Well, this bill finds your support in that committee.
And do you think it has enough support among your colleagues?
Well, first off, I suspect we'll go through an extensive amendment process
tomorrow and financial services were successful there.
The bill will pass out. We'll go through a similar process in
the Agriculture Committee because it's a split jurisdiction.
But yes, I believe it's time to bring some certainty to this process.
I will give Chairman McHenry of the Financial Services Committee and
Chairman Thompson of the Academy high marks for working really hard to get us
to this point. The number of hearings, the number of
briefings, the number of roundtables, the number of stakeholders we listened
to is really quite incredible. But this is a complex bill, and we'll
see how comfortable the members are. Will it passed unanimously?
Probably not. Will the Republicans overwhelmingly
support it? I believe so.
Will we get Democrats? I think so.
Do we have wild cards on both sides of the room in the hours and days?
Absolutely. That's the nature of this complicated
session of Congress. Yeah, well, this is Washington in 2023.
Congressman, what are you hearing, though, from your Democratic colleagues
on this matter? I think they're generally supportive.
There is some hesitation. You have to understand that a lot of it
depends on your philosophical perspective.
Most of my conservative colleagues, without regard to party affiliation,
view this potentially as where financial transactions go.
View this as a legitimate effort that it's been evolving and it needs to have
certainty and regulation to move forward.
Some of my more Liberal colleagues, I think, are a little hesitant about
creating parallel ways to move resources because they would like the government
and the traditional payment system to control everything.
But we'll work our way through that tomorrow.
But also remember, this will be a committee markup in Financial services
and AG this week. We will still have to go to the floor.
The Senate will still need to do something.
We'll still wind up with a conference committee report or a final version of a
bill that then goes to the president's desk.
So we've come a long ways. But this is just the first step to get
to the end. Congressman, what is the Democratic
compromise here, knowing that there are a large group of Democrats that don't
necessarily agree with the bill as it stands today?
I don't know that I can answer that question.
They're a handful who just philosophically don't believe that
resources should be able to pass through sources outside of the government.
If you want to tax everything, if you want to regulate everything, then you
want to keep it close to where Uncle Sam can the Federal Reserve System and
Treasury can keep a grip. If you believe that resources should
move where the economy and the markets dictate, which tends to be more of my, I
suppose, my conservative Republican colleagues than you're generally
supportive of this. But the markets, the consumer reaction
has been so far. We want to do this now.
Regulation and regulatory certainty competing in the international financial
world and safety for people making these investments, using these avenues.
That's critically important that this bill is all about.
What does this mean for the control that the CFTC has over the crypto industry
vis a vis what the FCC will be overseeing moving forward under the new
constructs of the law? Well, I've been a part of both
committees from both committees for almost three decades.
There's different perspectives of from how the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission functions from the FCC. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission
is proactive. The FCC is reactive.
FCC tends to be, at least under its present leadership, more control
oriented generally about everything. But the bottom line is this The fact
that the two chairmen are working so methodically together says that there is
a way to achieve a consensus now still have to have the Senate and we still
have to have some other folks participate with us.
But we can't continue in the Wild West format we're working in right now.
Our international competitors will lead us alive and we'll continue to have
circumstances where, you know, sometimes $1,000,000,000 at a time seems to
disappear. That's unacceptable in the format we're
working in now. Congressman, you alluded there to SEC
Chair Gary Gensler, who obviously was dealt a bit of a blow in court recently
in regard to the Ripple case and whether XRP was indeed a token.
The court ruling that it is not when sold to retail investors.
Do you think court decisions like that build momentum in Congress toward making
this delineation, deciding what the FCC ultimately has authority over?
It is stressing the urgency for Congress to react.
The courts, depending on which court it is, depending on which judge it is,
depending on the nature of the case put together.
You get a variety of results that's not just in these issues, but all issues.
It reinforces the fact we need to provide some certainty.
We'll see if we're capable of starting that process this week.
Again, I give my full committee Chairman McHenry and G.T.
Thompson much credit for getting us to this point, but it's a big boulder.
We're pushing up a tall economic and political hill.
And Congressman, final question for you. Just given your role on the Agriculture
Committee, the AG appropriations bill now seems to be the subject of debate
over culture wars. There is also several concern,
conservative colleagues, that you have that are pushing for reductions in SNAP
benefits. Congressman, what is your take on all of
that? The House of Representatives is a very
intense body. The Republican conference is a very
intense group of conservatives. We're going to have challenges in every
piece of legislation that goes across the floor.
We saw this in Indiana. We're now going to see this in the
approach process. We'll see it in the farm bill.
Remember, the House passes language. The Senate takes action.
We have to reconcile the differences in a conference committee report.
Conference committee reports require a majority of the House and the Senate.
A majority of the overall bodies. The final product may not look like
everything that originally leaves the House or the Senate, but that's okay.
It's called legislating.