The States CP-Part 1

It is pretty stupid to chose your aff based entirely on the states CP. I know it will probably be a huge generic this year, so it may make sense to have it be a factor in your decision, but making it a heavily weighted factor seems silly. Some reasons:

1. Lopez- there is no aff that has an answer to the states CP in a world of the lopez CP. For those who don't know, the lopez cp has the supreme court extend jurisdiction needed to do the plan to the states. For example, ruling that electricity transmission is not a form of interstate commerce, or that the states can regulate Indian country for example. In a world of this cp, any federal key warrant is fiated away. To beat this CP you must either impact turn the net benefit, go for theory, or have a disad to state action/devolution- your aff is basically meaningless. Many people who feel that "only the USFG CAN do it" is an answer to the states CP are quickly humbled by the lopez counterplan.

2. Positive incentives- these affs have zero answer to the fiat world of a states counterplan. Any money put up by the federal government, say a tax credit for wind, can be put up by the states in the form of a lump sum payment. This creates the same market effect that federal action would.

3.Multi plank- these CP's do more than just the plan- for instance if the aff claimed a soft power advantage they would have the states do the plan and something additional to boost soft power.

4. There is never a reason the states CP achieves ZERO solvency, only reasons it achieves less solvency. This is problematic for two reasons: first, most aff advantages are not linear, they are threshold issues- the cp may achieve less solvency but still solve ENOUGH to avoid the affirmatives impacts. Second, many of the reasons the states do not solve are often unrelated to the aff's advantages. For example, the 1AC will read RPS with a pollution and grid advantage, and then say federal action is key to business confidence. Unfortunately, business confidence is not really necessary to solve either of those advantages. And even if it were- no solvency take out ever goes far enough as to say the states will be unable to solve X, which means terminal impact of Y. Instead they are written to say the USFG will be nebulously better than the states. At the end of the round a judge must compare this amorphous

solvency deficit with a risk of politics and that generally doesn't work out well for the aff.

5, In order to win a solvency deficit, you must not only win that the states don't solve your advantage, you have to win your advantage. Many times an aff will spend a lot of time on states don't solve only to drop case defense or not extend the advantage their solvency arguments pertain too.

Basically- most affs do not have a STRATEGY to deal with the states counterplan. The states counterplan is a strategy (although a simplistic one): read a cp that pushes the theoretical limits to suck up most of the case and shift the focus from the topic to a generic like politics, thus allowing the neg to dedicate all their research time to one issue and not have to deal with a wide range of affirmatives. There are relatively few answers, so all arguments can be blocked out in advance, whereas very few 1AR's are ready with blocks to extend answers to the states counterplan. Aff teams hope to be able to bypass doing any of this work by having a "trick" like federal jurisdiction or some such nonsense.

The problem with the states counterplan, preparation wise and strategically, is two fold

1, In reality the states never act in a uniform fashion, so no one writes comparative evidence about federal vs all 50 states and territories. Yes there are minor exceptions, but for the most part this is a capital T truth. Scholars who work in the field of energy do not spend a lot of time writing about hypothetical uniform state action.

2, The negative gets away with way to much theoretically- fiating things they have no evidence on, ridiculous devolution, and the nature of uniformity itself.