Breaking News: Stick A Fork In The CLARITY Act -- It's Done. Expect a similar fate for the bogus SEC crypto rule that SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has proposed. Under a false flag of "fostering innovation," Atkins is attempting to usurp Congressional authority to market a Ponzi scheme, deploying the deep state to decree what Congress has specifically declined to do.
N.B. I already wrote the brief that will take down this absurd Atkins crypto-deregulatory morass. It's Free. Cut. Paste. File. Win.
johnreedstark.com/wp-content…
And stay tuned for the next salvo when a surprise co-author and I file our blockbuster comment letter, which will make it clear that the Atkins Crypto-Deregulatory charade will fail five times over because it:
1️⃣ Exceeds the SEC’s exemptive authority under Securities Act Section 28 and Exchange Act Section 36, statutes now read de novo because Chevron is dead;
2️⃣ Rests on findings the record cannot support and the SEC’s own decade of litigated positions squarely contradicts;
3️⃣ Disregards the reliance interests that record created;
4️⃣ Cannot be sustained by any honest economic analysis; and
5️⃣ Arrogates to the SEC a decision of vast economic and political significance that belongs to Congress, which considered the CLARITY Act for over a year and declined to enact, precisely the regime the Atkins Proposal would decree.
The fifth argument is my favorite and perhaps the most obvious and compelling. Here’s why:
The CLARITY Act’s tortured journey is not, as Atkins will undoubtedly claim, irrelevant legislative noise. It is the single most probative fact in the case: living, docketed, roll-call-voted proof that the crypto market-structure question belongs to Congress. The rule is an attempt to disappear and moot the U.S. Senate.
And now the part that should make the Trump White House squirm: the deepest irony of this spectacle is that the SEC’s crypto end run is precisely the species of bureaucratic lawmaking this administration was elected condemning and has spent its tenure formally denouncing. This is the administration that celebrated Loper Bright as the emancipation of the citizenry from unelected bureaucrats.
This is the administration whose entire administrative-law philosophy is that policy of national consequence must be made by elected representatives, not conjured by agencies from elastic readings of old statutes. Every word of that philosophy is a brief against Atkins’s upcoming spectacle.
You cannot spend four years preaching that unelected bureaucrats have no business legislating and then legislate Big Crypto’s wish list via three unelected Republican SEC Commissioners and a comment file.
The Stark Reality: Defeating the CLARITY Act was a mammoth defeat for the cryptoverse and the first big legislative loss for the Trump Administration. Perhaps Big Crypto, which is spending, and has spent, hundreds of millions of dollars to buy Congress and the White House, ain't so Big after all.
wsj.com/politics/policy/land…