{beacon} Technology Technology The Big Story Democrats block data center bill in Senate Senate Democrats blocked a bill that seeks to address data center electricity costs, calling it ineffective and “toothless.” Though the legislation passed the House with significant bipartisan support. © Greg Nash Democrats did not provide the…
Page F3From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 September 2026
Senate Democrats block two reform bills this week, replacing both with nothing.
As it ran on the front
The week's ledger opens on September 15, when the Senate moved toward a vote on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a bill drafted alongside the crypto industry during a $190 million lobbying push. Two days later, on September 17, Senator Martin Heinrich blocked a different bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would require data centers to help cover their own electricity costs, when Senator Jon Husted tried to pass it by unanimous consent. By September 28, the Senate Democratic leader was working to kill that same bill on the floor, even as his own caucus split: House Democrats had voted for it overwhelmingly before it ever reached the Senate.
The caucus held. On September 30, Senate Democrats blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act outright, calling it toothless. The bill had passed the House with bipartisan support. The next day, October 1, Senate Democrats blocked a second bill, one that would have restricted lawmakers and their families from trading individual stocks, over a voter ID provision Republicans had attached to it. The objection was the same one used one day earlier against the data-center bill: the restrictions did not go far enough.…
…(cont) Here is the filing against the table. Two bills arrived this week carrying the word reform. Two were blocked by the party that says it wants reform, each time citing the other side's addition as the reason. The count of what got rejected is two. The count of what replaced either one is zero.
Neither bill reached the sixty votes the Senate requires to move.
Hon, when the books close on a week like this, the entry that matters is not which rider killed which bill. It is which bill had no rider attached and kept moving anyway. That bill had the industry's own lawyers at the table. The other two had one sentence somebody didn't like, and that sentence was reason enough to walk away from the whole bill.
“They'll tell you the stock bill died over voter ID and the data-center bill died over being toothless, like those are two different stories. Add it up and the number's the same both times: zero. Congress keeps the right to trade stock in companies they regulate, and your electric bill still has no cap on what a data center can push onto it.”
“Look, nobody's against stock trading reform, we just can't let Republicans slip voter ID into it, that's basic principle — wait, we also killed the data center bill, and that one didn't have voter ID in it at all, we called that one toothless... did I say toothless? That's usually our word for the bills we support. Forget I said that.”
The receipts
A bill that would have prohibited lawmakers and their family members from buying publicly-traded stocks was blocked by Senate Democrats on Wednesday over an attached rider on voter ID laws. CBS News' Taurean Small reports.
A Republican-led effort to approve a House-passed stock trading bill fell short in the Senate, with Democrats saying the restrictions don't go far enough and pushing back against a voter ID provision.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) is aiming to kill a bill sponsored by Republican Sen. Jon Husted (Ohio) to protect taxpayers from additional costs posed by AI-driven data centers, but his Democratic caucus isn’t fully on board after House Democrats overwhelmingly voted for the proposal. The looming Senate floor fight over…
· Senate Democrat blocks House-passed bill on data center electricity costs from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
· Will 7 Senate Democrats Join GOP to Advance Trump's Crypto Grift Legislation? from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.