Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

10 Appleton East MM Aff

https://hsld.debatecoaches.org/Appleton+East/moorhead+Aff

Stock (w/ Spillover/Genocide & Race)

1ac general

Advocacy

We’ll defend the resolution as a general principle, if you want us to specify any further ask in cross-x

Advantage 1 is Spillover

Plea bargaining reforms spillover – empirics prove

The Economist 11/9 (“The troubling spread of plea-bargaining from America to the world,” 11/9/17, https://www.economist.com/news/international/21731159-tool-making-justice-swifter-too-often-snares-innocent-troubling-spread, accessed online 12/14/17, also published in print edition, KED)

In plea-bargaining, as the promise of a lesser penalty in return for a guilty plea is commonly known, prosecutors offer to drop some charges, to replace the original charge with a less serious one or to seek a lower sentence. It has long been central to America’s criminal-justice system. But over the past three decades it has spread across the world. A study of 90 countries by Fair Trials International, a campaigning group, found that in 1990 just 19 used some form of plea-bargaining. Now 66 do. Plea-bargaining took off in America around 1920 with Prohibition, which led to a steep increase in the number of criminal offences. By 1930 the number of federal prosecutions under the Prohibition Act alone was eight times the total figure for all federal prosecutions in 1914. Bargaining with defendants to plead guilty in return for lighter punishment seemed like the only way to cope. Prohibition ended in 1933, but plea bargains did not. Since 1970, when the Supreme Court ruled that they were permissible, they have become ubiquitous. In 1980 some 19% of federal defendants went to trial. In 2010 the share was below 3%, where it remains. Practice in other countries varies widely. In Australia, England and Russia more than 60% of cases are resolved with plea bargains. In Chile, India and Italy, the share is less than 10%. Some recent converts to plea bargains have adopted them with vim. In Georgia, which has allowed them since 2004, the share of convictions that involved a plea bargain rose from 13% in 2005 to 88% in 2012. Export deals The central role of plea-bargaining in America goes some way to explaining its spread elsewhere. America’s criminal-justice system has a big influence globally, with legal training often forming part of its foreign-aid efforts. The Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development Assistance and Training (OPDAT), part of the Department of Justice, was established in 1991, after the break-up of the Soviet Union and as the war on drugs in Latin America intensified. Among the countries where America helped new governments with legal reforms are Bolivia, Colombia, Poland and Russia. Plea-bargaining was often among the suggested reforms. OPDAT is now helping to write guidance on criminal procedures, including plea-bargaining, in Croatia and the western Balkans. In Ukraine it trains justice officials in the system. Last year it started work with Guatemala on introducing plea-bargaining to clear a backlog of cases.

This spillover includes international criminal tribunals

Turner 2/27 (Turner, Jenia Iontcheva, “Plea Bargaining and International Criminal Justice” (February 27, 2017). 48 U. Pacific L. Rev. 219 (2017); SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 347. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2924610, accessed 12/14/17, KED)

As plea bargaining began spreading to an increasing number of domestic jurisdictions in the 1990s, it was perhaps not surprising that it ultimately made its way to international criminal courts. All such courts, with the exception of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, provide for the possibility of plea bargaining. But the introduction of plea bargaining was far from predetermined and remains controversial. In fact, three of the courts that allow plea bargaining in their statutes—the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon—have yet to resolve a case through plea bargaining. And the two major international tribunals to use plea bargaining extensively—ICTY and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)—have not accepted a negotiated guilty plea since 2007. When the ICTY and ICTR were established in the early 1990s, neither their statutes nor their rules mentioned plea bargaining. The drafters of the ICTY Rules of Procedure expressly rejected a proposal to allow offers of immunity to suspects who provide substantial cooperation to the prosecution. Both testimonial immunity and plea bargaining were seen as inappropriate in the context of international criminal prosecution. Yet, the Statutes and Rules of the ICTY and ICTR did provide for guilty pleas, which was a stepping-stone to the introduction of plea bargaining. The ICTY received its first guilty plea in May 1996, when Dražen Erdemović pled guilty to crimes against humanity for participating in the killing of hundreds of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica. His initial guilty plea was apparently not induced by prosecutorial promises of lenient treatment. But because he did not fully comprehend the consequences of his guilty plea, the ICTY Appeals Chamber concluded that the plea was uninformed and therefore invalid. At the same time, in commenting on guilty pleas more broadly, the Appeals Chamber lauded the merits of plea bargaining and concluded that the practice could make a valuable contribution to international criminal justice. Reassured of the acceptability of plea bargaining at the ICTY, Erdemović and the prosecution reached a plea agreement under which Erdemović would plead guilty to the lesser offense of war crimes and the prosecution would recommend a lower sentence to the court. The ICTY found that Erdemović’s second guilty plea was sufficiently informed. Once the ICTY Appeals Chamber displayed its approval of plea bargaining, the practice quickly gained a foothold. In 2000, Stevan Todorović entered a guilty plea that was the product of a negotiated plea agreement. Between 2001 and 2003, thirteen more defendants did the same. As of August 15, 2011, the ICTY convicted sixty-four defendants, twenty of whom pled guilty. The ICTR accepted its first guilty plea from Jean Kambanda in 1998. Between 1998 and August 2011, the tribunal convicted thirty-seven more defendants of international crimes, seven of whom pleaded guilty.

This prevents the courts from fulfilling their goals of finding the truth of international crimes and fails to deter genocide and crimes against humanity

Turner 2/27 (Turner, Jenia Iontcheva, “Plea Bargaining and International Criminal Justice” (February 27, 2017). 48 U. Pacific L. Rev. 219 (2017); SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 347. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2924610, accessed 12/14/17, KED)

Plea bargaining remains more controversial and less common at the international level than at the national level. Several reasons account for the skepticism toward plea bargaining in international criminal courts. First, the granting of concessions to defendants accused of international crimes is perceived as unseemly given the heinousness and large scale of the crimes in question. Plea bargaining is seen to dilute the moral message that international courts aim to send—that the international community is outraged and will bring to justice those responsible for the crimes committed. Second, plea bargaining is viewed as interfering with the goal of uncovering the truth about international crimes. Finally, plea bargaining is said to disrespect victims’ interests in a public trial and in a sentence proportionate to the defendant’s blameworthiness. Advocates of the practice counter that plea bargaining is not inherently at odds with the goals of international criminal justice and, that if properly structured and administered, a limited form of plea bargaining may provide important benefits to international criminal courts. The merits of the first major objection to plea bargaining—that it is unfit to use in the heinous crimes that international courts handle—depends heavily on the steepness of the plea discount. If negotiations lead to a sentence of a mere few years imprisonment for a crime against humanity or genocide, the system will have failed. A sentence that is disproportionately low would conflict with the retributive goal of imposing on the offender the punishment he deserves and expressing commensurate outrage at his actions. Overly lenient dispositions resulting from plea bargains would also reduce the deterrent effect of international criminal justice, which depends on the swiftness, likelihood, and severity of punishment. International criminal courts already face difficulties on all three scores: they are neither swift nor very successful in apprehending and prosecuting suspects, and their baseline sentences are, by many estimates, too low. Reducing these sentences further as part of plea bargaining dilutes a deterrent effect that is already in question.

Genocide goes beyond physical death to destroy the very fabric of social existence that makes life worth living and death bearable—social death outweighs

Card 03, Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, 2003 [Claudia, “Genocide and Social Death,” Hypatia 18.1 (2003) 63-79, project muse]

Genocide is not simply unjust (although it certainly is unjust); it is also evil. It characteristically includes the one-sided killing of defenseless civilians—babies, children, the elderly, the sick, the disabled, and the injured of both genders along with their usually female caretakers—simply on the basis of their national, religious, ethnic, or other political identity. It targets people on the basis of who they are rather than on the basis of what they have done, what they might do, even what they are capable of doing. (One commentator says genocide kills people on the basis of what they are, not even who they are). [End Page 72] Genocide is a paradigm of what Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit (1996) calls "indecent" in that it not only destroys victims but first humiliates them by deliberately inflicting an "utter loss of freedom and control over one's vital interests" (115). Vital interests can be transgenerational and thus survive one's death. Before death, genocide victims are ordinarily deprived of control over vital transgenerational interests and more immediate vital interests. They may be literally stripped naked, robbed of their last possessions, lied to about the most vital matters, witness to the murder of family, friends, and neighbors, made to participate in their own murder, and if female, they are likely to be also violated sexually. 7 Victims of genocide are commonly killed with no regard for lingering suffering or exposure. They, and their corpses, are routinely treated with utter disrespect. These historical facts, not simply mass murder, account for much of the moral opprobrium attaching to the concept of genocide. Yet such atrocities, it may be argued, are already war crimes, if conducted during wartime, and they can otherwise or also be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. Why, then, add the specific crime of genocide? What, if anything, is not already captured by laws that prohibit such things as the rape, enslavement, torture, forced deportation, and the degradation of individuals? Is any ethically distinct harm done to members of the targeted group that would not have been done had they been targeted simply as individuals rather than because of their group membership? This is the question that I find central in arguing that genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, to any of the other war crimes, or to the crimes against humanity just enumerated. I believe the answer is affirmative: the harm is ethically distinct, although on the question of whether it is worse, I wish only to question the assumption that it is not. Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual, social connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination. This view, however, is controversial. Stopping genocide is an absolute imperative—there is no reason we can justify inaction O’Donnell, Staff Writer, 2003 [Michael J, “Genocide, the United Nations, and the Death of Absolute Rights.” Spring, 23 B.C. Third World L.J. 399, l/n] Genocide is the most heinous crime that can be committed against a human population. 39 In the famous words of the UN General Assembly, genocide "shocks the conscience of mankind." 40 A mandate for its prevention and punishment has been enshrined in a widely-ratified multilateral treaty. 41 Genocide's status as a jus cogen, or customary norm of international law from which no derogation is permitted under any circumstances, is broadly accepted. 42 Commentators have suggested that any list of absolute rights should be short and relatively abstract. 43 It nearly goes without saying that the right of a people to be free from wholesale slaughter would top any such list. 44 Given the near-universal consensus that the taking of innocent life is a moral wrong, genocide stands alone as a wrong  [*407]  that actually multiplies a wrong, magnifying its infamy. 45 The essence of genocide's power is that it denies the very right to exist to entire groups of people based solely upon their identity, making it at once selective in practice and universal in scope.

Advantage 2 is Racism

Plea bargaining favors white people and pressures people of color into taking plea bargains because it saves the courts time. Borchetta and Frontier 10/23

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta and Alice Fontier, 10-23-2017, "New Research Finds That Prosecutors Give White Defendants Better Deals Than Black Defendants," Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2017/10/new_research_finds_that_prosecutors_give_white_defendants_better_deals_than.html / MM

Two officers escorted a young black man into the courtroom, bringing him in handcuffs from a holding cell in the back called “the pen.” They placed him beside his public defender and stepped away. So far, things were routine. The prosecutor had offered the man a plea deal of probation, and he indicated that he would accept. In a scene that plays out dozens of times a day in the Bronx Criminal Court, the judge ran through a constitutionally required script. She explained what it means to accept a prosecutor’s plea offer: that he was giving up his right to a trial; he was admitting guilt; he could not change his mind. The judge asked, as she must: “Is anyone forcing you to accept this plea today?” At this point, most people quietly say "no." But the man responded “yes,” he was being forced to accept the plea. Refusing to accept meant facing the strong arm of prosecution and potentially going to prison for years. He protested that he had no real choice. Three court officers surrounded him. The judge repeated the question: “Is anyone forcing you to accept this plea today?” This time, flanked by officers, he said no. A few minutes later, he walked out a free man, but he now had a criminal conviction and the oversight and constraints that come with probation. Countless people like this young man face tremendous pressure to accept a prosecutor’s plea offer. And most criminal punishment results—not from a trial by a jury of your peers—but in convictions imposed through plea deals. Against this backdrop, a new study showing racial bias in the plea bargaining process demands attention and action. A new study from Carlos Berdejó of Loyola Law School demonstrates for the first time that there are significant racial disparities in the plea deals white and black people receive on misdemeanor charges—with black people facing more severe punishments. Berdejó analyzed 30,807 misdemeanor cases in Wisconsin over a seven-year period and found that white people facing misdemeanor charges were more than 74 percent more likely than black people to have all charges carrying potential prison time dropped, dismissed, or reduced. And white people with no criminal history were substantially more likely to have charges reduced than black people who had no criminal history. This suggests, as Berdejó concludes in his report, that prosecutors use race to judge whether a person is likely to recidivate when deciding what plea to offer. Countless people like this young man face tremendous pressure to accept a prosecutor’s plea offer. Prior studies have found racial disparities in the plea bargaining process. The Berdejó study differs, however, in that it analyzes a detailed statewide data set of the entire life of criminal cases, from charging to sentencing, making it more reliable and expansive.

Plea bargains just create a system of increasing racial domination, the completion of “white European liberalism” that enforces a contract of ontological racial inferiority

Heiner 16, Brady. “The Procedural Entrapment Of Mass Incarceration: Prosecution, Race, And The Unfinished Project Of Am.” Philosophy and Social Criticism. 2016.. . / MM

The US Constitution, through its philosophical separation of the legal powers of legislation, interpretation and enforcement, is conventionally celebrated for eliminating the kind of irresponsible, unaccountable power that Douglass describes. And yet, writing some 70 years after the framing of the US Constitution, Douglass identifies the operation of the unchecked power of racially structured domination and discrimination, not as a regrettable, contingent, accidental deviation from American ideals of governance, but as the norm – normative ‘not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but ... in the sense of being formally codified’.16 To conceptualize this contradiction, which substructures both US democracy and the modern project of European liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills argues that the modern social contract was underwritten by a racial contract. The racial contract is ‘a visible or hidden operator that restricts and modifies the scope of [the social contract’s] prescriptions’, conceptually partitioning and transforming human populations into ‘white’ persons, who enjoy the privileges and protections of full citizenship, and ‘nonwhite’ subpersons, who are excluded by a social ontology of race from enjoying those privileges and protections.17 Mills also argues that the racial contract ‘is continually being rewritten’, suggesting that even after the period of formal, de jure white supremacy, the racial contract continues to give differential powers and privileges to whites and to subordinate and disadvantage non-whites through ‘an illusory color blindness’.18 The contemporary racial contract, according to Mills, has been installed now as a subtext, ‘the invisible writing between the lines’ of the facially race-neutral discourses of mainstream moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, and the official contractual mechanisms of legal statute and jurisprudence.19 In passing, Mills also mentions that the racial contract requires enforcement: The coercive arms of the state, which include the police and the penal system, need to be seen as in part the enforcers of the Racial Contract, working both to keep the peace and prevent crime among white citizens, and to maintain the racial order and detect and destroy challenges to it, so that across the white settler states nonwhites are incarcerated at differential rates and for longer terms.20 I would like to take up this claim, suggested but undeveloped in Mills’ text, on the enforcement of the contemporary racial contract. I will argue that in the current era of mass incarceration, the racial contract is enforced through an arbitrary power functionally analogous and genealogically linked to the irresponsible power that Frederick Douglass denounced in the mid-19th century. This current power circulates between the prosecutorial and policing functions of the American system of penality; it is activated and embodied in the actions of individual prosecutors and police officers; and it inhabits an unchecked, virtually unaccountable discretionary space carved out, unremittingly enabled and deferentially sustained by legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. I will focus here on the prosecutorial function. I will show how the American plea bargain system is a technology of racial domination. Specifically, it is a form of procedural entrapment through which meanings and practices of racial domination from previous eras have been functionally sedimented in the contemporary criminal justice system.

Abolishing plea bargaining helps break apart the racialized view of the CJS not only by not charging black individuals based on racialized biases like drug misdemeanors, but also by putting more of a focus on larger cases like white collar crimes

Savitsky 12, Douglas. “Is Plea Bargaining A Rational Choice? Plea Bargaining As An Engine Of Racial Stratification And Over.” Rationality and Society. 2012. . / MM

The literature on plea bargaining has focused on the one-on-one interaction between a prosecutor and a defendant (Weimer, 1978), and beyond this focus, the broader social significance of the plea bargaining system has not been widely considered. For instance, what would happen if no defendants pled guilty? That is, what might the counterfactual thought experiment of no plea bargaining tell us about the societal impact of the plea bargaining system? It is clear that prosecutors lack the resources to bring every defendant to trial. Were defendants not to plea bargain, each case would cost a prosecutor more in resources, which would influence the ways in which the prosecutor must select which, if any, defendants to prosecute. Thus, if a sufficient number of defendants refused a guilty plea, it would change the bargaining interaction for them all. Indeed, the criminal justice system would likely become overwhelmed. In contemplating eliminating plea bargains, Chief Justice Burger once surmised that reducing the number of guilty pleas from 90% to 80% would increase demand for judges, jurors, court reporters, bailiffs, clerks, and courtrooms by 100% (Burger, 1969). Thus, without plea bargaining, for every defendant to receive the criminal procedure due under the law, the number of prosecutions would need to drop precipitously. Moreover, prosecutors would need to reassess where they invested their resources. The likely result would be not only fewer prosecutions, but fewer prosecutions for low-level crimes and for poor defendants. Currently it is more expensive to prosecute a white-collar embezzlement case involving a lengthy investigation and trial than a low-level case, like a drug case, that can be disposed of quickly via a plea bargain. A prosecutor who wants to show she is effective must win a large number of convictions. As such, she does well to focus on cases that can be easily disposed of through a plea bargain. However, if the easily disposed of cases were to become expensive, due to the need for a trial – with the cost of the difficult ones staying about the same, as they already require a trial or at least an expensive investigation – then a prosecutor’s incentives would likely shift. She would be incentivized to prosecute cases with greater social importance, especially when prosecuting those cases costs the same, or only slightly more, than the less important ones. The definition of what constitutes a socially important case is subject to disagreement. However, in the wake of Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the sub-prime meltdown, it is difficult to argue that the prosecution of a smalltime marijuana dealer is more important to society than the prosecution of a white-collar criminal.

Framing

Structural violence is a manifestation of unjustified biases that make certain groups invisible and is morally unjustifiable.

Winter and Leighton |Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|[Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice] “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 ghs//VA

Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social jus- tice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace.

Thus, the standard is minimizing structural violence

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater with the best policy option to fight structural harms, even if the state is bad, using it as a heuristic provides the best universal education

Zanotti 14 [Dr. Laura Zanotti, Associate Professor of PoliSci, Virginia Tech. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 38, p. 288-304. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 – the stated “Version of Record” is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30th, 2013.] / MM

By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’

The state is inevitable—even if the state is bad, learning to speak the language of power creates the only possibility of social change debate can offer. Coverstone

Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005

An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill

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