Senate Republicans Release Revised 630-Page CLARITY Act Text Days Before Sept. 15 Vote, Still No Democratic Support

Senate Republicans released a revised, 630-page version of the CLARITY Act on September 10, five days before the chamber's scheduled cloture vote on the crypto market-structure bill, with Senator Cynthia Lummis framing the redraft as a direct response to Democratic demands.

"We have incorporated more than 114 separate provisions at my Democrat colleagues' request," Lummis said, according to The Block, calling the result a "strong bipartisan product" and telling Democrats they "demanded the felony bar on fraudsters, $150M for the CFTC, the crackdown on platforms like Binance, and they got almost everything they asked for."

In her own press release announcing the text, Lummis called the bill "the last real chance we will have for years to get this right" and said she was committed to "reaching a deal in the coming days."

The substantive changes target complaints raised since the bill cleared the Senate Banking Committee 15-9 in May. The new draft requires what it calls "decentralized-in-name-only" trading protocols, those effectively controlled by an individual or group rather than genuinely non-custodial, to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with the CFTC and Treasury directed to write implementing rules. It also narrows the bill's DeFi carve-outs to apply only to spot and cash digital commodity transactions, a change aimed at addressing tribal governments' objections to how the original text treated prediction markets, and adds clarifications on how credit unions can conduct crypto activities. Ethics provisions restricting officials and their spouses from issuing digital assets, one of the fights that stalled the bill over the summer, remain largely unchanged and still rely on Justice Department enforcement rather than the independent oversight Democrats have pushed for.

Despite Lummis's characterization, Politico reported that no Democratic senators currently support the revised text. That matters because the September 15 cloture vote needs 60 votes to succeed, and Republicans' 53 seats require at least seven Democratic or independent crossovers, with only Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks having backed the bill at the committee stage. The redraft is Republicans' most concrete attempt yet to close that gap before what both parties are treating as a do-or-die moment for comprehensive crypto legislation this year.