Liberal Silicon Valley entrepreneurs sent Washington a clear message in last year’s presidential campaign when they abandoned Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: the left’s hostility toward innovation has gone too far. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–MA) has sent an equally clear message back to the entrepreneurs, and it’s not a friendly one.
Fortunately, a rare bipartisan consensus has emerged in Congress around the need for clear crypto regulation to protect markets from the kind of agenda-driven lawfare that pushed so many moderate Democrats into the arms of Donald Trump. Yet Warren is working single-handedly to torpedo this bipartisanship.
To see why regulatory clarity is needed, recall the recent excesses of Gary Gensler, the ambitious and widely disliked chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Biden. Instead of using the standard rulemaking process, Gensler weaponized enforcement actions against entrepreneurs across the financial sector.
What he couldn’t achieve through legally required procedures, he tried to impose through coercive lawsuits. Gensler’s favorite targets were developers of blockchain technology — the foundation of the “crypto” economy.
Exploiting ambiguities in existing law, Gensler claimed that Americans buying or selling blockchain-based code were illicitly trading unregistered “securities.” Courts repeatedly rejected his legal theory — one he had opposed himself when serving as President Barack Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission chairman — but the damage was done. Gensler’s lawfare campaign chilled innovation, destabilized markets, and triggered a wave of anti-competitive consolidation.
It could have been worse. Had Gensler persuaded U.S. attorneys to follow his lead, crypto developers might have faced criminal charges rather than civil suits.
This year, Congress moved to prevent such abuse from recurring. In a rare show of bipartisanship, the House passed the CLARITY Act, which clearly defines what constitutes a crypto security and limits the SEC’s enforcement discretion. The bill won unanimous Republican support — and votes from 78 Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and social-media firebrand Jared Moskowitz.
The Senate Banking Committee is now crafting its own version, similar in purpose and scope. Chairman Tim Scott (R–SC) has emphasized that the Senate’s bill, too, should be bipartisan and open to Democratic input. Ending lawfare, after all, should not be a partisan issue.
If a bill were brought to the floor, it would likely pass with a healthy majority — enough to overcome a filibuster. Which explains why Senator Warren is doing everything she can to stop it from reaching a vote.
As the committee’s ranking Democrat, Warren has effectively frozen bipartisan cooperation. She’s blocked Democratic staff from even basic collaboration with their Republican counterparts, preventing Scott’s team from drafting a genuinely bipartisan proposal. Her obstruction isn’t nuanced — it’s as blatant as it is undemocratic.
Why is Warren doing this? Likely because she has made no secret of her desire for a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once warned, “CBDCs are the ultimate mechanisms for social surveillance and control.” Unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies, a CBDC would record every citizen’s transactions on a government ledger, giving bureaucrats the power to track, freeze, or manipulate individuals’ finances at will.
The CLARITY Act would block that ambition. A robust, independent crypto market would ensure any government-issued digital currency would compete against private, censorship-resistant alternatives. But if Biden-Gensler style lawfare were to once again be used to suppress independent crypto, the government’s path to a CBDC monopoly would become much easier.
Earlier this year, the House passed a bipartisan CBDC ban. Knowing she lacks the numbers to stop this effort, too, Warren is relying on procedural obstruction to deny the Senate — and the American people — a fair vote on the CLARITY Act.
It’s a familiar tactic from a politician whose career has long relied on narrative manipulation: the same Elizabeth Warren who misrepresented her ethnicity to Harvard and fabricated a story about being fired for being pregnant now hopes to quietly smother legislation that would restore fairness and transparency to financial regulation.
Whether she succeeds depends on Chairman Scott and his Democratic colleagues. If they stand up to Warren’s obstruction and insist on open debate, the U.S. can secure a future of financial freedom, innovation, and competition. If they do not, the message will be clear: unelected regulators have learned how to use lawfare to force Americans into a government-controlled financial system — and they won’t hesitate to use it again.
