Status quo or competing policy option= stupid

What is the point of framework? It's to prevent cheating. One kind of cheating is making debate not about "policy". This could be the neg reading a poem, doing an interpretive dance or some such nonsense. How often does this happen? In high school basically never. So what is the point of this framework?

Most teams who make this argument are trying to say that the plan needs to be the focus of the debate, i.e. that the only reason you can vote negative is because the plan is bad (i.e. links must be to the plan). This may seem like a trivial distinction, but I think its important when you are reading framework in the 1AC. The reason for this is that you can't change your fwork argument after the 1NC when you do that. This means the neg can still cheat and you have now handicapped yourself. Some examples

1. The anarchy CP- is a policy option, directly competes with the plan. Fits in your framework with the statism K. Other examples might be the everyone stop being capitalist alternative, though that might be government plus. The point is people think this fwork excludes those arguments because they arent a "policy". However, this distinction is tenuous at best. Most people think policy= government, which is highly contestable. Also there are many kritiks of this conception of policy the neg will read as new offense, and against these k's of your fwork you can't use your plan as offense because they aren't linked to the plan. So the neg takes you farther away from the ground you want.

2. Reps K's - these are probably the most prolific form of cheating. This fwork stinks against the reps K because since most of them question the accuracy of your representations (security for example) they do deal with should the plan be done, although obviously that is usually not the brunt of the negatives position. Also, the floating pic to do the plan sans the reps is usually a policy option (whether or not it competes is another issue obvi). Plus these kritiks always have evidence that says "reps affect policy" and there is basically zero evidence that says "no they don't".

3. Related to reps, any prior question k (methodology, ontology etc) these k's dont say you can't evaluate policy, they say something is logically prior to doing so. This puts the aff in a tough position because they somehow have to say its a good idea to exclude arguments that call the value of their policy into question in order to discuss policy.... which is logically suspect.

4. The evidenced defenses suck- most affs have an advantage, and they are ready to defend it against most k's. Say, hegemony. They have some realism good cards and are good to go. Then they read fwork with a Rawls card. Now the neg is reading k's of participatory democracy and citizenship, which the aff has no cards against. Now the aff is hosed because they have gift wrapped an arg for the neg they have no offense against. A similar thing occurs when teams change their impacts to avoid K's. They take out the heg adv and just read poverty, then the neg reads a different K like biopower and the aff is hosed cause they have no defenses of their poverty adv re: biopower . One of the best ways to keep K teams on your ground is actually to read your big stick advantages like leadership or terrorism. It is hard for them to read obscure k's of those issues that your generic offense won't apply to. Realism good does not answer every k, but when your advantage is hegemony it answers a pretty large number of them.



So what should you do instead? I think your basic framework should be that the plan is the focus of the debate. Thats it. Then in the 2AC make link arguments about why the negative is not effectively testing the plan. For example

1. Anarchy CP- a reciprocity argument that says in order to test the plan there needs to be a fair comparison
2. Reps K- you can sever discourse, you are only forced to defend the plan