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Re: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM IS THE BEST TOPIC EVER

Aaron N Monick wrote:
> 
> My concern deals with the fact that most of the advantages that have been
> proposed so far by cfr supporters have been along the line of "x foreign policy
> initiative" or "economic and tax reforms", namely, certain legislation that
> will or won't be passed now in congress because of slush fund money or pac
> pressure. these dont seem to be legitimate advantages since the neg can just
> stand up and counterplan to do your advantage and get some link to a disad off
> of cfr. maybe i'm missing the boat, but how can you claim an advantage that
> doesn't stem off of future political action, and thus falls under the community
> accepted standard of 'fiat', on this topic? under last year's topic, i couldn't
> c/p to have businesses stop pollute, but i could c/p to revoke mfn if that was
> your advantage under a cfr topic.
> just a thought
> 
>    russell likes to ride bronchos -
>     aaron
> 
>I think that this is a serious question.  Can you counterplan away the effect of the influence?  Seems to fall into many of the fairly 
traditional questions concering negative FIAT which some could use a 
refresher course on during the season.  Obviously the arguments 
concerning subject/object FIAT seem to relate b/c in your example you go 
even further in banning actions of the object.  the analogy to pollution 
would be banning the chemical processes by which the pollutants are 
harmful.  Plus, it is doubtful that you would find field contextual 
evidence to support the Negative Fiat.  You may find advocates for the 
action of the counterplan, but doubtful that you would find evidence 
advocating the action as an alternative to CFR.  I think that Solt's 
defense of this standard in 1989 or so was reasonably strong and have 
not heard too many good attacks against it.

Obviously the affirmative needs to retain some advantage which cannot be 
counterplanned out for strategic purposes.  I haven't followed the voter 
participation literatures in sometime, but it seems like there are 
probably many, many arguments concerning these and other questions which 
the affirmative can tackle.  

I seriously doubt that you will extend your example to counterplanning 
the way individual voters vote in the election to eliminate the effects 
of campaign finance.  If that is where you're going, it will take a bit 
more time to demonstrate the absurdities of it.

I'm not certain that counterplan FIAT questions, in a minimal sense, are 
a reason to reject CFR.  It seems that those arguments came along at a 
time when the debate community was split widely.  I'm not certain that 
they have been thought through by the entirety of the larger debate 
community.

david rhaesa
References:
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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