{"id":18377,"date":"2026-01-29T16:47:03","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T16:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/senate-ag-advances-crypto-bill-along-party-lines\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T16:47:03","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T16:47:03","slug":"senate-ag-advances-crypto-bill-along-party-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/senate-ag-advances-crypto-bill-along-party-lines\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Ag advances crypto bill along party lines"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Senate Agriculture Committee voted along party lines Thursday to advance a landmark cryptocurrency bill, sending the measure to the Senate floor without bipartisan backing.<\/p>\n

The committee voted 12-11 to advance so-called crypto market structure legislation, which would create new rules governing how digital tokens are regulated. The bill that the Ag panel approved Thursday, which would grant new crypto regulatory authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, would need to eventually be merged with a second part of the bill dealing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that falls under the Senate Banking Committee\u2019s jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

The party-line vote came after months of negotiations between Ag Chair John Boozman<\/a> (R-Ark.) and Sen. Cory Booker<\/a> (D-N.J.) failed to yield a bipartisan deal. Boozman plowed ahead with a GOP-only bill, saying \u201cthere were fundamental policy disagreements\u201d between the two sides and it is now \u201ctime to move this process forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe CFTC is the right agency to regulate the spot trading of digital commodities,\u201d he said in an opening statement. \u201cAt a high level, this bill provides a clear definition of a digital commodity, protects innovation and technology, establishes consumer protection safeguards, and equips the agency with the necessary resources to take on this new responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Booker, who is a member of a Senate Democratic working group that is negotiating with Republicans on the market structure bill, said Republicans were \u201cwalking away from the bipartisan process that produced\u201d a Boozman-Booker discussion draft<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat frustrates me because I see a bipartisan glide path to land this plane, to punch through the end zone,\u201d Booker said.<\/p>\n

Boozman said that he remains \u201ccommitted to continue working with\u201d Democrats on the bill as it moves toward the floor, adding that \u201cwhat we want is a bipartisan bill.\u201d<\/p>\n

The panel voted down several amendments offered by Democrats along party lines, including a provision from Sen. Michael Bennet<\/a> (D-Colo.) that would ban federal officials and their families from issuing or endorsing digital assets. Ethics issues have been a major sticking point in market structure negotiations, as Democrats have pressed for language targeting the Trump family\u2019s crypto businesses.<\/p>\n

Republicans also voted to reject a pair of amendments from Sen. Dick Durbin<\/a> (D-Ill.) that would seek to crack down on crypto ATM fraud and ban some crypto firms from receiving a federal bailout, respectively.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate Agriculture Committee voted along party lines Thursday to advance a landmark cryptocurrency bill, sending the measure to the Senate floor without bipartisan backing. The committee voted 12-11 to advance so-called crypto market structure legislation, which would create new rules governing how digital tokens are regulated. The bill that the Ag panel approved Thursday, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}