[eDebate] Courts considerations - susceptibility to Congress/Executive CP's?

[Jon Wright]

Avoiding studying for finals...



This isn't so much an argument against the topic areas that have been 
suggested so far as it is a thought that occurred to me as I was reading.

It seems like a lot of these potential topic areas are based on the premise 
that "The government is doing Bad Thing X right now, affirmatives will have 
the SC rule that the government can't do Bad Thing X."  While that's fine, 
I'm curious as to what people see as the affirmative's offense against CP's 
that just have the executive or legislative branch stop doing Bad Thing X.  
Off the top of my head, I can imagine some sort of judicial legitimacy or 
separation of powers arguments, but it seems like the aff might need 
something a bit more concrete to outweigh a wave of disads and courts bad 
arguments.

I suppose the affirmative could run politics against these CP's, but that 
seems like a recipe for a tough 1AR.

To deal with some of these concerns, we might want to lean towards 
situations that only the Courts can remedy, i.e. "USFG can't do X now, 
causing bad things to happen, SC should rule so USFG can do X." or "X thing 
is legal now because of the Courts ruling, and that's bad - the SC should 
change it so X is no longer legal [ex. Roe]"  Or we should focus on cases 
that have clear benefits to court action.

It's good that there are controversial areas for harms, and I agree that 
issues like the war on terrorism, immigration, environment, death penalty, 
etc. are ripe for debate.  We just need to consider the unique ways the 
Court interacts with these areas, and construct topics accordingly.

Any thoughts?  This certainly doesn't disallow all the topics that have been 
suggested, but might be a good start for limiting the scope of the 
resolution.

Jon

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