Last Friday, things took a turn on the Senate Banking Committee. Republicans released a new draft bill for crypto market structure—all 182 pages of it. It’s a detailed piece of work, but it landed with a thud for at least one prominent Democrat.
Senator Elizabeth Warren wasn’t pleased. Not with the bill itself, necessarily, but with how it came to be. Her office shared some strong comments on the process, calling out the lack of collaboration.
Warren Questions the Process
The core of Warren’s criticism is pretty straightforward. She argues that crafting a new regulatory system, especially for something as tricky as crypto, needs input from both sides to ever have a chance of passing. And so far, she says, that hasn’t happened.
“Instead of working with us,” Warren claimed, “Republicans have produced two partisan drafts.” She pointed specifically to what she calls “secret feedback” from industry stakeholders. That feedback, she says, was used to shape the bill but hasn’t been shared with Democratic committee members or the public. It raises a real question: who actually wrote this thing? There’s a real possibility that lobbyists had an outsized hand in drafting it.
Which is interesting, because Warren is no fan of crypto. But she was quick to note that her Democratic colleagues have been trying to put something constructive together.
A Different Approach from Democrats
Just this morning, in fact, a dozen Democratic Senators released their own framework. It’s a broad outline of what they’d want to see in a good bill. Warren herself didn’t sign it, but most of the Banking Committee Dems did. It reads like a genuine attempt to find some common ground.
But there’s a catch. The Republican version is a finished, complex legislative draft. The Democratic one is a six-page list of priorities. That’s a big tactical difference. The GOP has effectively set the terms of the debate by putting a complete document on the table first.
The Complicated Reality of “Cooperation”
Publicly, some Republicans are welcoming the Democratic framework. Senator Cynthia Lummis, for example, thanked her colleagues across the aisle for it on social media, calling it a “strong start” and emphasizing collaboration.
Warren, however, seems to see a different picture. From her view, real bipartisanship means working together from the very beginning. Not being invited to tweak a pre-written draft. It creates a structural disadvantage, forcing Democrats to argue over rules they had no part in shaping.
And when you combine that with undisclosed industry influence, it’s enough to make any skeptic nervous. Crafting fair regulation was always going to be difficult. This process might be making it even harder.
