CLARITY Act Drops to 60% Passage Odds as Senate Calendar Tightens Before August Recess

Published by James Harris on June 9, 2026June 9, 2026

The CLARITY Act landed on the Senate Legislative Calendar this week, but Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn just cut his odds of the bill becoming law this year from 75% to 60%, and the reasoning is more mechanical than political.

The core problem is time, not opposition. Congress is expected to break for August recess in late July, and the bill still needs a floor vote, potential amendments, reconciliation between the Senate’s version and the Agriculture Committee’s competing draft, and House sign-off on any changes. That is a lot of procedural runway to cover in roughly six weeks. The FISA reauthorization vote failing last week made the calendar tighter, not because it’s related to crypto, but because it consumed floor time that could have been allocated elsewhere. This mirrors what happened to the stablecoin legislation in 2022 and again in 2024, when bills cleared committee with apparent momentum only to stall against a crowded Senate floor schedule that prioritized appropriations and defense.

A 60% probability from Galaxy is still a majority, but it’s not the near-certainty that post-markup optimism suggested.

The White House meeting with law enforcement groups Wednesday adds a different kind of friction. The specific concern is that developer protections derived from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, embedded in the CLARITY Act, could weaken the government’s ability to pursue money laundering cases. That is a substantive objection from agencies with institutional weight in any administration, and it tends to produce either carve-outs that narrow the bill’s original scope or delays while negotiators try to satisfy both sides. Senator Lummis has publicly acknowledged the ethics and illicit finance provisions are still being negotiated, which means the text is not fully settled even as it approaches a floor vote.

For projects and firms waiting on the CLARITY Act to define whether their tokens are commodities or securities, a slip into 2027 is not trivial. It extends the period where enforcement discretion, rather than statute, governs the market, and it keeps the SEC’s current interpretive posture in place longer than the industry anticipated when the post-2024 regulatory environment started shifting.

The next concrete signal will come from Senate Majority Leader scheduling decisions over the next two to three weeks. If floor time isn’t allocated before the July recess window closes, the bill either waits for a September return or gets absorbed into a lame-duck scramble at year’s end, where its odds drop considerably further.