Josh Riley Votes For Trump’s Stable Genius Act

Josh Riley turned his back on working people and embraced Donald Trump by voting for the Stable Genius Act.

Why did he do it?

Leading Democrats in Congress explain, in this episode, what makes Josh Riley’s support for Donald Trump’s Stable Genius Act, deregulating cryptocurrency, such a bad idea. These Democratic voices are:

Maxine Waters, the leading Democrat on the US House Financial Services Committee

Stephen Lynch, the leading Democrat on the US House subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence

Brad Sherman, the leading Democrat on the US House subcommittee on Capital Markets

Sean Casten, Vice Democratic ranking member of the US House Financial Services Committee

Nydia Velazquez, the leading Democrat on the US House subcommittee on Small Business

Dick Durbin, Democratic US Senator from Illinois

As Senator Durbin says, the Stable Genius Act is “phony regulation.” It’s a sham, creating loopholes for cryptocurrency criminal organizations to get rich by cheating working Americans, and in the process, setting the stage for a financial crisis of a scale that will dwarf even the Great Depression.

Why would Josh Riley do it? Why would he turn his back on Democratic voters, on working people, on basic common sense and decency?

The answer is that Josh Riley lacks the moral courage to use his public office for the public good. The cryptocurrency lobby has threatened Josh Riley with the loss of his office in the next election, and Josh Riley cares so much about keeping his seat in Congress that he’s willing to betray all the people who put him in Congress in the first place.

That is the corruption of Josh Riley.

If a member of Congress allows people to influence their votes on legislation, even if you don’t accept a direct bribe, it’s corruption. In this sense, Congressman Josh Riley is guilty of corruption.

Josh Riley could have been a leader in Congress. Instead, with his support for Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency bills, Josh Riley has become just another disappoint, just another person who should have stood up to Trump, but lacked the strength of character to do so.

Now, in the wake of Josh Riley’s failure as a member of Congress, the moral weight of this moment rests on us, the voters of New York’s 19th congressional district.

The voters of the Hudson Valley, of Cortland, of Binghamton, of Ithaca need to ask themselves: Now that Josh Riley has turned his back on us, what are we willing to do about it? Will we join Josh Riley, and slink into submission under Donald Trump, or will we at long last take a stand for what we know is right?

Full Transcript Below

Welcome to Josh Riley Watch.

This is going to be another episode about cryptocurrency and Josh Riley's shocking support for cryptocurrency through his votes in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Did the people of Binghamton, Cortland, Ithaca, and the countryside stretching over to the very border with Massachusetts elect Josh Riley to Congress in order to serve the interests of cryptocurrency lobbyists? Of course not. We elected Josh Riley to stand against the fascism of Donald Trump, and instead Josh Riley is helping Donald Trump’s schemes with cryptocurrency scammers.

When I call them scammers, here's what I'm talking about: The FBI reports that for the year 2024, there were 150,000 fraud complaints related to cryptocurrency scams in the United States alone., According to Ari Redbord, who is the global head of policy at TRM Labs, only about 15% of victims of cryptocurrency scams actually report those crimes.

The FBI reports that there were $3.9 billion in criminal losses because of those cryptocurrency scams in 2024. But remember, that's just 15% of the actual total, because only 15% of the victims report those crimes. Many victims remain silent because they're humiliated or they're threatened into silence by cryptocurrency scammers.

If you take into account that only 15% of the victims are reporting these crimes, that's 26 billion in damages. That's a major drain on the U.S. Economy.

What is cryptocurrency doing for the U.S. economy? Nobody can point to a concrete, positive gain.

Yes, cryptocurrencies have gained value as speculative securities, something that you can buy, and you hope that you can sell it at a higher price later on. Still, cryptocurrencies themselves are empty of actual value. They don’t create anything. They don’t contribute to society. They don’t even work as true currencies.

Instead, cryptocurrencies caused $26 billion in damage to the U.S. economy in just one year - and that's before the deregulation of cryptocurrency that Josh Riley voted for. After deregulation, cryptocurrency crooks will be free to cause even more havoc in the economy.

In this episode, we're going to be talking about a specific bill called the Stable Genius Act. Now, you'll find this just referred to simply as the Genius Act , but that's not the true name of this legislation.

The bill is about stablecoins, and it’s called the Genius Act. Stablecoin Genius —> Stable Genius. Get it?

Lobbyists found a way to concoct an acronym with the letters G-E-N-I-U-S, so they could call the bill the “Genius Act”. They did this in tribute to Donald Trump, to flatter his pride, because during his first term in office, Donald Trump praised himself as a “very stable genius”.

If there is one sign that a person is not a stable person or a genius, it's that they refer to themselves in public as “a very stable genius”. This phrase, “stable genius”, has become an encapsulation of everything that is absurd and insane under Donald Trump.

“Stable genius” is a representative phrase of Donald Trump’s fascism. Only in a fascist state where there is a cult of personality can you have a national leader who is so outlandishly absurd, so thoroughly out of touch with the basic reality of the ways that ordinary people in that country live, that they would spend their time giving speeches declaring themselves to be a very stable genius.

It's only in a fascist state that you can have something like that, where you have this kind of shared delusion. The worst thing about this kind of fascist shared delusion is that nobody really believes it, but they know that they are just supposed to follow along with it, to act as if they believe it’s true. They repeat the absurdity, saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. President, you are a very stable genius.”

That sycophantic submission to fascism is what Congressman Josh Riley performed when he voted for the Stable Genius Act. Congressman Josh Riley, aside from all of the harmful substance of this bill, has caused harm to the nation by engaging in a symbolic submission to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump asked every member of Congress to vote for this bill. To get this bill to pass, Donald Trump had to convince even Republicans to vote yes, because the legislation is obviously dangerous. Despite that, Josh Riley made Donald Trump's job in passing this bill easier, by supporting the legislation himself.

Josh Riley is supposed to be a Democrat. Why would he help Donald Trump get harmful, fascist legislation passed into law?

Josh Riley didn’t just help Donald Trump politically when he voted for the Stable Genius Act. Riley helped Trump personally, because Donald Trump is personally profiting from cryptocurrency. Since Trump became President, in the last six months, Donald Trump has taken in de facto bribes of $1.2 billion.

A typical American, might see a total of maybe half of a million dollars in their entire lifetimes. They might never see that much money. In just six months, however Donald Trump has taken bribes of $1.2 billion. That’s how far apart Donald Trump is from the lives of working Americans.

Why, then, is Josh Riley choosing to side with Donald Trump, and with cryptocurrency corruption, instead of with working Americans?

Cryptocurrency is the lifeblood of fascism in the United States of America. Don't just take my word for it that the Stable Genius Act is dangerous, though.

In this episode we are going to listen to Democratic members of Congress , members of Josh Riley's own political party, warning about the dangers of the Stable Genius Act.

Let's start out with U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, leading Democrat of the House Finance Committee. Here's what she had to say about the stable Genius Act:

“Two weeks ago, Republicans boasted about how they would provide billionaires with tax cuts they don't need by stripping healthcare from 17 million Americans, shattering hospitals across the country and starving $12 million families, including millions of children.

These billionaires are the same individuals who proudly gave millions of dollars to President Trump's campaign, literally buying votes during the last election, and even sponsored a Stalinist military parade to celebrate the President's birthday. No one should be surprised that the same Republicans' next order of business is to validate , legitimize, and endorse the Trump family's corruption and efforts to sell the White House to the highest bidder.

SD 1582, the so called Genius Act, establishes a woefully deficient federal framework for dollar denominated payment stablecoins in the United States. Stablecoins are a form of digitized private money. Unlike other types of crypto, these coins claim to always maintain their value, often one coin for one dollar.

Nevertheless, that promise of stability is precisely what causes stablecoins to be the subject to bank runs where the public rushes to sell their stablecoins at the first whiff of instability, making a bit of bad news into a full blown financial crisis. It was for this reason that when I was chairwoman of the committee, I sought to create a federal framework to oversee these stable coins, and ensure that consumers are protected.

I worked with the Biden administration and former Republican chairman, Patrick Henry, to craft legislation. We achieved that goal, and I posted that legislation earlier this year. We wanted to create a strong federal system to oversee this type of crypto market that protected consumers, our national security, and financial stability.

Unfortunately, the election of Donald Trump ended those bipartisan efforts and brought a significant new challenge with stablecoins, the Trump family's brazen corruption, using crypto to sell access in exchange for official acts. It just so happens that those stablecoins are one of the main vehicles Trump is using to make his corrupt crypto billions.

The Trump family, Crypto Company, World Liberty Financial, launched a stablecoin called USD1 in April. Shortly after that, the Abu Dhabi backed investment from MGX brought $2 billion of Trump's coin to make an investment in finance, a company that had been under investigation for numerous legal violations. Trump and his family were making tens of millions of dollars just on the transaction loan from the interest earnings alone.

That's Abu Dhabi’s money.

More concerningly, by passing this bill, Congress will be telling the world that Congress is okay with corruption, okay with foreign companies buying influence, okay with criminals buying Trump coins to seek pardons and beneficial treatment. Surely, each of you can see how this is blatant conflict of interest, right? Well, Democrats do, and the rest of America does as well.

This is why I introduced the Stop Trump In Crypto Act to ban the President, Vice President, and members of Congress from crypto corruption. If we do not ban elected officials in SD 1582 , including the President or Vice President, from crypto corruption, each of us will be complicit.

Let me be clear on this point, because there has been a lot of misinformation. This bill has a policy statement that elected officials, members of Congress and senators, as well as government officials, cannot issue their own stable coin, but do you know who Republicans did not ban? The President and the Vice President.

They're the only elected officials that can have a crypto business. Why are the Republicans protecting the President’s power to make billions and billions more dollars?

Don't just take my word for it. Earlier this week, Chairman Hill confirmed as much at the Rules Committee. Anyone who says that the bill stops the president's company from issuing stable coins is not telling the truth.

And yet, even if we adopt adopted such a ban, the Genius Act sent over by the Senate, and apparently unable to be amended, is still bad public policy. S 1582 creates creates the appearance of a federal framework for stablecoin, but it does not provide the federal government with the full authority it needs to ensure that all stablecoin issuers comply with the law .

The bill also creates risk for consumers who will be stuck in a lengthy bankruptcy process if a stable coin ever fails additionally, it leads the door open for foreign firms that present a major national security threat , including targets of sanctions, all to appease those in the Trump family’s inner circle, which has ties to those shady entities.

Yes, I'm talking about Tether, the foreign stablecoin issuer everyone knows has been used in terrorist financing, organized crime schemes, and other horrible acts, but which the Commerce Secretary has close ties with.

Let me give you one more example why this bill is just bad for America. The very heart of this bill is that stablecoins will in fact be stable because they will be backed one-to-one with solid safe assets.

But, I invite anyone to read the bill. While some of the reserves are cash and short-term treasury securities, this bill allows for uninsured deposits. We already know how dangerous these deposits are when Silicon Valley Bank failed, and Circle, the largest stablecoin today, had three billion locked up in uninsured deposits, needed the federal government to rescue it.

That isn't all. A stablecoin issuer is also permitted to hold Bitcoin as a reserve. That's because someone added language in this bill, late in the night, in the process that added new definition and language to the bill. The language allows for a stablecoin issuer to use any money received under repurchase agreements that are "a means of exchange currently authorized or adopted by a foreign government.”

Do you know what Trump's favorite strong man, the dictator of El Salvador, adopted as a legal currency? Bitcoin!

So, this highly volatile cryptocurrency will now be eligible to be a reserve backing on your stablecoins. It is truly absurd and dangerous, and will lead to consumers losing their money and the taxpayers being called on to bail out the financial system.

It is for all of these reasons that I submitted several amendments to this bill, none of which were made in order by Republicans, because the President has rejected any conflict of interest language that binds him.

One interesting point is that even even Chairman Hill himself inserted language at the end of the so-called Clarity Act, that the House is separately considering this week, that actually amends the Genius Act. You heard me me right, rather than amend the Genius Act, which our own chairman saw had problems, he put his changes at the end of the Clarity Act.

You may be asking why he would do that. He could just offer his amendments to the Genius Act.

The reason is, House Republican leadership has given up our power as the United States House of Representatives to work the will of members on behalf of our constituents and make changes to any legislation that the Senate sends us. Instead, we're simply taking the language directly from the Senate with no amendments, even when the chairman and other House members know that this bill is flawed, unfortunately, because President Trump demanded the bill be passed without any changes.

That's what the Republican Congress will do.

One of Chairman Hill's changes to the Genius Act addresses a key concern I've had from the beginning, which is that Facebook and any other big tech company should not be allowed to issue their own stablecoin that would violate a longstanding separation of banking and commerce in financial regulation. Our chairman's amended language would have closed this loophole.

Unfortunately, the Genius Act allows Elon Musk’s X to issue its own stablecoin and creates a pathway for Facebook to do the same. For this reason, and many more, I strongly oppose this bill.”

Maxine Waters starts out talking about that fascist parade that Donald Trump had earlier this year. You know who helped to fund that parade? Coin Base, a cryptocurrency company, helped to pay for Donald Trump's fascist military parade to celebrate his birthday as the revered cult of personality leader in the United States. American presidents don't do that kind of thing.

If you want to understand the culture of cryptocurrency, just consider what cryptocurrency lobbyists are doing to bribe the United States President. They are happy to go along with fascism, so long as the government doesn't get in the way of their criminal enterprises.

There already were the beginnings of really serious cryptocurrency legislation created under President Joe Biden, and some executive orders. Some of those were just using the present law that was already there to have the SEC regulate cryptocurrencies and regulate stablecoins .

This bill and the Digital Market Asset Clarity Act replace that regime, and Josh Riley has been voting along with the cryptocurrency scammers every step of the way.

They replace the old regime of regulation with deregulation, and then, because they destroyed the old regulation, and then put a tiny fraction of it back, they actually describe what they’re doing as regulation.

It’s actually deregulation, of course. Don’t get fooled. It's a carnival barker's cheap magic trick, and the cryptocurrency people think that you are stupid enough to fall for that.

I think that when you see that the President of the United States is creating an alternative currency that is on course to replace the U.S. dollar, you’ll understand that's dangerous.

If a private digital currency owned by the family of the President of the United States becomes our national currency, a percentage of every purchase using that currency will go to enrich Donald Trump's family. Every time you go to the grocery store to buy eggs, that's going to go to make Donald Trump richer and richer, eventually putting Trump’s family in the position of de facto monarchs over what was once the democracy of the United States of America.

Josh Riley voted for this.

Josh Riley voted for the President of the United States to gain the power to create his own personal currency to rival the dollar.

This bill, Maxine Waters, warns us, enables big tech corporations to do something similar, but not quite the same. It enables digital corporations to issue their own stablecoins as a kind of alternative investment in their companies, an alternative to stocks.

Why would they do that? Stocks are heavily regulated by the SEC. Under SEC regulation, you can't have pump-and-dump schemes, for example. A pump-and-dump scheme is an illegal conspiracy in which cryptocurrency insiders create the false appearance of a market rally. What's actually happening is that a bunch of large holders of the security of the cryptocurrency collaborate behind the scenes. They decide that they're gonna buy, buy, buy, and then they're going to all sell at the same time.

In this way, the cryptocurrency insiders create the false impression that a cryptocurrency is a great investment, encouraging rank and file investors to get involved. Then they sell at the higher price. When they sell, the price plummets, and that leaves rank and file investors with nearly nothing, having lost almost all of their investments.

The insiders can do that because they're already wealthy, and they already own so much of that cryptocurrency that they can manipulate the price for their own benefit at the expense of other investors. That kind of market manipulation goes on all the time in cryptocurrency.

When you think of cryptocurrency, you should be thinking of cheap scams, the kind of thing that you warn your grandmother about. That's the kind of thing the FBI was talking about when it warned us that there was $26 billion dollars taken out of the U.S. economy by cryptocurrency crimes alone last year, before the deregulation of this act passed with the help of Democratic Congressman Josh Riley.

With the deregulation in this bill, the Stable Genius Act, the level of cryptocurrency crime is going to skyrocket. What’s more, it's not just cryptocurrency crime that we’ll have to worry about, because, thanks to the Stable Genius Act, big tech corporations can now offer stable coins as an alternative to stocks, without the regulation that protects investors from fraud.

The Stable Genius Act invited huge new players at Google, at Apple, at Facebook, at X, to get involved in cryptocurrency, making their own crypto versions of stocks, their own deregulated securities, a new tools designed to enable the defrauding of the American people.

It gets even worse. Proponents of the Stable Genius Act keep talking about “stablecoins”. That term, stablecoins, makes you think that they're stable, but they're not.

Over and over again, stablecoins have been shown to be fraudulent. They are in fact, not backed up by the dollars that they say that they claim to hold in reserve. Josh Riley is going to tell you that this bill makes stablecoins safe, but that's a cryptocurrency lobbyist's lie.

As Maxine Waters warned us, this legislation allows stablecoins to be backed up by uninsured  assets. That makes stablecoins inherently unstable. There's no guarantee behind the stable coin.

To put a fine point on it, the Stable Genius Act allows stable coins to be backed up by Bitcoin, which is one of the most volatile, unreliable financial investments that exists. Bitcoin is constantly going through booms and busts. A stable coin backed up by Bitcoin is not stable at all.

What you're getting with the stablecoin under the Stable Genius Act is more vulnerability for American investors, and that's by design. The way that cryptocurrency investors become more wealthy, the way that they make a profit, is off the backs of gullible rank and file investors.

It is a shame that Josh Riley is helping those people to defraud everyday investors.

At the very least, the Stable Genius Act might have banned Donald Trump and J.D. Vance from accepting bribes, from crypto corporate investors, the whales, the people who own the most cryptocurrency. The Stable Genius Act could have banned Donald Trump from operating his own stablecoin as a business, a thing to bribe him with while he's President of the United States.

That could have happened. It didn't.

That amendment was not allowed to be included in the Stable Genius Act, because it defeats the whole purpose of the legislation. The purpose of the Stable Genius Act is to enable corruption, to enable bribery, to give cryptocurrency whales control over the U.S government itself.

Maxine Waters offered up another bill called the Stop Trump In Crypto Act. It simply says that if you're President or Vice President of the United States, you cannot be running a cryptocurrency scheme at the same time.

Who would not agree with that? You know who? Josh Riley.

Josh Riley is refusing to endorse Maxine Waters’s Stop Trump In crypto Act. Why? You got to wonder about that.

Why? Why? Why is Josh Riley doing this?

Why? Why is he helping Donald Trump?

Why is he helping bribery, corruption to take over this country?

Why is he helping crypto bros?

Why is he protecting Donald Trump's ability to accept bribes and to set up his own private currency?

Why is Josh Riley supporting fascism with this?

We're going to suggest an answer to that question later in this episode.

For now, though, don't just listen to me rant about the Stable Genius Act.

Let's listen to what another Democratic member of Congress has to say about this legislation. Let's listen to Nydia Velazquez, another Democrat in Congress, explaining why Josh Riley's decision to support the Stable Genius Act was so dangerous.

“I rise today in opposition to the Genius Act. From the beginning, I have said Congress needs to tackle stablecoin legislation, but we cannot pretend this is happening in a vacuum.

We are debating a framework for stablecoins while the President, his family, and members of his administration are personally invested in this market, and directly profiting from it.

Three days before taking office, President Trump launched his own memecoin. When the coins's value collapsed, his insiders cashed out.

Everyday investors were left holding the bag. It is estimated they lost over $2 billion dollars, while the Trump circle walked away from with more than $350 million.

Now, his family firm, World Liberty Financial, has launched its own stablecoin, once again netting the President's family tens of millions for dollars.

The administration is rolling back enforcement and reshaping policy to give this business interest a leg up. These are such clearcut conflicts of interest, and yet, this bill does nothing to address them.

It doesn't ban the President or Cabinet officials from holding financial stakes in stablecoin issuers. It doesn't address the foreign investors piling into these ventures. It doesn't even try to draw a line between public office and private gain.

This isn't a framework for innovation. It's a framework for more corruption.

If we are serious about protecting consumers, about protecting our market, we have to start with ethics. This bill fails that basic test. I urge my colleagues to vote no.”

Nydia Velazquez, a Democrat in the U.S. Congress, identifies something that really bothers me about what Josh Riley is doing. All year long, Josh Riley has been telling us, and I'm sure he's gonna continue to, that by lowering the price of eggs by four cents per dozen, he’s standing up for the families of Upstate New York, the “folks” of Upstate New York.

He says he's standing up for us, but by voting to pass the Stable Genius Act, Josh Riley turned his back on the folks of New York's 19th Congressional District.

The people of Upstate New York are not crypto whales. They're not people who have huge fortunes in cryptocurrency scams. They are people who are being taken advantage of by the cryptocurrency scammers.

Nydia Velazquez pointed out just one crime, one trading violation by Donald Trump with his memecoin that exploited everyday consumers. That one crime cost investors $2 billion.

It was an illegal emolument that violated SEC regulations. This cryptocurrency crime went unpunished, however, because under the fascist government, nothing Donald Trump does is counted as a crime.

With that kind of abuse involving cryptocurrency going on, most people understand that we don't need less regulation for cryptocurrency. We need more regulation of cryptocurrency.

We need to regulate the hell out of cryptocurrency, because it exists for no other reason than for rich people to get richer off the backs of the rest of us, as they exploit us, as they deceive us, as they defraud us.

Donald Trump is the Crypto Criminal In Chief. By voting for the Stable Genius Act at the request of Donald Trump, Josh Riley turned his back on the working people of New York's 19th congressional District.

Are we going to put up with that?

I want us to listen to another colleague of Josh Riley in the Democratic Party in Congress. The next voice you’ll hear is from U.S. Representative Sean Casten. Let's hear what he has to say about the legislation Josh Riley voted for.

“If I was to describe Jeffrey Epstein as a nice family man who works in finance, you might question why I was saying that. Well, if someone says that something that is neither a coin nor stable as a stablecoin, you might question why they're saying that, because they aren't stable.

Terra, which was a stablecoin, collapsed to 30 cents and wiped out $40 billion in investor value. That was an algorithmic stablecoin. More recently, as the ranking member has noted, USDC, a so called stable coin, fell to 88 cents and only exists today because taxpayers bailed them out.

These are some of the reasons why central bankers last week issued a warning that stablecoins threaten global financial stability and need a much more restrictive regime than traditional finance. The Genius Act ignores all those experts and instead ties stablecoins into our financial system, but without the safeguards that are required by banks and investment companies.

As the ranking member noted, this allows big tech companies to issue stable coins and amass consumer data, at the same time we’re gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects consumers.

It allows issuers to cherrypick the lightest touch regulator between the federal government and any of the fifty states.

Rather than fixing the problems created when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, it makes them worse by saying that you can have uninsured deposits, that if there is a run on a future Silicon Valley Bank , the stablecoin issuers have a superior claim over every single person in this room who has a legitimate deposit in that bank.

My colleagues have said this has a one-to-one requirement, except that that's not audited. There's only an audit requirement for companies over $50 billion in assets, which is only two stablecoins.

So Donald Trump's stablecoin just has to say, “I attest that there was value in here on the 30th day of the month,” and you don't have an auditor. That ain't one-to-one certification.

Finally, the Genius Act is a missed opportunity to limit foreign influence. We know that recently a convicted money launderer wrote the code so that the United Arab Emirates could buy $2 billion of Trump's stablecoin, which allowed President Trump to earn $30 million on the transaction.

Now this convicted felon... and I should clarify here the convicted felon I'm referring to is not the President. The convicted felon I’m referring to is the guy who ran Binance, not the President, but he's seeking a presidential pardon.

So the Genius Act sets the stage for an exponential crisis and allows the president to continue cheapening the office for his own financial gain, and I urge a strong no.”

Sean Casten isn't just a random member of Congress. Sean Casten is the second highest ranking Democrat on the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. U.S. Representative Sean Casten knows what he's talking about, and he's a Democrat. So. why is it that Josh Riley is turning his back on Sean Casten, and saying that Sean Casten doesn't know what he's talking about? Why is Josh Riley at the same time saying that Donald Trump knows what he's talking about and should be trusted? That is ultimately what a vote for the Stable Genius Act is. Donald Trump is the number one supporter of this bill, and he's also the number one profiteer from it.

Congressman Josh Riley is asking us in Ithaca, in Binghamton, in Cortland, in the Hudson River Valley, to believe that we should trust Donald Trump over people who actually have experience and expertise in finance and in regulating financial crimes.

Sean Casten described just one stablecoin collapse. Stablecoins, as he points out, are neither coins nor are they stable. The Stable Genius Act does not make stablecoins stable.

That one stable coin collapse Casten described costs the economy $40 billion.

Now, instead of learning from that disaster, the Stable Genius Act wants to make that collapse the model of the U. US economy. The Stable Genius Act allows every digital company out there to set up their own stablecoins, tying cryptocurrencies into the heart of what had been a stable economy, making it chaotic and exploiting that chaos for personal profit.

As Sean Casten pointed out, the Stable Genius Act requires no audit for most stable coins. They can call stablecoins stable because they can be backed by other assets, like, as Maxine Waters pointed out, Bitcoin. That’s backing one asset with the guarantee of another insecure asset.

Do those assets actually exist?

There have been stablecoins where the companies that issued them insisted they had dollars for every one of their stablecoins. They were completely lying.

This kind of thing happens all the time in cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency scammers are the worst. Practically everything they say, is a lie. If you hear something from a cryptocurrency person, you should presume you're being lied to as a default.

And the Stable Genius Act that Josh Riley supports requires most stablecoins not to have any audit at all, which means you don't have any independent regulator coming in to make sure that the stablecoin issuers actually are doing what they're saying that they're doing, that they actually have any assets at all to back up these stable coins, that they're anything more than monopoly money.

That's not stable. That's not genius. It's just ruthless criminality, and that's what Josh Riley voted for.

He voted to make the economy tied to the criminality of cryptocurrency. It's like having criminals come in and set up an office inside the police station itself. When that happens, you cannot trust a single thing in that economy.

It baffles me to see Josh Riley supporting this.

The worst thing about this, as that Sean Casten points out here, is that the Stable Genius Act gives stablecoin issuers a priority over everyone else for government bailouts.

Why would Josh Riley give that kind of privilege to cryptocurrency scammers? Why would he do that?

I want us to listen to another Democrat explore these issues. I want us to listen to Stephen Lynch. Like the voices we've heard before, he's not just a backbencher in the Democratic Party. He's a senior member of the Democratic Party leadership.

He's also the leading Democrat on the U.S. House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence. If there's anybody who has specialized knowledge in the Democratic Party about cryptocurrencies, Stephen Lynch is that guy.

Let's hear what he says about the legislation that Josh Riley just voted for.

“I rise in strong opposition to the so-called Genius Act. Mr. Speaker, this bill has never even been considered or debated in the House Financial Services Committee or the Agricultural Committee, the committees of jurisdiction, which is the usual practice in this body. I guess this is what passes for genius these days.

Republican leadership has once again caved into President Trump's demands for quickly pushing crypto legislation. President Trump, just yesterday, posted, "Pass the Genus Act, ASAP.”

I guess there's no need to debate it or read it or amend it. Just pass it.

You might think that Republicans might be cautious about taking financial policy direction from someone who has a side hustle selling baseball hats and Bibles and who has filed for bankruptcy six times in the past 20 years. Sadly, you would be mistaken.

This bill significantly weakens the U.S. dollar, which is the global reserve currency and provides a huge competitive advantage for our country. This bill allows a complete takeover of our financial system by big tech companies by allowing these massive companies to issue their own cryptocurrencies.

For example, Google, with 3.5 billion daily users, Meta has over 2 billion active daily users, not to mention Amazon or X or Walmart. Several of these companies have already indicated they're planning to launch crypto stablecoins if this bill becomes law.

And those companies can easily compel or incentivize users to move away from the dollar and away from traditional banks and into these so called stablecoins.

President Trump's own stablecoin is set to be become one of the top 10 stablecoins after Abu Dhabi announced a $2 billion dollar investment in World Liberty Financial, which is a joint venture between the Trump family, his sons, and Steve Witkoff and his family. You may recall that Steve Witkoff is the Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, where Abu Dhabi is located.

Nothing in this bill prevents the clear conflicts of interest in violations of ethics laws by President Trump.

The worst aspect of this bill is the danger and risk that it puts on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer, because this will not end well, and nothing in this bill prevents a taxpayer bailout of crypto. If we really wanted to protect the taxpayer, we could require that crypto companies that are pushing these bills absorb the losses if they fail. That would seem to fair. Yet, despite several attempts to have amendments included in the bill that would protect the taxpayer from paying for crypto bailouts, my Republican colleagues repeatedly refused.

We've seen in the past in 2008, when the last version of financial innovation blew up collateral debt obligations and other complex derivatives. It was the taxpayer that had to pay to clean up that mess to the tune of about $700 billion, while bankers who created the mess, they got bonuses. We should not let that happen again.

I urge my friends on the other side and my colleagues on our side to defend the U.S. Taxpayer and vote no on this bill.”

Stephen Lynch, the leading Democrat on the U.S. House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence asked Josh Riley to please defend the American people from the financial calamity that will come if we deregulate cryptocurrency.

What did Josh Riley do?

Josh Riley turned his back on Stephen Lynch, turned his back on the Democratic Party and embraced cryptocurrency scammers and Donald Trump.

This legislation, as Stephen Lynch pointed out, wasn't even given the chance to be reviewed by the House, Financial Services Committee, or by Josh Riley's Committee, the Agriculture Committee.

I want to remind you why the Agriculture Committee has anything to do with this. The trade in agricultural commodities historically has led to the formation of the House Agriculture Committee as a strange kind of congressional body that doesn't just regulate agriculture, but also regulates the trade in different financial products.

What’s essential to understand is that the Agriculture Committee tends to regulate financial product more weakly than the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The House Agriculture Committee established the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. As multiple people have pointed out, Congress has allowed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to become weakened, to become underfunded, to the point that the CFTC is unable to do its job. It doesn't have the resources to perform the regulation that it's been tasked with already.

Through the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act and the Stable Genius Act, the CFTC is supposed to take on the task of regulating cryptocurrencies instead of the SEC, which actually has the resources to do it.

That's a setup.

It’s a setup to create de facto deregulation, because the Commodities Futures Trading Commission does not have funds to actually do the job of regulation, and Josh Riley knows it.

If Josh Riley had any kind of sense of congressional integrity or on this issue, he would have said, "Hold on, I'm not going to vote for any bill that goes through what should be the jurisdiction of my committee without having the right to have hearings, to question expert witnesses, and to amend the bill, and possibly to turn it down.”

Instead, Josh Riley said that it's okay, that he doesn’t have to review this bill. He doesn’t have to amend this bill. He’ll do whatever Trump asks.

In passing this bill, Josh Riley is obeying Donald Trump.

Donald Trump tweeted out his own message on this: "Pass the genius Act ASAP.”

Josh Riley obeyed Donald Trump.

Did you elect Josh Riley so that he was would obey Donald Trump?

I went out going door to door on behalf of Josh Riley last year, and the people I talked to, you know what they wanted Josh Riley to do? They wanted him to stand up to Donald Trump, not to become Trump’s toady to help cryptocurrency scammers.

Yet, that's just what Josh Riley has done. He's turned his back on us.

How can we trust him when he's gone this far?

I've got a lot of strong feelings about this, but I don't want this just to be about me, so let’s listen to Brad Sherman. He is the leading Democrat on the U.S. House Subcommittee on Capitol Markets, a subject matter expert.

What does he have to say to Josh Riley?

“It is customary when we consider major legislation to give credit to those who created the bill.

The ghost of Sam Bankman Fried looms above this auditorium. He is the genius behind the Genius Act, and one can only hope that he's able to watch C-SPAN on a black and white television set in his prison cell.

You don't have to be a genius to know that this bill is an attack on working families.

That's why the AFL-CIO says no, and they are scoring it.

They call it “stablecoin”. It's not stable. It's not a coin.

It's a money market account that under this law must pay 0% interest. So who wants to forego a 4% rate of return and get a 0% return in stablecoin? Those who are desperate for what cryptocurrency offers.

Cryptocurrency literally means hidden money. These stablecoins are exempt from the anti-money-laundering provisions. Thus, it meets the needs perfectly of drug dealers, human traffickers, sanctions evaders, those who are hiding assets from their former spouses, and tax evaders.

Just to be clear, the Republicans rejected unanimously in committee a provision to prevent mixers. Mixers are devices whose sole purpose is to defeat even top law enforcement efforts, pursuant to a warrant. Under this bill, mixers will be used to defeat law enforcement.

Republicans claim to be against crime in the streets, but but they're creating a device whose sole purpose is to facilitate crime in the suites.

Page 43 of this bill contains a provision maintaining the eligibility of stablecoins for bailouts under a facility created under Section 133 of the Federal Reserve Act. Jay Powell won't bail out stablecoin, but the next guy will. Stablecoin marketers are going to tell investors that if they ever have a problem, they're going to get bailed out.

After all, crypto has all the power in Congress, because it is the number one source of Super PAC independent expenditures. Last year, crypto did more Super PAC expenditures than Big Oil and Big Pharma times five .

This bill is designed to enrich President Donald Trump. Even Richard Nixon never thought of printing up bills baskets of monopoly money and selling them for cash. Trump thought of it, and he's doing it.

Electronically, Abu Dhabi has announced they're investing $2 billion in Trump's stable coin, $2 billion in Trump's hands where he has to pay 0% on the loan. He invests the money, he makes $2 million a week, up until Abu Dhabi demands its money back, which they're never going to do as long as our foreign policy meets the needs of Abu Dhabi.

Republicans rejected unanimously an amendment to prevent, taxpayer money from being used to buy Trump Coin. If you're voting for this bill, you're voting for taxpayer money to go into buying Trump Coin.”

You heard what Brad Sherman had to say there, and he's an expert in capital markets. This is an attack on working families. By voting for the Stable Genius Act, Josh Riley has attacked the working families who trusted him.

Let's listen to one more voice.

This voice does not come from the U. S. House of Representatives.

It comes from the Senate, where this legislation got started.

This is from a veteran of the Democratic Party, Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.

“The president's crypto business unfolds. Throughout his first term, President Trump was officially skeptical of cryptocurrency.

In a social media post from July 11, 2019, the President said, ‘I’m not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air, unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.’

That is a quote from the president in his first term.

Once the president figured out how to personally make this a part of his investment portfolio, his tune changed.

This is how President Trump is using the unregulated crypto industry to enrich himself and his family: Three days before he took office, President Trump lost launched his memecoin, a novelty item similar to baseball cards or beanie babies. They hold no intrinsic value.

Memecoins are risky and highly volatile.

Despite the risk, many investors purchased President Trump's memecoin, and in the first few weeks after its launch, the President, in his second term, profited up to $100 million in trading fees, while more than 200,000 investors lost money. There's never been a precedent for anything like this in the history of the presidency.

Then, President Trump auctioned off access to himself by hosting a crypto gala dinner here in Washington. The President made a whopping $148 million just off this dinner from 220 investors willing to pay for facetime with the president. Nearly half the winners of this memecoin a competition were still losers. 95 attendees suffered a net, 8.95 million loss by purchasing per President Trump's memecoin.

In total, 764,000 investors lost money to President Trump's memecoin scan, but his corruption does not stop there. His family started its own crypto firm, called World Liberty Financial. In March, they launched their own stablecoin right as the Senate was working on the Genius Act, legislation to so-called regulate the stablecoin market.

Conveniently, this legislation allows the President and his family to continue owning and issuing stablecoins. There's never been anything like this in the history of the presidency. Passing the Genius Act will help the stablecoin market grow tenfold over the next three years to a two trillion dollar market.

I'm going to vote no on this legislation when it comes up this week.

We prohibit members of Congress from asset activity in cryptocurrency. The same should be true for the presidency.

Why are we having two different standards? I think the answer is obvious.

If the Senate passes this legislation tomorrow, it would give Congress its blessing for President Trump and his family to further enrich themselves with very little protection for consumers.

President Trump's crypto dealings reported the account for nearly 40% of his net worth. All of the years and decades of investment notwithstanding, 40% of President Trump's net worth has been generated in just a few months in the second term of his presidency with his cryptocurrency. In just a few months, the family, the Trump family, has pulled in approximately $1 billion from crypto, one billion.

Tomorrow's vote on the Genius Act could bring us closer to enabling the President Trump's latest scam.

This is shameful. It is corrupt. Especially since we could have stopped this from happening, if we'd conducted an open amendment process as Leader Thune promised.

We could have had amendments on the floor that would have brought real regulation to this industry.

Instead, we have phony regulation.

I filed an amendment to crack down on ATM operators who've been scamming seniors out of their life savings with crypto machines. My amendment would have created guardrails to prevent crypto ATM fraud. Thirteen states have already done so we should do so on a national basis.

But we won't have that opportunity. They have foreclosed all amendments to this bill. We can't even debate it on the floor and ask for a vote.

Instead, the Genius Act will allow the crypto scam to continue at the expense of unsuspecting Americans and to the enrichment of the president and his family.”

What Dick Durbin had to say here, I think, sums up a lot of the points about why the Stable Genius act is so obviously wrong for America.

This is not an ideological thing. This is not some abstract political disagreement, in which I'm saying, hey, I disagree with what is being done in a philosophical sense. No, this is practically dangerous.

What we're talking about, and what so many of these esteemed members of Congress, people who are experienced in the Democratic Party are saying, is that cryptocurrency deregulation is going to cause a financial crisis.

Dick Durbin said that the passage of this bill is going to enrich people who already have wealth, "at the expense of unsuspecting families” Unsuspecting families, like your neighbors, like you, people who have to work hard for what they have, they can't just invest and reap in the benefits and sit back and get wealthy on the basis of other people's work.

People like you, people like me, we get up every morning. We go to work. We're helping the economy from our own sweat.

The Stable Genius Act creates a new pathway for rich people to exploit the system, for their own benefit, and to control our democracy in a way that we have not seen within our lifetimes, a level of corruption that has never existed in American society before.

This bill, along with a digital market asset Clarity Act, deregulates cryptocurrency, which was already underregulated. Furthermore, it integrates cryptocurrency into the mainstream economy, connecting it through mainstream financial institutions, and the most powerful digital corporations.

These are the most powerful businesses that have ever existed, and they’re connected in turn with the fascism that's going on in Washington, D.C. Any fool who takes time to look at this issue can see it.

It's not hidden. It's happening in plain sight, and Josh Riley is no fool. He is not an idiot.

So, I return to the question that I have been asking for weeks on this podcast: Why would Josh Riley support this? Why would he put his lot in with cryptocurrency scammers from outside of our political district who are exploiting working people, cheating them out of their money?

Why would he make it easier for them to do that? Why would he help Donald Trump to consolidate power, using cryptocurrency and bribery?

I will tell you, as I have said before, I do not think that Josh Riley is taking bribes.

But here is the conclusion I have come to: It is not necessary for Josh Riley to take bribes to be participating in political corruption. Here’s why: The one point of pressure that I can see from the outside is that the cryptocurrency lobbyists, this group of power brokers that run cryptocurrency, they have become the most politically influential group in America because they're spending huge amounts of money.

In 2024, this was the group that elected Donald Trump, and it's the group that elected a lot of members of Congress, and specifically, it's the group that kicked a lot of Democrats out of power, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, for example, a long-standing US Senator and a vocal opponent of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency lobbyists funded the opposition to him.

So this is what I think is going on with Josh Riley: I think he's afraid that if he stands up, that if he speaks out for the people of New York's 19th Congressional District, if he says the plain truth, which is that cryptocurrency is nothing more than a tool of financial fraudsters who exploit everyday working people and who are supporting the fascism of Donald Trump, if he says that basic truth, he's going to have the most financially powerful economic force in the United States of America gunning for his seat, and they're going to fund whoever is running against him, and he's going to lose.

That is really a kind of political corruption. It's not taking bribes and saying, “I’m going to vote for cryptocurrency lobbyists' legislation because they've given me money to do so.”

I don't think that Josh Riley's guilty of that, but here's what he is guilty of: He's guilty of the profound cowardice of thinking that what he must do, above all else, is keep himself in office.

I suspect that Josh Riley likes to think that he's somehow defending the people of the New York’s 19th district because anyone else in the job would do something worse. Yes, probably a Republican member of Congress would do something worse, but that's not an excuse

It’s not an excuse to abuse the people of this district.

It's not an excuse to abandon opposition to fascism.

It's not an excuse to abandon democracy itself.

It's not an excuse to allow outright bribery to take over Washington, D.C.

To Congressman Josh Riley, I have this to say:

You may think that staying in Congress is the most important thing to do, but you’re asking voters to accept pro-fascist actions by you in Congress in order to keep you there.

What are we going to get if we send you back to Congress for another term? Are we supposed to believe that somehow, magically, next term, you're not going to be ethically compromised, that somehow, magically, next term, you're going to be the Representative you promised to be, and finally get a backbone? Are we supposed to believe that if we just reelect you this time, then you're going finally to stand up to Donald Trump in 2027?

To that, I say no. It’s not plausible. I don’t believe that's not going to happen. Here's what's going to happen instead: Whatever you're doing right now, whatever choices you're making right now, that's what you're going to do for the rest of your career. Your character as a legislator is not going to change.

Some members of Congress only get one term in office, but they can do something good with it. You've got something special, Josh Riley: You have a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, right now. So what are you going to do with it?

Don’t tell me what you’ll do if you’re re-elected. I’m watching what you’re doing right now, and I’m not impressed.

Is this the path you want to stay on? Are you going to keep running like a coward from the cryptocurrency lobbyists because you're afraid that you're not gonna get right reelected?

I have this to say to you, Josh Riley: If you don't stand up to cryptocurrency now, you are not worthy of being reelected.

We trusted you. I trusted you. I believed you.

I believed you when you said that you were going to stand up for the people of this district, when you said you were going to stand up for working people.

With these votes to create loopholes for cryptocurrency scammers, you have abandoned those promises.

You've abandoned your commitment to your constituents because you have lost the courage of your own convictions. It doesn’t have to be this way. I know that you know better.

It’s just six months into Josh Riley's term in office. Six months, 25% of this term is already gone, and so far, Josh Riley has made a terrible showing of it.

He's done the easy thing, offering only little gestures of opposition to Donald Trump, a little speech here and there. At the same time, Josh Riley has repeatedly encouraged Democrats not to spend too much time opposing Donald Trump.

Even worse, Josh Riley has encouraged xenophobia, the hatred of immigrants and scapegoating of them. He's opposed efforts to have Donald Trump removed from office. Now, Josh Riley supporting Donald Trump in the most rampant corruption our country has ever seen.

Now, seeing what Josh Riley has done, I want to turn away from the question of what Josh Riley should do. Instead, I want to turn to a more difficult question.

Given what we're seeing from Josh Riley, what are we willing to do about it?