Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming director of debate “What’s the status of the counterplan” is often one of the first questions you’ll hear in the cross-x of the 1NC. I’ve judged my fair share of debates where a bewildered debater turns to their partner for help after this question is asked. Fear no more, because after this primer you’ll know everything you need to confidently answer that question. The status of the counterplan refers to whether or not the neg can kick the counterplan and go for the status quo (the world as it is now, without either the plan or the counterplan). Some of you might be thinking: the neg kicks out of disadvantages all the time, what makes counterplans so special? You can read 3 disads in the 1NC, after all, but a smart 2N knows to kick out of 2 and narrow down to just 1 of those disads by the 2NR. Nobody makes a theory argument about kicking disads. What makes counterplans different is they diverge from the status quo. All three of those disads are defenses of the status quo, but the counterplan offers a different path forward. The negative normally defends the status quo, arguing the world is fine now, but the plan will make it much worse. A disadvantage is a typical defense of the status quo: uniqueness says the world is great, the link says the plan makes it worse. But what do you do if the status is not quo? You offer an alternative: a counterplan. But are you stuck with that? Have you abandoned a defense the status quo? That depends on the status of the counterplan. There are three statuses we’re going to talk about: conditional, unconditional, and dispositional. What the different statuses are A conditional counterplan is one the negative can kick at any time. Did the 2AC have good answers to the counterplan and you’d rather go for your econ DA and the status quo? Kick the CP. Did the aff have an amazing DA to the CP you never saw coming? Kick the CP. Are you just not feeling it? Kick the CP. Is it the 2NC? Kick the CP. The 1NR? Kick the CP. Even the 2NR? Kick the CP. Do you have 3 counterplans and they’re all conditional? Kick 2 in the block, maybe kick the last one in the 2NR. When the counterplan is conditional, the ball is in the neg’s court. The world is your oyster. Maybe you’ll go for the counterplan, maybe you won’t. There ain't no strings on you. Conditional counterplans give the neg flexibility, but open the door to theoretical objections to the counterplan. Unconditional counterplans are the opposite. When a counterplan is unconditional it means the neg has given up the right to defend the status quo. The counterplan will be the world they call for, no matter what. Did the aff have a sick DA to the counterplan and you don’t have answers to it? Yikes. You better think quick, because you’re stuck with it. Unconditional counterplans significantly constrain negative flexibility, but make theory pushes against the counterplan based on its status nonsensical. One important note here. There is one escape hatch left if you read an unconditional counterplan and you’re definitely losing it: topicality. Counterplan status is all about which worlds you’ll defend: the status quo, the counterplan, the kritik alt, etc. But you don’t have to go for substance against the aff. There’s a path to a W outside the status quo or an alternative picture of the world. If you beat them on a procedural argument (topicality), what world you’re defending is irrelevant. You are still “going” for the counterplan, in the sense that you’re not defending the status quo, if you go for topicality. You’re still bound to that world, not the status quo. But the procedural question of T comes before the substantive question of the plan vs the counterplan, so it doesn’t matter if you lose the CP if you win T. Dispositional counterplans are pitched as a middle ground. A dispositional, or dispo, counterplan is one in which the neg can kick it at any time unless the aff straight turns it. Now hang in there, because this is where 90% of high school debaters get lost. How do you straight turn a counterplan? A straight turn is when you only read offense against a position. With counterplans, a straight turn is when you read any argument except a perm or non-status related theory argument (note: the “types of counterplans” section of this series will go more in-depth on other theoretical objections to CPs beyond their status). You might be wondering, but a solvency deficit is defense, right? Nope, a solvency deficit is a bucket of offense. A solvency deficit says the counterplan doesn’t solve the aff, which means the 1AC is just a bundle of disadvantages against the counterplan. Again: a straight turn on a counterplan is any combination of arguments except a perm or non-status related theory. Did you say perm do both? The counterplan isn’t straight turned, they can concede the perm and kick it. Did you say PICs are illegitimate? The counterplan isn’t straight turned, they can concede PICs bad, go for reject the argument not the team (more on this in a different section), and kick the counterplan. One more time: a straight turn on a counterplan is any combination of arguments except a perm or non-status related theory. Come back and re-read this section after you’ve finished this entire series, and then comment on the article if you still have questions. Counterplan theory can get a little complex at times, and I know this is one of them, but it’s worth it to learn. Okay, so we (mostly) understand what a straight turned counterplan is now, but, why is dispo a thing? Like I said before, it’s pitched as a middle ground. Unconditional counterplans eliminate nearly all neg flex. Conditional counterplans, some argue, give the negative too much flexibility. Dispositional counterplans put the ball in the aff court: the aff gets the choice to sacrifice some extremely strategic arguments (the perm and theory) but in exchange gets to stick the negative with the counterplan, in effect, choosing the 2NR they want to debate. That is a pretty sweet deal for the aff. Which one should you choose? Okay, so now we know what different types of counterplan statuses there are. But, which one should you choose? When the 1A asks that inevitable question, “what’s the status of the counterplan?” (or the more efficient, “under what conditions can you kick the counterplan?”) what should your answer be? It depends on the judge. Most national circuit judges have judge philosophies you can find online, but that may not work on the local circuit. Local judges tend to be more conservative when it comes to theory (meaning dispo and unconditional counterplans may be safer), but that is not universally true, and most biases can be beaten back with a firm understanding of theory. So I have two suggestions for you: 1) Have your squad keep a judge book (a google document online so that everyone can see and edit it). If a judge votes you down on conditionality and says they’re not a fan, take a note. But be cautious, there’s a difference between you losing on conditionality and your judge saying they’re not a fan of conditional counterplans (and there’s a difference still between a judge saying they’re not a fan but you could have won it and a judge saying there was never a chance). You may often need to take insights from your teammates with a grain of salt, but it’s far better to have something to go on than nothing at all. 2) Learn to passionately defend conditional counterplans. My answer to the question “what’s the status of the counterplan” is always the same: “the status quo is always an option.” This means the counterplan is conditional, even in the 2NR (more on this soon). I’m a passionate believer in conditionality, and I’m going to try to convince you to be one too. Let me pause for a second and say that most of the time I’m writing descriptively about arguments in debate, but now I’m going to be addressing counterplan status from a normative lens. I’m dropping the neutral act and admitting I’m going to try to persuade you about something. Not everyone, and certainly not all of your judges, is going to be as gung-ho as conditionality as I am -- that’s important to know. That said, condo is good, and here is why: Let’s go back to the McDonald’s and Chipotle example from the intro post of this series. Imagine you’re the judge. The aff says, I’m a little hungry, let’s go to McDonald’s. The neg says McDonald’s gives you food poisoning, counterplan: Chipotle. The 2AC reads the E. coli DA against the Chipotle counterplan, and says their romaine lettuce is tainted. The 2NR goes for the food poisoning DA and the Chipotle CP, the 2AR goes for the E. coli DA to the counterplan. How is this a hard choice for anyone? Obviously Chipotle (but with sofritas) Let’s say both the aff and neg are winning the vast majority of their DAs. As the judge (or, a person who is a little hungry), you’re completely convinced if you go to McDonald’s you’ll get food poisoning and if you go to Chipotle you’ll get E. coli. Not a good place to be right? If you vote for the aff, you’re gonna get sick. If you vote for the neg, you’re gonna get sick. I guess food poisoning is the lesser evil, maybe, so you vote aff? No! No reasonable person would make that decision. If I handed you that choice in real life, you would choose to do neither. Neither the plan, nor the counterplan. Logically, you would just stay home, because being a little hungry is wayyyyy better than getting food poisoning. You would vote for the status quo. This is one of the best defenses of conditionality: logic. Conditionality keeps all of the options on the table. If the counterplan isn’t working out (Chiptole has an E. coli outbreak), that doesn’t automatically make the plan better than the status quo. If the negative wins their DA, whether it’s about food poisoning, the economy, or nuclear proliferation, logically, you wouldn’t just ignore the status quo as an option because the counterplan is worse than the plan. A logical person would weigh all their options, both the counterplan and the status quo, against the plan. Affirmative teams like to go for an argument about advocacy skills against conditional counterplans. This goes something along the lines: debate teaches us advocacy skills, and the ability to willy-nilly kick counterplans teaches us poor advocacy skills because we don’t learn to fiercely advocate for our ideas. I think this argument is backwards for two reasons. First, I think it’s a pretty bad version of advocacy skills that teaches you to dogmatically back every idea no matter how wrong someone shows you it is. I believe one of the functions of debate is to get us to question deeply-held beliefs in the face of new evidence. The ability to admit you were wrong is a much better skill, and one more deeply needed in society, than the natural inclination to dig in and defend your original position in the face of new evidence that it’s flawed. Second, I think it teaches the affirmative poor advocacy skills to only learn to defend their argument in the face of one voice of opposition. Think about President Obama and the Affordable Care Act. To get the ACA passed, Obama had to advocate for it in the face of opposition from the right and the left. Conservatives and blue dog democrats (moderate/centrist dems) voiced opposition to an expanded government role in healthcare, while simultaneously Democrats like Dennis Kucinich said the ACA was too weak and they wouldn’t vote for it without at least a public option in the bill. To get the ACA passed, Obama had to defend it from the left and the right simultaneously. He couldn’t bend his idea to make it more persuasive to one group, because that would alienate the other. That’s the type of advocacy skills conditionality teaches: how to advocate for your idea when you’re facing fierce opposition from two deeply divergent camps. Now think about the video that came out during Romney’s campaign against Obama, where Romney was secretly recorded trying to convince a group of millionaire donors that he was on their side. What he said to them when he thought no one else could hear eventually came out and it destroyed his campaign with the working class. That’s the kind of advocacy skills the aff wants when they go for conditionality bad: to be able to face off against one negative argument at a time, bending the aff to most persuasively respond to that strategy and not have to respond to every objection or alternative at once. Instead of that, I believe it’s the negative’s job to represent every constituency opposed to the plan, and the aff’s job to have a consistent defense of their plan that responds to the criticism of all comers. That’s my brief defense of conditionality. But in addition to this pedagogical defense, you should choose to read counterplans conditionally because that gives you more flexibility. This isn’t Squirtle, Charmander, or Bulbasaur. There aren’t advantages and disadvantages to both. It’s a sliding scale that constrains negative strategy, with conditionality being the best for the neg and an unconditional counterplan the worst for the neg. You want to keep your options open. Think of that scene in every sports movie ever where the coach draws a game plan on a whiteboard with multiple lines leading in different directions. Those lines represent reactive options, if your opponent is weak in one area, that’s where you push forward. Constraining your strategy to just one option lets your opponent group all of their defenses in that one place: that’s a losing strategy. Conditional counterplans give you options to test your opponent’s defenses and then punch forward where they are weakest. Also, Squirtle, obviously. All your friends are going to pick Charmander because they think fire is cooler and then you can dunk on them. “Judge Kick”
I mentioned before that my answer to the question “what’s the status of the counterplan” is “the status quo is always an option.” This isn’t meant to be a dodge, I’m not avoiding the question. To say the status quo is always an option is saying the counterplan is conditional (I can always kick it and go for the status quo), but it’s also providing more information. It’s clarifying that the counterplan is conditional, even in the 2NR. What’s that mean? It means even if I go for the counterplan in the 2NR, I want the judge to evaluate both the counterplan vs the aff’s plan and the status quo vs the aff’s plan. Did the aff win a perm? Well, kick the counterplan and evaluate whether the disad I went for as a net benefit outweighs the aff. Did they win a good DA to the counterplan? Well, kick the CP and evaluate whether the DA I went for as a net benefit outweighs the aff. In other words: “Even if I lose the counterplan, the DA still outweighs the aff.” It’s become unfortunately common for people to erroneously refer to this as "judge kick." I say erroneously, because the judge isn’t kicking the counterplan, I am. From the moment I said “the status quo is always an option” I had instructed the judge on how to evaluate the counterplan in the 2NR. That said, you shouldn’t assume your judge is me. You should (1) tell the judge you can kick the CP in the 2NR when your opponents ask the status in the CX of the 1NC, by saying the status quo is always an option, and (2) explicitly instruct the judge you can still kick the CP during the 2NR. The same logic argument to defend conditionality is the defense of “judge kick.” Revisiting the McDonald’s/Chipotle example, you wouldn’t choose to make yourself sick when you could just choose to do nothing. That is why, even if you don’t explicitly tell me to, I will always logically evaluate both the counterplan and the status quo, unless the affirmative gives me a good reason not to. In most debates I judge where “judge kick” comes up, the aff is usually objecting to it by making weak or non-arguments, and is usually doing so far too late (after the 2NR). However, you should be on your guard: when the aff says “judge kick” bad, you should be ready to cross-apply defenses of conditionality, or, if that debate hasn’t happened, go for your arguments about logic. Last, don’t say “the 2NR checks” in your condo good blocks. What this argument translates to is “we’ll make a decision about what we’re going for in the 2NR, so the 2AR only has to respond to one world.” Nope. Don’t let up the heat. “The 2NR checks” obviates the ability to go for both worlds in the 2NR, and you don’t want that. Jumping back for a second, there is one other answer to the status of the counterplan question I like, and that’s: “anybody can kick it but you.” That answer also both communicates that status of the counterplan is conditional and that it’s still conditional in the 2NR. While this links to my discourse K about “judge kick,” it’s pretty funny so I’ll allow it. Legitimacy Meter I’m going to introduce a tool to help explain the perceived legitimacy of different arguments: the emoji scale. The emoji scale is a quick tool to help you get a general idea of what people think about the theoretical legitimacy of different arguments. This scale is only about theory, not about the efficacy of an argument. For example, an unconditional counterplan is completely legitimate, but not very useful for the neg. I’m also going to score legitimacy for two audiences: what I perceive to be the average opinion of the national circuit judge pool (“generally”), and myself. The local circuit is too difficult to pin down, that’s why you need your judge book. This scale is a shortcut, not the final word. The final word is your ability to debate and defend the legitimacy of your strategy (with the caveat that you should know your judge, and if they have one, always read their philosophy). Without further ado, the scale: 😎 Totally legit 🙂 I like this, but someone could persuade me to vote against this 😐 This is fine. I'm not in love with is, but I don't hate it 😑 I'm beginning to question the legitimacy of this strategy, but more power to you if you win it 😣 I want to vote against this on theory, I will be angry if the other team doesn't go for theory 😠 26.5 Here is the scale applied to the arguments discussed in this section: An unconditional counterplan Generally: 😎 Me: 😎 Dispo Generally: 🙂 Me: 😎 1 conditional CP Generally: 🙂 Me: 😎 2 conditional CPs Generally: 😐 Me: 😎 3 conditional CPs Generally: 😑 Me: 😎 4 conditional CPs Generally: 😣 Me: 😎 Infinite conditional CPs Generally: 😠 Me: 😎 “Judge kick” Generally: 😐 Me: 😎 That’s all on the status of counterplans. If you want to get more in depth on this, read Roger Solt’s “The Disposition of Counterplans and Permutations: The Case for Logical, Limited Conditionality.” It’s a bit older, but it’s the original authoritative text on counterplan statuses. Keep reading in the series to learn more about other parts of the counterplan debate. Next up is counterplan competition and perms. We want to hear from you! Disagree with something we said? Have a question? Feel free to jump in in the comments, we'll be sure to respond! Do you have a topic you’d like us to address in a future post? Email us at [email protected] Go Pokes!
2 Comments
Harry Hittle
3/26/2020 02:23:28 pm
Thank you for including the part about statuses of counterplans. I was asked that one time and had zero idea of how to respond, let alone what it meant.
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Matt Liu
3/27/2020 01:11:32 pm
Happy to help! We take requests, so if there's anything else that's stumped you in a debate or a topic you'd us like to address, let us know at [email protected]
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