“Today, I am going to embrace the topic that has caused a good deal of consternation in this Congress, a topic that many people would say it would be injudicious to embrace, because of the consequences,” Green said in a speech on the House floor Thursday. “Why is the crypto industry spending mega millions of dollars to control Congress?”
Most Democrats have spent the months since the 2024 election aiming to avoid angering the crypto industry, especially after it made an example out of former Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) by spending millions of dollars on ads attacking them before they lost their races. But recent Democratic primaries may have sown the seeds of an eventual Democratic backlash.
“What they’re doing in trying to affect and buy an election by coming in and spending $10 million at the last minute — all it did was turn voters against them,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) told HuffPost. “All it did was make me think twice about what they’re willing to do to further the industry and reduce the guardrails around them. And so if anything, they hurt their cause with what they did in Chicago, in Illinois.”
“This season, we’re seeing a lot more really explicit condemnation of the super PAC spending from crypto as well as from AI,” White said, pointing to statements from Democratic candidates Juliana Stratton and La Shawn Ford in Illinois. “I think it’s probably the beginning of a trend, and one that might be resonating with voters, because we saw a fairly strong rejection of the crypto industry’s favorite candidates in Illinois, with limited exceptions.”
“You can only take so many incoming attacks, and sometimes you need to be smart about picking your enemies,” said one progressive campaign strategist who has advised his clients to avoid angering the industry and requested anonymity to speak frankly about strategy. “Say what you will about the crypto industry, they have not been helping to run cover for a genocide for the past three years.”
There has also been some confusion about how the crypto industry is picking its targets. Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, a Democrat who won on Tuesday and is now on a glide path to Congress, had an “A” grade on Stand With Crypto’s website, purportedly based on his answers to their questionnaire. But the Warren-endorsed progressive said he would not be an ally to the industry in Congress.
“I view financial regulation with both traditional financial institutions and with these new, dangerous cryptocurrencies as critical to the nation’s well-being,” he said in an interview with HuffPost before the election. “I can’t speak to their grading process, but I can say they’re not going to have a friend should I be elected.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have kept quiet about what’s known as the “market structure” legislation. It seems unlikely that as many Senate Democrats would be willing to vote for the bigger bill as voted for the stablecoin bill, which was dogged by complaints of President Donald Trump’s brazen use of digital assets to enrich his family — a corrupt spectacle that’s only become more obvious.
“This is one F that I’m going to talk about for the rest of my life, because I think that what I’ve been doing is appropriate,” Green said. “But apparently, the crypto industry doesn’t want any regulation at all, or if they have some, as little as possible, or regulation that they believe to be appropriate, without input from people like me in Congress.”