CLARITY Act faces 5-week Senate window as Trump blocks housing bill

Ripple deployed a CLARITY Act advocacy truck in Washington D.C. on June 25, as the crypto market structure bill faces a narrowing path through Congress with roughly five weeks before the Senate's August recess.

President Donald Trump canceled a planned June 24 signing ceremony for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill that passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32. The legislation includes a provision blocking the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through Dec. 31, 2030. Trump said via Truth Social that the event is "hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE America Act, which I consider to be a National Emergency."

"The current version of the CLARITY Act undermines law enforcement's ability to trace illicit finance and recover victims' money," Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), a former Nevada attorney general who voted against the bill in the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement. The CLARITY Act passed the House 294-134 in July 2025 but has stalled in the Senate over an ethics provision targeting officials with direct crypto exposure and revised tax and broker-reporting language.

The SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and photo ID at the polls, has not moved through the Senate. TD Cowen policy analyst Jaret Seiberg said in a June 24 research note that "there is no path for the SAVE Act becoming law," noting that a cloture vote would require 60 senators, a threshold Republican leadership has already declined to pursue. Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters the legislation "has been stuck in the Senate" and suggested leadership may fold it into a budget vehicle.

The housing bill standoff creates a sequencing bottleneck. Every week spent on the SAVE America Act fight is a week not available for the CLARITY Act, which still requires a floor vote and 60 votes to pass. The Senate's August recess deadline has been a recurring pressure point in CLARITY Act floor vote discussions, and intra-chamber negotiations over ethics and tax revisions have consumed months of calendar time without resolution.

The housing bill's CBDC ban was a secondary objective for crypto advocates, but Trump's veto threat has turned it into leverage for an unrelated elections measure. Trump signed an executive order in 2025 prohibiting U.S. government moves toward a CBDC, arguing it would "threaten the stability of the financial system, individual privacy, and the sovereignty of the United States." The statutory ban in the housing bill would have provided a more durable vehicle for the same policy goal.

Ripple's truck deployment signals the industry's urgency. The CLARITY Act would define SEC versus CFTC jurisdiction over digital assets and classify Bitcoin and Ethereum as digital commodities — a framework the crypto industry has sought for years. Without it, U.S.-based firms face continued regulatory ambiguity that has driven some operations offshore.

If Trump vetoes the housing bill outright, Congress would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override him. Given the original vote margins, that threshold appears reachable, but the constitutional 10-day window for presidential action has not yet started. The most likely near-term outcome, according to policy analysts, is a Senate attempt to decouple the CLARITY Act from the SAVE America sequencing demand by attaching digital asset market structure language to a must-pass budget vehicle before the recess.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.