David Crane/AP
Immigration Raids Padilla
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., is pushed out of the room as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem holds a news conference regarding the recent protests in Los Angeles, Thursday, June 12, 2025.
Shortly after Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) was repeatedly shoved, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed inside a federal building in Los Angeles while trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question about immigration enforcement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) interrupted business on the Senate floor. “I just saw something that sickened my stomach; the manhandling of a United States senator. We need immediate answers to what the hell went on,” Schumer said. I don’t know what answers he wanted; the Padilla incident was captured on tape, and there wasn’t much left to the imagination.
The interesting context is what Schumer actually interrupted. His outraged comments came right after the Senate advanced a substitute amendment to the GENIUS Act, with the assistance of 16 Democrats. If Schumer and his fellow Democrats were truly sick to their stomachs—and I believe they were—over witnessing representatives of a Republican administration assault one of their colleagues, why are they continuing to collaborate with Republicans legislatively?
In theory, you can compartmentalize actions happening outside legislative votes with the votes themselves. But in this instance, cooperating with a Republican Party that keeps arresting, indicting, and detaining the political opposition, on a bill that would place congressional sanction on corruption in the digital asset space, including that personally conducted by Donald Trump, as well as severely destabilizing the financial system, cannot be blindly forgotten without some highly situational ethics. “They will continue to stern-letter us into fascism,” one former Hill staffer told me.
This is in part an example of the extreme power of the crypto industry. They wanted their rewards from buying Congress. They got Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to end regular order in the Senate, and now they got Democrats to shake off the attack on Alex Padilla, so they could stay on schedule for their task.
But part of this is on Schumer and his leadership team. Democrats in the House of Representatives called for adjournment after hearing the news about Sen. Padilla, gathered on the steps of the Capitol, and then marched en masse to Thune’s office. Democrats in the Senate stuck around to take another vote after Schumer’s remarks. Sure, a handful returned to give floor speeches, but the they did not have the entire caucus with them, nor were they prepared to use their power to do more than chatter, to disrupt, dislodge, slow down, or at the very least not actively cooperate with the business of government so long as they are targets of it.
The Senate will have plenty of chances to take the authoritarianism in their midst seriously. In fact, they’ll even have a chance on the GENIUS Act, which even if it’s completed on schedule by next Monday, will likely have to come back to the Senate for a vote.
This morning, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, after a survey of its members, is formally coming out in opposition to the GENIUS Act, which deals with stablecoins, and the CLARITY Act, a market structure bill that passed the relevant House committees last week. The latter bill would downshift oversight of most digital assets to the crypto-friendly Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission. As currently drafted, the CPC says the bills “allow the President and his family to enrich themselves, engage in corruption, and sell access to the White House through cryptocurrency.”
House sources expect that those two bills will be combined, or at least sequenced, for votes sometime in this June work period. That means the whole package will have to come back to the Senate, where there aren’t enough Republicans to pass normal legislation on their own. Senate Democrats therefore have a choice: Ignore the pummeling of one of their own colleagues or withhold their votes until this behavior changes.
If House Democrats are demanding accountability while Senate Democrats are engaged in collaboration, that’s an untenable scenario.
Unlike Senate Democrats, the Progressive Caucus’s votes aren’t needed to pass crypto legislation. And a similar bill to the CLARITY Act got dozens of Democratic votes last year. But even crypto-friendly Democrats have balked, after significant public pressure, at handing over to Donald Trump the means for crypto self-enrichment. As I wrote earlier this week, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), a good bellwether for this thing, said that “Those of us who might be inclined to support this thing so that it can be bipartisan are not going to add our names to something that is associated with the rank corruption that we see out of the White House.”
By formally opposing the bills, the CPC believes it can push the House Democratic leadership to take a negative position as well, and therefore hold a united front against the legislation, which would make it harder for Senate Democrats to mindlessly comply. The context of the incident with Sen. Padilla looms even larger in this context. If House Democrats are demanding accountability while Senate Democrats are engaged in collaboration, that’s an untenable scenario.
The GENIUS Act picked up new Democratic supporters since last month, the last time the bill had a vote. Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Andy Kim (D-NJ) flipped to yes. Indeed, Padilla would certainly have been a yes vote if he weren’t indisposed; he was a yes on a separate test vote the day before.
The Senate could take a stand any time they want. The final passage of the GENIUS Act comes Monday, and while that only needs a majority vote for passage—and Republicans have 51 votes secured—by switching to no, Democrats could signal that they cannot continue business as usual in the face of thuggish Trump administration tactics. Since the bill is almost certainly coming back to the Senate again, they would have the leverage to stop it. And really this isn’t about crypto in itself, but rather basic self-respect on the part of Senate Democrats. How can they participate like what’s going on with this government is normal?
Padilla said at a press conference after the incident, “If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers.” Actually Trump listened to the farmworkers—or at least their bosses—and plans to stop the raids on them. But if this is how DHS responds to a senator and those senators don’t have his back, things will get much worse.
