Crypto Week Revealed the Dittohead Congress

There are no ‘hard-liners’ in the Republican conference. And nobody interested in standing up for the institution of Congress either.

by David Dayen July 18, 2025


On January 20, it was reasonable to suggest that the legislative output of Donald Trump’s second term would be as thin as the first, primarily due to the unwieldiness of the Republican coalition. The recent history of the House of Representatives suggested total dysfunction; they couldn’t even keep a Speaker for an entire term. House Democrats provided deciding votes for essentially all the major bills in 2023-2024, amid splits between mainstream Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus.

For a while, it seemed like Trump was operating on the principle that Congress was not worth dealing with. He could rule through edicts and executive orders and never trifle with the need to pass laws. The Supreme Court was all too willing to give whatever he scribbled on paper the force of law, anyway, so why bother with Capitol Hill.

But Trump eventually realized that Republicans in Congress were as willing to shrink in subservience to him as the Roberts Court. That includes the Freedom Caucus, whose vaunted principles no longer exist, if they were anything beyond cheap talk. Already they have passed a presidency’s worth of lawmaking in one deeply unpopular bill, with little pushback. This week, Republican lawmakers decided to hand over the power of the purse to the president, while rubber-stamping action on crypto that Trump is openly and brazenly using for self-enrichment.

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A word on this priority: The Federal Reserve has taken essentially no steps in issuing a central bank digital currency. Conservatives claim they oppose a CBDC because of the threat of digital surveillance of personal information; I guess it’s OK that private crypto firms have that information, then. Indeed, there have been numerous crypto data breaches in recent years. The real reason pro-crypto lawmakers don’t want a CBDC is that it would represent a public alternative to the industry.
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-18-crypto-week-revealed-dittohead-congress/


Joseph Stiglitz: Bitcoin ought to be outlawed
The World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org › stories › 2017/11 › joseph-...
Nov 30, 2017 — Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has condemned Bitcoin as “successful only because of its potential for circumvention [and] lack of oversight,”