Today the full US Senate failed to pass its first vote re the GENIUS Act stablecoin bill. Initially the vote was 49 in favor and 48 against, but Senate leader Thune then changed his vote to no, to enable the Senate to revisit the legislation at a future date. Republican senators Josh Hawley and Rand Paul voted with the Democrats. The vote was not about the content of the bill but about cloture, or an agreement to avoid endless debate (filibuster) which requires the support of 60% of the senators present.
Democrat Senator Ruben Gallego warned last weekend that Democrats would not vote for cloture on the current version of the stablecoin bill, and today requested postponing the vote until Monday when the bill would be debated.
Progress made on GENIUS Act content
The Democrat Senator thanked the Republicans for their good faith work in trying to improve the content of the GENIUS Act in the past few days. “The reason you’re hearing some hesitancy is (something of) this scope and importance really cannot be rushed. And we need time, both to educate our colleagues and people.”
He said he did not want to end all the good work done so far.
“I want to be clear that you do have enough members across the aisle that want to see this pass in a good manner. What I’m going to be asking for is that we collapse today’s vote and Monday’s vote into a single vote on Monday. And I believe there is a pathway for us to actually get this done, get good language (and) have a bipartisan win for this country,” said Senator Gallego.
Postponing the cloture vote would have required unanimous consent, but someone objected. We believe it was Senator Warren.
Senator Warren and other Democrats have raised concerns about President Trump’s conflicts of interest with crypto, following the revelation that $TRUMP memecoin holders would have dinner with the President. Plus, last week it was announced the Trump family stablecoin USD1 was used for a $2 billion payment by a UAE firm chaired by the country’s national security adviser and brother of the President.
Mr Thune accuses Democrats of obstruction
After the vote, Senate majority leader John Thune expressed dismay given it is a bipartisan bill and had a bipartisan process. He pointed to several Democrats supporting the bill in passing it out of the Senate Banking Committee.
“If Democrats were interested in making further changes as they claim, they would have had the chance to make those changes on the floor. All they had to do was vote for cloture. Not every bill that comes to the floor is the final bill,” said Senator Thune. He highlighted that there had been six iterations of the bill with many modifications made to satisfy Democrat demands, including sessions into late last night.
He continued, “It makes you wonder if this is about the bill at all. Or, if it’s simply Democrats obstructing because they want to deny Republicans or President Trump a bipartisan win. Given the fact that the Democrats keep moving the goalposts, it’s hard not to suspect that that is the case.”
