Generic Counterplans
From Mike Marse (Cal Baptist’s coach)
Let me welcome myself to this blog by offering many thanks to Danny for this wonderful forum. I am very excited about the number of LD entries at the APU tournament this weekend, and really appreciate his willingness to post his own team’s affirmative.
I thought this would be a good time to post a generic counterplan for this year’s topic. Of course, by “generic” I mean, “should link to most resolutional plans, if not all”. NFA L/D rules are more restricting than CEDA rules concerning counterplans. They must be:
1) Non topical – They must violate the resolution in some way. The reasoning is that even though topical counterplans are more like the real world (like what goes on in Congress), a topical counterplan would be another reason to vote affirmative, since in that case the negative would advocate the resolution as well. This means that NFA has a “resolutional” focus, whereas most judges in CEDA/NDT these days have a “plan” focus, which means that the plan replaces the resolution and the counterplan must only differ from the affirmative plan, not necessarily the resolution.
2) Competitive – The counterplan “must deal with the problem area defined by the affirmative” (quoting the NFA L/D rules on the NFA website). This prevents the negative from just running the same counterplan with no connection to the resolution every round. Basically, the counterplan should try to solve for the same general harms as the affirmative.
3) Mutually Exclusive – This means the counterplan should not be able to occur at the same time as the plan. If the affirmative can successfully “perm” (short for “add the counterplan as a permutation of plan”) the plan, the counterplan should lose. How the negative proves mutual exclusivity is very hotly debated at the moment, with views everywhere from the counterplan must render the plan impossible, to the view that it just simply be unwise to do both at once. The key issue is whether the perm is a test of mutual exclusivity, or an actual advocacy position for the affirmative. I believe a perm is only a test, but counterplans should negate the possibility for the literal enforcement of the affirmative plan.
4) Net-beneficial – In other words, a tie goes to the affirmative. The counterplan should solve not just as well as plan, but even better. The two major ways of doing this are through offering disadvantages that the affirmative plan links to but the counterplan does not, or simply proving stronger solvency for the counterplan.
I should note that this generic counterplan (clean coal) does contradict Danny’s Global Hunder D/A, so they should not be run at the same time. NFA L/D rules allow the judge to intervene against contradictory negative positions.
If anything is unclear or just plain wrong above, please feel free to post comments or e-mail me at mmarse@calbaptist.edu.
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Comments
You bring up some interesting points. I think that most kritiks (like “you entrench democracy”) are outlawed in the rules, but a “counter proposal” that for example, indicts the narratives of the affirmative would be at least debatable. I’m thinking of perhaps the RPS case, and a counter proposal that suggests that only grassroots movements solve, and that the affirmative entrenches the narrative of big business as environmental benefactor. Could the negative advocate a grass roots movement? While it may it fall to a perm, it seems that this may be a kritik hiding as a counterplan.
If you have solvency for the claim that grassroots movements would solve case harms, then it is cool. If not, it is still debateable anyway. In the case of RPS, there are probably decent enough cards on how movements solve for renewables, which is all RPS solves for. You are right about the perm, unless you have evidence that says federal action stifles movements, which means the perm would crush the movement. At that point if you can prove the CP gets MORE renewables than RPS would, the CP is preferable to both the perm and the RPS aff.
Even the “you entrench democracy” argument is still legal. However, it is probably just a non-unique disad. Now, if the argument comes with an alternative to reject democracy, the alternative would be against the rules arguably. However, the ‘democracy is bad, you use democracy’ argument, while a terrible disad, is perfectly legal.
Very good clarity here. What I’m getting is that perms must not only be proven to be logistically possible, but also desirable over C/P. That is the common position in parli and ceda these days, but seems odd to me. Here’s why: If the perm is judged this way, than mutual exclusivity is not a binary counterplan stock issue, (like non-T) and instead becomes an opportunity for an affirmative case shift. If the affirmative can shift out of a C/P disad by adding counterplan to plan, then why can’t they shift out of disads through a minor repair to plan? It seems much more restricting, but liberating to the debate theory to require that C/Ps be impossible to add to plan.
This is a late addition to our discussion, hopefully you’ll see it. I’ll play devil’s advocate to begin, then have a more sensible argument at the bottom.
I see the perm as serving the purpose of whether or not the CP competes with the 1AC. If the same logic could be applied to a disad, then why not? I remember reading some theory on this a while back. The author referred to disads as being intrinsic to case. For instance, if you could prove that a minor change to squo or the post-plan world would eliminate the disad, then haven’t you proven that the disad is not essential to the case if something totally irrelevant to plan passage and solvency would take out the disad?
There are limits to the type of permutation that the aff can run, like it is theoretically bankrupt for the aff to time-frame perm, severance perm and intrinsicness perm. The same would hold in a disad debate. If the ‘perm’ that the aff is running to get out of the disad goes beyond what the status quo would normally do or beyond a minor repair, then it is illegitimate.
These arguments are merely TESTS of the CP or DA, so I feel like if they test the competition of the argument to prove that they don’t really compete with the affirmative, then it is all good.
However, I think you can just say that CPs and DAs are different arguments. I get to perm a CP, and I get to make different arguments against a DA. Plus, how would you ‘perm’ a DA? Your argument isn’t “Do the Squo and my Plan” because that makes no sense. So if your argument is to my plan AND this minor repair, that’s an intrinsicness perm, and if you tried to do that to a CP you’d lose on theory voters.
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Mike,
I’ve been involved in NFA-LD for about 10 years now, and I think I can safely say that most judges will allow CP that are not specifically mutually exclusive (meaning the PERM is physically impossible) but are competitive because the perm is not desirable. That is a pretty common position.
Generally, most judges are pretty serious about the non-topicality of counterplans. In some regions, like the midwest, some critics are open to ‘rules-bad’ arguments allowing for topical CPs. Unfortunately for the negative, you have to win that topical CPs are legitimate AND that the rules are bad. A tall order. The affirmative only has to win either one to exclude the entire CP from the debate in the 1AR. Running topical CPs just has no advantage for the Neg and is a generally bad strategy given the rule’s existence.
The bigger grey area is the “CP must solve the problem area as defined by the affirmative” caveat. What does this mean? How lenient are judges on this? Do you have to capture ALL of case harms to be legal? This is debateable, but not often debated.
Also, does this caveat exclude some kritiks? Kritiks, despite having a different name than CPs are often a CP (alternative) and disad (kritik impacts) in secret.
Most importantly, the rules are rules for Counter Proposals, not Counter Plans. Does the language counter proposals include kritiks? I would argue it does.
LD rules regarding CPs are a very interesting discussion and I’m glad you’ve brought it up.