Will the CLARITY Act crypto market structure bill become law in 2026?

The sponsors, Tim Scott, John Boozman and Cynthia Lummis, forced a vote on a 'last, best and final' draft released two days earlier. Pushing a vote you expect to lose is often about assigning blame before an election rather than passing a law. Lummis warned colleagues not to hand the future to someone else, which is the language of a closing argument, not of a deal about to close.

The hardest issue is one no negotiator can trade away: ethics language aimed at senior officials' crypto businesses, which reaches the President's family ventures. Democrats cannot be seen voting for a bill without it, and the White House cannot be seen accepting limits aimed at the President. Once the House changes hands, as many in the industry expect, Democrats also gain from waiting: they would have a say over any bill in 2027, while their Senate Banking leader could be a longtime crypto skeptic.

Reference class: high-profile bills whose Senate cloture effort failed before the election in the final months of a Congress and that then faced a lame-duck revival attempt. Our list: Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal (2010, enacted December 22, 2010), the DREAM Act (2010, failed again in December), the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (failed again in November) and the 2024 child tax credit and business tax bill (blocked in August, not revived). That is 1 success in 4, or 25 percent. In version 1 we also counted the Paycheck Fairness Act (2010), Keystone XL approval (2014) and the USA FREEDOM Act (2014), but their cloture failures came in the lame duck itself, so they are not revivals of a pre-election failure and we have dropped them.

Closest analogue: Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, the lone success. Where it breaks: repeal had majority support at every step and was split into a clean standalone bill that could draw a handful of Republicans. CLARITY's recorded tally was 49 to 50, though Sen. Thom Tillis switched to no only to keep the right to move to reconsider, so its real support was 50, still 10 short of 60. Three Republicans voted no on the merits, and its core dispute (ethics tied to the sitting President) cannot be split off without losing Democrats. The GENIUS Act, the 2025 stablecoin law, is the best counterexample: its first cloture vote failed, and it still became law after quick changes. But that recovery came in the spring of an off year, not in the last weeks of a Congress.

Start from the revival base rate of 25 percent (1 of 4, after dropping the three bills whose cloture failure came in the lame duck itself).

Subtract 8 points because CLARITY needs 10 more senators, while the successful analogue needed only a handful, and because its dispute cannot be severed into a cleaner bill. Subtract 6 points because even a Senate win is not enough: the House must then pass the Senate's 600-plus-page text in the same few December weeks, when appropriations, the defense bill and a possible war funding package compete for floor time.

Add 2 points for the GENIUS Act precedent: the 2025 stablecoin bill lost its first cloture vote 48 to 49 and passed 11 days later once Democrats won changes, so a failed first vote on crypto legislation is not always final. Subtract 6 points for the record since the vote: no second cloture vote scheduled, no named Democrat moving to yes, and industry attention shifting to SEC and CFTC rulemaking.

25 minus 8 minus 6 plus 2 minus 6 lands at 7 percent, band 3 to 13 percent (our calculation). In version 1 we started from 14 percent on a looser class and subtracted 6 points for falling short of a simple majority, which overstated a procedural artifact; correcting both moves us from 6 to 7. Kalshi priced 'Before Jan 1, 2027' at about 8 cents on September 26, so we are now within a point of the last market price we could confirm.