THEY REWROTE THE ETHICS TITLE — THE CHILDREN STAYED OUT

Republicans rewrote the CLARITY ethics title on September 14 and called it their last, best and final offer. The rewrite is real and it tightens in several directions at once.

Covered officials and their spouses must now divest substantial crypto holdings or move them into a qualified blind trust. State attorneys general get a role enforcing it, which the White House had resisted. The package as a whole carries 126 substantive changes Senate Democrats asked for, a number the sponsors put on their own document before Senator Lummis started rounding it down to “over 120” in public.

Coverage still stops at the official and the spouse.

This desk read that section before the rewrite. A covered individual is a public official or employee, a certified President, Vice President or Member of Congress, and the spouse of either. The word “family” does not appear in the bill. “Child” appears twice, both times inside definitions of illicit use, neither time in the ethics title.

The rewrite did not move that line. Children and dependents remain outside a ban that the same officials’ existing federal disclosure rules already reach past.

There is a version of this that is not a loophole. Drawing the line at the household a person shares is a defensible place to draw it, and going further raises real questions about adult children who have their own lives. Nobody has made that argument. The line simply stayed where it was while six other things moved.

Whatever else changed on Sunday night, the thing this desk flagged before any of it is the thing that did not.