The Senate Agriculture Committee has postponed a hearing on the Cryptocurrency Market Structure Act’s price increase scheduled for Tuesday afternoon by two days.
The committee intended for lawmakers to debate and vote on amendments to the bill that would define how the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would oversee cryptocurrency markets, but a once-in-a-decade winter storm hit the East Coast and much of the eastern half of the country over the weekend, canceling flights and altering the Senate schedule.
The Senate preemptively canceled a vote scheduled for Monday afternoon on a government-wide funding package. The U.S. government ran out of money late Friday and the House of Representatives passed a funding package Thursday.
The Senate needs to vote to advance its appropriations bill; those votes were delayed until Tuesday afternoon, giving lawmakers a chance to fly back to Washington, D.C., after recessing last week.
Citing “winter weather,” the Agriculture Committee said Monday it will hold a hearing Thursday at 10:30 a.m. ET.
The hearing is expected to be contentious; while the Agriculture Committee is expected to have a more bipartisan draft, committee Chairman John Bozeman said in a statement last week that he and his negotiating counterpart, Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, were unable to agree on text due to “fundamental differences in policy.”
Democrats on Friday unveiled a number of proposed amendments that point to the source of those divisions. They include provisions forcing senior government officials to make ethics pledges and strong language forcing regulators to be led by bipartisan commissions.