The House on Wednesday finally mustered the votes to adopt a rule governing floor debate on cryptocurrency bills and the fiscal 2026 Defense spending bill, overcoming a two-day impasse that had halted the legislation but at the price of action being potentially pushed into next week for some of the bills.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., emerged from three hours of meetings with lawmakers late Wednesday to say they agreed to go ahead with a vote this week on a Senate stablecoin bill that House conservative Republicans disliked.
Johnson said the House could also vote Thursday on a bill that would ban a central bank digital currency and that a third digital asset market structure measure, but he added they could both also slip to next week. He said the language of the CBDC bill would become part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Johnson said work on the Defense spending bill would also slip into next week. But the House began debating the bill after the rule was adopted.
The result of the agreement was floor adoption, 217-212, of the rule after the vote was held open for more than nine hours. But the painstaking effort to agree on a compromise scuttled what House Republicans had been saying would be “Crypto Week.”
“As long as we get it done, it doesn’t matter to me how long votes are held open. We just got to get the votes,” Johnson said.
The rule was also needed for speedy consideration of the Senate rescissions package. Tucked into the rule was a provision providing same-day authority to consider the rescissions bill as soon as it’s delivered from the Senate. The Senate was voting on amendments to that bill Wednesday.
At the root of the opposition to the rule was the view among some House Freedom Caucus members that the it didn’t allow them to amend the Senate stablecoin bill. They wanted firmer language prohibiting a central bank digital currency.
“I’m pleased that we’ll be able to get this done,” Johnson said. “The president is as well. I just spoke with him. Obviously, this is a big priority for him, and it was for us. And, so, this breaks the logjam, allows us to get our work done. And sometimes it takes longer than at other times, but it’s all part of the process. We build consensus and we got it done tonight. I’m very pleased.”
Johnson and Scalise were apparently able to salvage Wednesday’s vote after lawmakers rejected the rule 196-223 on Tuesday, prompting President Donald Trump to meet with the GOP rebels. But amid expectations that the problems were solved when the vote opened on Wednesday, an apparent agreement broke down as the hours dragged on.
Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., a member of the House Financial Services Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence Subcommittee, said in the afternoon that what appeared to be a solution announced by Scalise earlier in the day was the obstacle.
Scalise had laid out a strategy, as the vote was unfolding in early afternoon, that the House members would vote on the Senate stablecoin bill that Republican conservatives objected to because they thought it didn’t do enough to prohibit a central bank digital currency. Then they’d vote on a market structure and the anti-central bank digital currency bill, he said.
“Those two [market structure and anti-CBDC] would be merged together on their way to the Senate,” Scalise had said, adding that the plan emerged from the House Freedom Caucus talk with Trump Tuesday. “They had a meeting yesterday evening and reached that agreement with the president,” he said.
But Huizenga said combining the market structure and CBDC bills was a problem, including for House Financial Services Chairman French Hill, R-Ark.
“The merging, and I agree with Chair Hill, is problematic if we are trying to maximize a bipartisan vote out of the House,” Huizenga said.
House passage of the Senate stablecoin bill would get that measure to the president’s desk. Trump demanded last month that the House take up the bill quickly after the Senate passed the legislation. Enacting the bill, dubbed the “GENIUS Act” by its authors, would deliver a major victory for the crypto industry and bolster Trump’s goal of making the U.S. a leader in digital assets.
