Block House GOP crypto hearing

Waters plans to block House GOP crypto hearing

Her move will be the latest Democratic effort to derail GOP-led crypto legislation by highlighting potential conflicts of interest with the Trump family.

Jasper Goodman

House Financial Services ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) plans to object to a joint hearing the panel is hosting Tuesday on cryptocurrency policy, which will effectively prevent the meeting from taking place, according to a Democratic aide with direct knowledge of the matter who was granted anonymity to discuss unannounced matters.

Joint hearings require unanimous consent. The Financial Services Committee is hosting the meeting jointly with the House Agriculture panel, which also has jurisdiction over crypto regulation.

After objecting to the hearing, the person said, Waters plans to walk out with at least some Financial Services Democrats and host a “shadow hearing” focused on the Trump family’s entanglements in the crypto industry. Her move will be the latest effort by Democrats to derail industry-friendly digital assets legislation that GOP lawmakers are pursuing by highlighting potential conflicts of interest with the Trump family.

A spokesperson for Financial Services Republicans, Brooke Nethercott, said in a statement that since the last Congress, the committee has “had productive bipartisan, bicameral discussions on market structure legislation.”

“We encourage the Ranking Member to attend tomorrow’s hearing to express her views and reconsider her decision to object,” she said.

The hearing is scheduled to take place just one day after House Republicans unveiled a draft of landmark crypto regulation that would divvy up oversight of digital assets between market regulators.

Waters called House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) on Saturday to tell him she planned to object to the Tuesday hearing unless he agreed to include a provision in the crypto legislation he is pursuing that would take aim at the Trump family’s crypto businesses, the person said.

Hill has said that the Trump family crypto ventures are making legislating on the issue “more complicated,” but Republicans — and some crypto-friendly Democrats — have rejected calls to address the issue in their legislation.

Republicans’ crypto legislation “places universal requirements on issuers of all stripes,” Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who chairs a House Financial Services subcommittee on crypto, said at a markup last month.