[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 100 (Wednesday, June 11, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3329-S3331]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Cloture Motion

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before 
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination 
     of Executive Calendar No. 173, William Long, of Missouri, to 
     be Commissioner of Internal Revenue for the remainder of the 
     term expiring November 12, 2027.
         John Thune, Eric Schmitt, Bernie Moreno, John Boozman, 
           Jim Justice, Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Mike Rounds, 
           Chuck Grassley, Jon A. Husted, Ted Cruz, Rick Scott of 
           Florida, Josh Hawley, John Hoeven, Mike Crapo, Ashley 
           B. Moody, Marsha Blackburn.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the mandatory quorum 
call under rule XXII has been waived.
  The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the 
nomination of William Long, of Missouri, to be Commissioner of Internal 
Revenue for the remainder of the term expiring November 12, 2027, shall 
be brought to a close?
  The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk called the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Georgia (Mr. Ossoff) is 
necessarily absent.
  The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 53, nays 46, as follows:

                      [Rollcall Vote No. 304 Ex.]

                                YEAS--53

     Banks
     Barrasso
     Blackburn
     Boozman
     Britt
     Budd
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Collins
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Cramer
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Curtis
     Daines
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hagerty
     Hawley
     Hoeven
     Husted
     Hyde-Smith
     Johnson
     Justice
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     Lummis
     Marshall
     McConnell
     McCormick
     Moody
     Moran
     Moreno
     Mullin
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Ricketts
     Risch
     Rounds
     Schmitt
     Scott (FL)
     Scott (SC)
     Sheehy
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Tuberville
     Wicker
     Young

                                NAYS--46

     Alsobrooks
     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Blunt Rochester
     Booker
     Cantwell
     Coons
     Cortez Masto
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Fetterman
     Gallego
     Gillibrand
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Hickenlooper
     Hirono
     Kaine
     Kelly
     Kim
     King
     Klobuchar
     Lujan
     Markey
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Padilla
     Peters
     Reed
     Rosen
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schiff
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Slotkin
     Smith
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warnock
     Warren
     Welch
     Whitehouse
     Wyden

                             NOT VOTING--1

       
     Ossoff
       
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ricketts). The yeas are 53, the nays are 
46, and the motion is agreed to.
  The motion was agreed to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.


 Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act

  Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I rise today to talk about the GENIUS Act 
and the threat it poses to our financial system, our national security, 
and our democracy.
  Now, at this moment, I expected to be on the floor urging the Senate 
to adopt a series of amendments filed by both Democrats and 
Republicans, amendments that would fix the core problems with this 
bill.
  For weeks, Leader Thune promised that Senators would have a chance to 
vote on amendments on the stablecoin bill. Today, he broke that 
promise. This bill goes forward without a single chance for a single 
Senator to offer a single amendment.
  Even changes that have widespread, bipartisan support are left aside 
as Leader Thune decides just to strong-arm the bill on through the 
Senate.
  Now, before I outline the specific dangers posed by this bill, it is 
worth taking a step back to ask a simple question: Why is the crypto 
industry so vigorously lobbying for a bill that proponents claim will 
bring much needed regulation to the market?
  Simon Johnson, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Brooksley Born,

[[Page S3330]]

the former Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, answered 
this question in a recent op-ed by reminding us that we have seen this 
movie before.
  Back in the late 1990s, derivatives were a relatively niche market, 
but a new type of product called an over-the-counter derivative had 
just been developed.
  Most investors didn't really understand what they were or what they 
did, but the derivatives industry came knocking, begging for so-called 
regulation. Congress was ready to oblige. In 2000, Congress passed the 
Commodities Future Modernization Act, and President Bill Clinton signed 
it into law.
  Proponents of the bill claimed that the new law would provide legal 
clarity, promote innovation, reduce risks, protect consumers, and 
advance U.S. competitiveness. After all, people said, surely some kind 
of regulatory framework was better than nothing at all.
  But the bill established a weak set of rules loaded with loopholes--
just as the industry wanted. Sound familiar?
  The result was a disaster. Derivatives moved from the edge of the 
financial system to the center of it. After all, with regulation, these 
derivatives now seemed to have the implicit blessing of the U.S. 
Government, and buying, selling, and designing derivatives became a 
more mainstream activity on Wall Street. In less than 8 years, the 
market for over-the-counter derivatives grew sevenfold and embedded 
itself into the core financial system.
  By simultaneously boosting the derivatives industry and lightly 
regulating it, the bill Congress had passed helped set the stage for 
the 2008 financial crash. After the meltdown, Congress came back and 
cleaned up the mess in Dodd-Frank, but that was long after hundreds of 
billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts had been handed to Wall 
Street, while 10 million families had lost their homes and millions 
more had lost their jobs.
  Mr. Johnson's Nobel Prize is an impressive credential, and his 
warning should carry great weight. But we should also pay special 
attention to the thoughts of his coauthor Brooksley Born. She was one 
of the few people who saw the 2008 train wreck coming and opposed the 
derivatives bill at the time, and now she is ringing the alarm again.
  The parallels to the Commodity Futures Modernization Act are 
striking. Industry is the driving force behind the GENIUS Act. 
Proponents argue the GENIUS Act will provide legal clarity, promote 
innovation, reduce risks, protect consumers and advance U.S. 
competitiveness in a new financial market.
  Passage of the GENIUS Act is expected to significantly grow the 
market from $200 billion now to an estimated $2 trillion in a short 
time. And the GENIUS Act is riddled with loopholes and contains weak 
safeguards for consumers, national security, and financial stability.
  Yes, it all sounds very similar. But there is one big difference 
between the GENIUS Act and the CFMA: President Clinton did not own a 
derivatives company. President Trump does own a stablecoin company.
  Through his crypto business, President Trump has created an efficient 
means to trade Presidential favors--like tariff exemptions, pardons, 
and government appointments--for hundreds of millions, perhaps 
billions, of dollars from foreign governments, from billionaires, and 
from large corporations. This is the single greatest corruption scandal 
in American history, and by passing the GENIUS Act, the Senate is about 
to not only bless this corruption but to actively facilitate its 
expansion.
  The New York Times ran a front page essay this week by Ben Rhodes, 
President Obama's former Deputy National Security Advisor, on Trump's 
corruption. Rhodes interviewed Sandor Lederer, who heads a Hungarian 
anti-corruption organization and has witnessed the disintegration of 
Hungary's democracy under Viktor Orban. Lederer warned that ``the 
pressure corruption puts on a political system [is like] a river 
bearing down on a dam. Once the dam breaks, you're washed downriver by 
currents you can't control. If you try to rebuild the dam, it's too 
late.''
  Instead of fortifying the dam, the Senate is now hacking away at it. 
In April, President Trump's crypto company, World Liberty Financial, 
launched its own stablecoin, called USD1. That stablecoin is already 
the fifth largest stablecoin in the world, and foreign investors have 
already begun to exploit this avenue for corruption.
  A UAE state-backed investment firm used Trump's USD1 to finance a $2 
billion investment in a crypto exchange whose owner is reportedly 
lobbying President Trump for a pardon, essentially giving Trump a cut 
of this $2 billion deal. This is the model: Deposit your money in the 
``Bank of Trump'' and use his stablecoin to make payments. He earns 
money by investing those deposits in other assets, like a bank, and 
also earns money on every transaction that occurs whenever the 
stablecoin is used as a means of payment.
  Even more publicized than his stablecoin, Trump launched a meme coin, 
another type of crypto asset. The coin was issued shortly before 
Trump's inauguration, and it initially soared in value. When people 
lost interest and the value of the coin began to sag, Trump launched a 
new scheme to make money.
  A few weeks ago, he hosted a dinner for the top holders of his meme 
coin, which, again, juiced the price and increased trade and volume. 
The meme coin has netted more than $320 million in transactions fees 
alone and has inflated Trump's net worth on paper by billions of 
dollars.
  And the favors for people who bought millions of dollars of Trump's 
coins have just begun. For example, one of those top holders at the 
dinner was crypto executive Justin Sun, who recently had his SEC 
lawsuit quietly dropped. Another was an investor with close ties to the 
Chinese Communist Party.
  There is nothing in the GENIUS Act to stop this corruption. In fact, 
the Senate bill would accelerate the corruption. The bill would expand 
the reach of USD1 and grow its size. It would make Trump the regulator 
of his own financial company, and, importantly, the regulator of his 
competitors. Senator Merkley is leading an amendment to fix this--an 
amendment that Leader Thune has blocked.
  There are other serious problems with the GENIUS Act--problems that 
Democrats and Republicans have amendments to fix. The bill permits Big 
Tech companies and other conglomerates to issue their own private 
currencies and take control over the money supply. It includes a 
special carve out that makes it even easier for private companies like 
X to issue a stablecoin.
  Musk has made it clear that, in a few years, he wants his new X Money 
payment platform to be ``half of the global financial system.'' Senator 
Hawley and Senator Blumenthal have an amendment to fix that. Leader 
Thune has blocked that amendment.
  Community banks have warned us that by creating a parallel, lightly 
regulated banking system, the stablecoin market will drain deposits 
from our local communities. There will be less funding available for 
small businesses and households all across our country. Senator 
Hickenlooper has an amendment to fix that. Leader Thune has blocked 
that amendment.
  The bill would also mean easier access to money for terrorists and 
cartels. Even today, the crypto industry's own analysts are calling 
stablecoins ``the new kingpin of illicit crypto activity.'' According 
to Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm, stablecoins account for 
more than 60 percent of all illicit crypto transactions. Unfortunately, 
the GENIUS Act massively expands the marketplace for stablecoins, while 
failing to address the basic national security risks posed by them.
  It also includes glaring loopholes that would allow Tether, a 
notorious foreign stablecoin issuer now based in El Salvador, access to 
U.S. markets. Just this week--just this week--prosecutors charged a 
Russian national in New York for using Tether to help Russians evade 
U.S. sanctions. Senators Schumer, Reed, Shaheen, and Blunt Rochester 
have amendments to fix those problems. Leader Thune has blocked those 
amendments.
  The bill also increases the likelihood that consumers will get ripped 
off and scammed in financial transactions involving stablecoins. It 
jeopardizes the CFPB oversight and the suite of consumer protections 
that people enjoy

[[Page S3331]]

when they are using their Venmo app or an ordinary bank account. If you 
get cheated using a stablecoin, you may just be out of luck.
  The vast majority of stablecoin issuers won't even be required to 
undergo financial audits to make sure that they aren't committing 
fraud. Senators Durbin and Warnock have an amendment to fix this. 
Senator Thune has blocked that amendment.
  And, finally, the GENIUS Act lacks the basic safeguards necessary to 
ensure that stablecoins don't blow up our entire financial system. The 
bill permits stablecoin issuers to invest in risky assets and allows 
them to engage in risky, nonstablecoin activities, like private credit 
or derivatives trading. At the same time, the bill constrains 
regulators' ability to apply capital and liquidity safeguards to limit 
the chances of stablecoin failures. Again, we have amendments to fix 
this. And, again, Leader Thune has blocked those amendments.
  Over the past few months, Democrats seem to have forgotten that we 
actually have some power. This is an opportunity to use that power. 
Democrats can withhold their approval of this bill today and say that 
the bill will not go forward unless we have the opportunity to vote on 
some amendments, precisely as Leader Thune promised we could do.
  Democrats should show a little spine and insist on amendments as the 
price for helping advance this bill. We don't have to speculate on what 
could go wrong if this bill advances without changes. We have already 
seen it. The next time Trump is cut into a corrupt deal by a foreign 
government using his stablecoin or the next time North Korea uses 
stablecoins to add to its nuclear arsenal or the next time a person 
falls victim to a stablecoin scam or the next time the financial system 
is stressed by a stablecoin run, it is likely that the resulting harm 
will be traced right back to the inadequacies of the GENIUS Act.
  I urge my colleagues to vote no on this bill.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.