TWO WEEKS LEFT ON CLARITY — NEW SENATE DRAFT MERGES COMMITTEE TEXTS AND ADDS AN ETHICS CARVE-OUT. DEMOCRATS REJECT IT AS TOOTHLESS. MOTION-TO-PROCEED WATCH MON/TUE. DEAL BY JUL 30 OR DEAD BY AUG 7 RECESS.

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act got a new draft that merges Senate Banking and Agriculture Committee texts and adds an ethics provision for the first time. That provision gives the sitting president a year to divest crypto holdings or set up a blind trust, directs DOJ enforcement, sunsets when the next administration is inaugurated, and preserves the name-image-likeness clause that lets existing Trump tokens keep operating. Democrats reject the whole construction as toothless — DOJ won’t enforce against Trump under Trump, the sunset kills retroactive action, and the NIL clause insulates the tokens Trump made $1.4 billion on last year. Senator Warren says the bill should be “dead on arrival.” Lummis says negotiations continue. The mechanical timeline: motion-to-proceed watch Monday or Tuesday of this week. If filed by Wednesday, that clears runway for cloture votes the final week of August 3. For any of that to work, one industry source told CoinDesk, lawmakers need an ethics agreement by Thursday July 30. Senate leaves for recess August 7. If the bill doesn’t clear the floor before then, it dies for the summer and lives to be re-fought in September — alongside election-year pressure on Democrats to run the “$1.4 billion” number in the midterms. The Fundamentalist reads this as the regime layer negotiating with itself. Bitcoin doesn’t need Clarity to function. But the wrapper class and the exchange class do, and the fight tells us which side of the operator regime the U.S. is going to build.