Another musing on debate theory.

In previous posts I’ve lamented on my desire to see objectivity/universality in theoretical frameworks that debaters use and abuse to construct theory arguments. One practical application of this concept comes to mind is debating the boundaries of negative fiat. If you were to ask most high school debaters to think of two reasons why international fiat is abusive, I’d say the most common responses would be:

• no policymaker can make the choice between the plan and the CP
• there are thousands of international actors/permutations of international actors

One of these arguments establishes a “universal framework” and one of them doesn’t. Saying that there are an overwhelming number of international actors doesn’t establish a universal framework because it can’t be applied in a general sense; in other words, there’s no “brightline” that logically defines how many actors is too many before we should exclude the entire idea from debate.

Arguing that counterplans that present an impossible choice for any policymaker via argument #1 does establish a framework that could potentially be applied to other counterplans, e.g. domestic agent CPs. The debate over the merits of this “impossible choice” argument seem to always end here. What policymaker has the choice between Congress acting and the President acting? The DoD? The military? State governments? Virtually none – unless, however, we place the judge in the role of a policymaker that has jurisdiction over the entire United States federal government. Because such a policymaker doesn’t exist, this forces the logic of “international fiat bad” to also exclude domestic agent CPs.

This line of thinking causes us to regress further and further until we reach the theoretical construct of a policymaker* that has jurisdiction over the decision to do either the plan or nothing else. Even this stretches the bounds of conceivability since most affirmatives would require the consent and cooperation of multiple officials & policymakers within the United States federal government, and this type of unitary decision-making is not how the government works.**

In my mind, the idea that the judge is supposed to take the role of a policymaker that comprises or is within the United States federal government derives a foregone conclusion from the resolution. The core issue at hand is the question that the resolution asks. To use a previous international topic as an example, does the resolution ask whether the United States federal government should increase public health assistance to sub-Saharan Africa as compared to, say, a different country? Or, does it ask where the United States should send its public health assistance? Or, does it ask what type of assistance the United States should send to sub-Saharan Africa? Defining the question inherently defines the scope of policymaking that debates about that resolution will encompass.

Because I see no resolutional justification for excluding any of these questions, it is my opinion that if we are to consider enabling the judge to make a “choice” between competing policy options, the judge should not be constrained by “real-world” assumptions about what a policymaker can or can not do, since the policy-making “role” the judge takes on*** is not defined by the resolution.

However, debaters are free to shape and alter what the role of the judge is as long as there is some sort of reasonable justification that draws the boundaries on what the judge can or cannot do in all circumstances. We do this all the time when debating kritik frameworks. It is in this sense that the fundamental question of the resolution is sacrosanct, since justifying an arbitrary policymaking role for the judge to take on necessitates justifying one view of the resolution over another (i.e., presuming that the resolution does not ask all of the questions I identified above).

* “policymaker” in this sense could also encompass a governing body made up of multiple policymakers, e.g. Congress.
** While I won’t go into too much detail, this is also an answer to the “non-intrinsicness” argument commonly made against the politics DA, which says that the judge logically has the option to vote for the plan and whatever the substance of the politics DA is (say, health care reform). Such an assumption is a) not grounded in the resolution and b) impossible to subjectively define, because fiating that health care reform passes is not a component of the politics DA, and if the judge has the capability to do that it justifies things like “the judge has the capability to do the plan and stop war between the US and China”
*** I make an assumption here by stating that the judge takes on a “role” as a policymaker, since that is also an assumption not grounded in the resolution, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article.