The American system of government has worked pretty well. The US Constitution has held up and the growth of American economic power in the world over the last two hundred years ranks with the greatest in recorded history.
So, the this begs the question, “How did this happen with some of the most backward rules in the federal government that are presided over by what appears to be people with their heads stuck up their own asses?”
Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) was able to kill the recent crytpo compromise in the infrastructure bill with a 50 billion-dollar defense bill amendment, the below came from a Forbes article on the subject:
Today in the Senate, Senator Toomey introduced a process known as Unanimous Consent, which required zero objections to pass a motion. Although support for the compromise agreement was widespread, it failed on the objection of Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), who objected with the request of including a $50 billion defense amendment to the bill.
That is right, one man was able to kill a bi-partisan and popular idea by requesting money for something unrelated. Exactly how a representative republic should work, right?
What was great about the work to strip the language from the bill was that the crypto crippling legislation was a last-minute addition buried in thousands of pages of text. It was supposed to sneak into the bill and happen under the radar. Instead, there was a huge outrage over it and the new language happened quickly and should have fixed it, or at least watered it down.
Not so, one man (who was in his late seventies when Bitcoin came on the scene) stopped it.
Or did he. My thought is that this was a lot show for the masses where Washington got to look like they cared and understood, but in the end, they knew they could squash it. They were able to get an 87 year-old senator from Alabama to kill it on his way out the door and to a retirement home of his choosing. Do you really think this would have happened if the powers that be in the senate didn’t want it too? It was just a scripted move to try and make the senate look like they were listening and then just go ahead and do what they planned all along.
You can read more about the bill in my previous articles or any of the thousand others out there. My point in this article is that there appears to be an upside from all this. That is that crypto is rallying. We are seeing what decentralized actually means. That the idea behind the movement is working right now and it is acting independently of traditional government.
Will it last? Will Washington ramp up its efforts? Will the people in power try to legislate crypto out of existence? Will governments simply create their own hybrid currency to compete? Once again, I don’t know, but I am excited to see the crypto market rebounding in the face of Washington rattling their sabers. It is a great sign.
(One last point, it was reported that over 40,000 calls were made to senators to stop the crypto legislation from going through. That is 40,000 calls on a 28 billion line in a 1.2 trillion-dollar bill. The people spoke up and it didn’t matter. They couldn’t even stop .02 percent of a bill. Take from this what you will. At this point, does it matter who you elect or how involved you are in the federal government?)