Lummis Presses Senate on CLARITY Act as GENIUS Act Turns One

Senator Cynthia Lummis marked the first anniversary of the GENIUS Act by demanding that Congress finish the job. One year after President Donald Trump signed the stablecoin law on July 18, 2025, the Wyoming Republican wants the Senate to move on the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, the broader market-structure bill that would set rules for the rest of the U.S. crypto industry. Her post on X was blunt: "Let's get the Clarity Act done!"

Lummis called GENIUS "an important first step in securing the dollar's dominance" and said the country must build on it to "cement America's legacy as the crypto capital of the world." The distinction matters. GENIUS governs payment stablecoins and nothing else. CLARITY would draw the lines that the stablecoin law leaves blank: who regulates which digital assets, and when a token counts as a security or a commodity.

The Senate math

The bill is not stuck for lack of support in the House. It cleared that chamber 294-134, a bipartisan margin, and advanced out of the Senate Banking Committee in May 2026 on a 15-9 vote. It now sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar, ready for a floor vote that leadership has not scheduled. The obstacle is the filibuster. CLARITY needs 60 votes, so Republicans have to peel off several Democrats to pass it.

The calendar is the other enemy. Lawmakers are racing to act before the Senate breaks for its August recess, and the timeline already slipped once. Updated bill text expected on Friday was held back as negotiators kept haggling over ethics provisions. Industry participants now expect the revised language next week.

Why supporters are pushing

Representative French Hill has been arguing that GENIUS cannot work alone. He compared a stablecoin law with no market-structure bill to owning a cellphone with no network to connect it. "If you have the GENIUS Act, which authorizes dollar-backed stablecoins, but you don't have a market structure bill, it's like being authorized to own a cell phone without an ecosystem to support it," Hill said.

The stakes, as supporters frame them, are geographic. Industry representatives have told lawmakers that years of murky rules already pushed blockchain firms and developers offshore, and that clear ones could bring the companies, capital, and engineers back. Lummis has warned that the window is closing. Without its own digital asset rules before 2030, she says, the United States risks letting another country write them first.