This past weekend, the United States Senate packed up and left town for its August recess, once again leaving unfinished the basic work it was sent to Washington to do. Two bills sat on the calendar, both with broad, often bipartisan support, both directly touching the lives of Massachusetts families.
Neither got a vote before senators headed home.
I didn’t come to this fight as a crypto lawyer. My career has been representing working families—mesothelioma and asbestos victims—against some of the largest corporations in the world, companies with unlimited resources fighting people who just want to be made whole.
I became known as a “crypto attorney” almost by accident, because I sued the federal government for the same thing I’ve spent my career suing corporations for: overreach and a refusal to play by clear rules.
When federal regulators decided to govern an entire emerging industry through “regulation by enforcement,” punishing people after the fact instead of writing rules in advance, I represented the retail investors caught in the middle. That work earned me the Consumer Advocate of the Year award, Lawyer of the Year, and the Defender of Freedom award for pro bono representation of retail investors.
I didn’t set out to become a crypto lawyer. In fact, I’ve never made a single dollar for my legal work involving crypto. All my crypto work has been on a pro bono basis. I set out to hold power accountable, wherever I found it, and that’s what led me there.
Which is exactly why this weekend’s non-action matters so much. The CLARITY Act, digital asset market structure legislation that would finally give innovators and everyday investors clear rules of the road, has been eligible for a floor vote since June. It didn’t get one.
The SAVE Act, requiring proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and photo ID to vote, didn’t get one either. Both went home unfinished.
Here’s the deeper problem, and it’s one I see in courtrooms and in Congress alike: we are trying to govern the technology of 2026 with laws written in 1933.
Artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics, quantum computing—entire industries reshaping the American economy—and the operative legal framework federal regulators keep reaching for was written before television was in American homes. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a symptom of a Congress that has stopped doing its job.
Writing modern rules for modern technology is hard, unglamorous, unrewarding-in-a-fundraising-email work. So it doesn’t get done. Instead, agencies improvise, courts are flooded with cases that should never have been filed, and American innovation pays the price while other countries write the rules first.
This is not an accident. It is a pattern, and it is exactly the pattern that produces decades of one-party, career-politician rule: a Senate where the incentive is to protect incumbency, not legislate; where recess is treated as an entitlement rather than something earned by finishing the people’s business first.
Think about what happens in any Massachusetts workplace when someone doesn’t do their job, year after year. They get a performance review. Then a warning. Then they get fired. That’s true whether you’re a nurse, a machinist, a small business owner, or an associate at a law firm. Nobody gets to leave a decade of unfinished work on their desk and keep collecting a paycheck—nobody except, apparently, the United States Senate.
Senator Ed Markey has spent 53 years in elected office—longer than most Massachusetts residents have been alive—without ever holding a job in the private sector, and without ever facing the accountability the rest of us live with every day. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where electricity costs about half as much as it does here, while Massachusetts families choose between air conditioning and groceries. That’s the distance between the people writing our laws and the people living under them.
If Massachusetts employees would be fired for this kind of sustained lack of progress and productivity, it’s time career politicians in Congress faced the same standard. Unfinished work should cost you your job—in a courtroom, on a factory floor, or in the United States Senate.
I’m running because Massachusetts deserves representation that treats a recess as something you earn, not something you’re owed, and because writing clear, modern rules for modern technology and finishing the people’s business shouldn’t be optional.
The work is still sitting on the calendar. It’ll be sitting there when the Senate gets back. The only question is whether anyone in that building still remembers they were sent there to finish it.
John Deaton is a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Massachusetts.