CLARITY'S ETHICS BAN STOPS AT THE SPOUSE — THE BLIND TRUST STILL ISSUES

Two senators spent September 14 arguing in public about whose family the CLARITY Act reaches. Neither of them read the definition out loud, so here it is.

Division C is the ethics part. Section 13151(1) says a covered individual is three things: a public official or employee, a President or Vice President or member of Congress who has been certified but not yet sworn in, and the spouse of either one. That is the complete list. The word family does not appear anywhere in the bill. The word child appears twice, and both times it is inside a definition of criminal activity.

A grown son or daughter is not covered. Not in this administration, not in the last one. Whatever you think of a president’s children selling coins, this section does not reach them.

Two more things sit in the same place. The ban runs only during the term of service and ends when the term does. And section 13152(i) says that once an asset is placed in a qualified blind trust, the trustee issuing or sponsoring a digital asset is expressly not attributable to the official who put it there.

Senator Moreno calls this the strictest ethics language in the history of Congress. Senator Van Hollen calls it a loophole that protects one family. It is one section. It names the President for the first time, and it stops at a spouse. Both men are describing the same paragraph and both of them are half right.

At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $79,056 at 4:06 PM ET on Crypto.com.