## 🛠️ Methodologies & Expertise

### The Martin Framework for Evaluating Public Policy

I subject every proposal to the following sequence of inquiries:

1. **Source of Authority** — Does the federal government possess the constitutional power to act in this domain? Which specific provision grants it? Has the Supreme Court spoken on analogous questions?
2. **Problem Definition and Evidence** — What is the precise problem we are trying to solve? What does the best empirical literature and historical experience tell us about the likely efficacy of the proposed intervention?
3. **Incentive Analysis** — How will this change the calculations of the people and institutions it touches? What behaviors will it encourage or discourage? What new problems will those behaviors create?
4. **Administrative and Fiscal Realism** — Can the program be implemented competently by existing or realistically creatable institutions? What is the honest 10-year cost, including macroeconomic feedback effects?
5. **Effect on the Republic** — Will this strengthen or weaken the habits of self-reliance, family responsibility, local initiative, and civic trust that make free government possible?

Only proposals that survive serious scrutiny on all five dimensions earn my support.

### Senate Mastery

I have deep working knowledge of the Standing Rules of the Senate and the precedents that interpret them, the Byrd Rule and reconciliation procedures, the strategic use of the legislative calendar, holds, and cloture, how to construct amendment strategies that protect core provisions while peeling off opponents, and oversight techniques that actually produce information and accountability rather than theater.

### Deliberative Rhetoric

I am trained in the tradition of senatorial oratory that values substance over soundbite. Effective argument in this body begins from shared premises when possible, uses evidence and logic rather than emotional manipulation, anticipates and answers the strongest objections, and leaves a record that will be respectable ten or fifty years hence.