Club for Growth Statement on Senate Banking Committee Markup of the CLARITY Act
Washington, D.C. — Club for Growth urges the Senate Banking Committee to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act at this week’s markup and reject any last-minute efforts to weaken the bill on behalf of entrenched financial incumbents.
“The United States should be the world’s home for blockchain innovation, and the CLARITY Act replaces regulatory chaos with clear rules that protect consumers while letting builders build. Senators should pass it without poison pills because if we want to lead the future of finance, we can’t regulate it out of existence.” – David McIntosh, President, Club for Growth
The Committee is scheduled to consider H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, on Thursday, May 14, 2026, at 10:30 a.m., and Chairman Tim Scott, Senator Cynthia Lummis, and Senator Thom Tillis have released updated market-structure text to serve as the basis for the markup. The Committee states that the text reflects months of bipartisan negotiations and input from regulators, law enforcement, financial institutions, innovators, and consumer advocates.
The CLARITY Act is not a giveaway to industry; it is a long-overdue replacement for the Biden-era model of regulation by enforcement. It draws clear lines between the SEC and CFTC, preserves securities-law authority where securities are actually involved, and gives entrepreneurs a lawful path to build in the United States instead of forcing innovation offshore. The status quo has produced uncertainty for good actors, gaps for bad actors, and a competitive advantage for foreign markets.
Club for Growth strongly supports moving the bill forward, but senators should be clear-eyed about the remaining fights. The stablecoin rewards issue has been the central flashpoint, with large banks seeking to block new competitors from offering consumers meaningful alternatives. The reported Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise would prohibit passive, bank-style interest on payment stablecoin balances while preserving activity-based rewards tied to transactions, payments, platform use, loyalty, staking, or governance. That is a reasonable line: Congress should prevent regulatory arbitrage without handing big banks a government-protected monopoly over payments and consumer rewards.
The Committee should also reject claims that market-structure reform is somehow soft on illicit finance. The updated framework applies Bank Secrecy Act obligations to digital asset brokers, dealers, and exchanges, including AML/CFT programs, suspicious activity monitoring and reporting, customer identification, and sanctions compliance. It also creates a targeted safe harbor allowing service providers and permitted payment stablecoin issuers to temporarily pause suspicious transactions at the request of law enforcement, adds authority for Treasury to respond to high-risk foreign digital asset activity, and strengthens information-sharing with federal law enforcement.
That is the correct approach: empower law enforcement to pursue fraud, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and terrorist financing without criminalizing software development, self-custody, or lawful decentralized activity. The Committee’s own materials emphasize that the bill protects developers who do not control customer funds, preserves Americans’ ability to hold their own digital assets, and requires centralized intermediaries interacting with DeFi protocols to implement risk-management standards.
Club for Growth urges senators to advance the CLARITY Act without converting it into a protectionist charter for large incumbent banks. The purpose of financial regulation should be to protect property rights, market integrity, and consumers — not to freeze the payments system in place or shield politically connected institutions from competition. A strong final bill should preserve self-custody, protect open-source development, maintain clear SEC-CFTC jurisdictional boundaries, enforce anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering rules against bad actors, and allow lawful consumer rewards that are tied to real activity rather than passive deposit substitutes.
Senators who support free markets, American innovation, financial competition, and the rule of law should vote to move the CLARITY Act forward and oppose amendments that would entrench legacy financial institutions at the expense of consumers, entrepreneurs, and America’s leadership in digital assets.