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Ahmed Barakat
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Senator Bill Hagerty told FOX Business on June 18 that he still hopes the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act can clear the Senate before the July 4 recess, even while conceding the bill may slip past Independence Day.
His optimism lands against a wall of procedural reality: the CLARITY Act has not yet received a Senate floor vote, still needs to clear a 60-vote cloture threshold, and requires reconciliation between two competing Senate committee texts before any House-Senate alignment can even begin.
The gap between Hagerty’s stated hope and the legislative calendar is measurable. Congress has fewer than 9 working days before the July 4 recess.
Prediction markets on Kalshi currently price Senate passage by August 2026 at roughly 22%, which reflects the broader analyst read: passage this summer is possible, passage before July 4 is a different question entirely.
The House passed its version of the bill on July 17, 2025, by a 294–134 margin, a bipartisan result that gave the legislation genuine momentum.
The Senate Banking Committee followed with a 15–9 approval on May 14, 2026, advancing the bill to the Senate’s legislative calendar. That step made floor action procedurally possible. It did not make it imminent.
At its core, the crypto legislation would establish a CFTC-led regulatory regime for digital commodities – classifying assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum under CFTC oversight while assigning the SEC narrower jurisdiction over certain broker-dealer and exchange activity.
That division of authority is the bill’s central policy architecture, and it carries real market implications: Standard Chartered has estimated that passage could unlock $8 billion in XRP ETF inflows alone, based on the regulatory certainty the framework would provide.
Three Obstacles Between the Clarity ACT Bill and a Senate Vote
The 60-vote cloture threshold is the first hard constraint. The Senate Banking Committee’s 15–9 approval demonstrates committee-level support, but converting that into 60 floor votes requires bipartisan buy-in that has not yet been publicly secured.
That threshold does not move regardless of how aligned lawmakers and industry are on the bill’s substance.
The second obstacle is inter-committee reconciliation. The Senate Banking Committee text and a separate Senate Agriculture Committee text must be merged into a single floor-ready bill.
Those two committees share jurisdiction over the CFTC-SEC authority split at the heart of the legislation, and any manager’s amendment resolving their differences needs to be filed before a floor vote can be scheduled. That step alone typically takes weeks of staff-level negotiation.
The third, and currently most active, obstacle is the ethics provision dispute. David Nage, managing director and portfolio manager at Arca, said after meetings with Senate offices that lawmakers and industry participants are roughly 80–85% aligned on the bill’s substance, and that stablecoin yield provisions, despite continued criticism from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, are no longer the primary friction point.
What remains is a conflict-of-interest fight over how to restrict senior government officials from participating in crypto-related business activities while in office.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has reportedly conditioned her support on explicit ethics language barring senior officials from profiting off crypto holdings, warning of withheld votes without the clause.
That is not a minor drafting issue, it is a named senator with leverage over the 60-vote math making a specific demand. Nage characterized the remaining disagreement as a political and implementation question rather than a dispute over market structure, but political questions are precisely the kind that stall floor scheduling.
A coalition of gaming associations, tribal governments, and labor unions has separately pressed the Senate to include language banning prediction markets from offering sports and casino-style event contracts under the CLARITY Act framework, another contentious provision that adds to the reconciliation load before any floor vote is viable.
