Yesterday we sent you a piece about a vote that was short of sixty. Last night the sponsors released new text and called it their last, best and final offer. The vote is Tuesday at 2:15 PM.

So we read it. Not the coverage. The text, all 635 pages of it, released by Senator Lummis's office as EHF26724.

Here is the part nobody is leading with.

Section 10404 is titled, in capital letters, "PROHIBITING INTEREST AND YIELD ON PAYMENT STABLECOINS." Subsection (c)(1) does what the title says. No covered party shall "directly or indirectly, pay any form of interest or yield (whether in cash, tokens, or other consideration)" to a customer for holding a stablecoin.

Two pages later, subparagraph (c)(3)(B) says permissible payments "may be calculated by reference to a balance, duration, tenure, or any combination of the foregoing."

Balance. Duration. Tenure.

Those are the three words the bank trade groups spent the summer asking to have removed. They are still in the bill, inside the section that says prohibited.

What separates a banned payment from a permitted one is one phrase: whether it is "economically or functionally equivalent to the payment of interest or yield on an interest-bearing bank deposit." Nobody has defined that. The bill gives two federal commissions and the Treasury Secretary a year after enactment to write the rule that will. In the meantime, a platform that sets up a rewards program in good faith is protected, and gets ninety days to fix it if the rule later says no.

There is a backstop. It is worth reading slowly.

If, within eighteen months of enactment, the Secretary of the Treasury makes a written determination that depositors at community banks moved their money into stablecoins in an amount causing "substantial detrimental impact," and that it happened "due specifically to the activities regulated under this section," then the Secretary writes rules banning the payments.

A community bank, for this purpose, is one with less than ten billion dollars in assets. The determination has to be in writing. It has to find that the rules are necessary. And after eighteen months, the trigger is gone.

So the banks did not get a prohibition. They got a title, a sense of Congress, and a switch held by one man on a clock. That man is Scott Bessent.

The sponsors circulated their own summary. It is called "126 Democratic Wins in the Clarity Act," and it is more useful than anything either side said out loud.

Title VI, item 4: edits to the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act "which restricts developer protections to civil only." A second entry narrows developer protections again, to cash and spot transactions. A third strikes the reference to that Act out of the decentralized finance title entirely.

We checked what that means in practice. Title 18, Section 1960, the criminal charge for running an unlicensed money transmitting business, is the one open-source developers have been prosecuted under. The number 1960 does not appear anywhere in the 635 pages.

And the bill's own long title still says it amends the Federal Reserve Act to prohibit Federal reserve banks from offering products directly to an individual, and to prohibit the use of central bank digital currency for monetary policy. The phrase "central bank digital currency" appears in that title and nowhere else in the document. No section carries it.

That is because the ban already passed somewhere else. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act prohibits the Federal Reserve from creating a central bank digital currency through 2030, and it became law on July 11. The CLARITY title is a leftover from a draft written before that happened.

A reader, Kevin Burris, pointed this out to us after we asked Senator Lummis where the ban had gone. We had the measurement and not the reason. That is the right trade: we will tell you what the document says, and sometimes you will tell us what it means.

Section 10605, the Keep Your Coins Act, in full:

One page. No rulemaking. No definition to be written later. No circuit breaker, no eighteen-month window, no cabinet officer with a pen.

That is the whole bill in two sections. What a dollar claim is allowed to pay you is a question for a rulemaking that hasn't been written and a written determination by a man who hasn't made it. What you are allowed to hold yourself is one sentence.

Yesterday we told you six Republicans were on record as no or withholding, and that the arithmetic put the ask at thirteen Democrats.

That text has changed. The agriculture title was tightened, the bank language moved, and both were aimed squarely at the people we named. We are re-checking every one of the six against the new language before we print that number again. If it moved, we will say so before the vote, not after it.

That is the difference between a count and a guess.

Fundamentalist.