The Senate Banking Committee will debate amendments before ultimately voting on the market structure legislation on Thursday.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who said she was a Bitcoin champion even before entering the Senate, thanked a number of lawmakers for their efforts on the bill. She framed the bill as being a bipartisan effort, giving shoutouts to Senators Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Angela Alsobrook as well as Republican Senators Bernie Moreno, Thom Tillis and John Kennedy.
"This is the hardest piece of legislation I've ever worked on," she said, reiterating a claim she made last year. "This is a very new commodity and security, and it takes time to craft something to address the innovation that has been brought about through blockchain technology and that's why it's taken such a bipartisan effort, heavy lift, lots of negotiations, involvement from those people who are in the industry."
She argued the bill is pro-consumer, addresses law enforcement concerns and otherwise meets the concerns Warren laid out earlier.
"It provides a woman who's trying to get out of a battered, miserable marriage the opportunity to walk away with her money in her head," she said. "It provides people who are being tortured in foreign countries the opportunity to walk away from that country with their money in their head, because Bitcoin can be memorized."
