act. It wasn’t always pleasant, but they got there.
“I am tired of making history,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday night. “I just want a normal Congress. But some people have forgotten what that looks like. But as long as we get it done, it doesn’t matter to me how long a vote is held open.”
Leadership. We have lots of questions about how the House ended up in this position. Why did the GOP leadership bring the rule to the floor if they knew they had vote issues? Why did the White House staff allow Trump to negotiate with the HFC without committee leaders in the loop?
Republican leadership’s retort is that the HFC is simply miffed with the state of the House Republican Conference. Hardline conservatives feel as if they have been jammed by the Senate a number of times this year — most recently during reconciliation.
The HFC missed the boat on influencing this debate. There was a discussion about combining CLARITY and GENIUS a few weeks ago.
In the end, the HFC didn’t really get that much. GENIUS and CLARITY will get separate House votes — as originally envisioned. Only now, CBDC gets into NDAA, where it becomes one more provision that could simply get stripped out by the Senate.
