Leading House Dem Will Block Crypto Market Structure Bill Hearing

The leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Maxine Waters, will block efforts to hold a joint hearing between her committee and the House Agriculture Committee on Monday's newly unveiled market structure discussion draft bill.

Under House rules, all participants in a joint hearing need to agree to proceed. Waters will object to the joint hearing and prevent it from proceeding as planned, a Democratic staffer told CoinDesk, pointing to U.S. President Donald Trump's recent and increasing engagement with crypto.

The Financial Services and Agriculture Committees announced they would host a joint hearing on market structure issues last week, and unveiled the first text addressing the issue — including how the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission would oversee crypto — earlier Monday.

"Ranking Member Maxine Waters has been incredibly vocal about Trump’s crypto crimes and has pushed Republicans to investigate these crimes," the staffer said. "Ahead of tomorrow’s hearing, Ranking Member Waters gave Chairman Hill a phone call and told him she would not approve this hearing unless Republicans included provisions in their legislation to block Trump from further profiting from crypto off the backs of investors."

Politico first reported that Waters would object to the joint hearing.

In recent days, Trump announced he would host a dinner for the 220 parties holding the most TRUMP memecoins. One of his children, Eric Trump, announced just last week that Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX would use World Liberty Financial's USD1 stablecoin to close its investment in crypto exchange Binance. Freight Technologies, a publicly traded logistics firm, also said last week that it would buy $20 million in TRUMP coins with the explicit purpose of trying to influence trade policy.

The Democratic staffer told CoinDesk that Waters and other Democrats on the Financial Services Committee would hold their own hearing investigating Trump's different crypto ties, which would include World Liberty Financial.

A spokesperson for the Financial Services Committee's chair, French Hill, said in a statement that, "Since the last Congress, we’ve had productive bipartisan, bicameral discussions on market structure legislation. We encourage the Ranking Member to attend tomorrow’s hearing to express her views and reconsider her decision to object."