The Politics Disadvantage is different than many other disadvantages in debate. Temporally, it focuses on the process of plan passage rather than plan enactment. Structurally, it requires the discussion of some external bill unrelated to the plan. And recently in high school debate, it’s probably the disadvantage you see most often. Because of its unique relation to the plan and the external world, the disad has created theoretical controversy regarding its legitimacy as well as how plan passage ought to be imagined (that is, the meaning of fiat). In this post, I want to isolate two of these controversies, explain how they are deployed on the aff and how the negative can respond to them effectively. The first is the intrinsicness perm, an older argument that has made a resurgence in popularity, and an argument about the theoretical implications of voting neg on political capital, a newer response. I will spend most of this post on intrinsic perms, because they are more common and more complicated.
1) The intrinsic perm
The intrinsic perm tests whether or not the disadvantage is intrinsic to the plan. Does the plan really result in the lost opportunity that the disad suggests? For instance, does the drawdown of troops from Okinawa require that the South Korea Free Trade Agreement not pass? The premise of this argument is that the aff need only defend the consequences of plan enactment. The aff must argue why certain tradeoffs will not result from the plan implementation, or if they did, why those tradeoffs would be good (or not as bad as foregoing the plan). The aff should not have to be prepared to defend against disadvantages that are not opportunity costs to plan implementation.
This strategy often goes by several different names in the debate. Sometimes, the judge is invoked as a “logical policymaker” who could vote for both the plan and the politics disad scenario (For the purposes of this post, I will be assuming that the politics disad is and Obama good disad; that is, some bill will pass now, plan costs Obama political capital, bill not passing causes bad things to happen.). Some say that the disad is not an opportunity cost to the aff. I think that how someone phrases the argument changes how you ought to respond to it. It is best to clarify in cross-examination whether or not it is actually a permutation or just a no link argument because a permutation may require an extra sentence as to why intrinsic perms are bad or why perms cannot be advocated.
Ultimately, I think these arguments are not all that persuasive. If the negative wins that the plan passage forces an opportunity cost for Obama (which bill to push in Congress), then talk of logical policymakers and opportunity costs are red herrings. In addition, if the links are based on agenda sequencing, focus, or a quickly closing legislative session (all distinct link argument from political capital), then the logical policymaker in the American political system would also face issues of lost opportunities. This is all to suggest that the negative, if they have a link, can argue why for someone, the choice to vote for the plan requires foregoing a vote in favor of something else on the agenda. For members of congress, this could be because the plan and the DA scenario are unpopular in their district or party, so Obama can only convince them to vote for one of them because voting for both would guarantee electoral defeat. Or it could be an issue of horse-trading (think the tax cuts deal in the 2010 lame duck session, where Obama had to give into Bush tax cuts in order to get START. The plan, if unpopular, could take the place of some other unpopular bill (like START) in the horse trade). A real rational policymaker does what she can to get the most out of compromise while giving away the least. The aff changes those calculations irrevocably. The question is not could a rational policymaker do both. The issue is would a rational policymaker do both.
The real issue of the intrinsic perm is whether or not the affirmative ought to defend the process of plan passage. We can interpret fiat to mean that the question is whether the implementation of plan passage is a good idea, not whether the process of plan passage is a good idea. The argument that the aff does not ask questions of plan passage underlies the arguments about competition for agent counterplans, consultation counterplans, and any process counterplans (such as veto-cheato). The argument usually derives from the “should” in the resolution; the question is one of the plan’s desirability and nothing more. In order to win this argument, the aff must have a robust defense of this interpretation of fiat.
The main arguments against having to defend process are as follows:
-Predictability: “Should” in the resolution means this is the most stable interpretation, which is key to research and aff offense.
-Limits: There is an unlimited number of ways to tweak the process by which a plan passes/unlimited links to process disadvantages, while there is no offense to garner a large solvency deficit or link turns from that process, which means the aff cannot generate or research sufficient offense.
-Education: focus on process destroys topic specific education because it encourages less topic specific research in favor of strategies that can be recycled for years/encourages researching superficial news analysis instead of peer-reviewed foreign policy analysis.
Negative responses:
I discussed above how I believe one ought to answer the claim that a logical policymaker could do both. Here, I will consider both theoretical reasons why the logical policymaker model is bad and why the implementation-not-process model of fiat is bad.
Problems with logical policymaker:
-Simulating the US federal government is not simulating any one person in the federal government. Durable fiat (the only real solution to inherency) requires that one fiats the actions of multiple agencies, which means there is no logical policymaker, otherwise plan would never be implemented.
- Rather, one is voting on the resolution: should the federal government as currently constituted do the plan? If it is not this government, there can be no claim about timeframe of solvency or impacts. If it is not a question of the current government passing the plan, then this makes any standard impact calculus impossible to engage in.
-Limits: Much as people accuse kritiks as involving ‘infinite’ frameworks, there are a limited, but large and unpredictable number of ways to interpret what makes someone ‘logical.’ The increasing number of debates that involved carded responses to probability versus low risk magnitude arguments should expose how many different ways one can logically consider a problem. Also, any passing glance at judge philosophies will also show how many different weighing mechanisms judges use in deciding debates. Assuming most judges think they are logical, this really presents a limits problem for the neg.
Negative responses to intrinsicness perms:
-Process is an important part of policy education; policymakers do make calculated decisions about how to approach policy change, whether it be legislation, litigation, and the endless subsets of venues or approaches to law-making bodies.
- Almost all disads and advantages have elements that are in addition to plan implementation; most notably, perception links (necessary for short-term solvency for advantages like hegemony, where the restoration of our readiness would take at least months after implementation of the plan because of the need for retraining and redeployment This is also true of relations-based advantages, where the guarantee of plan passage is what is necessary for a change in relations). If the aff can claim advantages off of non-implementation-based links, then the neg ought to be able to show how those non-implementation based issues cause bad things to happen.
-Arbitrary distinction: Any disadvantage could be spun by the aff to not be a genuine opportunity cost to the affirmative, or to be based on process and not implementation, which means all disadvantages would be illegitimate. This is the flip side of the argument right above, though the impact is slightly different. Instead of a reciprocity claim, this is a ground claim.
2) Voting Negative costs political capital
I am probably late to the party on this one, but I heard this argument for the first time in January. The argument is, as far as I can tell, that if the judge votes neg, it will show that Obama is too weak to get his agenda passed, which will cost him political capital, making the disadvantage inevitable. This is a tricky argument because it is relatively new and because it has the veneer of a logically coherent argument; if plan is perceived in horse-trading negotiations, then voting against the plan would be perceived as well. This is a no-cost argument for the affirmative to make, but I think a couple of simple negative responses can defeat it.
Negative responses:
The main problems with this argument are that it presumes that the negative has to defend something other than the status quo. The negative is not a no vote after the plan is proposed; the negative merely has to defend that how things are in the present is better than how things would be if the plan were passed. But even if the negative did have to defend a no vote on the plan in Congress, there are several reasons why the aff’s interpretation of its consequences is incorrect.
-First, a no vote would prove that Obama spent his political capital getting the scenario passed as opposed to getting the plan passed. The judge’s ballot would be more of a choice of where Obama ought to spend his political capital as opposed to a sign of the political capital’s failure. Dennis Kucinich proposes bills all the time that never are voted on. Just because a bill is proposed does not mean Obama pushes it.
-Second, a vote neg could actually increase Obama’s political capital. If the plan is really as unpopular as the link evidence says, then when it is proposed, it will scare those who oppose the plan into a less-extreme agenda item. The plan is a warning shot, as it were, that Obama can abandon in order to get more support for his centrist agenda items.
Because the original aff theory argument has no evidentiary basis, it is easily spun to support the negative’s position. When the facts are as indeterminate as this, oftentimes, judges will default to the team defending its position, rather than the team trying to forward a positive claim. As long as this argument is answered, it is difficult for the affirmative to win such a position.
These are obviously not the only theoretical arguments that are involved in the politics disad (others are bottom of the ‘docket’ or other time frame arguments and other interpretations of fiat), but I believe that the logic of these two arguments ought to help you deal with other types of theoretical objections to politics disadvantages. Thinking through these forms of arguments and thinking about how they implicate the type of negative and affirmative argumentative possibilities as well as what they assume about the negative’s relationship to the status quo will often be enough to argue against new types of theory you may encounter.
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