Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) told Breitbart News that now is the time to pass the Clarity Act to set a light-touch regulatory structure for the crypto industry, saying Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) may try to “kill” the industry if Democrats take power again.
The Senate Banking Committee on Thursday advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, more commonly known as the Clarity Act, a bill that would establish clear rules of the road for the burgeoning crypto industry. The bill advanced out of the committee 15-9, with two Democrats, Sens. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), voting for the bill. President Donald Trump has made making America the capital of the crypto industry a key priority of his second term in office.
Lummis told Breitbart News that the advancement of the legislation is the “culmination” of four years of hard work and ensures that the crypto jobs of tomorrow get created in America.
“If we don’t legislate today and in the coming months on this, this industry moves to the Cayman Islands, to Dubai, to Singapore, the UAE, wherever regulators are willing to engage. And so it’s important that we quit handing our competitors an advantage that we won’t get back. Once they take their headquarters off the United States shores, it’s going to be hard to get them back. And not only that, American consumers are left completely unprotected because there are no disclosure requirements, no reserve standards, no recourse,” Lummis said.
“It’s just time to join the 21st Century and have the world standard for the digital asset industry. This is a tremendously robust industry that’s going to do nothing but grow. Every currency is going to be digitized, including the U.S. dollar in the future,” she continued.
The legislation ensures that there is a clear delineation of whether certain assets would be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), protects developers creating digital assets, and ensures that law enforcement can have the tools to fight illicit finance.
Lummis has worked for years on providing a regulatory framework for digital assets. In 2022, she introduced the Responsible Financial Innovation Act with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The next year, she and Gillibrand reintroduced the legislation. In July 2025, she, Senate Banking Committee Tim Scott (R-SC), Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Bernie Moreno (R-OH) introduced the discussion draft of the Responsible Financial Innovation Act.
Other Republicans have cheered the legislation’s advancement.
Scott said in a written statement:
Today, the Banking Committee showed the American people that Washington can still work together. We had a serious debate, worked through real differences, and came together around a shared goal: protecting consumers, supporting innovation, and keeping the future of finance in America. This legislation brings digital assets into the sunlight with clear rules, stronger safeguards, and better tools to stop bad actors. For me, this is personal. My mother raised my brother and me with faith, grit, and determination, and she taught me that the American Dream should be within reach for every family, including single mothers working hard to build a better life for their children. Today is a historic day for this Committee and a major victory for the American people.
Moreno wrote, “The financial services revolution begins today!”
Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) wrote, “Just voted for the crypto market structure bill. If we don’t write the rules for digital assets, China will. American innovation doesn’t wait for Washington to catch up.”
Lummis cheered the grassroots activism that has led to this successful advancement of the legislation despite some Democrats not supporting it and the banking industry lobbying against the legislation.
“Having their [crypto] advocacy has been tremendously helpful, because we’re finding traditional banking pushing back on the existence of digital assets, pushing back on having a regulatory framework that allows them to embed in the United States. And I just don’t get it. I just think the banks could offer this new, exciting financial product right alongside us, dollars in their own banks,” she told Breitbart News. “And to me, it would be exciting. Actually, the credit unions have been excited and do want to embrace digital assets into their offerings. Why the traditional banks have chosen to fight this, I worry, is just a failure to see how popular it is for the average consumer to have something they can transmit faster and cheaper than using a credit card or using a traditional bank service. So this is a very pro-consumer bill.”
Not all traditional finance companies have opposed the legislation. Fidelity, which has embraced crypto, said on Wednesday, “Fidelity commends the Senate Banking Committee for advancing the CLARITY Act. The bill provides a balanced approach and, if passed, will offer statutory clarity to digital asset markets, benefiting American investors and helping ensure the U.S. remains a global leader in digital assets.”
Lummis said that she hopes that Congress could move next to tackle crypto taxation, including providing a de minimis exemption for crypto use to minimize potential capital gains taxes.
She said, “When I talked to folks at Coinbase, they had to file something about like 12,000,00 1099 DA filings. It’s what you have to file because we don’t have a de minimis threshold for digital assets. And, Coinbase said that half of those 1099s were for less than one U.S. dollar. Now that wastes Coinbase’s time and money, and it wastes the IRS’s time. So we’ve got to address this de minimis issue so this is not a frivolous and fruitless paper exercise that everyone’s spending time and money on.”
Lummis said that the time is now, because a potential Democrat-controlled Senate could work to kill the crypto industry again.
She said, “It could be a very long time before it it passes again. You know, we could not get the Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee to lift a finger on this industry. In fact, they were trying to kill it, and this industry has had a shot at a regulatory framework only because Republicans are in charge now of the Senate Banking Committee. If we were to go back to a Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee, it would be chaired by Elizabeth Warren, and she’ll do everything she can to kill this industry, and she’s a formidable adversary. So we really need to do this now.”