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Go Vegetarian: Send the Sacred Cow of the States Counterplan Out to Pasture

June 03 2009 by Stefan Bauschard

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Every year about this time I begin to work on the Baylor Briefs for the high school topic as well as get ready for the upcoming Samford Debate Institute. As I began to delve into the poverty topic, I got excited about Affirmative possibilities.

I found articles about:

*Poverty and Immigration

*Social Services in segregated areas with concentrations of poverty

*Full Service Community Schools for Low-Income Children

*Faith based legal services as bolstering legal benefits for those in poverty

And then I quickly realized the obvious.

None of this matters. None of these affs are strategic, no negative team will ever research any of them, nor will they learn about any of this literature, because all of it will be obsolete when the 1nc says


The 50 states, the District of Columbia, and all relevant territories should implement the mandates of the affirmative plan


It’s time to put the sacred cow out to pasture. The states counterplan devastates education and the benefits of in-depth, topic specific research. The arguments in favor of it are weak, shallow, and protected mainly by about a decade of presumed legitimacy and the negative’s ability to spew off 15 answers to protect it.

For my overview, I’ll make three arguments.

First, the states counterplan guts in-depth education on domestic topics. As a result, it not only devastates the educational benefits students get when debating such a topic, it also severely limits the range of topics that people will consider to be “debatable” at the collegiate level. This argument has particular salience every year when it comes to the topic selection process, because many people will not vote for certain resolutions because the states counterplan eviscerates these resolutions.

Second, the states counterplan thrives by distorting the literature base to answer it. The answers in the literature to the states counterplan frequently consist of attacking the lack of uniformity on the state level, hence justifying the action on the federal level. In the world of the Lopez CP, not even the notion that something is currently considered to be a federal only activity protects the aff. I’ve seen federal nuclear policy, federal transportation policy, and federal lands policies Lopez’d back to the states.

Third, the benefits of testing the “federal government” in the resolution with the states counterplan are vastly overstated. To paraphrase Will Repko on the consult counterplan, “would anyone go to an academic conference and defend a paper entitled: ‘The States Counterplan: providing in-depth education to generations of policy debaters?’” This paper title is far more persuasive: “The States Counterplan: shielding negative teams from topic specific research for over a decade.”

First, the counterplan guts in-depth education on domestic topics. Education is best served by the requirement that debaters do research on a variety of different subjects. To some extent, this requires getting rid of arguments that allow the negative to win without doing such research. The incentives for either side to learn about the vast majority of social services related to poverty will quickly be undermined by the mere existence of the counterplan. Negative teams will have their short-cut, and they will take it. Most will probably cut a handful of cards on “states can do legal services” or “states can solve immigration.” But that will be the depth of the negative research necessary to beat the few teams that stray outside the “exclusively in federal domain” literature.

I suspect we will see a lot of military aff’s and aff’s dealing with federal agencies to try to carve out some narrow warrant for why the USFG is necessary in this instance. The topic will be conceptually very large (any social service for poverty), but practically very narrow (only social services that have an overwhelming federal government warrant).

There is nothing inherently wrong with those affirmatives, but they shouldn’t be the only functionally viable affirmatives allowed on the topic. While seemingly very broad, the high school poverty topic is in fact very narrow. The enormous hurdle of overcoming the states counterplan will stunt the development of many affirmatives before they even get started. There is also probably merit to a “chilling” argument that even if there may be some answers deep in the literature on one of these affirmatives to the states counterplan, the overwhelming hurdle states creates prevents that research to begin with.

It would be better to simply draw a line and say that 50 state counterplans are illegitimate. While there are certainly some benefits to the discussion of states versus feds in any area, the notion that the negative gets to wish away the entire 1ac in one fell swoop seems extremely problematic. I can cite the obvious litany list of


-this is utopian

-there is no literature at all pretending that all the states would do this at the same time

-they have zero solvency advocate

-they gut topic specific education by recycling the tired federal/states arguments year after year

-they eliminate 95% plus of affirmative cases in one swoop

-they destroy incentives for people to research huge areas of the literature on poverty—meaning students never engage in or learn about such literature

-it isn’t reciprocal: the federal government is one agent, they get 50 plus (considering they get states + territories + DC, and they also probably FIAT’d devolution by an actor of the USFG—the Supreme Court—to get there in the first place).

At the same time, spewing off the litany list seems less persuasive than just pointing out the overall damage the mere existence of the states counterplan does to the way we debate topics. Instead of encouraging understanding of issues related to poverty, the states cp forces everyone involved to narrow and obscure areas of poverty literature.

Everyone who researches, teaches about, leans about, and grapples with every domestic topic is intentionally cordoned off to a narrow literature base to research the topic to get around that blasted “federal government” warrant. Maybe it’s time we learned about more. We are losing something here, and we are losing the in-depth understanding about issues that are important for our students to learn about, especially in trying economic times.

Second, the states counterplan thrives by distorting the literature base to answer it. The magical “FIAT wand” is incredibly synergistic with the states counterplan, in that it wishes away the answers that most “rational policy-makers” in the real world cite to the logic of having the states do the plan.

There may be more to the “rational policy-maker can’t assume others will act” argument than we give it credit for. Can you imagine this statement being made on the Senate floor, “Senators, there is no need for us to take this action today, because all 50 states are about to unanimously act in a way they never have before, and the Supreme Court will validate this, because all 50 states will cite the Michigan v Long precedent insulating the action in their state constitutions from federal strike down. Therefore, I urge my colleagues to reject this policy as it is unnecessary for us to act upon this.”

You’d never see that statement because it is preposterous. The states counterplan debates we get into are so far removed from real world policy-making as to strain credulity. The world of debate we have created with the states counterplan is incredibly at odds with the literature based world that debate rests upon for its arguments.

I’m not saying that clever teams don’t find ways to answer the states counterplan. I have no doubt that the brilliant debate teachers who work at camps across the country will come up with solutions to the problem not predicated in debate theory. But to do so, they have to create a world far removed from the core of the debate about whether or not social services for poverty are justified.

Even in my limited research, there is a robust literature on a variety of potential social services for poverty. However, it is very likely that this literature will never be tapped even to a limited degree by most students at debate institutes this summer because the states counterplan can solve all those affs. Additionally, so few judges seem willing to take a stand against the states counterplan that debaters are chilled from conducting such research in the first place. This argument shapes the world of debate arguments by shutting off huge areas of research before it even begins. The literature base and the use of the states counterplan in debates simply doesn’t match up.

Third, the benefits of testing the “federal government” in the resolution with the states counterplan are vastly overstated. To begin with, the federalism disad provides those benefits. People can research the question of federalism related to all of these issues by running a disad.

Ah, but federalism is a bad disad
on its own. The link isn’t very good, the uniqueness is bad, the internal link is worse. Federalism only works well when melded with its ever powerful ally that robs the affirmative of all their case advantages. The hot “federalism da” works a lot better when the 2nr can parrot out the following about a hundred times in a season, “Counterplan solves 100% of the case, any risk, [sqwak] any risk, [sqwak] any risk
Polly says any risk
” If we get tired of hearing that same debate, we may need to set the alarm clock and wake up from the world where states allows students to do the same thing, over and over again, on this topic.

One argument that is kind of tough to answer is that the benefits of researching federalism in various areas around the globe is pretty strong. But we do that all the time. Every single year (at least on domestic topics), we have students do all the updates on “Afghan federalism good, Iraqi federalism good, Russian federalism good, Nigerian federalism good, etc.” We rarely do research on whether or not legal services for the poor are beneficial, necessary, cost-effective, etc. Instead of recycling the same old generics, we can have more robust debates specific to the topic.

What is more interesting is why do we keep protecting the states counterplan? It radically influences case selection on every topic, it radically influences the way we select topics, it radically influences everything we do. Is it so radical to just throw this baby out with the bath water?

One of my favorite song lyrics is from the Police’s “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” The line goes, “I will turn your face to alabaster, when you find your servant is your master.” Our creation, the states counterplan, dictates too much of our thinking about affirmatives, about topics, and about what kind of arguments we allow in debate. Eliminating the states counterplan from the equation frees up our thinking in new and different directions.

A little thought experiment is how much time you will spend on camps talking about areas like “legal services,” “education,” “immigration,” etc to students you teach at camp this summer? If the primary focal point will be “make sure we have a card saying that states can do ‘x,’” then we are short-circuiting the education possible on these subjects. I think a much better pedagogical model would be multiple seminars on “answering legal cases,” “answering education cases,” “answering immigration cases,” etc. Our students would get the benefits of strategizing and researching about multiple different facets of the poverty topic, as opposed to the tried and true, states and federalism cocktail.

Will this mean the aff wins more? Probably so. But in an era of all the other kinds of neg ground available (a world of competing interpretations on T, a world of high magnitude disads that turn the case, a world of PIC’s, a world of Kritiks), are we really giving the negative too little ground by getting rid of the states counterplan?

Our education has gotten lazy and fat on the red meat diet of the states counterplan. Go vegetarian. Get rid of the sacred cow.

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Thoughts on the States

There is a pedagogically and competitively sound version of the states counterplan, and it is the one that has a single state do something and then uses the actual evidence about you know, state experimentation, modelling, and such to, hey, i don't know, debate what the thing would actually look like in relationship to the actual literature that hardworking debaters and coaches find about a particular plan.

Proponents of the states counterplan claim that we need it to test federal key warrants. That is all well and good. I agree. But the most ardent supporters of the states counterplan want it both ways- they want to claim the counterplan's legitimacy by making reference to its necessity to test the resolutional agent while simultaneously deploying the counterplan in such a way that it has no relationship to the debate in the literature about how exactly such a thing as the plan would be done at the state level.

Example: States spending disads are often read against states counterplans, but the states counterplan is often able to get out of these with 2NC counterplans, or just building an end to balanced budget amendments into the counterplan, or whatnot. That the states don't actually have the money to implement the plan isn't consider a real impediment. In what world is "not having the money" not a relevant and useful question for deciding on a particular course of action? Certainly we behave as though the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is constrained by these concerns-- spending disads, reverse spending disads, and interest rate disads all relate to this concern.

Whats even more ironic is that the 2NC counterplans or anticipatory 1NC Cp planks exist to beat say, a state politics or some such thing. And yet the net benefit to the counterplan is almost always politics. So let me get this straight: the negative, by virtue of having won a computer assigned coin flip, gets to wish away a number of valid concerns simply by virtue of being negative when it is questionable whether their own net benefit to the counterplan virtuously tests the necessity of the federal action? i'm probably ok with the politics disad at the end of the day but then you need to consider the fact that if IT is a relevant test of the aff, then the DAs to the cp are relevant tests too.

CERTAINLY we might consider at least limiting the fiat of the counterplan to not include planks which moot questions of the "federal key" warrant assumed in the literature. For example, if you have good ev that the Courts would rollback the states counterplan because it violated federal jurisdiction, it seems to me that this plank out to be clearly theoretically illegitimate because it essentially grants the affirmative's premise: yes, the federal government is key, but WHAT IF IT WAS NOT. What question do we think this is answering? What educational benefit is possibly provided? And sense no one votes on education anymore, its just not fair. Debaters write affs based on what exists in the literature. The literature seems to indicate there is a debate about whether or not the court would strike down the counterplan. The aff sets off for GSU with their aff, comfortable against the states counterplan because the court would not allow it. the negative has  the court not grant cert to the challenge and says "look, this tests WHETHER YOU HAVE A FEDERAL KEY WARRANT".

That does not make any damn sense to me. The uniformity thing is a good target to aim at, but the extra planks that make the debate about something which is assumed nowhere in the literature base seem to me to be the first things that need to go.

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Seven Comments

Seven comments about this State CP discussion.



1. Bracketing out theories about the illuminati, at least one actor has
the ability to directly choose between Federal and State action: the debate  judge. This is roughly the same number of actors who have the ability to  dictate Congressional/Presidential cooperation to get a particular law  passed & signed, not to mention funded, implemented, and upheld in perpetuity. Although I like the 'no single actor' argument because negatives  often answer it poorly, I don't see it as a silver bullet in the abstract.

2. People would bank more of their 2nr’s on case defense if case defense
were rewarded more, relative to CP’s. Instead, judges reconsider 1ac
evidence that has been poorly extended or not extended at all, prefer that  evidence over smart analytic arguments, etc., while having relatively lower standards for negative performance on counter agent CP’s. There are reasons  for this, and perhaps even good reasons, but I think the solution lies more  in privileging case debate than in banning classes of counterplans outright  (not exactly sure such a ban has been proposed).

3. Fritch used to judge in a way which made it very easy for affirmative
to win that a CP wasn’t legitimate and very hard for the affirmative to
elevate this objection to voting issue status. If the judging pool were
filled with such judges, I think these concerns about state CP’s would be
greatly lessened.

4. “Argument not the team” takes the bite out of theory objections to a
CP. Thus, it should perhaps lower the threshold for what it takes to beat a
CP on theory. Don’t get me wrong – I think the 1ar should engage, line by  line, the justifications proposed by the negative for their counterplans.
But, when they do, judges should be willing to exclude a CP from the round,  without prejudice toward the same type of CP in the next round (when perhaps  the aff didn’t engage the theory debate as completely). It is possible to beat back the negative’s “10 reasons why States CP’s are critical” in under  1 minute provided that (a) some of them were terrible (b) the judge was  willing to let this debate resolve fairly and (c) the debater was confident  enough about (b) that they were comfortable going all in on the theory  objection as their 1ar response to the CP, and then heading off to the next  page.

5. The solution in #3 is great, because it means negatives would feel
less comfortable going into the 1nc with “only” a state CP to refute the
case (thus encouraging research) but also negatives could feel “more”
comfortable going into a 2nr with the state CP instead of the case debate
(assuming the aff was good on the case and bad on the CP) instead of
worrying that the judge would be there to lend the aff a hand.

6. Fiat durability is part of the issue here as well. In time, the states
could surely develop redundant nuclear safety expertise. But, given the
inefficiencies of that approach, the system would probably gravitate back
toward the federal government. Attitudinal inherency doesn’t have to lock in  rollback (after all, some body of government did just vote for the
plan/c-plan), but using fiat to bracket out discussions of what might happen  next makes it hard for affirmatives to bank on many of the best solvency  deficits. You never know how strongly the judge will be committed to durable  fiat.

7. I agree with Ricky that many debaters privilege certain types of
impacts, but I disagree that the K is an effective solution to these
problems. Although I think a lot of the K literature is very interesting and
important, in actual K debates judges often encourage clash avoidance (side  stepping through minimal distinctions), let people wiggle out of impact  turns, encourage new and hidden alternatives, allow implicit framework  arguments (like ‘rep’s first’) to dramatically refocus the rounds, etc. The  generalized ambiguity about how K rounds are to be resolved leads to  considerable inconsistency from round to round. That inconsistency appears  to favor certain teams over others (which ones? It depends on the point of  view of the observer), and makes hyper specific strategies against  particular K’s ineffective, while they should be extremely effective. A more  positive spin on the same phenomenon would be ‘when there are no rules, the  better debater always wins.’ (which sounds fine, but it’s nice when the  weaker debater can sometimes win through hard work and preparation). In this  way, the post structural orientation of some K’s and many K friendly critics  tends to disincentivize K debating. (I would be happy to brainstorm friendly  solutions to this problem with anyone who shares my assessment in broad  terms).

1. Identifying current practices as 'calcified' is not equivalent to
refuting them. To critique a concept is not to refute it, but at most to
propose a line of inquiry. Judges should encourage direct refutation of
critiques, and often judging privileges indirect refutation and discourages
direct refutation. It should thus be unsurprising that few debaters select
direct refutation. I don't ask that K debates go away - I would like to see
them decided more consistently. I suggest a degree of calcification is thus  good, since it makes it easier to train debaters what they should be looking  for when they cut cards about a particular K.

2. Few arguments disenfranchise undergraduate research as much as the K as  currently practiced - particularly due to the ambiguities of how debate  rounds will be decided. It should be much easier to (a) get people to offer  their cites (including first word/last word) as is the expectation for  academic work in other settings (b) get mileage from attacking the  assumptions behind a particular book or article - which often have a far stronger link to the K than the K often does to the case and (c) describe in  fair detail the alternative framework assumptions under which the K is  operating to anticipate which arguments 'count' and why. Creating a norm  where attacking the K directly is a better path to victory would increase  greatly the number of people who attempted that approach. I should note that  there are some judges who will give counter evidence to the K a great deal  of weight, but many do not. Like policy arguments, there are lots of  practices that have the combined effect of protecting K's as strong  strategic options.

3. Evaluation of a particular debate may (and should!) draw upon arguments  about whether a particular argument is 'good for debate', but individual  round decisions should focus more on answering the question at hand (who won  THIS debate) than the broader question (invoking a strong bias against the  states CP, or the K, etc.).

4. I'm not willing to concede either that (a) no states CP's are opportunity
costs or (b) no politics disads are opportunity costs. In the latter case, I
think it depends on the link. I do think any 'unified theory of action' is a
formula for calcification. But, I'm not opposed to calcification per se.

5. I do think that theory arguments which oppose not ALL states
counterplans, but certain types of fiat (uniformity) which negate much of
the lit base, might be a way forward. This PIC-based approach to theory
debating has won a lot of rounds, particularly on topicality.

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 11:12 AM, Richard A. Garner
<richardgarner at gmail.com>wrote:


> "I agree with Ricky that many debaters privilege certain types of impacts,

> but I disagree that the K is an effective solution to these problems."

>

> Let me rephrase: I don't think that critique is a solution to this problem.

> My argument is that debate operates as a larger discursive structure whose

> concepts valorize or disallow certain discourses, and that this valorization

> tends toward an overall objectivization (organization of objects of analysis

> via practice and discourse) that privileges questions of externally oriented

> national policy (and thus, ultimately, geopolitics) measured by a discourse

> of utilitarianism. Whether or not this is a good or a bad thing, or why this

> is the case, debate likes/wants/desires/prefers/chooses to be this way, and

> has developed an aresenal of concepts designed to stabilize this focus. The

> States CP is one of these tools, and one of the primary ones.

>

> In this sense, critiques per se are not a solution to the States CP tout

> court, unless by that one means that they, and this is an empirical

> question, refocus debate on questions of nonutilitarian political choices,

> or produce subjective positions that have been able to open up political

> discussion that operate outside this central circuity of evaluation. In this

> sense, the critique has already been an answer to the States CP, and an

> effective one.

>

> What the critique has done is posed questions about what it means to

> debate, and what debate's proper coordinates are, on the level of a theory

> that pluralizes and enriches the calcified concepts of education, fairness,

> political action, government policymaking, and jurisdiction (five seconds of

> a topicality violation when I was in high school). The greater depth into

> which these questions can be analyzed in debate today versus ten years ago

> is undeniable, even shocking (despite the often extremely well-justified

> wishes of many that these discussion would go away ... and I judge more

> framework debates than most).

>

> It is precisely at this level that critiques have provided conceptual tools

> that might be useful in advancing a slightly different standard of

> policymaking, though I think the real value is in focusing not on what the

> stakes are re: States CP, but where the stakes are located.

>

> RG

>

> p.s. I would also like to add, that one of the problems of the discussion

> might be that there is no unified theory of action that can allow for

> certain CPs while excluding others that we do want; we can make the

> arguments a la a series of justifications, but there is no strong conceptual

> differentiation that does not allow for both possibilities to exist. For

> example, it may be that opportunity cost allows for such a conceptual

> organization, but it seems like opportunity cost also negates the conceptual

> validity of the politics disadvantage. Most people are unprepared to accept

> such collateral damage.

>

> p.p.s. I think that an answer to Stefan's arguments would be: 1) Dylan's

> argument re: block grants, etc, which would look much more like the

> literature and restrict the actor to the FG, and 2) abandoning the States CP

> would force policy-area specific CP choices, which would increase the depth

> of debates re: the negative's approach to research, whereas there is

> currently no incentive to research these areas at all because the States CP

> is an option.

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Illigit

To me, the best argument against the states counterplan is:

There is no entity with the power to decide between state & federal
action. Likewise with international fiat.

Assuming that position is inane because the choice does not exist.

Why do we need to get further into educational or fairness concerns?

The choice posed by the counterplan is silly because no entity has the
power to choose between the plan and the counterplan.

That is the real damage done by the states counterplan: Voting negative
rejects the plan for a reason nobody should consider.

Its not just literature, or aff ground, or anything else, its real world
choice.

The fact that the states could do the plan better can't disprove that
the USFG should, because that comparison does not exist to any real
policy maker.

If you actually find an entity with the power to choose between fiating
the Federal Government and the States, please let me know!

Non-logical choices lead to bad debates. We shouldn't found debate on
nonsense.

My solution? Win more theory debates. Tides will change if affs are
right that 50 state fiat doesn't exist.

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One defense of States

The arguments that Ryan, JP, and Dylan make are all very persuasive to me.

I do, however, think that there is at least one, and maybe three, argumentsin its defense.

Breadth. As noted by Ryan, this social services/poverty topic is an
incredbily large topic. One of the primary arguments made in defense of
this broad wording at the topic meeting was that the states counterplan and  federal "justification" arguments would effectively narrow it. The voting  was close enough that I do not think that a resolution of this breadth would  have made it on the final ballot without many people being reassured that  the negative's states cp would reign the topic in. In a word of such broad  topics, especially very broad high school topics, I think that this argument is at least difficult to overcome.

Fiat. I don't have a great articulation of this argument, but the basic idea
is that since the advantages aren't intrinsic to federal action, the
affirmative really couldn't claim its advantages absent its ability to
"fiat" state action. To adequately discusse the general merits of state vs.
federal action, the negative should be able to use state fiat to
fiat solvency for the non-intrinsic advantages the same way that the
affirmative is.

Reality. Social/domestic issues are generally not addressed at the federal
level. They *can be,* but most of the action of the action occurs at the
state level and there is certainly a reasonable, "real world" argument as to  why those issues should be addressed at that level.

In all of the articles that you read on the poverty topic, there are way
more advocates for state and local action than federal action.

I will add one caveat: One potential solution is to strip USFG from at least
some domestic resolutions. Say "nearly all" states (I know "nearly all"
brings baggage, but something along that lines may work). This also elimates  the politics DA, which may be getting old for some And, it would be good to  get rid of the politics DA at least for a year on domestic topics because in  modern risk calculus (small percentage risk of extinction o/wing domestic  deaths), there is no way that people are going to run many of the cases that  Ryan describes even without a states counterplan (though we could probably  find other big impact generics to replace politics -- inflaiton, housing  markets).

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