Cross Examination: Robots are everywhere and they eat old people's medicine for fuel

Seems like it's long overdue that I discuss Cross Examination, since it happens so early in a debate round. Novices seem to have a love-hate relationship with Cross Ex. Either you're foaming at the mouth to get in there and match wits mano-a-mano or you're absolutely terrified of getting caught with your pants down. Both predispositions have some truth to them: It's nerve-racking to have to face whatever questions come from your opponent, but it's a heck of a rush to get the chance to skewer the other team.

There's also a word of warning here for the "bring on the CX" folks. There's a distinct possibility that you have an inaccurate idea of what Cross-Ex looks like, especially if you watch a lot of Law and Order. This isn't a court room, and it's especially not a TV court room. You aren't going to get them to admit to murder, or even that their plan is a bad idea. If you do your best "Sam Waterston Gets All Angry and Wins the Case" impression, you are probably just going to look like an ass.

That's not to say that CX doesn't matter. It's a great opportunity to make yourself seem smart and your opponents seem less smart. It's a great chance to point out over-tagged cards or over-claiming authors. You can poke some critical holes in your opponents position, and get them to concede links to your arguments. The problem is, all of that takes practice. You'll have to watch a lot of rounds before you can recognize a good CX question, much less ask one. Winning in Cross-ex comes from subtelty and strategy, not from yelling until you are blue in the face.

You'll have to do crawl before you can walk, so to speak. I think that most judges evaluate CX on a sort of "level" system like you'd see in an Role-playing game or a standardized test grading rubric. Different people would rank these behaviors differently, but I think that most students progress through these stages roughly in order

• Level 1 - Fills time: Is able to ask 3 minutes worth of questions that are relevant to the other team's arguments. Questions don't go anywhere strategically relevant, but is able to keep a conversation going.


• Level 2 - Fills holes: Uses most of CX time to fill in holes in their flow. Questions sound like "What was your third answer on the Spending disad?" and don't go any further. Shows that the student is at least making an honest attempt to flow, even if they don't have a complete picture of the round.


• Level 3 - Pokes holes: Uses CX to find flaws in specific cards/arguments, but not particularly important holes. Might spend an entire cross-ex drilling their opponent about how their Uniqueness evidence is "too old" from a few months ago, but when their speech rolls around their non-uniques are just as old.


• Level 4 - Link Fishing: Asks CX questions that establish links to positions they plan on running, but aren't terribly subtle about it. "So, uh, plan spends money, right?" Shows that they are at least thinking a little bit about using CX strategically, but also that their strategic considerations are shallow.


• Level 5 - Pokes deep holes: Asks questions that expose deeper flaws in their opponent's positions: necesary trade-offs, flawed assumptions, biases that cut along multiple pieces of evidence, etc. Also, their constructives/rebuttals actually use and impact those flaws.


• Level 6 - Link Harpooning: Uncovers links, but without being clumsy and obvious about it. Opponents/Judge might not know what links they are going for. Is able to use opponents' fear of linking into arg A to link them into arg B. Uses the Reverse Pit of Doom.


• Level 7 - Yomi: From the Japanese word for "reading," as in "reading the mind of the opponent. This debater is always one step ahead. Asks the questions that their opponents are most afraid of, exposes the links that they are most vulnerale to. Is focused on winning the round, not just the 3-minute CX time. Uses the Level 5/6 behaviors along with this "reading" to gain ground on the opponent.

This list isn't meant to be a step-by-step guide, more like a thermometer. A level 7 CX is evidence of a good debater. You can't just tell yourself "OK, I'm going to start asking smart, strategic questions" because you don't know what those questions are yet. Use this list to take your own temperature on occasion... are you stuck at Level 2? Did you miss an opportunity for a Level 5 question last round? Also, when debating/watching more experienced opponents, watch for their higher-level questions, and take note of them. Maybe even steal them when the opportunity arises. Like all parts of this activity, I think that learning to appreciate a good CX question goes hand-in-hand with being good at CX yourself.

On the subject of "The Turn"

Now onto the turn, a concept that I've mentioned a few times, but one that really ought to be given it's own article. I'm going to allow Mr. Calum Matheson to introduce the turn for me:



This snippet (a deleted scene from a debate documentary) is everything I love about debate in two minutes. Calum starts with a very dry, methodical description of what a turn is. The examples of turns, at first just for illustration's sake, become like battle scars, reminders of wars fought long ago. Notice the kid-in-a-candy-store smirk at about 1:00 when discussing the pollution turn? Calum hasn't just heard about this argument. He's given sweat and blood and tape for this argument, and he's definitely won rounds on this argument.

That's the thing about turns. Merely describing what a turn is doesn't do it justice. A link turn isn't just "winning that your plan prevents the impact," it's using your judo skills to flip the 300 pound thug straight over your head. Impact turns aren't just winning "their impact is bad," it's destroying your opponent's entire worldview, it's force-feeding them the blue pill and blowing the matrix out their butts. It's having the power to answer an argument with just about anything.

You're really only limited by what qualified authors say in published materials. That sounds rather constricting, but if there's anything that debate has taught me over the years, it's that the universe of "arguments made by smart people" is much bigger than it looks. Pretty much anything short of the blatantly offensive (holocaut denial, racism good, rape good) is fair game. Debate is about challenging assumptions: find an assumption that your opponents are not ready to defend and you've got an opportunity, a chink in their armor.

Now, just because you can argue anything from here to ridiculousness doesn't mean you should. Some students go off the deep end when it comes to counter-intuitive arguments. The reason that there's a certain badge of honor that comes with winning rounds on nuclear-war-good is because it's hard. It takes a lot of preparation, forethought, and technical skill. Just because an argument is off-the-wall doesn't mean that your opponents won't be able to think up the common-sense answers.

There's a bit of a tension here, I think, between the practical and the sexy. Say you are answering a disad that says that plan crashes the economy, which would be bad. The link turn (we help the economy) is, in most cases, the path of least resistance. You can generally be better prepared about your plan than your oppoents can, so make the debate about what your plan does. Let them leave their piles of "growth good" cards in the tub. Pragmatic. Practical. It's boring, but it's boring because it works.

And even though this article is about "offense" (as opposed to defense), it's worth noting that sometimes the right argument to make is even less sexy. Maybe you beat the disad on a non-unique, or "congress will ignore plan." You should generally have some sort of turn as part of your strategy, but you should be making arguments good enough that dropping any of them means you win, no matter how un-sexy.

Let your creativity run wild, sure. But edit. Part of being a successful debater is knowing when to be crazy and when to be boring. It usually doesn't take long in the season before you have more argument options than could fit in an 8-minute speech, so preparation will become not about what to add, but about what to take away.

Getting this eye for editing early might help you prevent the worst "everyone does it" mistake of novice debate. A link turn plus an impact turn equals a double turn, and double turns are bad. If you say, in the same round, both that plan saves the economy (link turn) and that economic growth is bad (impact turn), you've given your opponents a free disad just by conceding your arguments. Worse, it's a free disad that you don't get to answer. Remember, once your arguments are made they can't be un-made. You are stuck with this new "growth bad" disad the rest of the round.

Sounds easy enough to avoid, right? Just never run link turns and impact turns together. But when the ink starts flying it's a lot harder than it seems to keep everything consistent. And there's no guarantee that both parts of the "double turn" will happen on the same piece of paper, or in the same speech. If you aren't keeping your stories straight, a good opponent will find ways to punish you.

Now, there are ways of preventing this debacle, but all of them boil down to "know what you are doing." The biggest step you can make over your first year is to move beyond thinking of debate in terms of "their third argument on the politics disad" and start thinking in terms of the round. Strategy instead of tactics. Editing instead of just grab cards and read.

It's hard, but there's a benefit in all this. Really, debate, when done well, allows you to unlock parts of your mind you wouldn't have ever explored before. Returning to my video snippet, I love this quote:

"I love these arguments because some of them are so ludicrous, but people will think so little about them that in the end, many people are incapable of dealing with them... these are issues that one cannot discuss anywhere but in a debate"

When I die, put that on my tombstone.

I'm laying knowledge on us, predict like Nostradamus, or the Three Great Impact Comparisons

Imagine, for a moment, a hyper-simplified model of a debate round that has only two kinds of arguments: "yours" and "theirs." "Your" arguments are the arguments that you introduced, that you have well researched, and that you are used to debating. Your opponents are similarly prepared to debate "their" arguments. Let's also suppose that you and your opponents are of roughly equal debating skill.

Which arguments are you likely to win in this debate? Why, your arguments, of course. And, by extension, which arguments are your opponents likely to win? Their arguments. So, if you win all your arguments, and they win all their arguments, who should win the round?

Or, in more concrete terms, say you win that your plan saves a million impoverished people from dying of starvation, but they win that your plan will crash the US economy and cause war to break out, say between the US and China. Who wins? If a million people dying of starvation is worse than the war, then plan is a good idea, and you win, and they win if the opposite is true. The victory, in other words, goes to the team that prevents the "worse" impact.

So, what makes an impact worse than another? Arguments that answer this question are called Impact Comparisons, and these arguments are critically important in competitive debate. The "You win all your arguments, they win all their arguments" scenario doesn't often play out exactly, but some version of it does happen quite a bit, for exactly the reasons in my hypothetical scenario. Impact comparisons also focus the debate on a core concept, so if you can win an impact comparison you may be able to make a large part of the rest of the debate irrelevant.

The question that is probably burning on many minds by now is "well, how many people does the US-China war kill? Is it more than a million?" This is a magnitude comparison. For countable impacts like this, magnitude is fairly straightforward: how many die? how far does global GDP fall? For some other impacts, this can be a bit tricker: Is societal sexism worse than societal racism? Is a genocide a worse atrocity than war even if fewer people die?

Of course, magnitude is not the only thing that matters when it comes to making decisions. Say you are considering walking to the library. If you decide to go, there is a small (but real) possibility that you could get hit by a bus on your way. Getting hit by a bus has a much greater magnitude than going without the latest Harry Potter, but yet you go to the library anyway. Why? The probability of getting hit is so low that you decide it is worth the risk.

It is the same way with policymaking. Higher probability impacts are more important than lower probability impacts. Here is where a smart debater can sway a debate in their favor. You might not be able to win your link turn on the Econ Disad, but you might be able to mitigate the probability. After all, there are a lot of things that have to go wrong for a crash to lead to a war... maybe you've got evidence that the US wouldn't want to attack China. And maybe your case harms are worse than a 20% chance of war, even if fewer people die.

When comparing impacts based on magnitude and probability, it's important to note another characteristic: whether an impact is Linear or Terminal. Terminal impacts are a yes/no proposition. War either happens or it doesn't. We either get hit by an asteroid or we don't. Linear impacts have varying degrees of bad (that scale "linearly" if you were to plot them). We might be able to save all 1 million impoverished folks, or we could save 500k of them, or 100k of them, or none of them, or any amount in between.

The upshot of this is that a statement like "their impact has 50% probability" is ambiguous if I don't know much about the impact. A 50% chance of saving a million people from starvation (and probably saving 500k) looks much different than a 50% chance of a war breaking out.

In addition to magnitude and probability, the last of the "three great comparisons" is timeframe. It's an intuitive notion that a bad thing today is worse than a bad thing 100 years from now, but it might pay to reflect on why. If a policy now would cause a war in 100 years, maybe we'll figure out how to stop the war in the meantime. If plan costs a lot of money in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to save up.

For many affirmatives (especially on this year's topic), timeframe is an important weapon, because harms like poverty are happening now (they are "systemic," as some like to say). Of course, this can be taken too far. For example, people are infected with AIDS right now, with 100% certainty. But say we want to put more research money into finding a cure. The research has maybe a 10% chance of finding a cure (generous), and it might take 10 years. Suddenly your timeframe advantage is less definite. If your opponents know what they are doing, your advantage is only as short as the longest link in the chain.

The three great comparisons are powerful tools, but a few more Dos and Don'ts are in order so that you can use them most effectively.

• Comparisons aren't comparisons unless they actually Compare. Don't just tell me your war happens fast, tell me why it's fast-er than theirs.


• Most of the time, you can't win all three. Much better to tell me why the comparisons you are winning are more important than grasp at straws


• Get specific. Not all wars are created equal. A "nuclear war" between the US and Korea wouldn't be fun, but it would pale in comparison to a US-Russia nuclear conflict


• The three biggest lies in the world are: "The check is in the mail", "This might sting a little", and "Our plan results in extinction." Don't let your opponents over-claim their impacts.

The Fundamenals of Debate Strategy, or Ryan Battles the Pink Robots

For the purposes of this post, I am assuming that you have seen, heard, or read some piece of science fiction involving a robot. If you haven't, please close this web browser, make haste to your local library, and read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot.

The reason that I recommend I, Robot in particular is because every other piece of fiction involving a robot is really just I, Robot in disguise. Asimov's collection of stories introduces and explores the Three Laws of Robotics: a system of rules that control all robot behavior.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.


2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.


3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

You can see these principles in every Robot character written since Asimov. Every good-guy robot follows the three laws (See: Data, Autobots, C-3PO, H.E.L.P.eR, every character in WALL-E). Every bad-guy robot deliberately flaunts the three laws (See: Decepticons, the T-1000, "The Machines" in The Matrix). Every funny robot character is a satire of the three laws. From the pilot episode of Futurama:

Fry: Wait a second. You're a bender, right. We could escape if you would just bend the bars.
Bender: Dream on, skintube! I'm only programmed to bend for constructive purposes. What do I look like, a de-bender?

The great thing about the Three Laws isn't just their influence over science fiction (and real-world robotics, actually), it's how these three simple rules can create such deep, interesting worlds. Asimov uses these rules to transform unthinking mechanical men into three-dimensional, relatable characters. Testing the limits of the Three Laws opens up a world of gripping plot devices. This system of rules takes a paragraph to describe, but you could fill an entire library with the fiction and nonfiction that uses this system to do interesting things.

One of the hard things about being a novice debater is that there are just so many things to remember. Hell, I've only yet covered a handful of topics in my "Intro to Debate" series and I've already introduced over a dozen vocab words. Especially when the rubber meets the road in a round, it's daunting to remember and act on all the "dos and don'ts" that you learn in your first few weeks of debate.

Which is why I'd like to make an attempt at the organizational simplicity of the Three Laws of robotics, applied to debate. Like the Three Laws govern the entirety of robot behavior, my "Three Laws of Debate" are the fundamental basis of a debate round. None of these are written in rulebooks (that I know of), but these three principles are widely accepted norms of how a debate round ought to function. Most of the strategic advice that I have to give stems from these three principles. So without further ado, here's my stab at the Three Laws.

• An argument, once made, cannot be un-made


• A conceded argument becomes true


• No new arguments in rebuttals

Time will tell if these laws prove as powerful and influential as Asimov's (I wouldn't bet on it), but I think that they do a pretty good job setting up the logical foundation of our little game. Allow me to explain some of the implications of the Three Laws of Debate.

An argument, once made, cannot be un-made

We've all said things that we wish we could take back. In debate, just like real life, we are stuck with the consequences of what we choose to say. If the plan I advocate in my 1AC gets trounced by the negative, I can't just introduce a new plan in the 2AC. If my harms scenario gets turned by the negative (let's say that they win that Global Warming is necessary to prevent a coming Ice Age), I can't just say "never mind" and get rid of the advantage. My strategic decisions have consequences, and I must always be "responsible" for my arguments.

Of course, the mere existence of an arugment doesn't guarantee that it is in any way important or useful. Much of that depends on how my opponent reacts to that argument, leading to the second law:

A conceded argument becomes true

If you make an argument, and I concede it whether explicitly (by saying something like "I concede their argument about blah") or implicitly (by not addressing the argument at all, or "dropping" it), then you get to use that argument for whatever you want. This is the fundamental reason that speed developed as a debate strategy: If I can make so many arguments that my opponent cannot answer them all (or cannot deeply answer them all), I force them to choose which arguments to answer and which to concede. Hopefully I can get them to concede something important that I can win the round on.

Of course, concessions aren't usually that clean cut. If I concede an argument that says that the earth is warming, and you concede an argument that says that the earth is cooling, both of those statements can't simultaneously be true. We're stuck having to debate out the relative merits of those arguments. Also, the strength of the conceded argument matters in determining how important the concession is. Conceding a one-line claim-without-warrant that my plan will crash the economy carries much less weight than conceding a well-warranted piece of evidence that my plan will crash the economy. There are different amounts of "true," in other words.

The second law creates an incentive to make as many arguments as possible, but this incentive is checked by the third law,

No new arguments in rebuttals

The classical formulation of this argument is that "Constructive" speeches are for making new arguments and "Rebuttals" are for discussing/evaluating/rebutting arguments that have already been made. Actually, I think that the law is better viewed as a contiuum, where arguments must get "less new" as the debate goes on.

One of the few types that most judges will unashamedly "intervene" against are new 2AR arguments. The rationale is pretty simple: the Negative has no chance to respond, so 2AR arguments are obviously unfair. Progressing backwards through the debate, the 2NR can make new arguments, but all the 2AR generally has to do to defeat them is point out that they are new. The 1AR can usually only make new arguments in response to new arguments in the block. The block can generally make new arguments, though new Topicality arguments are generally frowned upon. The 2AC can do pretty much anything except run a new plan, and the 1AC and 1NC are wide open.

Now, I'm attempting to make a generalization here of what is allowable in each speech, so obviously there are exceptions and caveats, but the point that I am trying to make is that there is a general consensus in the community that arguments must become "less new" as the debate goes on.

My goal for my remaining articles on Strategy is to show, whenver possible, how my random bits of advice are connected to one or more of the three laws. The great experiment of these laws hinges on my ability to do so naturally, and without adding any laws. Like I said, I'm hoping for success but I'm not yet ready to bet on it.

Hammers, Screwdrivers, and The Stock Issues

I'm no expert on debate history, but I think that one of the driving
forces behind innovations in debate is one simple reality: it's darn
tough to be a negative. Those pesky affirmatives get all the time in
the world to craft their 1ACs, and us negatives only get a few
precious moments of prep time to cobble together a round winning
strategy. Living here in the real world also makes the prospect of
defending the status quo pretty tricky. The one thing that every
political ideology seems to agree on is that the world isn't all
puppies and rainbows right now.

Which is why the debate community has crafted quite an extensive
toolkit for the negative through the years. The problem is, learning
this entire toolkit all at once is overwhelming, you need to use a
hammer for a little while to really appreciate the reason for the nail
gun. The most basic negative toolbox has 4 tools, which are the four
stock issues that the affirmative needs to prove to win the round.
Topicality is a big enough subject for it's own article, so I'll focus
here on Inherency, Harms, and Solvency.

There are two different strategies for attacking an Affirmative's
harms scenario, which inolve two concepts that re-occur quite a bit in
the debate universe: takeouts and turns. Takeouts are
arguments that mitigate the impact of a harm. They might reduce the
size of the harm ("Fewer people in poverty die of starvation
than the affirmative claims"), lessen the probability of the
harm ("The affirmative says that a war with Russia is likely if we
don't act, but Russia knows that they would lose this war so they'd
never attack us"), or lengthen the timeframe ("They say that
the world will run out of oil in 2025, but we prove that we have until
at least 2100, which means we'll be able to come up with new
technology in the meantime").

Takeouts implicitly assume that the "bad thing" that the affirmative
describes actually is a bad thing. Turns take the opposite approach.
As it turns out, there is some debate amongst smart people over
whether some things are good or bad. Take Free Trade, for instance.
Some economists argue that free trade around the world is the best way
to grow the economy and prevent war. Other economists argue that we
are better off protecting our domestic industry by restricting free
trade. This means that if the affirmative's harms story centers on
free trade, as the neg we have the option of arguing the other way.
They say trade good, we say trade bad, or vice versa. This is a tough
strategy to do right, but it can be a powerful tool. Teams might not
take time to prepare for arguments like "pollution good," and we can
use that to our advantage.

Inherency, you'll remember, asks the question "If plan didn't
happen, would the harms continue." One of your options as a Negative
is to answer this question with "no." If the neg is going to win on
inherency, they have to prove either than (1) the Aff's plan is going
to happen in the status quo or (2) something else in the status quo
will solve the harm. Proving that plan will happen in the status quo
is tough to do, mostly because aff's tend to pick plans that aren't
being done. However, if you can catch a team unawares by finding their
plan buried in an omnibus spending bill, you've got a pretty easy road
to victory. If the aff's plan itself isn't going to happen in the
status quo, you can occasionally find something else in the status quo
that is going to solve. This also has limited potential, however. At
the end of the day its pretty easy to find some harm out there that
the powers-that-be aren't doing enough about.

Fortunately for the negative, it's much harder to fix problems than it
is to find them, so there's usually an argument to be made over
Solvency. Just like harms, we can attack solvency with takeouts
(plan won't have the intended effect) and/or turns (plan will have the
opposite effect). In those two categories, there are some re-occuring
patterns in successful solvency arguments. Does the plan solve part of
the harm but not all of it? Does the plan make the problem better now
but worse in the long term? Lots of things have to happen for the plan
to solve - are they missing evidence that, say, people will actually
take the social service offered to them? Are the aff's solvency cards
based on faulty predictions, bad science, or biased experts? There have
been more than a few Neg rounds won by finding a part of Solvency that
the Aff takes for granted and exploiting their lack of evidence.

Now, it's important to mention that as the neg, all of the stock issues are
options you have, not requirements. The aff has to prove the entirety of their case by defending the stock issues, but aside from a few exceptions that I'll mention later, the neg has the luxury of picking and choosing. Maybe you want to run your best solvency turns along with some harms takeouts. Maybe you can concede solvency and turn harms. Maybe you want to go all in on inherency. Now, knowing which issues to pick and choose is a more complicated question, but remember that as the negative you have the power to focus the debate on the issues that you think you can win. And if you win, say, that plan doesn't solve, it probably doesn't matter if the aff wins that their harms are really big.

It won't take long for you to learn the limitations of these tools, but they are important tools nonetheless. It's also important to note that this is about the point where you are ready to actually have a debate in the standard policy format, which I recommend you do, actually.

Making your case - the Stock Issues

It might not make sense to follow this pattern strictly, but it seems like the best place to start explaining how a debate round works is to talk about what happens in the first speech. So let's start at the beginning. The affirmative speaks first, and in their "First Affirmative Constructive" or 1AC they are tasked with building a case "affirming" the resolution.

There are many different approaches that the affirmative can take to affirm the resolution (especially considering the long history of policy debate), but the vast majority of affirmatives will present a plan. Most high school resolutions are very broad, for example this year's is "The United States federal government should substantially increase social services for persons living in poverty" There's a lot of different different social services the government offers, many different ways for the government to "substantially increase" them, and many different kinds of "persons living in poverty." The aff generally finds it to their advantage to advocate a more specific policy option, and presenting a plan is how to do that.

Let's say I'm the affirmative and I choose the following plan to advocate: "The United States Federal Government should expand Medicaid coverage to all persons meeting the United States federal poverty definition." I haven't thought too hard about the wording, but I'd expect that similar plans will be popular next year. Reading the plan itself won't take me much time, so I'd use the rest of my 8-minute 1AC to build a Prima Facie case. Prima Facie is a latin term borrowed from the legal system which means "on first appearance." Basically a prima facie case is a complete justification for my plan. There are four parts that make a complete affirmative case in policy debate, we call them The Stock Issues: Topicality, Harms, Inherency, Solvency. THIS is a popular pnemonic.

Topicality is whether or not the aff's plan fits under the resolution. The Aff gets to prepare their 1AC ahead of time, meaning they effectively get "infinite prep time." If the Neg came prepared to debate social services for poverty and the Aff's plan was to fund a NASA mission to Mars, it's not very fair to the neg. For my Medicaid plan, however, the aff has a pretty good argument that their plan is topical. I'll describe some of the specifics of how to argue T in a different article, but one important thing to note is that the aff's plan is generally assumed to be topical until the Neg argues otherwise. Most affs don't spend much time arguing T in the 1AC.

The second stock issue is Harms, or the reason why we need plan. This is usually a reason why the Status Quo - more latin, for "the way things are right now" - is bad. There are a bunch of different "harms" that apply to persons living in poverty, but our case would probably focus on a lack of access to health care. You can live "under the poverty line" and still not qualify for Medicaid, especially if you don't have any kids. Many of these people have jobs and able to meet their basic necessities, but would be unable to pay for any type of medical emergency. Something as simple as breaking an arm in a car accident could cause them to spiral into bankruptcy or worse.

Inherency is a little bit trickier, mostly because it has a bit of an archaic name. Inherency is whether or not the harms are "inherent" to the status quo. The way I like to put it is, "If the plan didn't happen, would the harms continue?" As an affirmative, there are two possible attacks I'd need to defend against. First of all, I'd need to make sure that my plan, as written, won't happen on the status quo. If my plan had just passed (or will soon pass) through both houses of congress and was unlikely to be vetoed by the president, I'd have some serious inherency problems. I'd also want to show that no other action being taken in the status quo is likely to solve my harms. For example, if an insurance company were to start a low-cost insurance program targeted people below the poverty line who are uneligible for medicaid, I'd probably want to present some evidence that that program is not likely to succeed.

Solvency tends to be the Stock Issue that attracts the most argument. After all, it's easy to find problems, but generally much harder to solve them. Solvency is whether or not the affirmative's plan will improve the status quo or "solve the harm." My Medicaid plan would solve by offering the government's Medicaid insurance to everyone who makes less than the Federal Poverty Line. This expansion of coverage would reduce preventable disease and lower the bankruptcy rate. If this was a real round, then attaching some data and warrants to those claims would be a priority for my 1AC.

I've got plenty more to say about all of the stock issues, but that serves as an introduction. These are the components of an affirmative case, but they are also the first tools that the negative can use to win the round. If the Negative wins that, say, the Aff's plan doesn't solve (maybe medicaid coverage isn't enough to meet the needs of this demographic), then the neg wins the round.