Senate votes 49 against CLARITY, Warren rages against Trump for making money

According to Woofun AI, the US Senate rejected the “Clarity Act” (Clarity Act, H.R. 3633) motion with a narrow margin of 49 votes in favor and 50 against, which is 11 votes away from breaking the 60-vote threshold.

This result marks the first time since the bill passed with a high vote of 294 to 134 in the House of Representatives in July 2025 and approved by the Senate Banking Committee by 15 to 9 in May 2026. The legislative process was forced to enter an “emergency room” state.

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Warren delivered an extremely aggressive opposition speech before the vote, and his core argument directly pointed to the chain of interest behind the bill. Warren pointed out that the Trump family made $1.4 billion in profits from the crypto business in 2025, a figure that even surpassed any US listed crypto giant. She cited a range of evidence of administrative misconduct: Meme coins promoted by Trump before taking office caused retail investors to lose nearly $4 billion; the Department of Justice's crypto enforcement team was dismissed; several campaign donation companies were not prosecuted; and several convicted executives were pardoned by the president. Warren said bluntly that this is not a regulatory divide, but rather that huge beneficiaries use the state machine to tailor regulations for private industries.

Warren criticized the ethical provisions urgently revised by the Republican Party on the eve of the vote as “the gold medal of immunity.” She stressed that Attorney General Todd Blanche has publicly claimed that he is “Trump's lawyer and not an American lawyer”; the new regulations allow White House regulators to directly exempt potential violations by issuing legal opinions; all Trump-related positions, including World Liberty Financial, have been left open, and the bill has not blocked its path to continuing to expand its commercial footprint. Warren concluded that when the president can easily stop an investigation into himself, any detailed ethics clause is just a carefully crafted legal backdoor.

Woofun AI collated data showing that as the bill's chief promoter in the Senate, Wyoming Republican Senator Lummis tried to respond to questions with compromise efforts. Lummis said that the text of the bill was expanded from the original 300 pages to 635 pages precisely because the drafting team fully absorbed and translated 126 amendments proposed by the Democratic Party. She defined this as a “sample of good faith legislation” and countered that the opposition was blocking a framework system that was supposed to cross party boundaries. To prove the non-partisan nature of the bill, Lummis mentioned that 78 Democrats had supported the bill in the House of Representatives, and encouraged Chen that the White House had completed “the most binding self-restraint in history” on ethical issues, including the President, Vice President, federal judges, and their families in compliance restrictions, while relinquishing direct enforcement powers to state attorneys general.

However, this clever patch of technical dimensions failed to bridge the broken trust deficit between the two parties. The final registered vote outlined a clear map of power: 49 positive votes were all Republicans, and no Democrats or independent senators crossed the border. The 50 negative votes include 46 Democrats and 2 independent senators (King of Maine and Sanders of Vermont), as well as 4 Republican senators: Collins of Maine, Hawley of Missouri, Moran of Kansas, and Tillis of North Carolina.

Notably, Tillis' on-the-spot vote change is a typical Senate procedural tactic. By entering the majority (opposition) at the last minute, proponents retain their legal capacity to file a “motion to reconsider” (Motion to Reconsideration) at a later date. As soon as the vote was over, Tillis officially submitted the motion as an opposition member, reserving the possibility of restarting voting on the bill on a technical level. Delaware Democratic Senator Coons was absent that day and did not participate in this critical vote.

Although it is not completely blocked in terms of procedure, the time window left for the bill is extremely tight. Around 14:15 local time on September 15 (that is, September 16), the Senate will soon enter the election recess period at the end of September, and all members will participate in the midterm elections. To break through the hurdle twice before that, supporters must persuade at least 11 members of parliament to switch within two weeks, which is almost impossible in the current climate of raging between the two parties. The post-election “Lame Duck” session (November to December) provided another glimmer of life. As seats in the new National Assembly are settled, the Senate will usher in a vacuum before the handover of the old team. If the two parties can reach a secret compromise on the White House's ethics provisions after the fervor subsides, there is still a possibility that the bill will break through the border. If all of the above windows are missed, with the opening of the new National Assembly in January 2027, the accumulation of all previous committee endorsements and agendas will be completely reduced to zero, and the entire legislative run will only start from scratch.