Time Running Out and Odds Growing Long for Passage of Crypto Market-Structure Bill

Adding to Democrats’ trepidations is the widespread perception that the Supreme Court is poised to grant the president the power to fire commissioners of nominally independent agencies such as CFTC and the SEC at will.

“It is a deep concern,” Booker told Decrypt at the event. “This is a massive expansion of presidential power. We’ve seen what [Trump] has done with this power already.”

Booker said he is pushing to insert language into the bill that would ensure the commissions remain “balanced and fair,” regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in the pending case involving Trump’s purported firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

By law, independent five-member commissions, such as CFTC, SEC, FTC and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), are required to include two members from the minority party. But Trump has dismissed Democratic commissioners and refused so far to fill the empty slots.

The CFTC is currently being run by a lone Republican commissioner, acting chair Caroline Pham. Trump’s pick to become chairman, Mike Selig, refused at his Senate confirmation hearing last month to commit to urging the president to add commissioners. Nor would he commit to seeking additional resources for the agency, despite its being poised to assume vast new responsibilities to oversee crypto markets.

“The CFTC is able to function with a single chairman,” Selig said.

Related: CFTC Gives Formal Blessing to Spot Trading of Crypto on Registered Exchange

Another sticking point on the Senate bill is Democrat’s demand to add ethics language to the measure, in the wake of Trump and his family’s high-profile involvement in issuing and trading crypto currencies.

Speaking at the Blockchain Association event, one of Booker’s Republican counterparts, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (WY) said she and Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and worked out some ethics language she hopes to put before the Banking Committee next week.

“Our staffs are exhausted,” Lummis said, per CryptoRank. “It’s just time to reveal a product. We are at prime time now. We’re in the last two weeks,” before the long holiday recess that will take Congress into an election year, when making progress on major legislation gets harder.

While negotiations on a market-structure bill continue, politically influential groups have also voiced concerns. On Monday, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federal of Teacher, wrote to Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Senate Banking urging them to scrap the bill altogether.

“This legislation poses profound risks to the pensions of working families and the overall stability of the economy,” Weingarten’s letter said. “Rather than providing desperately needed regulation and commonsense guardrails, this bill exposes working families— families with no current involvement in or connection to cryptocurrency—to economic risk and threatens the stability of their retirement security.”

With 1.8 million members, the AFT is one of the largest unions in the country and an important Democratic Party constituency.

“We are especially alarmed that this legislation would allow non-crypto companies to put their stock on the blockchain and evade the entire securities regulatory framework that currently exists,” the letter added. “This would allow crypto to completely avoid requirements that protect investors in securities, such as registration, reporting and regulation of intermediaries that facilitate transactions.”

Lummis said she hopes to have a draft of the bill ready for the committee to vote on it next week. But with time running out and other major legislation like health care subsidies likely to eat up space on the legislative calendar, the outlook for the crypto market-structure bill looks cloudy.