House Crypto Chair Bryan Steil On Why the CLARITY Act Can Pass the Senate
House Crypto Chair Bryan Steil explains why he believes the CLARITY Act can clear its Senate hurdle
By: Zack Guzman
September 15, 2026
The biggest test yet for crypto legislation in Washington could come down to a simple question Tuesday: Can the CLARITY Act get 60 votes in the Senate?
Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) thinks it can.
“Tomorrow’s vote is huge in the Senate,” Steil, the chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Artificial Intelligence, told Solana Policy Institute President Kristin Smith in a new Coinage interview. “Can they hit 60 on a motion to proceed? I’m actually bullish that they do.”
The Senate is scheduled to vote at approximately 2:15 p.m. ET Tuesday on whether to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, according to the Senate schedule. The vote represents a critical hurdle for legislation that has spent more than a year waiting for Senate action after comfortably passing the House.
Whether supporters actually have those 60 votes remains uncertain. Reuters reported ahead of the vote that lawmakers were still working to secure enough support after revisions aimed at addressing concerns raised by Democrats and the banking industry.
But Steil believes there is one reason to think CLARITY can get there: Congress has already demonstrated that crypto market structure can attract significant bipartisan support.
The House passed CLARITY by a 294-134 vote in July last year. All 216 Republicans voting supported it, along with 78 Democrats.
“It’s been over a year since the House passed CLARITY with overwhelming support,” Steil said. “About two thirds of the entire House, 78 Democrats, all the Republicans. And it’s been languishing a bit in the Senate.”
Now, he thinks some of that bipartisan coalition can be recreated on the other side of the Capitol.
“I’m actually very bullish that what we will see is the Senate Democrats come to the table,” Steil said. “We’ll cross the 60 vote threshold. And then the final negotiations of this bill will take place.”
That confidence is being tested after months of negotiations over what could become the most consequential piece of crypto legislation Congress has passed.
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The CLARITY Act is intended to establish a regulatory framework for digital assets and more clearly divide oversight responsibilities in the crypto market. Negotiations have continued over issues ranging from stablecoins and banking to ethics restrictions involving public officials. The revised Senate text released ahead of Tuesday’s vote included changes aimed at resolving some Democratic concerns, though Reuters reported that significant disagreements remained.
For Steil, however, the stakes extend beyond resolving the jurisdictional fights that have defined crypto regulation for years.
“A regulatory framework for digital assets is so absolutely essential,” he said. “It’s essential that the U.S. is the global leader in innovation and development.”
In fact, Steil argues that Washington could eventually look back on the current Congress as a turning point for financial regulation on the scale of some of the country’s most important financial laws.
When asked whether this could be crypto’s equivalent of a Dodd-Frank moment, Steil went even further back.
“This is the moment to put in place the core principles in the digital asset space,” he said. “The technology is pulling us to do it. The investment that will be made on the back side of this will be significant.”
Steil compared the potential impact of CLARITY to the securities regulatory framework Congress established with the Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
“I think we will look back at GENIUS, but in particular at CLARITY in the way that we do the ’33 and ’34 Act in the securities law,” he said, calling the current push “a transformational moment.”
It is an ambitious comparison, but one Steil has been making publicly. At a House Financial Services field hearing in New York this summer, he similarly argued that moments of technological and financial change have historically pushed Congress to establish new rules rather than stop innovation outright.
Getting CLARITY through the Senate, though, may prove more difficult than getting it through the House.
The fight has drawn intense lobbying from both the crypto industry and banks, with financial institutions raising concerns about how digital assets and stablecoins could compete with traditional deposits. Crypto groups, meanwhile, have argued that continued regulatory uncertainty risks pushing investment and development overseas.
The political calendar adds another layer of urgency.
With control of Congress potentially changing after the midterm elections, Steil said his concern is less that bipartisan support for crypto would disappear than that future legislation could simply stop reaching the floor.
“In some ways, I actually think the votes are there in Congress, even if the Democrats somehow got control,” he said. But first comes CLARITY.
More than a year after 294 House members voted for the bill, the question is whether supporters can turn that bipartisan showing into the 60 Senate votes necessary to move forward.
Steil believes they can.
“The broader need to put this in place is so great that our Senate colleagues will actually get the job done,” he said.
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