These 16 Democratic Senators Deserve a Primary. Allowing yourself to be bought by the crypto lobby is unforgivable.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-05-21-democratic-senators-deserve-primary-crypto-bill/



It’s official. As my colleague David Dayen and I both predicted, enough Democratic senators have voted for a crypto “regulation” bill (called the GENIUS Act), basically written by the industry and Donald Trump’s minions, that it passed easily on Tuesday. If anything, it was even worse than I expected—just nine Democrats were needed to get to the necessary 60 votes, but 16 voted for it. (Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jerry Moran of Kansas, voted against it.) This vote was technically for cloture, meaning the bill couldn’t be halted by a filibuster, but it’s the only vote that mattered. The official vote, now scheduled for Thursday, is only a formality, and I expect several of these senators to vote against it so they can pretend they aren’t monumentally corrupt.

The Crypto Sixteen are the following: Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who co-sponsored the bill, Adam Schiff (D-CA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Mark Warner (D-VA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), John Fetterman (D-PA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE). Every one of them ought to be primaried in their next election.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has more experience in financial regulation than anyone in Congress, outlined the problems in a speech on the Senate floor. First, the bill gives a clear green light to Trump’s world-historical corruption. “Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally. For crooks, it’s a two-for-one,” she said.

Second, it would greatly destabilize the financial system by allowing crypto stablecoins (that is, crypto assets supposedly pegged to the dollar and backed with real assets) into it without real regulations or protections. As Warren points out, we have seen in the past, with the financial derivatives that led to the 2008 crash, that a weak regulatory bill is worse than no bill at all. The powers of the various regulatory authorities are not clarified at all, and in any case, with Trump tearing these agencies to shreds, it wouldn’t matter if they were. Another crypto crash will come, but this time it might take down Wall Street with it.

Third, it would greatly enable criminal activity of all kinds............................

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