Senate Cloture Vote on the CLARITY Act Fails 49 to 50

The US Senate rejected cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, on September 15. Roll call vote 234 closed at 2:19 p.m. Eastern with 49 yeas, 50 nays and one senator not voting. Sixty votes were required.

Every yes vote came from a Republican. Four Republicans voted no: Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Every Democrat and both independents who were present voted no. Chris Coons of Delaware did not vote.

Because cloture was rejected, the Senate did not take up the bill, and no vote on the legislation itself followed.

What the bill would have done

The CLARITY Act is the market structure bill the House passed on July 17, 2025. It splits supervision of digital assets between two agencies, giving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission exclusive jurisdiction over digital commodity spot markets while the Securities and Exchange Commission keeps authority over investment contract assets.

The Senate Banking Committee's own summary describes the bill as drawing a bright line between the two agencies, adding registration and disclosure duties for exchanges, brokers and dealers, preserving anti-fraud powers, protecting software developers and peer-to-peer systems, and creating targeted tools against money laundering, terrorist financing and sanctions evasion.

The Senate Banking Committee approved its version in the spring of 2026. The bill was placed on the Senate legislative calendar on June 1, 2026, and the cloture vote was the first floor test.

Where the negotiation broke

The unresolved section was the ethics language restricting officials from profiting through digital assets, which first entered the bill in July. Republicans circulated compromise text on Sunday that would have barred federal officials from issuing digital assets and required divestment of significant holdings. Senate Democrats prepared a counteroffer on Monday night that widened the restriction.

Republicans rejected it on Tuesday morning. Senator Cynthia Lummis, the lead Republican negotiator, said the counteroffer looked identical to the Democratic opening position and that Republicans had moved substantially on every front while Democrats had not budged an inch. Senator Mark Warner replied that the language Democrats wanted had been under discussion for the better part of a year.

According to NPR, Democrats also objected to the Department of Justice being the enforcer of the ethics provisions, arguing that this would not meaningfully constrain a sitting president. The reporting notes that President Trump disclosed 1.4 billion dollars in family income from digital asset ventures for the prior year.

What the senators said

Lummis after the vote: "I think we're done. It's over." She said negotiators had given Democrats over 120 of their requests.

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan published her reasons the same day. She called the bill's ethics provisions "simply too thin", said more was needed on money laundering and terrorist financing, and argued that the agencies "lack the necessary oversight and staffing" to implement the law. She also called the bill's bipartisan provisions a possible foundation for a future attempt and said the US should lead on digital asset innovation, "but we need to get it right."

Senator Thom Tillis, recorded as a no vote, said: "This is not the end for the Clarity Act. We've made substantial bipartisan progress in large part because of the White House."

Patrick Witt of the White House digital assets council said the result "increases the risk that the standards that global financial markets adhere to in the future will be those of Brussels or Beijing, rather than Washington and New York."

What happens next

Under Senate practice, only a senator who voted with the prevailing side can move to reconsider. Tillis is recorded on that side and filed the motion, which keeps a second cloture vote procedurally available. As of September 16, no second vote had been scheduled.

The floor calendar is narrow. The Senate is scheduled to adjourn on October 1, a government funding deadline falls on September 30, the midterm elections are on November 3, and the 119th Congress ends on January 3, 2027.

Both agencies moved the next day. SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the commission will "act decisively within the SEC's statutory authority to deliver certainty" with or without legislation. CFTC Chair Michael Selig said his agency is "locked in and ready to ship its rules." The SEC's pending Regulation Crypto Assets proposal, which would create two registration exemptions for token offerings and a conditional safe harbor, is open for comment through October 20.

Market reaction

Bitcoin traded at an overnight high near 79,530 dollars on Tuesday and stood at roughly 75,850 dollars after the vote, down about 4.2 percent over 24 hours, according to CoinDesk's live coverage.

On Polymarket, the contract on the bill being signed into law in 2026 had traded above 30 percent on September 14 and around 14 percent on Tuesday morning. It fell into single digits after the vote and stood at 5 percent in the days that followed.

Why the bill also lost votes inside the majority, and what a statute would have settled that an agency rule cannot, is the subject of our analysis: Ethics and deposits, not Bitcoin.