As part of Anti-Crypto Corruption Week, House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-CA) authored an opinion piece for MSNBC sounding the alarm on Republican efforts to advance dangerous crypto legislation this week that risks repeating financial crises of the past. As Waters highlights in the op-ed, these bills would not only weaken critical consumer and investor protections but also legalize and legitimize President Donald Trump’s crypto corruption and abuse of power, which has already made him $1.2 billion richer.

Ranking Member Waters urges her colleagues to reject these bills.

Read a few excerpts below:

“This week, the House will consider several crypto bills, including the so-called CLARITY Act and the GENIUS Act, which proponents claim will establish a pro-innovation regulatory framework for crypto that also safeguards consumers and investors. But the reality is that they would be passing bills written by and for the crypto industry. If either bill passes through Congress, we’ll one day look back on its enactment as a pivotal moment in time — much like we point to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. That legislation dismantled Glass-Steagall’s firewall between commercial and investment banking, allowing banks, brokers and insurers to combine into mega financial “supermarkets” — all in the name of “innovation.”

When the predatory mortgages-fueled housing bubble burst, these ‘innovators’ who amassed their wealth on the backs of vulnerable families required massive taxpayer bailouts. That is, they privatized their gains and socialized their losses. A warning from the more recent past is the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018, which weakened oversight of regional banks and exposed depositors to potential losses, as seen in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023.

... On top of that, these bills have a special, intentional wrinkle that makes them especially dangerous: They would legitimize and legalize the unprecedented crypto corruption by the president of the United States.

Donald Trump and his family are raking in piles of cash, much of it through shady crypto ventures, which have made Trump $1.2 billion richer. At the same time, the Trump administration has gutted watchdogs and silenced critics, allowing Trump to exploit the oversight gap created to enrich himself through meme coins, stablecoins and backroom deals with foreign governments. What we’re witnessing isn’t just unethical; it’s the largest fraud and abuse of power in modern history.

Trump has used the power of the presidency to pitch crypto deals abroad — engaging with questionable and dangerous foreign entities. The bills Congress will consider this week place no checks on that behavior. Indeed, they make it easier for Trump’s personal financial interests to dictate U.S. policy.

In committee, Democrats offered numerous amendments to curtail the president’s abuse of power. Republicans voted down every single one.”

Read the full op-ed HERE.

###