A.

Interpretation – reducing restrictions requires the AFF to diminish the number of

statues. Restrictions are not removed until legislation is repealed.

Reduce means to “diminish in number.”

Merriam Webster Dictionary, 2012
To diminish in size, amount, extent, or number <reduce taxes> <reduce the likelihood of war>

“Restriction” is a limitation by statute or regulation.

Free Dictionary ‘5 ("restriction," http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/restriction
restriction n. any limitation on activity, by statute, regulation or contract provision. In multi-unit real
estate developments, condominium and cooperative housing projects, managed by homeowners'
associations or similar organizations are usually required by state law to impose restrictions on use. Thus,
the restrictions are part of the "covenants, conditions and restrictions," intended to enhance the use of
common facilities and property, recorded and incorporated into the title of each owner.

B. Violation – The AFF does not reduce restrictions – instead, it clarifies acceptable
conditions under which legal immigration can occur
Court rulings can’t reduce restrictions – they only make it judicially unenforceable.
Consensus of court rulings prove an irrefutable legal distinction.
Treanor and Sperling, ‘93 (William Michael, Associate Professor of Law @ Fordham University, and
Gene B., Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, December, Prospective Overruling and
the Revival of "unconstitutional" Statutes, 93 Colum. L. Rev. 1902, Columbia Law Review)

Unlike the Supreme Court, several state courts have explicitly addressed the revival issue. The
relevant state court cases have concerned the specific issue of whether a statute that has been held
unconstitutional is revived when the invalidating decision is overturned. 42 With one exception,
they have concluded that such statutes are immediately enforceable . The most noted instance in which the revival
issue was resolved by a court involved the District of Columbia minimum wage statute pronounced unconstitutional in Adkins. After the Court reversed
Adkins in West Coast Hotel, President Roosevelt asked Attorney General Homer [*1913] Cummings for an opinion on the status of the District of Columbia's
statute. The Attorney General responded, The
decisions are practically in accord in holding that the courts have no
power to repeal or abolish a statute, and that notwithstanding a decision holding it unconstitutional
a statute continues to remain on the statute books ; and that if a statute be declared unconstitutional and the decision so
declaring it be subsequently overruled the statute will then be held valid from the date it became effective. 43 Enforcement of the statute followed without
congressional action. 44 When this enforcement was challenged, the Municipal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Jawish v. Morlet 45 held that
the decision in West Coast Hotel had had the effect of making the statute enforceable. The court observed that previous opinions addressing the revival issue
proceed on the principle that a
statute declared unconstitutional is void in the sense that it is inoperative or
unenforceable, but not void in the sense that it is repealed or abolished; that so long as the decision
stands the statute is dormant but not dead; and that if the decision is reversed the statute is valid
from its first effective date. 46 The court declared this precedent sound since the cases were "in accord with the
principle "that a decision of a court of appellate jurisdiction overruling a former decision is retrospective in its operation, and the effect is not that the former
decision is bad law but that it never was the law.' " 47 Adkins was thus, and had always been, a nullity. The court acknowledged that, after Adkins, it had
been thought that the District of Columbia's minimum wage statute was unconstitutional. As the court put it, " "Just about everybody was fooled.' " 48
Nonetheless, the court's view was that since the minimum wage law had always been valid, although for a period judicially unenforceable, there was no need
to reenact it. 49 Almost all other courts that have addressed the issue of whether a statute that has been
found unconstitutional can be revived have reached the same result as the Jawish court, using a similar formalistic
[*1914] analysis. 50 The sole decision in which a court adopted the nonrevival position is Jefferson v.
Jefferson, 51 a poorly reasoned decision of the Louisiana Supreme Court. The plaintiff in Jefferson sought child support and
maintenance from her husband. She prevailed at the trial level; he filed his notice of appeal one day after the end of the filing period established by the
Louisiana Uniform Rules of the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals rejected his appeal as untimely, even though the Louisiana Supreme Court had
previously found that the applicable section of the Uniform Rules violated the state constitution. One of Ms. Jefferson's arguments before the state Supreme
Court was that that court's previous ruling had been erroneous and that the rules should therefore be revived. In rejecting this claim and in finding for the
husband, the Court stated: Since we have declared the uniform court rule partially unconstitutional, it appears to be somewhat dubious that we have the
right to reconsider this ruling in the instant case as counsel for the respondent judges urges us to do. For a rule of court, like a statute, has the force and
effect of law and, when a law is stricken as void, it no longer has existence as law; the law cannot be resurrected thereafter by a judicial decree changing the
final judgment of unconstitutionality to constitutionality as this would constitute a reenactment of the law by the Court - an assumption of legislative power
not delegated to it by the Constitution. 5 The Louisiana Court thus took a mechanical approach to the revival question. According to its rationale, when a
statute is found unconstitutional, it is judicially determined never to have existed. Revival therefore entails judicial legislation and thereby violates
constitutionally mandated separation of powers: because the initial legislative passage [*1915] of the bill has no legitimacy, the bill's force is considered to
be purely a creature of judicial decision-making. Jefferson has little analytic appeal. Its view of the separation of powers doctrine is too simplistic. Contrary to
the Jefferson rationale, a "revived" law is not the pure product of judicial decision-making. It is, instead, a law that once gained the support of a legislature
and that has never been legislatively repealed. Its legitimacy rests on its initial legislative authorization. Moreover, the
view that a statute that
has been found unconstitutional should be treated as if it never existed may have had some support
in the early case law, but it has been clearly rejected by the Supreme Court. Instead of treating all statutes that it
has found unconstitutional as if they had never existed, the Court has recognized a range of circumstances in which people who rely on an overturned
decision are protected. Indeed, as will be developed, the doctrine of prospective overruling evolved to shield from harm those who relied on subsequently
overruled judicial decisions. 53 In short, the
one case in which there was a holding that a statute did not revive
does not offer a convincing rationale for nonrevival.

C. Standards –
1) Limits – allowing the aff to tinker with restrictions creates an unpredictable
floodgate of tiny affs that don’t completely remove the actual laws from the
books – explodes research burden.

2) Precision – courts do not have the power to remove laws – that’s Treanor and
Sperling. Prefer this distinction because it directs our research.

3) Ground – allowing tinkering crushes core negative ground by de-magnifying the

links to politics, wages, and trade-off disads

4) At best, the AFF is effects topical --- Court rulings do not reduce limitations by
themselves. They rely on other actors such as Congress or Executive agencies to
choose to enforce the Court decision. Effectually topical AFFs are an
independent voter --- they explode limits and destroy ground through
unpredictable, constantly shifting causal chains.

D. Voters – Topicality is an apriori voting issue for fairness and education

\
Legitimacy DA
- Run this against an AFF that uses courts

Legitimacy high now

Michael J. Nelson May 20, 2017 Assistant Professor Department of Political Science Pennsylvania State
University mjn15@psu.edu Patrick Tucker Ph.D. Candidate Department of Political Science Washington
University in St. Louis http://mjnelson.org/papers/NelsonTuckerPanel.pdf The Stability of the U.S.
Supreme Court’s Legitimacy
There is a bevy of evidence that the Court’s support is stable over time. Gibson, Caldeira and Spence
(2003b), relying upon repeated cross-sectional samples of the American people, found that support for
the Court was unaffected by its highly controversial ruling in Bush v. Gore, and the institution maintained
its high level of diffuse support even after the ruling. Likewise, in their year-long panel survey
surrounding the Alito confirmation, Gibson and Caldeira (2009) find “a) reasonably high levels of support
for the Court, and b) a great deal of stability in responses across the waves of the panel” (99).2 Thus,
there is substantial reason to believe that the Court’s support is stable over time.

The plans reversal of court precedent crushes legitimacy

Fowler & Jeon 8 — James H. Fowler, Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego, AND Jeon Sangick,
Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, 2008 (“The authority of Supreme Court precedent,” in
Social Networks, Science Direct, January, Available online at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378873307000378, Accessed at 6/30/17, RKim)
Legal historians suggest that justices in the 19th Century responded to the crisis of legitimacy by strengthening the norm of stare decisis, a legal
norm inherited from English common law that encourages judges to follow precedent by letting the past decision stand ( Friedman, 1985, pp.
127–133). In order to foster compliance and enhance the institutional reputation of the Court, stare decisis
was implemented to place decision-making in the domain of neutral legal principles and the “accumulated
experience of many judges responding to the arguments and evidence of many lawyers” ( Landes and Posner, 1976, p. 250) rather than at
the whim of the personal preferences of individuals . To this day, the justices of the Supreme Court are aware
of the inherent weakness of the federal judiciary and place high value on maintaining their institutional
and decisional legitimacy through the use of precedent (Ginsburg, 2004, Powell, 1990 and Stevens, 1983). Recognizing that
legitimacy is essential to achieve their policy objectives, the members of the Court justify their substantive rulings through
court opinions, which allow the justices to demonstrate how their decisions are consistent with existing legal rules and principles established in
prior cases (see Hansford and Spriggs, 2006, pp. 24–30). Because it is the
application of existing precedents that creates the
perception of judicial decision-making to be procedurally neutral and fair ( Tyler and Mitchell, 1994), these
opinions are often considered to be the source of the Court's power ( Epstein and Knight, 1998 and Segal and Spaeth,
2002).

Legitimacy key to Democracy

Peretti 1999 — Terri J, Politcal Professor at Santa Clara, 1999 (“In Defense of a Political Court”,
Princeton University Press, Available online at http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6758.html, Accessed at
6/30/17, RKim)

Should the Court lose its legitimacy and, consequently, its power, we in turn lose the benefits that only the Court
can provide. Vitally important constitutional rights and liberties, as well as minority groups, would be
unprotected and would likely suffer at the hands of an indifferent or hostile majority. An additional loss of
paramount importance is the ideal and the reality of the rule of law . All government action would be reduced
to arbitrary will and force, rather than being justified according to reason and, thus, rendered legitimate.
The consequences of the Court losing its legitimacy and the ability to play its specialized role, if we are to believe Philip Kurland, are horrible
indeed.

US democracy credibility prevents global democratic backsliding

Kagan 2015 Robert, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Security, Jan, "Is
Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics" Brookings Institution,
www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2015/01/democracy-in-decline-weight-of-geopolitics-kagan
These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when
democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded
declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to
produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of
retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up
the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such
rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor yet behaving as democracies
in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—
by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of
democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents.
Meanwhile, insofar as there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from
would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these
autocracies and these aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the democracies react,
and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained. It should not be surprising that one
of the side
effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in
those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often but
not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker
nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before. Consider the interwar years. In 1920,
when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War, contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law
of social progress.”[1] Yet almost immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were suffering the effects of the recent devastating
war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic,
and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s
shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then to a form of fascism. Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other
democracies fell prey to the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military
assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out. The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains
could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson
observed.[2] Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and
recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of
which autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than democracies. In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing
reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the
fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian
government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist
regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union. It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the Soviet Union) to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy by force and
through prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies and the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit. Greece
and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the
most prominent example being India. By 1950, the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent of the world’s population. Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of
arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out
that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the
Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, more than three-dozen governments
around the world had been installed by military coups.[4] Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed that “the limits of democratic development in
the world” had been reached, noting the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union).”[5] But then, unexpectedly,
came the “third wave.” From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. What explained the prolonged success of
democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It could not have been merely the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. Neither economic growth nor
human yearnings had prevented the democratic reversals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism in a cyclical, almost
predictable manner. What was most notable about the third wave was that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy was interrupted. Nations moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why? The
International Climate Improves The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward was simply more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to
autocratic governments than had been the case in past eras. In his study, Huntington emphasized the change, following the Second Vatican Council, in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution, which tended to
weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community (EC), meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations such as Portugal,
Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms increasingly became international norms. But they did not appear out of
nowhere or as the result of some natural evolution of the human species. As Huntington noted, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the
world.[6] The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because U.S. policy makers consistently promoted democracy around the world. They did not. At various times
throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted or was complicit in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed
unreliable—those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At times, U.S. foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. President Richard Nixon
regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[7] Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic
reasons. Officials in President Ronald Reagan’s administration came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was popular
local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice that it would otherwise have preferred to avoid, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Reagan
would have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by the moral challenge of Filipino “people power.” Rarely if ever did the United States seek a change of regime
primarily out of devotion to democratic principles. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human-
rights advocates, began to condition or cut off U.S. aid to authoritarian allies, which weakened their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human-rights issues drew greater attention to the cause of
dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human-rights abuses of the Soviet Union as well as of right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. The
U.S. government’s international information services, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration,
after first trying to roll back Carter’s human-rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated (if not always its actual) policy. Even during this period, U.S. policy was far from consistent.
Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with U.S. economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in U.S. policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was
significant. The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution put an end to a half-century of dictatorship. As Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and the European
democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment . . . in support of the democratic parties.”[8] Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid
democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. In 1978, Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when long-serving president Joaquín Balaguer refused to
give up power after losing an election. In 1983, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada restored a democratic government after a military coup. In 1986, the United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling
an election that he had lost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to help install democracy after military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. Throughout this period, too, the United
States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to try staying in office beyond constitutional limits. Huntington estimated that over the
course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a
contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”[9] Many developments both global and local helped to produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there might
have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be
powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the socialist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution. The greater activism of the United
States, together with that of other successful democracies, helped to build a broad, if not universal, consensus that was more sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian forms. Diamond
and others have noted how important it was that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the internal
political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient as well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting
nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the 1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—
some might even say imposed—democratic principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements. Equally important was the role that the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy
where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have been a
natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the
role of “catcher in the rye”—preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third wave unprecedented breadth and durability. Finally, there
was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet downfall may be in
dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw Pact
countries themselves. They had long yearned to achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. These peoples wanted to join the rest of Europe, which offered
an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. That Central and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the fruit of aspirations for
freedom or comfort. It also reflected the desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that
wanted to be part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic
tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That a democratic, united, and prosperous Western Europe was even there to exert a powerful magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S.
actions after World War II. The Lost Future of 1848 Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Beginning in France, the “Springtime of the
Peoples,” as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and representatives of the rising middle class as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks, they toppled kings and princes and
shook thrones in France, Poland, Austria, and Romania, as well as the Italian peninsula and the German principalities. In the end, however, the liberal movements failed, partly because they lacked cohesion, but also because the
autocratic powers forcibly crushed them. The Prussian army helped to defeat liberal movements in the German lands, while the Russian czar sent his troops into Romania and Hungary. Tens of thousands of protesters were killed in
the streets of Europe. The sword proved mightier than the pen. It mattered that the more liberal powers, Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had
sparked and inspired the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more concerned with preserving peace among the great powers than with
providing assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was suppressed.[11] As a
result, for several decades the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism. Scholars have speculated about how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of
1848 succeeded: How might German history have unfolded had national unification been achieved under a liberal parliamentary system rather than under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck? The “Iron Chancellor” unified the
nation not through elections and debates, but through military victories won by the great power of the conservative Prussian army under the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning
point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”[12] Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one that Bismarck taught—namely, that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . .
. but by blood and iron”?[13] Yet the international system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the mid-nineteenth century did not favor
democracy, and so it is not surprising that democracy failed to triumph anywhere.[14] We can also speculate about how differently today’s world might have evolved without the U.S. role in shaping an international environment
favorable to democracy, and how it might evolve should the United States find itself no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable, even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a
transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually exerted by the reigning great powers, often determine which
direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what might otherwise have been a “natural” evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic
nations can help liberal forces that, left to their own devices, might otherwise fail. In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their success or failure was influenced by the
balance of power at the international level. In the era of U.S. predominance, the balance was generally favorable to democracy, which helps to explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States
not been so powerful, there would have been fewer transitions to democracy, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a shallower and more easily reversed third wave.[15] Democracy, Autocracy,
and Power What about today? With the democratic superpower curtailing its global influence, regional powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common in the environs of
Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle East, where long dictatorial traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings. But even in regions where
democracies remain strong, authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of
illiberalism and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an
indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent Mexico, democracy collapses under the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence

. Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has

of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional powers for not doing what they have never done

affected the fate of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic superpower’s
behavior that bears most of the responsibility. If that superpower does not change its course, we are
likely to see democracy around the world rolled back further . There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal
world order we have been living in these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint
of human progress. There are those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one. Until now, however, they have not been able
to have their way, but not because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. Who is to say that Putinism in Russia or China’s particular
brand of authoritarianism will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of the
continent? Autocracy in Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it is autocracy, not democracy,
that has been the norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States, had the power to shape the
world. Skeptics of U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment has been tried over
the past few decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very
infertile soils. Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from impoverished India to
“Confucian” East Asia to Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy.
Yet it should be clear that the
prospects for democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal
world order, supported and defended by a democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great
powers. Today, as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the
plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the
weeds may sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.

Democracy solves existential threats

Peiser 2007 Benny social anthropologist @ Liverpool John Moores University “Existential Risk and
Democratic Peace” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7081804.stm
In recent years, humankind
has become aware of a number of global and existential risks that potentially
threaten our survival. These natural and man-made risks comprise cosmic disasters, volcanic super-eruptions and
climatic disruption on the one hand, and nuclear warfare, technological catastrophes and fully-fledged
bioterrorism on the other. In order to secure the future of civilisation, we are challenged to recognise and
ward off these low-probability, but potentially destructive hazards . A new debate is gaining momentum about how best
to achieve a secure future for our planetary civilisation. The rise of neo-catastrophism The perception that disorder rather than harmony held
sway in the solar system gradually began to emerge during the 20th Century. The traditional concept of an essentially benign universe was
replaced by that of an unpredictable cosmos punctuated by global catastrophes. The emergence of scientific neo-catastrophism surfaced as a
corollary of the space age. Artist's impression of asteroid impact. Image: AFP/Getty There can be little doubt that we are living in an age of
apocalyptic angst and alarm Images of impact craters sent back by space missions in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the pock-marked, impact-
covered surface of many planets. At the same time, the identification of hyper-velocity impact craters on the Earth and empirical evidence of
half a dozen mass extinction events generated a new view of our planet as a fundamentally hazardous and catastrophic place in space. More
recently, predictions
of large-scale disasters and societal upheaval as a result of catastrophic climate
change, as well as growing apprehension about impending bioterrorism and nuclear warfare, have
become almost routine issues of international concern . There can be little doubt that we are living in an age of apocalyptic
angst and alarm. The existential risk paradox At the core of today's collective anxieties lies what I call the existential risk paradox. As advances in
science, medical research, genetics and technology are accelerating, human vulnerability to global hazards such as cosmic impacts, natural
disasters, famine and pandemics has significantly decreased. Simultaneously ,
the proliferation of democratic liberalism and free
market economies around the world has dramatically curtailed the death toll associated with natural disasters and
diseases. A recent study confirms that the annual percentage of people killed by natural disasters has decreased tenfold in the last 40 years,
in spite of the fact that the average annual number of recorded disasters increased fivefold. Evidently, open and technological societies are
becoming increasingly resilient to the effects of natural disasters. Kari Marie Norgaard Read a view of the psychology of climate scepticism from
US scholar Kari Norgaard Inside the climate ostrich Yet the very same technologies that are serving us to analyse, predict and prevent potential
disasters have reached such a level of sophistication and potency that their misuse can transform vital survival tools into destructive forces, thus
becoming existential risks in their own right. The nuclear device that may protect us from a devastating asteroid impact can also be employed
for belligerent purposes. Genetic engineering that offers the prospect of infinite food supplies for the world's growing population can be turned
into weapons of bioterrorism. And without the global utilisation of fossil fuels we would lack all trappings of modern civilisation and social
progress. Yet, fossil fuels are regarded as dangerous resources that are widely blamed for economic tensions, wars and catastrophic climate
change. Existential risk perception There seems to be some correlation between media exposure and existential risk perception. The more
people see, hear or read about the risks of Near Earth Object (NEO) impacts, nuclear terrorism or global climate catastrophes, the more
concerned they have become. The mere mention of catastrophic risks, regardless of its low probability, is enough to make the danger more
urgent, thus increasing public estimates of danger. Scientists who evaluate risks are often torn between employing level-headed risk
communication and the temptation to overstate potential danger. Sunbather (BBC) Media called on 'climate porn' Chaotic world of climate truth
The inclination to amplify a possible risk is only too understandable. Personal biases, as well as grants and funding pressures, are considerable
motivating factors to hype a probable hazard; ;n many cases, funding is allocated on the basis of intense lobbying. This, in turn, can tempt
researchers to aggressively promote their specific "danger warning" via the mass media. Behind many alarms lurk vested interests of research
institutions, campaign groups, political parties, charities, businesses or the news media, all of whom vie for attention, influence and funding in a
relentless war of words. Professional risk analysts disapprove of such scare tactics, and point out that the detrimental affects of apocalyptic-
sounding alarms and the rise of collective anxieties are much costlier than generally presumed. Whether individuals regard existential risks as a
serious and pressing threat, or a remote and long-term risk, often depends on their psychological traits. Nobody has appreciated this
conundrum perhaps better than Sir Winston Churchill who famously said: "An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist sees a
calamity in every opportunity." Doomsday argument In recent years, leading scientists in the UK, such as Brandon Carter, Stephen Hawking and
Sir Martin Rees, have advanced the so-called Doomsday Argument, a cosmological theory in which global catastrophes due to low-probability
mega-disasters play a considerable role. This speculative theory maintains that scientific risk assessments have systematically underestimated
existential hazards. Hence the probability is growing that humankind will be wiped out in the near future. I believe that the prophets of doom,
including those predicting climate doom, are wrong Nevertheless, there are many good and compelling reasons why human extinction is not
predetermined or unavoidable. According to a more optimistic view of the future, all
existential risks can be tackled, eliminated
or significantly reduced through the application of human ingenuity, hyper-technologies and global democratisation. From this
confident perspective of emergent risk reduction, the resilience of civilisation is no longer restricted by the constraints of human biology.
Instead, it is progressively shielded against natural and man-made disasters by hyper-complex devices and information-crunching technologies
that potentially comprise boundless technological solutions to existential risks. Current advances in developing an effective planetary defence
system, for example, will eventually lead to a protective shield that can safeguard life on the Earth from disastrous NEO impacts. The societal
response to the cosmic impact hazard is a prime example of how technology can ultimately eliminate an existential risk from the list of
contemporary concerns. A technology-based response to climate change impacts is equally feasible, and equally capable of solving the problem.
Global democracy as a solution But while most natural extinction risks can be entirely eliminated by technological fixes, no such clean-cut
solutions are available for the inherent potential threats posed by super-technologies. After all, the principal threat to our long-term survival is
the destabilising and destructive violence committed by extremist groups and authoritarian regimes. Here, the solution can only be political and
cultural. Enola Gay. Image: Getty Effective democracy may prevent man-made catastrophes Fortunately, there is compelling evidence that the
global ascent of democratic liberalism is directly correlated with a steep reduction of armed conflicts . A
recent UN report found that the total number of wars and civil conflicts has declined by 40% since the end of the
Cold War, while the average number of deaths per conflict has dropped dramatically , from 37,000 in 1950 to 600
in 2002. According to the field of democratic peace research, the growing number of democracies is the foremost reason
for the pacification of many international conflicts. Democracies have never gone to war against each
other, as democratic states adopt compromise solutions to both internal and external problems. As Rudolph J Rummel, one of the world's
most eminent peace researchers, has stated: "In democracy we have a cure for war and a way of minimising political
violence, genocide, and mass murder." On balance, therefore, I believe that the prophets of doom, including those predicting
climate doom, are wrong. Admittedly, there is no guarantee that we can avoid major mayhem and disruption during our risky transition to
become a hyper-technological, type 1 civilisation. Even so, societal evolution has now reached a level of complexity that renders the probability
of human survival much higher than at any hitherto stage of history.

Plan Text: The United States federal government should increase restrictions on
immigration by reducing legal immigration to levels consistent with ecological
stability and prioritizing refugees.

The US should massively cut immigration levels—this solves overpop and

environmental collapse
McALPIN 2014 (David, Progressives for Immigration Reform, “U.S. Population and Its Impact on the Environment: Why
Curbing Per Capita Consumption Is Not Enough,” Sep 10, http://progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/publication/u-s-
population-and-its-impact-on-the-environment-why-curbing-per-capita-consumption-is-not-enough/)
Current immigration levels cast a long shadow on the United States’ future, as population
growth projections for the year
2100 predict that the U.S. population will hit 571 million under the current immigration policy , which
admits a little less than 1 million new immigrants annually. With a country already facing difficulty in
preventing water scarcity and the destruction of irreplaceable habitats (witness the deforestation of the
Tongass), there is no reason to believe the United States will be able to circumvent these problems with
nearly twice its current population size. More people living in the country leads to increased demands for food, water, and gas,
regardless of their income level. With already skyrocketing projections of population growth under the United States’ current immigration
policy, in a baffling move, the U.S. Senate recently proposed to double U.S. immigration levels to around 2 million new immigrants annually.
On May 28, 2013, the Senate Committee proposed the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act,” which
introduced radical increases in immigration levels to our already lenient immigration policy. The proposed legislation, according to the
Congressional Budget Office, would increase the United States’ immigrant population by 10.4 million by 2023.
This ‘immigration reform’ would double the amount of annual immigration in the U.S . from its current level of
around one million to a highly unsustainable two million. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, such “reform” proposals would
actually increase immigration to “over two million annually, which
has the potential to nearly triple our population to
over 850 million by the end of the century. Conversely, scaling back immigration 200,000 per year would
greatly reduce America’s population growth according to the studies by the U.S. Census Bureau.” With a
population twice its current size, the United States will do grave and irreversible damages to its
environment while struggling to prevent food and water shortages. With a population triple its current
size, the U.S. will exceed its carrying capacity far beyond its limits, as famine and drought result in
civilization-changing consequences.
The counterplan sends a worldwide signal to control fertility rates and solve
overpopulation
McALPIN 2014 (David, Progressives for Immigration Reform, “U.S. Population and Its Impact on the Environment: Why
Curbing Per Capita Consumption Is Not Enough,” Sep 10, http://progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/publication/u-s-
population-and-its-impact-on-the-environment-why-curbing-per-capita-consumption-is-not-enough/)
Allowing excessive immigration to continue completely disregards the population factor of John Holdren’s IPAT equation,
and stimulates population growth in the sending countries. Because it is unreasonable to expect that 300
million Americans will curb their consumption enough to offset an increasing population, immigration
reform is the most practical approach the United States can take to combat the destruction of our
environment. By failing to prevent excessive immigration, the United States signals a message to sending
countries that unmanaged population growth is an acceptable option. It is time for the United States to
take the initiative and address population growth through immigration reform , in order to prevent
further and potentially irreversible damage to the environment. By acknowledging our limited
population capacity through restrictive immigration reform, we will influence others to address
population growth within their own countries .

The counterplan is modeled and spurs population activism

McALPIN 2014 (David, Progressives for Immigration Reform, “U.S. Population and Its Impact on the Environment: Why
Curbing Per Capita Consumption Is Not Enough,” Sep 10, http://progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/publication/u-s-
population-and-its-impact-on-the-environment-why-curbing-per-capita-consumption-is-not-enough/)
Another target of criticism is that overpopulation and its effect on the environment are global problems, and it is not the United States’
prerogative to address such issues. As Muradian again writes, “Should immigration be used as a policy tool for an environmental improvement? I
think the precautionary answer should be ‘no.’ [ . . .] Policies aiming at population stabilization should be addressed at the global level.” While
climate change and other environmental problems are global issues, the magnitude of these problems
does not justify ignoring them here in the United States . Imagine if we adopted that attitude for other global problems.
Because racism is prevalent in every nation on earth, is it ethically sound for the United States to ignore these same issues here at
home? Deeming a problem too large to address nationally only breeds complacency, and deters activism
among individuals. Actually, the fact that overpopulation and the destruction of the environment are
global problems is precisely why the United States should take the initiative in addressing them. If we
acknowledge overpopulation and the resultant environmental degradation at home first, it is more likely
the United States will set an example other countries may be more willing to follow .
DA 1
Dems about to win the House
Giroux & McCormick 9/6/18 (McCormick is a politics reporter for Bloomberg News.
Giroux is an elections reporter for Bloomberg Government. “GOP Bracing for
Democratic Surge in November Congressional Vote” Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-06/gop-bracing-for-democratic-
surge-in-november-congressional-vote)//Chan
GOP Braces for Democratic Surge in November Republicans are at increasing risk of losing the House in the midterm elections. By and
September 6 2018 3:00 AM CDT SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email Republicans are bracing for a potential Democratic wave in November that would rip away their grip on the U.S. House leave their agenda in tatters and

embroil Donald Trump’s White House in a procession of congressional investigations. As the midterm election campaign enters the homestretch
independent analysts uniformly agree Democrats are well-positioned to take control of the 435-seat chamber when
the next Congress convenes and that their odds have only gotten better since the start of the year. The
GOP enters the final two months before the vote confronting an array of flashing warning signs—
including polls fundraising and primary voter turnout—pointing to the end of one-party rule in
Washington. “There is a confluence of things that suggest a very tough outcome for Republicans ” said Sara Fagen who served as White House political director to President George W. Bush when Republicans lost the
House and Senate in the 2006 midterm election. Democrats have expanded the congressional battlefield putting more than 60 Republican-held House districts in play. They need a net gain of 23

seats to take the majority in the chamber and are seeking to take advantage of the record number of
GOP seats left open by retirements and resignations which have left Republicans extra-vulnerable . Some House
Seats Democrats Hope to Flip Democrats need to pick up 23 seats to take control of the House Sources: U.S. House of Representatives Cook Political Report as of Sept. 2 Bloomberg research Meanwhile

stagnant wages—and rising prices—have wiped away the promise of big gains for the middle class that
were a central selling point of the GOP’s single biggest legislative achievement of the past two years —a
$1.5 trillion package of tax cuts. Despite controlling the House and Senate the GOP has been unable to
deliver on two central promises of Trump’s presidential campaign: expanding the border wall and
repealing Obamacare. Then there’s Trump. The swirl of legal and political turmoil around his presidency
has continued to grow most recently with the conviction of his one-time campaign chairman in Special
Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the guilty plea of his former lawyer in a separate probe in
New York. His approval ratings have been hovering at around 40 percent in most recent polls levels that presaged big midterm losses for previous presidents. Even Trump who has boasted of a “red wave” that would
sweep more Republicans into Congress seemed to acknowledge the headwinds his party is facing during an Oval Office interview last week with Bloomberg News. Asked about replacing House Speaker Paul Ryan who is retiring he
said: “It’s really going to be depending on the midterms. I hope that we’re going to be in a position that we’re going to have to worry about speaker.” The House battlefield ranges from traditional suburban swing areas such as those
in New Jersey and Virginia to some in less-expected areas. Districts in Kansas Maine and Kentucky that all voted for Trump in 2016 are now rated as competitive. Read more: Upset Primary Win Shows Democratic Voters Eager to
Make Changes Democrats also have upped their game in competing across the country. The party has candidates in more than 430 of the 435 congressional districts one of the highest totals in history. That would better the GOP’s
performance in 2010 when Republicans had nominees in 430 districts on their way to overturning the House Democratic majority at the midpoint of President Barack Obama’s first term. The non-partisan Cook Political Report rates
39 Republican seats as toss-up or lean Democrat up from 20 in January. Trump will loom large in almost every congressional race. He’s demonstrated his ability to drive Republican voters in primaries most recently in Florida’s
gubernatorial contest. But his record’s been mixed in special elections pitting a Republican candidate against a Democrat. November will test whether Trump’s pull with Republicans is enough to counter the intensity of Democratic
voter anger. President’s Midterm Party Losses According to Gallup President Trump’s job approval stood at 41% on Sept. 2 Sources: Gallup American Presidency Project Bloomberg research Trump’s lone-wolf style of governing his
tendency to put himself above what might be best for his own party and his unpredictability—something he views as central to his own political brand—remain major variables Republicans can’t control. White House aides have said
Trump plans to spend more than 40 days campaigning between the beginning of August and the election. That would outpace the off-year election efforts of Obama and Bush both of whom saw their party’s congressional majorities
evaporate in midterm wave elections. On Thursday he's in Montana and on Friday he's scheduled to be in North Dakota. Both are states he won in 2016 and where Republicans are trying to unseat incumbent Democratic senators in
November. If he were on the ballot this year Trump told Bloomberg people would come out and vote. “The question is whether or not it’s going to transfer.” How Poll Participants Said They’d Vote in U.S. House Race Generic ballot
questions in polls ask which party’s candidate voters would pick in their House district without naming candidates. Results from wave election years and this year. Sources: Pew Research Center Brookings Institution So far it hasn’t.

The average of
In an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Aug. 26-29 registered voters said they’d favor a Democratic candidate over a Republican one in their district 52 percent to 38 percent.

recent polls compiled by RealClearPolitics is a 9.3 percentage point Democratic advantage. Trump is
unlikely to be welcomed by Republicans in suburban swing districts where some GOP lawmakers are
running television ads emphasizing their willingness to “stand up” to him . Those candidates will do as much as possible to keep the president
out of the campaign conversation. “You make the argument that the Republican candidate is the better choice to advance the values perspectives and interests of that particular district ” said Republican strategist and pollster Whit
Ayres. “This is not about Donald Trump one way or the other. This is about who the best choice is for this state or this district.” The Senate is a more comfortable spot for Republicans even though their majority hangs on a two-vote
margin. Democrats are defending 17 more Senate seats than the GOP including 10 in states Trump won in 2016. While the party has a shot at capturing Senate seats in Arizona Nevada and Tennessee five of the most vulnerable

. While Trump frequently claims credit for a booming stock

senators—in Florida Indiana Missouri North Dakota and West Virginia—are Democrats

market and robust economic growth Republicans have had a hard time capitalizing on the gains . Unemployment
Before and After Midterm ‘Wave’ Elections Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Note: Data is seasonally adjusted The economy expanded at a 4.2 percent annualized rate in the second quarter the fastest since 2014 and the

the pay boost of $4 000 to $9 000 annually

unemployment rate—3.9 percent—is hovering near the lowest since 1969. The stock market keeps churning out record highs. But

that Trump and congressional Republicans promised would result from the corporate tax cuts that took
effect Jan. 1 hasn’t materialized. In fact real wages have remained mostly stagnant as inflation and higher
health-care costs have eaten into modest pay gains. Read more: Wage Stagnation Undercuts Trump’s Promise to ‘Forgotten Man’ Some in the GOP have
complained that a lack of legislative accomplishments beyond the tax cuts—including the failure to
revamp immigration laws build a wall along the entire southern U.S. border and repeal Obamacare—has weakened the GOP’s standing with
voters. Representative Dennis Ross of Florida said he fears his party will lose the House because of its inability to pass laws and keep promises. There are “little legislative failures that are adding up ” said Ross who’s retiring
at the end of this term Fagen agreed. “The overall environment is not terrible for Republicans but the combination of where the president sits and the

challenges Republicans have had in getting some things done in Congress and some scandals are
problematic ” she said. Still she added that predictions are dangerous in the Trump era. “This isn’t your mother’s political environment so it’s hard to base things on history.” John Lapp a strategist who served as
executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 said his party would be best served by focusing on core issues—health-care costs wages and congressional accountability—and avoid being
distracted by Trump. “He is melting down all by himself ” he said. Besides being a referendum on Trump the midterms will also measure whether women can expand their presence in Congress. More than 20 will be major party
nominees for Senate seats breaking the record of 18 set in 2012 according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. With primaries not concluding until mid-September the center’s data shows that 179
Democratic women and 51 Republican women have won House primaries so far already shattering the previous record of 167 in 2016. Female candidates and voters are especially important to Democrats. Polls are showing a sharp
gender split with women leaning heavily toward backing Democratic candidates. Senate Map Benefits Republicans But Democrats Have a Few Openings President Trump carried seven of eight states in 2016 that are identified by the
Cook Political Report as "toss-up" races in 2018 Sources: U.S. Senate Cook Political Report as of Sept. 2 Bloomberg research *Republican incumbents in Arizona Utah and Tennessee are retiring and not seeking reelection. Bernie
Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine both independents running for reelection caucus with the Democrats and are shown in blue. One of the biggest obstacles for Democrats is the formidable congressional district maps
Republican-controlled state legislatures drew after the 2010 election. Another is the concentration of their own voters in the cores of major metropolitan areas while Republicans are spread over a wider area. That was reflected in
Trump’s 2016 victory. He lost the popular vote by about 3 million in 2016 but won more congressional districts 230 to 205. Another major unknown is whether the large number of first-time candidates among the Democrats can
take a punch. While many look good on paper to party strategists they’re untested and will come under close scrutiny and many attacks in the weeks ahead. As much as this will be an election driven by feelings about the president

In California where five House districts are rated as tossups Republicans hope a gas
local issues could play a role on the margins.

tax-repeal effort also on the ballot will help boost conservative turnout . If control of the House ends up being close all eyes could
be on those five California seats. Polls don’t close there until 11 p.m. East Coast time and the state is known for a lengthy counting process because of widespread use of vote-by-mail ballots
that don’t have to be postmarked until Election Day.

Immigration reform without border security costs Democrats the election. The plan
turns off key independent and moderate voters.
The Hill 2/14/2018 “Democrats will lose this fall by fighting over immigration now”
http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/373883-democrats-will-lose-this-fall-by-fighting-over-immigration-
now

By focusing exclusively on the Dreamers and offering no practical limits on immigration, much less any border security, the Democrats are in the
process of writing their own political obituary for November and beyond. But a deal with President Trump can turn this perennially difficult issue into
an electoral benefit. Here’s how.

President Trump has proposed a compromise by offering a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, building a wall on the southern border,
ending the visa lottery program, and ending what he calls “chain migration” and what the Democrats call “family unification.”

In fact, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has proposed a bill in Congress based on these four planks. The Democrats have previously said this
proposal is dead-on-arrival, which is a clear mistake and there are some small bits of evidence now that the party is waking up to the fact that
the Schumer-Pelosi approach was just plain wrong.

This past weekend, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) teased that he might be willing to support the president’s wall. The precise words
Blumenthal used were an openness to “strengthening some of the physical structures and fence,” indicating that he was prepared to accept the
president’s deal. This deal offers a pathway to citizenship for more than twice as many Dreamers as President Obama protected through his
2012 DACA executive order in exchange for simply securing the border.

The statistical evidence is very clear that border security and controlling immigration remain central
issues for the American people, particularly the 9.2 percent of Obama voters who defected from the
Democratic Party to vote for President Trump, based on a report from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. Contrary to what the
Democrats have maintained, border security tests extremely well in public polling. The latest Harvard-Harris poll found that
an overwhelming majority, 79 percent, of Americans believe the U nited States needs secure borders .

While immigration reform has been framed by Democrats as a tradeoff between a popular initiative for the Dreamers and an unpopular wall,
this is a misreading of public opinion. The
wall is indeed unpopular, but it actually serves as a proxy for border security,
which remains a central concern of many voters, especially in swing states and among noncollege-
educated whites.
In terms of electoral politics, if
the Democrats are to regain the House, they will need to win back Obama-Trump
voters in the Midwest, as well as independents and moderates throughout the country . In fact, 10 of the 38
Republicans who are retiring or otherwise vacating their seats in 2018 are from the four Midwestern states of Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and
Pennsylvania.

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll also finds that the advantage Democrats hold in the generic congressional vote comes almost
entirely from districts the party already holds. Indeed, the Democrats hold a lead by a strong 38 points in their own districts, yet trail
Republicans by six points in the very districts they need to flip in order to regain the House.

It is very clear that immigration may very well have made the difference in 2016. In conjunction with the Democracy Fund
Voter Study Group’s report, John Sides from George Washington University also found that attitudes about illegal immigration were

strongly correlated with vote switching. In particular, the voters who were most likely to switch from Obama
to Trump opposed a pathway to citizenship and believed that immigrants detract from American society.

Thus, to expand their base of support, the party needs to win back the precise voters who defected from
President Obama to give Donald Trump his electoral college victory by reconciling their positions on immigration. It may well be that
the Democrats and Republicans can arrive at a compromise, which, on the whole, would work in the Democrats favor because the primary
objective is to take the issue off the table.

This means GOP will lead to offshore drilling---locks in warming which causes extinction
Patrick Parenteau 17, professor of law at Vermont Law School, 1/3/17, “Will Trump Scuttle Obama's Offshore Drilling
Bans?,” https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/03/will-trump-scrap-obama-s-offshore-drilling-bans //Elmer
President Obama gave environmental advocates a Christmas present when he announced in late December that he was
banning oil and gas drilling in huge swaths of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. This action “indefinitely”
protects almost 120 million acres of ecologically important and highly sensitive marine environments from the risks of oil spills and other
industrial impacts. President Obama acted boldly to conserve important ecological resources and solidify his
environmental legacy. But by making creative use of an obscure provision of a 1953 law, Obama ignited a legal and
political firestorm. Republicans and oil industry trade groups are threatening to challenge the ban in court
or through legislation. They also contend that the Trump administration can act directly to reverse it. But a close reading of the
law suggests that it could be difficult to undo Obama’s sweeping act. The power to withdraw Congress passed the law
now known as the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act in 1953 to assert federal control over submerged lands that lie more then three miles
offshore, beyond state coastal waters. Section 12(a) of the law authorizes the president to “withdraw from disposition
any of the unleased lands of the outer Continental Shelf.” Starting in 1960 with the Eisenhower administration, six
presidents from both parties have used this power. Most withdrawals were time-limited, but some were long-term. For example, in 1990
President George H. W. Bush permanently banned oil and gas development in California’s Monterey Bay, which later became a national marine
sanctuary. President Obama used section 12(a) in 2014 to protect Alaska’s Bristol Bay, one of the most productive wild salmon fisheries in the
world. In 2015 he took the same step for approximately 9.8 million acres in the biologically rich Chukchi and Beaufort
seas. Obama’s latest action bars energy production in 115 million more acres of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas – an area known as the
“Arctic Ring of Life” because of its importance to Inupiat Peoples who have lived there for millennia. The order also withdraws
3.8 million acres off the Atlantic Coast from Norfolk, Virginia to Canada, including several unique and largely
unexplored coral canyons. Why Obama acted In a Presidential Memorandum on the Arctic withdrawals, Obama provided three reasons for his
action. First, he asserted, these areas have irreplaceable value for marine mammals, other wildlife, wildlife habitat, scientific research and
Alaska Native subsistence use. Second, they are extremely vulnerable to oil spills. Finally, drilling for oil and responding to spills in Arctic waters
poses unique logistical, operational, safety and scientific challenges. In ordering the Atlantic withdrawals, Obama cited his responsibility to
“ensure that the unique resources associated with these canyons remain available for future generations.” Market forces support Obama’s
action. Royal Dutch Shell stopped drilling in the Chukchi Sea in 2015 after spending US$7 billion and drilling in what proved to be a dry hole.
Since 2008 the Interior Department has canceled or withdrawn a number of sales in Alaskan waters due to low demand. Shell, ConocoPhillips,
Statoil, Chevron, BP and Exxon have all to some degree abandoned offshore Arctic drilling. Low oil prices coupled with high drilling costs make
business success in the region a risky prospect. Lloyd’s of London forecast this scenario in a 2012 report that called offshore drilling in the Arctic
“a unique and hard-to-manage risk.” What happens next? Critics of President Obama’s action, including the state of Alaska and the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, say they may challenge Obama’s order in court, in hopes that the Trump administration will opt not to defend it. But
environmental groups, which hailed Obama’s action, will seek to intervene in any such lawsuit. Moreover, to demonstrate that they have
standing to sue, plaintiffs would have to show that they have suffered or face imminent injury; that this harm was caused by Obama’s action;
and that it can be redressed by the court. Market conditions will make this very difficult. The Energy Information Administration currently
projects that crude oil prices, which averaged about $43 per barrel through 2016, will rise to only about $52 per barrel in 2017. Whether these
areas will ever be commercially viable is an open question, especially since rapid changes are taking place in the electricity and transportation
sectors, and other coastal areas are open for leasing in Alaska’s near-shore waters and the Gulf of Mexico. The Royal Dutch Shell drilling
rig Kulluk broke loose and ran aground near Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska as it was being towed to Seattle for winter maintenance in
December 2012. This Coast Guard overflight video shows the harsh conditions along Alaska’s coast in winter. Alternatively, Donald Trump could
12(a) does not provide any authority for
issue his own memorandum in office seeking to cancel Obama’s. However, section
presidents to revoke actions by their predecessors . It delegates authority to presidents to withdraw land
unconditionally. Once they take this step, only Congress can undo it. This issue has never been litigated. Opponents can
be expected to argue that Obama’s use of section 12(a) in this manner is unconstitutional because it violates the so-called
“nondelegation doctrine,” which basically holds that Congress cannot delegate legislative functions to the executive branch without articulating
some “intelligible principles.” However, one could argue that Obama’s action was based on an articulation of intelligible principles gleaned from
the stated policies of the OCSLA, which recognizes that the “the outer Continental Shelf is a vital national resource reserve held by the Federal
Government for the public.” The law expressly recognizes both the energy and environmental values of the OCS. Thus President Obama’s
decision reflects a considered judgment that the national interest is best served by protecting the unique natural resources of these areas, while
at the same time weaning the nation from its dangerous dependence on fossil fuels. The section 12(a) authority is similar in some respects to
the authority granted by the Antiquities Act, which authorizes the president to “reserve parcels of land as a part of [a] national monument.” Like
the OCSLA, the Antiquities Act does not authorize subsequent presidents to undo the designations of their predecessors. Obama has also used
this power extensively – most recently, last week when he designated two new national monuments in Utah and Nevada totaling 1.65 million
acres. Some laws do include language that allows such actions to be revoked. Examples include the Forest Service Organic Administration Act,
under which most national forests were established, and the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which sets out policies for
managing multiple-use public lands. The fact that Congress chose not to include revocation language in the OCSLA indicates that it did not
intend to provide such power. What can the new Congress do? Under Article IV of the Constitution, Congress
has plenary authority
to dispose of federal property as it sees fit. This would include the authority to open these areas to
leasing for energy development. Members of Alaska’s congressional delegation are considering introducing legislation to
override Obama’s drilling ban. But Democrats could filibuster to block any such move,
and Republicans – who will hold a 52-48 margin in the Senate – would need 60 votes to stop them. On the other
hand, Congress may be content to let President-elect Trump make the first move and see how it goes in court. If Trump attempts to reverse the
withdrawal, environmental groups contesting his decision would face some of the same obstacles as an industry challenge to Obama’s action. It
could be especially challenging for environmental groups to show that the claim is “ripe” for judicial review, at least until a post-Obama
administration acts to actually open up these areas for leasing. That may not occur for some time, given the weak market for the oil in these
regions. In the meantime, this
decision is a fitting capstone for a president who has done everything within his
power to confront the existential threat of climate change and rationally move the nation and
the world onto a safer and more sustainable path.

Framing
Framing (Extinction)
Evaluating consequences is key to ethics
David Runciman 17, Politics, Cambridge University, “Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet,” The Journal of
Political Philosophy, Volume 25, Issue 1, March 2017, Pages 3–21 //Elmer
Contemporary political realism carries echoes of this line of argument and of Bentham's shift from the weaker to the stronger version of it, even
though Bentham's direct influence is rarely in evidence. Critics of the current ubiquity of the language of human rights often point out that in
the absence of a robust account of the power relations that are needed to underpin any rights regime—in particular, an answer to the question
of who does the enforcing—all such talk is a massive distraction from the real business of improving the situation on the ground to which
human rights are meant to apply.9 But for more radical critics the emptiness of human rights talk is too convenient to be merely a confusion: it
serves as the perfect cover for the sinister interests of those engaged in neo-colonial projects of exploitation and expropriation.10 However,
these two poles of the Benthamite case against moralism—from inadvertent confusion to deliberate deception—do not exhaust the range of
explanations for what is wrong with it. There is another answer, drawn from an alternative intellectual tradition, which appears more frequently
in the current realist literature. This is the Weberian idea that moralism
does not so much obscure what politicians are
really up to, as conceal the truth about their personal motives from political actors themselves. In other
words, political moralism is less a form of deception than of self-deception: it lets politicians
avoid looking political reality squarely in the face because it allows them to believe they have
their eyes set on something higher. Conviction politicians think they can transcend the messy
reality of politics. That belief is dangerous because their response when they encounter the messy
reality is to deny it, or to ignore it, or to insist they can mould it to their higher
purposes, which only makes the mess worse. Weber's case against allowing an ethic of conviction
to trump an ethic of responsibility in politics—which requires, among other things, that politicians face up
to the unintended consequences of what they do—remains compelling.11 But it does not map onto any sharp
distinctions between realism and moralism. That is because the convictions that can breed self-deception are not
necessarily moralistic beliefs; they can be beliefs about anything, including beliefs about
how contingency trumps moral certainty. On the Weberian account it is not what you believe but how
you believe it that makes the difference. Realists, too, can be self-deceived, because the strength of their convictions against
moralism produces its own self-deceptions and blind spots. This is the case that can be made against Bentham, who was so thoroughly dogmatic
about the vapidity of all talk of rights that it served to blind him to what was missing from his own understanding of politics. Macaulay made the
point in his celebrated takedown of the Benthamites published in the Edinburgh Review in 1829: ‘They surrender their understandings … to the
meanest and most abject sophisms, provided these sophisms come before them disguised with the externals of demonstration. They do not
seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric—that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as a metaphor.’12 Bentham was
insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which the attempt to ground political argument in the language of force neglects the capacity of other
sorts of arguments to move people successfully. Conviction politics is not simply the preserve of the moralisers. Likewise, it is not the case that moral political
philosophy is itself incapable of seeing the merit of arguments that point towards the unavoidability of unintended consequences. Just as realists can be blind to contingency, so moralists can be alive to it. Take the example of
Robert Nozick, the most prominent early critic of Rawlsian political philosophy from within the discourse of rights. Nozick's ‘Wilt Chamberlain example’ was designed to highlight the inability of Rawlsian schemes of justice to
accommodate the unintended consequences of cumulative instances of contingent rightful action on the part of individuals (in this case, their willingness to hand over small amounts of their own money to watch the best basketball
player around ply his trade, which would generate unjustifiable inequalities of wealth—Chamberlain becomes very rich—unless the state intervenes to circumscribe their choices).13 The challenge to Rawls is to adapt his patterned
view of justice to a world in which events inevitably take place that will break up the pattern. But this challenge does not come from a realist; it comes from a moralist (and a self-professed utopian to boot). There are many possible
ways to push back against the apparent force of the Wilt Chamberlain example.14 A realist response would be to challenge the assumptions behind the case itself. We live in societies that enrich leading sportspeople on a scale that
even Nozick might have found hard to imagine (Nozick envisages Chamberlain earning $250,000; his contemporary equivalent—LeBron James—earned more than $50,000,000 in 2015). But the players’ wealth is not simply the
cumulative consequence of the unfettered choice of large numbers of people to hand over small amounts of money to watch them play. Any such relationship—between fans and performers—is mediated by vast institutional
structures of commodification and exchange, which make it very hard to follow the money from individual consumers to the pockets of the superstars. It passes through the hands of many others—broadcasters, agents, advertisers,
and administrators—such that the path of justice may be at best obscured and more likely undermined (recent revelations about how FIFA operates do not inspire confidence that this is a transparently just business). A further
iteration of the realist response would indicate that an example drawn from the world of sports is itself a misleading one. Though polling evidence suggests that in our increasingly unequal societies it is sporting celebrities and their
like who are widely believed to be reaping the most outsize rewards—on the assumption that there is at least some correlation between reward and measurable talent—most of the superrich in fact come from the financial services
industry, where visible talent is much harder to identify.15 Tracing the just transfer of money in Nozick's terms from individual consumers to the pockets of bankers would be a thoroughly thankless task. In that sense, the Wilt
So realists can respond to Nozick's argument
Chamberlain example appears designed to play into our unwarranted presuppositions about the workings of the free market. It serves as a smokescreen.
about contingency with some contingencies of their own. But so too can Rawlsians. It is possible to turn Nozick's argument on its head. He
purports to grant Rawls his ideal society in order to show that no political ideal can survive eventualities for which it was not designed.
But what if Nozick is granted his ideal society—his utopia—in which there is no political eventuality that cannot be
justified in terms of the underlying individual rights that must remain un-breached for any social
arrangement to count as just. That society will also be subject to unforeseen contingencies, including
emergent monopolies and other market failures. Correcting for those failures will require breaches of
rights in Nozick's terms; but sitting back and doing nothing will make the preservation of the conditions
of justice—which includes the ability to track the distribution of wealth through a series of free exchanges—much more difficult.
There is a real world variant of this argument that illustrates what can be at stake. Critics of the most
urgent demands to address the threat of climate change tend to argue that pre-emptive responses will preclude
the sort of market innovation that offers the best chance of finding a solution.16 In other words, patterned state intervention
forecloses the opportunities provided by being open to unforeseen contingencies. But equally,
openness to contingency can be its own form of limitation, if it forecloses the opportunities
provided by state intervention in the face of failure. Putting one's faith in an unforeseen future to
generate outcomes that will in due course solve the problems of the present rules out the
possibility of an unforeseen future that requires action in the present to solve its looming
problems. Those whose convictions blindly ‘
favour contingency and the free exchange of ideas can be as self-deceived in Weber's sense as those who want to intervene in the name of a
better politics. All convictions, however adaptable, have an edge of fatalism to them.17

Extinction subverts all ethical frames

Angela Michelis 17, University of Turin, “The roots of human responsibility,” Rev. Filos., Aurora, Curitiba, v. 29, n. 46, p. 307-
333, jan./abr. 2017 //Elmer
Ethics and politics are necessarily interwoven, and Hans Jonas – in a situation where survival is
threatened, of emergency, owing to the exponential development of technological power, and in the conviction that human beings cannot
adapt themselves to everything – declares: “For the moment, all work on the ‘true’ [hu]man must stand back behind
the bare saving of its precondition, namely, the existence of [hu]mankind in a sufficient natural
environment”37. Responsible politics turns towards the future with the consciousness that it
must guarantee the very possibility of responsible action and the existence of future
generations, as well as the right to life of the world.

(_) Every criticism Nate Cohn makes applies to the aff- they rely on expert
interpretation, they’re not showing where the data came from, they haven’t met
Cohn’s “burden of proof” because they haven’t shown us the method section of the
studies they cite or justified each step, they haven’t filled in myriad gaps like “what are
the reimbursement rates, who sets them, what data would they use”… - vote neg on
presumption
Even Cohn says they have to beat the DA on specifics- they over-generalize the
argument and lead to lazy, poor analysis
- Read this Card ONLY if they also read Cohn ev saying DA are Bad
Cohn 13 [Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, previously worked as a staff writer for The New
Republic, as a research associate at The Henry L. Stimson Center and a debate coach at Whitman college, 12-12-2013,
http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?topic=5416.0;wap2]//Elmer
Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might
be willing to
summarily disregard “absurd” arguments , like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently
unrealistic, that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios , and that judges
should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments . I don’t think this is too different from elements of
Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.” Honestly, I was surprised
that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just
saying “it’s absurd, and you know
it” wouldn’t be enough against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed
argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing, but I still think it would
be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. To be blunt: I want debaters to
learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting
notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to
rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I
think this is a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more robust explanation of why the risk of the
disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response is offered. There are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the
substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of the various forms of knowledge production, from
journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many of our most strongly worded cards come from people giving opinions,
for which they offer very little data or evidence. And even when “qualified” people are giving predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely
skeptical without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and most people are wrong. And again, this
is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argument(!)—if deemed necessary.