HB 1193 Veto Debate: Hard to Have Battle Royale When Only One Side Argues the Actual Bill

Bob Mercer says Veto Day next week Monday could bring us a “battle the draft legislation makes no policy preference for a national digital currency. In any case, state law is incapable of creating such a currency. Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can do so.” between Republican bankers and Republican whackadoodles over Governor Kristi Noem’s misguided veto of House Bill 1193, the update of South Dakota’s Uniform Commercial Code:

Governor Kristi Noem has labeled 1193 “an attack on economic freedom.” In a letter to the Legislature, she said the legislation would “expressly” exclude cryptocurrencies from the definition of money.

The bill came from several years of work by the national Uniform Law Commission. South Dakota Bankers Association president Karl Adam has strongly defended it, saying that the governor and those legislators who voted against it don’t understand that it would allow banks to treat cryptocurrencies as controllable electronic records and accept them as collateral.

“If we don’t adopt the UCC amendments in our state, South Dakota could be set back in comparison to other states seeking to attract new businesses,” Adam wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “As companies find new ways to create and unlock value in digital assets, they will likely gravitate to states that pass these amendments, which give them more legal and financial certainty. We’ve already seen this happen. Just this week, North Dakota has adopted the UCC amendments.”

But a group of legislators known as the South Dakota Freedom Caucus praised the veto and issued a seven-page rebuttal on Thursday. “We’re not backing down,” Republican Rep. Aaron Aylward said in a statement, “we’re taking a stand to support our governor and her veto of this dangerous legislation” [Bob Mercer, “Cryptocurrency Might Be ‘Battle Royale’ on Veto Day,” KELO-TV, 2023.03.23].

Republican bank poobah Karl Adam blogs three main points that expand on the defense of HB 1193 that he offered on South Dakota Public Broadcasting last week:

1. HB 1193 would provide legal certainty that would encourage the use of cryptocurrency in South Dakota (the exact opposite of the first reason Noem gave for vetoing HB 1193).
2. Failure to adopt HB 1193 would put South Dakota at a competitive disadvantage in recruiting new businesses against other states like North Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa that adopt the UCC update.
3. HB 1193 has nothing to do with the “baseless hypotheticals” Noem and other whackadoodles with poor reading comprehension have been spinning about the UCC update’s intent to create a Central Bank Digital Currency. “…[T]he draft legislation makes no policy preference for a national digital currency,” says Adam. “In any case, state law is incapable of creating such a currency. Under the U.S. Constitution, only Congress can do so.”

Meanwhile, the whackadoodles in the South Dakota Freedom Caucus respond with an attempt to play logician. Like their membership list, no legislators are willing to put their name on this six-page PDF of claims and imputations of logical fallacy. And none of their poor attempt to play Vulcan refute any of Adam’s three points above. HB 1193 puts cryptocurrency on a firmer legal footing. Legal certainty means more business adoption. HB 1193 does not launch any Central Bank Digital Currency, and vetoing it does not undo the CBDCs that already exist or stop the United States or any other country from authorizing new CBDCs.

Battle royale? We’re talking about powerful bankers and legislators who’ve read the bill versus an ineffective Governor and even less effective radical right-wingers all clamoring for attention and relevance over a bill they have grossly misunderstood, if they have read it at all. The veto boosters will bring nothing but prattle royale, while literate legislators will listen to the bankers and override Noem’s veto of HB 1193.