The panel voted 12-11 along party lines to advance its portion of the market structure legislation, which aims to clearly divide oversight of crypto markets between two financial regulators.
The vote marks a major step forward for the bill in the Senate, where Republicans and crypto-friendly Democrats have been negotiating for more than six months. But the lack of bipartisan support underscores the long and likely bumpy road ahead for the legislation.
"While the conversations were cordial and substantive, what we found is that in some issues, there were fundamental policy disagreements," Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) said at Thursday's markup.
"In a democracy, that's OK," he continued. "After months of work, we have made significant progress, really significant progress, working together. Now it's time to move this process forward."
Boozman and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees digital assets, initially released a bipartisan market structure draft in November, although the text left several key issues unresolved.
This distinguished the panel from the Senate Banking Committee, where Republicans released a draft last July and have yet to secure support from crypto-friendly Democrats.
The Senate Agriculture Committee shares jurisdiction over the crypto bill with the Senate Banking Committee, as they respectively oversee the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — the two regulators at issue in the bill.
Despite early bipartisan agreement, Boozman released a new draft ahead of Thursday's markup that lacked Democratic support.
"I was excited," Booker said Thursday, adding, "But then I come back to Washington and start the year with the news that my Republican colleagues were walking away from the bipartisan process."
"To be clear, the product before us today is not the bipartisan draft that we were working on," he continued. "It was negotiated with two parties at the table, but it isn't in accord with the principles we laid out in November in a bipartisan way. However, despite this, I still deeply believe in the work that we've done."
Check out the full report at TheHill.com.
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