President Donald Trump's personal involvement in crypto has inspired a vigorous Democratic response in the Senate, including a new bill from Senator Chris Murphy to ban presidents and their families from dabbling in memecoins or issuing other financial assets.
As the Connecticut lawmaker was introducing the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement (MEME) Act overnight, fellow Democrat Elizabeth Warren was fresh from a Senate floor speech on Monday evening in which she outlined what would get senators from her party to return to the table on stablecoin legislation. In just a few short days, Democrats have mounted a resistance to the U.S. digital assets industry's Washington momentum.
Murphy's effort — matched in the House of Representatives by a bill from Representative Sam Liccardo, a California Democrat — is targeting the president's $TRUMP memecoin and the controversial ways in which he and his family seem to be benefiting financially from its launch just before his inauguration. The senator argued that there's no way to know who is buying the coin and enriching Trump. Last week, Eric Trump, one of the president's children, announced that an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm would use Trump-backed World Liberty Financial's stablecoin to help it close out a $2 billion investment in global crypto exchange Binance.
"The Trump meme coin is the single most corrupt act ever committed by a president," Murphy said in a statement on Tuesday. "Donald Trump is essentially posting his Venmo for any billionaire CEO or foreign oligarch to cash in some favors by secretly sending him millions of dollars."
His legislation has a wider range than just the president and his memecoin, seeking to ban the president, vice president, members of Congress, senior administration officials and any of their families from issuing, sponsoring or endorsing any financial asset — including securities, futures, commodities and digital assets. The Democrat's bill is unlikely to go anywhere under a Republican majority, but it represents a clear party response to Trump's activities.
White House spokespeople didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Elsewhere in the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Warren — a longtime critic of the crypto industry — ran through the list of changes that can be made to stablecoin legislation to make it more palatable to Democrats. On the Senate floor, she said the stablecoins bills that had so far been advancing through the Senate and House committees with bipartisan support, should include more controls on money laundering and other illicit use, a ban on big tech firms as issuers and limits on government officials issuing stablecoins to "line their own pockets."
The Trump family is heavily involved in World Liberty Financial, a company that has issued its own stablecoin.
“We cannot bless Trump’s corruption,” Warren said, but she contended that the stablecoin regulations can move forward with some consumer-friendly compromises.
After the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act easily cleared the Senate Banking Committee on which Warren is the ranking Democrat, many of her colleagues balked at developments in Trump's crypto business, including a dinner the president planned to host for top memecoin holders and the foreign use of WLFI's stablecoins. Nine Democrats objected in a statement that said they couldn't support the existing stablecoin bill under these conditions.
Read More: Dems Stall Stablecoin Bill, Jeopardizing More Important Crypto Regulation Bill