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Crypto-Fan Tom Emmer's Rise and Fall in the U.S. House Speaker Race Was Extremely Quick

Rep. Tom Emmer, the No. 3 in U.S. House leadership, has been Mr. Crypto on Capitol Hill, so his brush with the speaker nomination gave a jolt of hope to the industry.

Updated Oct 25, 2023, 4:06 p.m. Published Oct 24, 2023, 9:32 p.m.

Friend-to-crypto U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) was the Republican nominee for speaker of the House of Representatives for a single afternoon before reportedly giving up under opposition pressure within his party.

House Republicans are having an epic, no-holds-barred political showdown with themselves, and the abortive campaign of Emmer demonstrates that they've now burned through the most obvious candidates. And there are implications for the crypto industry.

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Emmer was specifically targeted by former President Donald Trump, who posted Tuesday that voting for him would be a "tragic mistake." Meanwhile, a perilous deadline approaches on Nov. 17 when the federal government is set to shutter from a lack of funding.

After firing Speaker Kevin McCarty (R-Calif.) earlier this month, the House was transitioned to the temporary hands of Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and another strong advocate for crypto regulation. So, McHenry is not spending his time focusing on committee matters such as moving his panel's crypto bills – one on stablecoins and another on market structure – to floor votes as the year wanes.

Despite Emmer's very brief appearance on the speaker stage, no name is entirely removed from the speaker discussion. As Republicans have more and more trouble raising a candidate who can win a near-unanimous 217 of the 221 available GOP votes, the possibility of a deal with Democrats remains one option.

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Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.