1NC

1NC
Legal immigration means admission for lawful permanent residence
Cheng, 4 – Social Security Administration (Anthony, A Stochastic Model of the Long-Range Financial
Status of the OASDI Program, September 2004,
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study117.pdf Italics in original; Equations omitted

Legal immigration is defined as persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence into the United States.7
The level of legal immigration largely depends on legislation which basically serves to define and establish limits for certain categories of immigrants. The

Immigration Act of 1990, which is currently the legislation in force, establishes limits for three classes of immigrants: family-
sponsored preferences, employment-based preferences, and diversity immigrants. However, no numerical limits currently exist for immediate
relatives of U.S. citizens. Historical data for legal U.S. immigration for years 1901 through 2002 are from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.8 Legal
immigration averaged nearly one million per year from 1900 through 1914, then decreased substantially to about 23,000 in 1933. Since the mid-1940s, legal
immigration increased steadily to over one million in 2002. An ARMA(4,1) equation was selected and parameters were estimated using the entire range of historical
data. The R-squared value was 0.92. Figure II.2 presents the actual and fitted values. The modified equation is: (3) In this equation, IMt represents the annual level
of legal immigration in year t; represents the projected level of legal immigration from the TR04II in year t; imt represents the deviation of the annual level of legal
immigration from the TR04II value in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t. 2. Legal Emigration Legal emigration is defined as the number of persons
who lawfully leave the United States, and are no longer considered to be a part of the Social Security program. Although annual emigration data are not collected in
the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the level of emigration for the past century roughly totaled one-fourth of the level of legal immigration.
Using the Census estimates as an approximate guide, the parameters of Equation (3) are multiplied by one-fourth.9 The modified equation is: (4) In this equation,
EMt represents the annual level of legal emigration in year t; represents the projected annual level of legal emigration from the TR04II in year t; emt represents the
deviation of the annual level of legal emigration from the TR04II value in year t; and εt represents the random error in year t. 3. Net Other Immigration Net

other immigration is defined as the annual flow of persons into the United States minus the annual flow of persons out of the United States
who do not meet the above definition of legal immigration or legal emigration. Thus, net other immigration
includes unauthorized persons and those not seeking permanent residence.

The plan violates—S-6 visas do not give permanent residence.

Voting issue to protect limits and ground. All predictable immigration DAs and CPs are
about the admissions process, and expanding the topic outside of admissions
potentially creates hundreds of additional affirmatives.
 1NC
The Supreme Court of the United States should rule that the restriction on legal
immigration described in the aff is unconstitutional.
Solves and avoids politics --- courts have the authority to rule on immigration and
provide citizenship.
Ludwin 99 (DEREK LUDWIN, Partner for Covington & Burling LLP, Instructor for University of Virginia School of Law, Law Clerk at United
States District Court for The Southern District of New York, 2000-2001 “CAN COURTS CONFER CITIZENSHIP? PLENARY POWER AND
EQUAL PROTECTION”, November 1999, NYU Law, http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-74-5-Ludwin.pdf)

In order for the Court to provide a remedy in naturalization based equal protection cases, it would need
to find a jurisprudential foundation to counter the plenary power doctrine and sanction such a remedy. For
citizenship applicants stymied by unconstitutional naturalization provisions, meaningful relief ultimately must come in the form of a grant of
citizenship, so the doctrinal foundation would need to support judicial conferral of citizenship. This Note considers two possible
doctrinal solutions: indirect or direct conferral of citizenship-the former a byproduct of the Court's striking down an
unconstitutional statute and the latter stemming directly from the Court's equitable powers. In the end, only equity
can provide a strong enough foundation to support judicial conferral. B. Indirect Conferral of Citizenship If the Court finds
that a statute violates the Equal Protection Clause, it may strike down the statute or sever the offending
clauses;10 3 this ensures that everyone is judged under a constitutional law.1'4 Indirect conferral of citizenship could mean
nothing more than striking down offending clauses of naturalization statutes and allowing
petitioners who meet the remaining, valid requirements to naturalize through those channels. At first
glance, this means of conferral seems unexceptionable, as courts regularly sever offending clauses from federal acts.105 In many cases, these
courts use the statute's own severability clause as a guide. Such clauses include instructions on severing, providing, for example, that if any
portion of the Act is struck down, the rest of the statute shall remain in effect. Given that the INA includes such a
clause, and thus contemplates severance, effecting such severance cannot inherently be seen as judicial overreach.10 6 From one perspective,
merely severing the unconstitutional provisions of the statute would not implicate the conferral issue: "[Once
the two
unconstitutional clauses are excised from the statute, that statute [would] operate[ ]
automatically to confer citizenship . ..'at birth.'" 07 On the other hand, severance could be seen as effecting a
conferral of citizenship, albeit indirect, contrary to Pangilinan's strictures; the practical import of such severance would be the indirect conferral
of citizenship to those included in the statute by virtue of the severance. The Ninth Circuit panel in Ahumada-Aguilar followed this path in
declaring petitioner a citizen: "The evidence in the record sufficiently demonstrates that Ahumada-Aguilar is the child of a U.S. citizen father,
satisfying the requirements of § 1409(a)(1) and (a)(2).' ' 1 o8
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Base support at 90% now.
Deaton, 9/27 Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard. "The Republican Party Has Gotten
Stronger—But Only Internally" Accessible at: https://www.weeklystandard.com/chris-deaton/the-republican-
party-has-gotten-stronger-but-only-internally// Published: 9/27/18

And yet: Gallup’s

September survey of American adults showed the party with a 45 percent approval rating,
the highest such finding since the tea party swept into Congress in January 2011. It seems like cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that
Republicans are headed for a rout in November but actually are relatively popular. But there are some explanations—starting with an obvious one Gallup
highlighted while analyzing its data. “The overall increase in the favorable image of the Republican party is a result of a jump in the positive views of Republicans,
including independents who lean toward the party,” Gallup wrote. “The percentage of Republicans and leaners with favorable views of their party grew from 67

corresponds with Trump’s steady favorability among

percent last September to 85 percent now.” That

Republicans—a number that lagged around 80 percent late last year but has touched 90 percent
multiple times this spring and summer, per Gallup. It’s worth bearing in mind that Republicans’ perceptions of the
president and their party have increased during a period in which the majority celebrated a signature
domestic policy achievement (tax reform) instead of a signature legislative disaster (Obamacare repeal).

Trump’s base support is a direct result of his hardline immigration stance – increasing
legal immigration betrays THE key campaign issue
Kapur, 18
Sahil Kapur is a national political reporter for Bloomberg Politics based in Washington, D.C.“Trump’s
Hard Line on Immigration Traps Republicans in a 2018 Dilemma” June 20, 2018
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/trump-s-hard-line-on-immigration-traps-gop-
in-a-2018-dilemma//dmr
President Donald Trump’s policy separating families who enter the U.S. illegally has caught 2018 Republican candidates between an anti-
immigration party base that favors Trump’s hard line and the majority of Americans who object to a policy widely criticized as
cruel. The “zero tolerance” punishment imposed by the administration has delivered harrowing footage of wailing toddlers to American living
rooms less than five months before voters decide which party should control Congress. "A picture is worth a thousand words, and a graphic
picture is always potent on this kind of issue. For the Republicans, getting this monkey off their back is critical,” said Tom Davis, a former
Republican congressman who chaired the party’s election arm. “Especially for members in swing districts.” Some of those swing districts, in
states including New York, New Jersey, Florida and California, will determine whether Democrats take the 23 seats from Republicans that
they’d need to gain control of the House. Republicans in those races will have to choose whether to defend or defy Trump on a deeply
polarizing issue that could hurt them with constituencies such as suburban women, independent voters and Hispanics. Preferred Message The
growing furor also is drowning out the GOP’s preferred campaign message about a booming economy on the week of the six-month
anniversary of the Trump tax cuts. It’s not necessarily an easy choice. “For the Republican base, if you resolve this wrongly it’s really going to
hurt your turnout,” Davis said. “They’re nervous about people saying ‘you sold out.’” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky
downplayed the prospect of political harm to his party. “It’s not going to tar anybody,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters. “We’re going to
fix the problem.” But he noted that any solution has to be bipartisan to pass the Senate and it wasn’t clear Tuesday after a series of meetings
whether that could be achieved. Three polls released this week said most Americans oppose the Trump policy, which requires the prosecution
of all adults crossing the border outside of an official port of entry and thereby sends children to be housed elsewhere. Approval stood at just
28 percent in a CNN poll, 27 percent in a Quinnipiac poll and 27 percent in an Ipsos poll, all driven by overwhelming opposition from Democrats
and independents. Republican Support But Republicans supported the policy — by a margin of 58 percent to 34 percent in the CNN poll, by 55
percent to 35 percent in the Quinnipiac poll, and by 46 percent to 32 percent in the Ipsos poll. Immigration
was a central force
in Trump’s rise after he catered to a hunger among core supporters for tough punishments on illegal entry
and cuts to legal immigration, including among asylum-seekers. “I run campaigns all over the country and
in every poll we run -- in every district, no matter where it is -- the No. 1 issue for Republicans is immigration.
It’s not even close,” said Harlan Hill, a Republican consultant and adviser to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. “It’s critical to
the president’s identity. He obviously ran on this. He opened up his entire campaign on this issue. So voters are quite
frankly holding his feet to the fire.”

Loss of core base support causes Trump to lash-out with nuclear weapons
Street 2016
Street, Tim. Senior Programme Officer on the Sustainable Security programme at Oxford Research
Group and has worked for many years on the politics of nuclear disarmament and the arms trade.
"President Trump: Successor to the Nuclear Throne,"
http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers_and_reports/president_trump_s
uccessor_nuclear_throne
With the former, Trump’s recent comment that he now has an ‘open mind’ about the importance of the Paris climate agreement—having previously said climate change is a ‘hoax’—is unlikely to assuage fears that he will seek to
dramatically expand the US’s extraction and reliance on fossil fuels. With the latter, strong doubts have been raised over whether the new President is capable of responsibly handling the incredible power that will be at his

several commentators are already raising concerns that a Trump administration will pursue policies that will
fingertips. Moreover,

aggravate and disappoint his supporters, a situation that could increase the possibility of the US
engaging in a ‘diversionary’ war. In order to consider what we can expect from a Trump presidency, as well as noting whom Trump empowers as members of his cabinet and those
whom he draws on for advice, it is vital to study the track record of recent administrations and appreciate the powers Trump will inherit. In doing so this briefing focuses on the question of what a Trump presidency might mean for
international relations with a focus on nuclear arms, including doctrine and disarmament. This means reviewing policies relevant to the US’s nuclear arsenal and pressing international challenges such as non-proliferation, including
in East Asia and the Middle East, as well as the US’s relationship with Russia and its role in NATO. The power and responsibilities of the nuclear monarch The US President is solely responsible for the decision to use the near-

Trump will have the sole

unimaginably destructive power of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Thus, as Bruce Blair—a former intercontinental ballistic missile launch control officer—makes clear, ‘

authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever he chooses with a single phone call.’ The wider political meaning of the bomb for
the world is aptly summarised by Daniel Deudney, who describes nuclear weapons as ‘intrinsically despotic’ so that they have created ‘nuclear monarchies’ in all nuclear-armed states. Deudney identifies three related reasons for
this development: ‘the speed of nuclear use decisions; the concentration of nuclear use decision into the hands of one individual; and the lack of accountability stemming from the inability of affected groups to have their interests
represented at the moment of nuclear use’. Similarly, Elaine Scarry has explained in stark terms in her 2014 book Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom, how the possession of nuclear weapons has
converted the US government into ‘a monarchic form of rule that places all defense in the executive branch of government’ leaving the population ‘incapacitated’. In response to this situation, Scarry argues that the American

the incredible
people must use the Constitution as a tool to dismantle the US nuclear weapons system, thereby revitalising democratic participation and control over decision-making. Scarry also outlines

might the president wields, with each of the US’s fourteen nuclear-armed submarines alone carrying
‘enough power to destroy the people of an entire continent’, equivalent to ‘eight times the full-blast power expended by Allied and Axis countries in World
War II’. Nuclear specialist Hans Kristensen has described how the US’s strategic nuclear war plan ‘if unleashed in its full capacity’ could ‘kill hundreds of millions of people, devastate entire nations, and cause climatic effects on a
global scale’. This war plan consists of a ‘family of plans’ that is aimed at ‘six potential adversaries’ whose identities are kept secret. Kristensen understands that they include ‘potentially hostile countries with nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons (WMD)’, meaning China, North Korea, Iran, Russia and Syria as well as a terrorist group backed by a state that has conducted a catastrophic WMD attack. The ‘dominant mission’ for US nuclear weapons within
these plans is termed counterforce, meaning strikes on ‘military, mostly nuclear, targets and the enemy’s leadership’. Despite these plans, the US’s nuclear arsenal is often described by mainstream commentators as being solely
intended to ensure mutual assured destruction (MAD), i.e. as part of the ‘balance of terror’ with Russia, in order to prevent armed conflict between the two nations and to ensure a response in kind to a surprise nuclear attack.
However, as Joseph Gerson and John Feffer explain, rather than deterrence just being about enough nuclear forces surviving a surprise first strike attack to ensure MAD, US military planners have also understood it to mean
‘preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to US interests’. David McDonough thus describes the ‘long-standing goal of American nuclear war-planners’ as being the achievement of the ability to
launch a disarming first-strike against an opponent- otherwise known as nuclear superiority. This has been magnified in recent years as the US seeks to ‘prevent’ or ‘rollback’ the ability of weaker states—both nuclear and non-
nuclear powers—to establish or maintain a deterrence relationship. Taking all this into account, the new commander-in-chief’s apparently volatile temperament thus raises deep concerns since his finger will be on the nuclear
trigger as soon as he assumes office on 20th January 2017. Given his past experience, Bruce Blair’s statement that he is ‘scared to death’ by the idea of a Trump presidency is but one further reason why urgent discussion and
action, both in the US and globally, on lessening nuclear dangers—and reviving disarmament—is vital. A recent report by the Ploughshares Fund on how the US can reduce its nuclear spending, reform its nuclear posture and
restrain its nuclear war plans should thus be required reading in Washington. However, as the Economist has rightly noted, ‘It is not Mr Trump’s fault that the system, in which the vulnerable land-based missile force is kept on hair-
trigger alert, is widely held to be inherently dangerous’ since, as they point out, ‘no former president, including Barack Obama, has done anything to change it.’ Over sixty years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
nuclearism thus remains very much embedded in the nation’s strategic thinking. Yet the election of Obama, and the rhetoric of his 2009 Prague speech, in which he stated ‘America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a
world without nuclear weapons’ led many to think that a real change was on the cards. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima earlier this year to commemorate the bombings was thus a painful reminder of how wide the gap is between the
rearmament programmes that the US and other nuclear weapon states are engaged in and the disarmament action that they are legally obliged to pursue under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Obama himself said in
Japan that, ‘technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.’ For this statement to be
meaningful it is necessary to identify who is responsible for the existing, highly dangerous state of affairs. In short, the US government’s recent record supports Scarry’s suggestion that a democratic revolution is what, in reality, is
most needed if the US is to make substantial progress on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Short-term reforms towards the democratic control and ultimate dismantlement of the US’s nuclear arsenal have been outlined
by Kennette Benedict, who writes that the next administration should: place our nuclear weapons on a much lower level of launch readiness, release to the public more information about the nuclear weapons in our own arsenals,
include legislators and outside experts in its nuclear posture review and recognize Congress’ authority to declare war as a prerequisite to any use of nuclear weapons. Assessing Obama’s nuclear legacy In order to properly
appreciate what a Trump presidency may bring, we need to revisit the range and types of powers bequeathed to the commander-in-chief by previous administrations. Despite the military advances made by China and Russia in
recent years, it is important to recognise that the US remains far and away the biggest global spender on conventional and nuclear weapons and plans to consolidate this position by maintaining significant technological superiority
over its adversaries, which will, as is well appreciated, push Beijing, Moscow—and thus other regional powers—to respond. Yet spending on nuclear weapons alone is set to pose significant budgeting difficulties for future US
governments. According to a 2014 report by the James Martin Center, the Departments of Defense and Energy plan to spend approximately $1 trillion over the next 30 years ‘to maintain its current nuclear arsenal and procure a
new generation of nuclear-armed or nuclear capable bombers and submarines’ as well as new submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Arms Control Today has found that total
Defense Department nuclear spending ‘is projected to average more than $40 billion in constant fiscal year 2016 dollars between 2025 and 2035, when modernization costs are expected to peak’. Including costs for the
Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s projected weapons-related spending during this period ‘would push average spending during this period to more than $50 billion per year’. If anywhere near these
sums are spent, then the modest reductions to the US’s nuclear stockpile achieved during the Obama presidency will be entirely overshadowed. Moreover, as analyst Andrew Lichterman notes, the US’s continued modernisation of
its nuclear forces is ‘inherently incompatible’ with the ‘unequivocal undertaking’ given at the 2000 NPT Review Conference to eliminate its nuclear arsenal and apply the ‘principle of irreversibility’ to this and related actions. For
Lichterman, the huge outlays committed to the nuclear weapons complex were part of a political ‘bargain’ made by the Obama administration with Republicans. This ensured that the New START nuclear arms control treaty would
pass in the Senate whilst also not disturbing the development of missile defense and other advanced conventional weapons programmes. New START is a bilateral agreement between Russia and the US, which Steven Pifer
describes as ‘one of the few bright spots’ that exists in these nations’ relationship. Under the treaty Moscow and Washington must, by 2018, reduce their stockpile of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550.
Furthermore, both must keep to a limit of 700 deployed strategic launchers (missiles) and heavy bombers, and to a combined limit of 800 deployed and non-deployed strategic launchers and heavy bombers. Despite New START
‘proceeding smoothly’ according to Pifer, Hans Kristensen recently produced a report comparing Obama’s record with that of the previous presidents holding office during the nuclear age, which found that, hitherto, Obama has cut
fewer warheads—in terms of numbers rather than percentages—than ‘any administration ever’ and that ‘the biggest nuclear disarmers’ in recent decades have been Republicans, not Democrats. Kristensen thus drily observes of
this situation that, a conservative Congress does not complain when Republican presidents reduce the stockpile, only when Democratic president try to do so. As a result of the opposition, the United States is now stuck with a
larger and more expensive nuclear arsenal than had Congress agreed to significant reductions. As his presidency draws to a close, presumably as a means of securing some sort of meaningful legacy in this area, it has been reported
that Obama considered adopting a no first use (NFU) policy for nuclear weapons, something which, whilst reversible, could act as a restraint on future presidents. Yet this was apparently abandoned, according to the New York
Times, after ‘top national security advisers argued that it could undermine allies and embolden Russia and China’. Furthermore, according to Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, the governments of Japan, South Korea, France and
Britain all privately communicated their concerns about Washington adopting NFU. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is also said to have argued that such a move would be unwise because ‘if North Korea used biological weapons
against the South the United States might need the option of threatening a nuclear response’. However, as Daryll Kimball explains, the US’s ‘overwhelming’ conventional military advantage means that ‘there is no plausible
circumstance that could justify—legally, morally, or militarily—the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a non-nuclear threat’. Such resistance to NFU is thus deeply disappointing given that, as Kimball goes on to note, this move
would go some way to reassuring China and Russia about the US’s strategic intentions. It would also be an important confidence-building measure for the wider community of non-nuclear weapon states, showing that the US is
willing to act in 'good faith' towards its disarmament obligations under the NPT. Thinking about the causes of proliferation more widely requires us to understand what drives weaker states to seek deterrents, if their reliance on
them is to be reduced. For example, as Dr Alan J. Kuperman observes, NATO’s bombing and overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 ‘greatly complicated the task of persuading other states such as Iran and North
Korea ‘to halt or reverse their nuclear programs’. The lesson Tehran and Pyongyang took is thus that because Gaddafi had voluntarily ended his nuclear and chemical weapons programmes, the West now felt free to pursue regime
change. When assessing the importance of the Iran nuclear deal, which is often hailed as one of Obama’s landmark achievements, and which the next President must not be allowed to derail, it is thus important also to consider
carefully what behaviour by the most powerful states will enable existing or potential nuclear possessors to embrace disarmament and reduce their interest in seeking non-conventional deterrents. The inability of Washington to
make substantial progress towards reducing the salience of nuclear weapons at home and abroad is all the more noteworthy when one considers the state of US and Russian public opinion on nuclear arms control and
disarmament. As John Steinbrunner and Nancy Gallagher observe, ‘responses to detailed questions reveal a striking disparity between what U.S. and Russian leaders are doing and what their publics desire’. For example, their
polling found that: At the most fundamental level, the vast majority of Americans and Russians think that nuclear weapons have a very limited role in current security circumstances and believe that their only legitimate purpose is
to deter nuclear attack. It is highly consistent, then, that the publics in both countries would favor eliminating all nuclear weapons if this action could be taken under effective international verification. Another important measure
which the US has failed to hitherto ratify is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This is despite President Obama stating in 2009 that he intended to pursue Senate ratification of the treaty ‘immediately and aggressively’.
Once more, there is notably strong public support–82% according to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—for the US joining the CTBT but, again, the Republican-controlled Senate has blocked the treaty at every
opportunity. Overall, the gap between the public’s will and the government’s inaction on nuclear issues is alarming and redolent of the wider democratic deficit in the US. On a more positive note, the fact that the citizenry supports
such measures suggests that groups advocating arms control and disarmament initiatives should continue to engage with and understand the public’s positions in order to effectively harness their support. Stepping back from the
 much
brink In terms of priorities for the incoming administration in the US, stepping back from military confrontation with Russia and pushing the threat of nuclear war to the margins must be at the top of the list. Whilst

has been made of a potential rapprochement between Trump and Putin, the two have, reportedly, only just spoken for the first time on the
phone and still need to actually meet in person to discuss strategic issues and deal with inevitable international events and crises, including in relation to Ukraine and Syria. As of now, whilst the mood

music from both sides might suggest a warming of relations, as has been seen with previous administrations, unless cooperation is rooted in a real willingness
to resolve problems (which for Russia includes US ballistic missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe and NATO expansion) then tensions can quickly re-emerge. Another related
how Trump will conduct himself during any potential crisis or conflict with Russia or another
question concerns

major power, given the stakes and risks involved, as highlighted above. Whilst we must wait to find out precisely what the new administration’s approach to international affairs will be, in the past week, NATO’s
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the BBC that he had been personally informed by Donald Trump, following the election, that the US remains ‘strongly committed to NATO, and that the security guarantees to Europe stand’.
Trump had previously shaken sections of the defence and foreign policy establishment by suggesting that NATO was ‘obsolete’ and that countries such as Japan (and by extension others such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia) ‘have
to pay us or we have to let them protect themselves’, which could include them acquiring the bomb. One reason why some in Washington have, in the past, not wanted their regional allies to develop their own nuclear weapons is
because the US might then become dragged into an escalating conflict. Moreover, if an ally in one region seeks the bomb, this may cause others elsewhere to pursue their own capabilities- an act of strategic independence that
might make these states harder to influence and control. The US’s key relationships in East Asia and the Middle East illustrate why, if a future US President wishes to take meaningful moves towards a world free of nuclear
weapons, then developing alternative regional political agreements, including strategic cooperation with China and Russia, will be necessary. As Nancy Gallagher rightly notes, the ‘weaknesses of existing international organizations’
thus requires ‘more inclusive, cooperative security institutions’ to be constructed regionally ‘to complement and someday, perhaps, to replace exclusive military alliances’, alongside progressive demilitarisation. Such confidence-
building measures would also support efforts to halt missile and nuclear tests by states such as North Korea, which may soon be capable of striking the US mainland. Imagining the next enemy As well as mapping out the US’s

domestic political dynamics under a Trump

current nuclear weapons policies and its regional relationships, it is important to reflect upon how

presidency might drive Washington’s behaviour internationally, particularly given the nuclear shadow that always hangs over conflicts
involving the US. For example, in the near-term, Trump’s economic plan and the great expectations amongst the American working class that have been generated, may have particularly dangerous consequences if, as seems likely,
the primary beneficiaries are the very wealthy. Reviewing Trump’s economic plans, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times concludes that ‘the longer-term consequences are likely to be grim, not least for his angry, but fooled,
supporters. Next time, they might be even angrier. Where that might lead is terrifying’. Gillian Tett has also highlighted the ‘real risks’ that Trump’s policies could ‘spark US social unrest or geopolitical uncertainty’. Elsewhere,
George Monbiot in the Guardian, makes the stark assertion that the inability of the US and other governments to respond effectively to public anger means he now believes that ‘we will see war between the major powers within
my lifetime’. If these warnings weren’t troubling enough, no less a figure than Henry Kissinger argued on BBC’s Newsnight that ‘the more likely reaction’ to a Trump presidency from terror groups ‘will be to do something that
evokes a reaction’ from Washington in order to ‘widen the split’ between it and Europe and damage the US’s image around the world. Given that Trump has already vowed to ‘bomb the shit out of ISIS’ and refused to rule out the
use of nuclear weapons against the group, it goes without saying that such a scenario could have the gravest consequences and must be avoided so that the US does not play into the terrorists’ hands. Looking more widely,
President-elect Trump’s existing and potential cabinet appointments, which Glenn Greenwald has summarised as ‘empowering…by and large…the traditional, hard, hawkish right-wing members of the Republican Party’ also point
to the US engaging in future overseas conflicts, rather than the isolationism which many in the foreign policy establishment criticised Trump for proposing during the presidential campaign. William Hartung and Todd Harrison have
drawn attention to the fact that defence spending under Trump could be almost $1trillion (spread over ten years) more than Obama’s most recent budget request. Such projections, alongside Trump’s election rhetoric, suggest that
the new nuclear monarch will try to push wide open the door to more spending on nuclear weapons and missile defense, a situation made possible, as we have seen, by Obama’s inability to implement progressive change in this
area at a time of persistent Republican obstruction. Conclusion The problem now, for the US and the world, is that if Trump does make good on his campaign promises then this will have several damaging consequences for

if Trump does not sufficiently satisfy his supporters then this will likely pour
international peace and security and that

fuel on the flames at home, which may then quickly spread abroad. The people of the US and the world thus now have a huge
responsibility to act as a restraining influence and ensure that the US retains an accountable, transparent and democratic government. This responsibility will only grow if crises or shocks take place in or outside the US which

the next administration

ambitious and extremist figures take advantage of, framing them as threats to national security in order to protect their interests and power. If such scenarios emerge

and its untried and untested President will find themselves with a range of extremely
powerful tools and institutional experience at their disposal, including nuclear weapons,
which may prove too tempting to resist when figuring out how to respond to widespread
anger, confusion and unrest, both at home and abroad.
 1NC
Their international legal modeling forces non-Western countries into the dominant
neoliberal model – the “rule of law” allows Western institutions to hold aid hostage to
enforce neoliberal reforms
Tamanaha 8 (Brian, prof of law @ Hammond, The Dark Side of the Relationship Between the Rule of
Law and Liberalism, NYU Journal of Law & Liberty)
The final piece in the entangled relationship between the rule of law and liberalism brings us to the present. Unlike the pre- ceding discussion, it
does not involve the work of theorists, but rather represents the culmination of this stream of ideas in a course of action. Beginning in the
late 1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, Western nations and international financial institutions implemented
world-wide a set of reforms labeled the “Washington consensus.” The World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund began to condition loans and grants to developing countries on a package of economic and political
reforms called “good governance” and “structural adjustment programs,” which entailed reducing market restrictions and
trade barriers, freeing capital flow, privatizing publicly held assets, protecting property and enforcing contracts, protecting
foreign investments, enacting western commercial laws, reducing corruption, establishing independent courts,
enhancing democracy, and, prominently, building the rule of law.95 This neoliberal package of
reforms aims at reproducing the economic and legal conditions that prevail in Western countries. In
addition to requiring loan recipient countries to implement these reforms, international lending organizations altered how
they allocated aid. Spending money directly on infrastructure development and economic projects
came to be seen as wasteful when established legal institutions are lacking. The resultant shift in
expenditures has been dramatic. “Thirty years ago,” the General Counsel to the World Bank recently observed, “the
Bank had 58% of its portfolio in infrastructure, today it is reduced to 22% while human development and law
and institutional reform represent 52% of our total lending.”97¶ Today, establishing the rule of law is the
central plank in development thought and activities. As Thomas Carothers observed, “Aid agencies prescribe rule-of-law programs to cure a remarkably wide array
of ailments in developing and post- communist countries, from corruption and surging crime to lagging foreign investment and growth.”98 Citing World Bank studies, former President of the
World Bank James Wolfensohn “said that the empirical evidence shows a large, significant and causal relation- ship between improved rule of law and income of nations, rule of law and
literacy, and rule of law and reduced infant mortality.”99 A detailed study issued in 2006 by the Bank, Where Is the Wealth of Nations?, asserted that “in most countries intangible capital is the
largest share of total wealth.”100 “Intangible capital,” according to the study, includes human capital (knowledge and skills in labor force), social capital (trust), and governance elements. The
study emphasized that “the rule of law”—which it defined as “the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society”—makes a substantial contribution to intangible
capital.102 Increasing the rule of law, it concluded, is one of “the most important” means to increase total wealth.103 The study even made a concrete assertion that a one percent increase in

It is beyond the scope of this article to

the rule of law index contributes more to intangible capital than a one percent increase in school years.104¶

evaluate the often claimed connection between the rule of law and economic development (although it
must be said that the extraordinary economic development of China in the past two decades, when lacking key
aspects of the rule of law, serves as a major counter-example). The point of raising it here is to show once again
how the rule of law has been intertwined in a broader liberal agenda with adverse
implications for democracy. Although enhancing democracy is routinely listed among the collection of
development initiatives, a prominent feature of the structural adjustment and good governance programs was
the manifestly anti-democratic mode in which they were implemented.¶ Under the threat that the aid
would be withheld if they re- fused, these reforms were “voluntarily” accepted by nations that wished to receive
economic aid. Political leaders often bypassed popular input, for the reforms invariably brought harsh immediate social and economic
consequences.106 Recipient countries
typically enacted these programs without seeking or securing broad domestic
consent.107 They “emerge from a top-down and secret process of negotiations between
technocrats representing a government and an international lending agency.”108 The programs, which restrict and control domestic law-making on a host of important issues,
amount to a form of “economic constitutionalism” that precludes policy choices and politics in connection with broad swaths of internal matters.109 Defenders of these programs insist that
where properly implemented they have helped the poor (a disputed claim110). What is relevant here is not whether the promised economic benefits have been delivered, but rather the anti-
democratic tenor of these programs—the latest episode in the long history set forth in this article. Democracy is fine, as long as it keeps its hands off the liberal program. Even legislation is
fine, as this ex- ample shows, when legislation is utilized to implement and protect the liberal program.
Neoliberalism is an ideology of perpetual disaster – locks-in widespread inequality and
environmental collapse – only envisioning new alternatives can solve.
Monbiot, 16 (George, best-selling author, staff writer for the Guardian, “Neoliberalism – the ideology
at the root of all our problems,” April 15,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot,
CMR)
Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be

Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a

rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it.

symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial
meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public
health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald
Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either

catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to
operate namelessly? So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We

appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of
biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape
human life and shift the locus of power. Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of
human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by
buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that
could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services

should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market

distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as
virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create
a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We

internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth
through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor
begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t
have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no

longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become
defined and self-defined as losers. Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders,
depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of
Europe. We are all neoliberals now. *** The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von
Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as
manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism. In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing
individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who
saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the
Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations. With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe

The movement’s rich backers funded a

as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists.

series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the
Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also
financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia. As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident.
Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly
power could be seen as a reward for efficiency. Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal.
But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common
alternative. At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely
applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without
embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets. But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic,
neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help
of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim
Callaghan’s government in Britain. After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions,
deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were
imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example.
As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.” *** It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been
promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my
personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling
when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows. Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages.
Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom

neoliberal theorists advocated the use of

from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty. As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine,

crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and
Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans. Where neoliberal policies cannot be

imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute
settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental

protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from
ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre. Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition
relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and
monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead

Economic growth has been markedly slower in

created one. Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one.

the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in
the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of
trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation. The privatisation or
marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up
tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income.
When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the
fact that they have you over a barrel. Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and
India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.
Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As
the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from
the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives
clean up. Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make
their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been

supplanted by unearned income. Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are
the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which

means that competition cannot run its course.Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk. The greater the failure, the
more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to
cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations
and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the

political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can
exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not

equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar
neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement . Large numbers of people have been shed

from politics. Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they
have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the
admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant. Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing

totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when

but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The

governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are
reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”. *** Like communism,
neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather,
a cluster of anonymities. The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that
the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since
1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one
of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”. The words used by neoliberalism often

The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or
conceal more than they elucidate. “

But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what
atmospheric pressure.

corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities,
the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading
us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation. A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by
passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.
These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the
companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle
governments; the financial products no one understands. The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term,
maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are
both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom. *** For all
that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists
with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power. Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire
economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an
alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic

To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st

thought for 80 years. Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure.

century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws
exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament:
the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic

growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction. What
the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be
proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic
Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st
century.

The alt is to embrace historical materialist pedagogy to reframe our understanding of

the neoliberal justifications of education. Only this revolutionary theory can lead to
transformative politics.
Ebert ‘9 [Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95]
materialist critique aims at ending
Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms,

class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures
that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the philosophical and
theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a
normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on ) in local

and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and

provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy
of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body
without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere
within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides
knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now
know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in
the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value .
The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every
other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of
this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the
face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we
are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and
Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they
come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they
exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and
puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they
do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal
and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard
by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides
in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is

Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist

bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding.

politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires,
in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . .
and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of

difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that
historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of
class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is.
Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under
wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical knowledges and
class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social
arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the
pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and
the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate
events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the

highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that
informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In

Critique, in other words,

sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced.

enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced
and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in
global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy
is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who
cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class
politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire.
Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not

The core of the pedagogy of critique is that

in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation.

education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of
signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical
practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It
understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor
force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire.
It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are
historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of
the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.
 Terrorism

There’s no war—all their evidence says is that the President wants to bomb
terrorists—all that means is he many launch missiles at ISIS, there is no scenario for
nuclear war.

Lack of staffing and misdirection are alt causes—increasing S-6 visas CAN’T solve--
Homestead in green.
Timmons 17 (Heather, Quartz White House Correspondent and former New York Times columnist,
12/18/17, “Trump’s obsession with immigration is making the US more vulnerable to terrorism,”
https://qz.com/1151939/trumps-national-security-strategy-a-focus-on-immigration-makes-the-us-
more-vulnerable-to-terror-threats/)
For the “first time ever,” America has a serious plan to defend its homeland, Donald Trump said on Monday (Dec. 18), before pledging again to
build a wall on the Mexico border and end visa programs that have made the US a cultural melting pot. Rather
than make the US
more safe, though, Trump’s own obsession with immigration threatens to do the opposite, US security
experts say. The threat of terrorism in the US today is as high as it was in the 9/11 era. But America’s
main agency for preventing terror attacks is being misdirected, security experts, law enforcement professionals, and
Since Trump took office, top jobs have been left unfilled at the
government officials tell Quartz.

Department of Homeland Security, and the agency is being pushed into a

dangerous pattern of focusing on immigration while ignoring real threats. The issue is
about to come to a head in Congress, which needs to approve DHS’s $44 billion budget (pdf) in coming weeks. Trump has proposed that DHS
trim counterterrorism spending in order to fund the wall on the Mexican border, and new head Kirstjen Nielsen, who was nominated by the
White House in October, ispushing his controversial anti-immigrant agenda in her first days in office. She and the White
House are ignoring the US’s real risk, critics say—domestic attackers. “Individuals who live in the US,
and who become inspired by what they see through social media and on the internet” pose the
country’s greatest danger, said John D. Cohen, former DHS acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, and counter-
terrorism coordinator. “These people go on to commit mass attacks, but operate independently of any
terrorist group,” Cohen said. “From an ideological and resource perspective, the DHS has become overly
focused, if not obsessed, with immigration and building a wall on the Southern border, to the detriment
of other functions,” Cohen said, “particularly those that relate to the current terrorism threat the country faces.”
The US’s homegrown threat The Department of Homeland Security was created after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by pulling together
over 20 other US agencies. The 240,000-person DHS does everything: securing the US borders, responding to hurricanes, training local police
should focus inside the
and law enforcement agents in identifying and stopping terrorists, and more. When it comes to terror, DHS
US borders, other agencies say. Homegrown violent extremists “clearly represent the most immediate and
most ubiquitous threat to us here inside the United States on a daily basis,” Nick Rasmussen, the outgoing head
of the US’s National Counterterrorism Center, said in November. “Most terrorists are either born or raised here, or only
became radicalized well after they came to the Untied States,” he said. Akayed Ullah, who exploded a crude
homemade pipe bomb in the New York City subway system earlier this month, is part of that trend. Originally from Bangladesh, Ullah said he
attempted the failed attack for the “Islamic State.” But he had been in the United States legally since 2011, long before the formation of ISIS,
and doesn’t hail from one of the countries on the Trump administration’s travel ban. None of Trump’s immigration proposals before the attack
would have stopped it. To anti-terror experts, how and where the 27-year-old was radicalized is more
important than his nationality or religion. Ullah started reading about ISIS online in 2014, and started looking up information
about how to build explosive devices on the internet last year, according to the complaint filed against him (pg. 9).
 Legitimacy
Their evidence says NOTHING about S-6 visas but DOES cite OTHER thumpers—
Homestead in green.
Koh 17 [Harold Hongju Koh, Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, “The Trump
Administration and International Law,” October 13, 2017,
https://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/speakers.html#title_775339459]
The most serious argument against my

position comes from those international lawyers, in America and elsewhere, who don’t trust Donald Trump and his administration to get this
right. As should be clear by now, I share this skepticism. But in
the international order, there is only one United States,
and regardless of who is president, the U.S. plays a critical role as a balance wheel of the international
system. What the first eight months of the new Administration have shown—particularly, the blocked Travel Ban and the unconsummated
threats to withdraw from the Iran Nuclear Deal and the U.N. system—is that the United States is much bigger than Donald Trump. And this
lecture has shown that Donald Trump will shift on many aspects of his stated foreign policy aims, if subjected to enough political pressure.207
Our challenge as participants in transnational legal process is to keep the Trump Administration’s
feet to the fire,
to demand a Syrian policy and strategy, not just a set of
military strikes, and to seek a pivot to a broader smart power diplomacy
that might resolve the underlying Syrian crisis. And if America’s
president is truly serious about pursuing such diplomacy, he would be
wise to revise other aspects of his chaotic early foreign policy. In
particular, he should withdraw his offensive Travel Ban 3.0; do a better
job talking and listening to our allies and working with critical
organizational partners like NATO and the European Union; dial back
his bombastic rhetoric in situations of growing tension with hostile
countries like North Korea, and be more careful about telling the truth
and respecting our intelligence agencies, so that listeners will actually
believe our government when, for example, we accuse Russia of
complicity in Assad’s April 6 chemical weapons strike. If he cannot make these
adjustments on his own, concerted pressure from litigation, allies, and public opinion will be necessary
to make him bend. In recent months, in the so-called “Astana process,” the Russians have expressed receptivity to the notion that Iran,
Russia, and Turkey would be guarantors of so-called “de-escalation zones” within Syria, authorized to use any necessary force to prevent
civilian harm within thosezones.208 The proposal does not mention chemical weapons, provide any legal rationale, or offer a credible group of
guarantors. Nevertheless, it would make sense for the Trump Administration to seize on Russia’s seeming concession that indicate within Syria
are both a legally and politically available policy option. Ultimately, finding a durable solution to the festering crisis in Syria will require far more
sustained diplomacy than we have seen to date from this Administration. Surely, an institutional State Department populated by the kind of
U.S. diplomats who brought about Dayton, Paris, and the Iran Nuclear Deal are capable of finding and concluding creative diplomatic solutions.
What remains to be seen is whether this President and Secretary of State will give them the mandate and discretion to do so.209 III. What’s at
Stake Several important lessons emerge from this rapid tour d’horizon. America’s observance of law, international and constitutional, is
preserved not just by the federal political branches and the leaders who lead them at any particular time, but by an ongoing transnational legal
process whose diverse stakeholders elected officials do not control. Institutional habits, once formed, prove surprisingly hard to break. With
respect to international organizations and regimes, as the old song goes, breaking up is hard to do. And in the 21st century, the better way to
produce good foreign policy outcomes remains Engage–Translate–Leverage, not Disengage–Black Hole–Hard Power. When Donald Trump took
office, he was faced with international and domestic rules that created a persistent default path to compliance with pre-existing norms. Once in
place, the law became a “guard-rail” for politics, and early signs indicate that most of those guard-rails are still holding. A new president cannot
simply have his way. Domestic constituencies and interests with institutional authority to push back are doing so, as are foreign allies with
shared interests in preserving rules of law within a painfully constructed international system. Government bureaucracies long devoted to
pursuing solutions to climate change or promoting diplomacy in foreign policy do not turn on a dime.210 The United States has become deeply
enmeshed in many multilateral regimes, and exit from those regimes is neither immediate nor easy. Most fundamentally, many Americans
want what many of these regimes offer, whether it be a nuclear-free Iran or clean energy. So exit, if it is attempted, will be challenged, by
transnational actors committed to the default agenda. And if exit and change are made difficult, the Administration will have to ask itself “how
critical, really, are these policy changes and institutional exits to the core agenda of this Administration?” Whatever the new Administration
may say to claim that it has fulfilled particular campaign promises, the real question is how much does it really care about any particular policy
initiative, especially when those resisting say, a religiously-based Travel Ban, are ready to fightback together against a radical policy change
from both the inside and the outside. So even for an Administration that made many promises to win a tumultuous campaign, enough
internal and external resistance to change can make the Administration’s path of least resistance to stay
in and underperform within existing legal regimes, rather than to absorb the costs of actual violation of
standing international rules and exit from standing international institutions In battling over all of these issues, what’s really at stake? In
brief, our current system of Kantian global governance versus a cynical system of authoritarian spheres of
influence. That is why we are potentially at such a dramatic moment of change. What is being rejected
now is not just a prior administration’s foreign policy strategy, but a broader political philosophy of
international cooperation, of the kind that philosopher Immanuel Kant talked about in his great pamphlet, Perpetual Peace.211
Significantly, Kant did not advocate world government and those who attack Kantian global governance as “world government” are attacking a
strawman. What Kant declared instead was that “[t]he law of the nations shall be founded on a federation of free states”: that law-abiding
nations should live in a law-governed international society, where sovereign states that respect basic
values—democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom, and the mutual advantages derived from peaceful intercourse—engage in mutual
discourse based on respect for domestic and international rule of law in order to achieve shared outcomes.” Or otherwise put, Engage,
global governance is a system that the United States helped to create, and that
Translate, and Leverage. Kantian
has sustained our global leadership role since World War II. It formed the basis for the United
Nations—our system to end war and promote human rights—and the Bretton Wood system to govern
international monetary flows, trade and development through the IMF, WTO, and World Bank—our system
to end global depression and poverty. Kantian global governance has allowed the United States to lead a
group of like-minded nations to organize an ambitious multilateral attack on all manner of global
problems: e.g., climate change, through the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change; intellectual property,
through the World Intellectual Property Organization; and global health, through the World Health Organization. For seventy years, the
United States has been the driver, the balance wheel of this Kantian governance system: whether it be in the United Nations, the World Trade
Organization, the Paris Climate Change Regime, or the Iran Nuclear Deal. But as I speak, all of these historical experiments, as well as the Brexit-
led attack on the European Union are under threat of displacement by a counter-model of Orwellian Spheres of Influence. Remember the nasty
and brutish world that George Orwell described in his haunting1984: where cynical global mega-powers—indistinguishable from one another in
their authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and commitment to disinformation and “fake news”—violate human rights and the rule of law within
their own spheres, while making cynical alliances and manipulating public opinion to make today’s adversaries tomorrow’s allies.212 Unlike
Kant, Trump does not seem to believe in universal rights or accept the notion that everyone can rise together. His “America First” strategy,
most recently repeated in his first United Nations speech, grimly views our interactions with the world as zero-sum, an approach that inevitably
promotes reciprocal self-centeredness on the part of other powerful nations. Will we head in this Orwellian direction? Will Donald trump
international law? Will he change the process, will it change him, or will consistent “rope-a-dope” resistance force him to adapt and change
course in a more international law-friendly direction? And as his fragile coalition comes under stress, will it solidify or crumble? The answer, of
course: we shall see, but the early signs give reason for optimism. As this review has chronicled, in some issue areas, bold public acts of
resistance are playing a critical role in blocking Trump’s initiatives. In other areas, bureaucratic inertia, path dependence, overly high
opportunity costs, and international realpolitik realities, have posed powerful constraints. In many of these areas, both heroic and mundane
constraints can be seen at work. But the
ultimate challenge for those who wish to join forces actively to resist is to
search for, find, and apply political pressure to those critical pressure points within transnational
legal process that can be strategically leveraged by anti-Trump actors. And is the rope-a-dope working? While we
are still in the early months of this administration, here’s the tally so far. More than 40 Executive Orders in six months, with little real impact.
Fourteen senior White House officials resigned in 6 months. A stunning loss on repealing Obamacare. Travel ban: twice blocked. Torture order:
never issued. Climate: a claimed withdrawal that will not go into effect until after the next presidential election. Iran nuclear deal still in place.
North Korea: saber-rattling and rhetoric, but no real change in policy. Russian hacking: continued turmoil, many active investigations. Ukraine:
mobilizing transnational legal process on its own. IS and Syria: borrowing from the Clinton playbook, but lacking the “smart power” plan that
might achieve a real foreign policy. Many strained alliances, both with foreign governments and with Trump’s Republican allies. Little progress
on Trump’s core agenda. And all of that less than a year into a four-year term. In closing, I am reminded of an old joke by comedian Mel Brooks,
playing a 2,000-year-old man. That super-elderly man is asked, “Before the Almighty, did you believe in any superior being?” His answer: “There
was this guy, Phil; and we used to plead, ‘Oh Phil, don’t kick us; don’t beat us; don’t hurt us.’ Until one day, lightning came out of the sky and
struck Phil down. At which point we realized, ‘There’s something bigger than Phil!”213 Well, in the same way, there’s something bigger than
Donald Trump. He does not own transnational legal process. He is just another player in it. But what this lecture should remind you, is that, so
are we. As are all the other transnational actors I have mentioned. In sketching this early picture, I am intensely mindful that the fight is just
beginning. Inevitably, a “rope-a-dope” strategy wears down both sides. While the resistance has won some impressive early victories, the
constant battering by the Trump Administration may have a longer-term corrosive effect on the health and well-being of our democratic
institutions. And while in Donald Trump’s America, legal guard-rails may be keeping the traffic of power on the road of law, more or less, in
other countries where democratic institutions and civil society are weaker, the news is far darker. China, Russia, and illiberal democracies like
Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela are emerging not just as spoilers, but as active predators within the liberal international order. Perhaps our
postwar alliance system can preserve and continue to build the international order by keeping these illiberal states within the guardrails. But as
pressure on human rights activism is visibly growing, not just in these states, but in other
I write,
democracies takes throughout Europe as well as India. The language of human rights and democratic
sovereignty are increasingly being turned against the whole idea of external monitoring of domestic
compliance with international law.214 Put another way, the game is on, and the stakes are high.
The Fight is in its early rounds, and the transnational legal saga is just beginning. As you all know from living here in Topeka, Kansas, the home
of Brown v. Board, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., used to remind us, the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.215 But it doesn’t bend
by itself. We are all participants in transnational legal process. So it is up to us, as the story of this administration unfolds, to continue to fight to
help the arc of history bend in the right direction.

Increasing S-6 visas DON’T change the STRUCTURAL WAYS that policymakers in the
U.S. act—their evidence says the U.S. ALREADY the capacity to create a global
governance but ISN’T doing so-- Homestead in green.
Brooks 14 (Rosa, Professor of Law at Georgetown & Schwartz Sr. Fellow at the New America
Foundation, 11/13/14, Foreign Policy, “Embrace the Chaos”,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/13/a_strategyless_nation_america_democrats_grand_
strategy_foreign_policy)

All this has had a dark side, of course. As access to knowledge has been democratized, so too has access to the tools of violence and
destruction, and greater global interconnectedness enables disease, pollution, and conflict to spread
quickly and easily beyond borders. A hundred years ago, no single individual or nonstate actor could do more than cause localized
mayhem; today, we have to worry about massive bioengineered threats created by tiny terrorist cells and globally devastating cyberattacks
devised by malevolent teen hackers. Even as many forms of power have grown more democratized and diffuse, other forms of power have
grown more concentrated. A very small number of states control and consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and a very
small number of individuals control most of the world's wealth. (According to a 2014 Oxfam report, the 85 richest individuals on Earth are
worth more than the globe's 3.5 billion poorest people). Indeed, from a species-survival perspective, the world has
grown vastly more dangerous over the last century. Individual humans live longer than ever before, but
a small number of states now possess the unprecedented ability to destroy large chunks of the human
race and possibly the Earth itself -- all in a matter of days or even hours. What's more, though the near-term threat
of interstate nuclear conflict has greatly diminished since the end of the Cold War, nuclear material and know-how are now
both less controlled and less controllable. Amid all these changes, our world has also grown far more uncertain.
We possess more information than ever before and vastly greater processing power, but the accelerating pace of global change has far
exceeded our collective ability to understand it, much less manage it. This makes it increasingly difficult to make predictions or calculate risks.
As I've written previously: We
literally have no points of comparison for understanding the scale and scope of
the risks faced by humanity today. Compared to the long, slow sweep of human history, the events of the
last century have taken place in the blink of an eye. This should ... give us pause when we're tempted to conclude that today's
trends are likely to continue. Rising life expectancy? That's great, but if climate change has consequences as nasty as some predict, a century of
rising life expectancy could turn out to be a mere blip on the charts. A steep decline in interstate conflicts? Fantastic, but less than 70 years of
why one can't dismiss the risk of catastrophic events [such as
human history isn't much to go on.... That's
disastrous climate change or nuclear conflict] as "high consequence, low probability." How do we
compute the probability of catastrophic events of a type that has never happened? Does 70 years without
nuclear annihilation tell us that there's a low probability of nuclear catastrophe -- or just tell us that we haven't had a nuclear catastrophe
yet?... Lack of catastrophic change might signify a system in stable equilibrium, but sometimes -- as with earthquakes -- pressure may be
building up over time, undetected.... Most analysts assumed the Soviet Union was stable -- until it collapsed. Analysts predicted that Egypt's
Hosni Mubarak would retain his firm grip on power -- until he was ousted. How much of what we currently file under "Stable" should be
recategorized under "Hasn't Collapsed Yet"? This, then, is the character of world messiness in this first quarter of the 21st century. So on to the
next question: Where, in all this messiness, does the United States find itself? This has urgent implications for U.S. strategic planning.

Precisely because U.S. global power may very well continue to decline, the United
States should use the very considerable military, political, cultural, and economic
power it still has to foster the international order most likely to benefit the
country if it someday loses that power. The ultimate objective of U.S. grand strategy should be
the creation of an equitable and peaceful international order with an effective system of global
governance — one that is built upon respect for human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law, with
robust mechanisms for resolving thorny collective problems. We should seek this not because it’s the “morally right” thing for the United States
to do, but because a maximin decision rule should lead us to conclude that this will offer the United States and its population the best chance of
continuing to thrive, even in the event of a radical future decline in U.S. wealth and power. But, one might argue, the United States already tries

We
to promote such a global order — right? Sure it does — but only inconsistently, and generally as something of an afterthought.

pour money into our military and intelligence communities, but starve
our diplomats and development agencies. We fixate on the threat du
jour, often exaggerating it and allowing it to distort our foreign policy in
self-destructive ways (cf. Iraq War), while viewing matters such as
United Nations reform or reform of global economic institutions or
environmental protection rules as tedious and of low priority. If we take
seriously the many potential dangers lurking in the unknowable future, however, fostering a stronger,
fairer, and more effective system of international governance would become a matter of urgent national
self-interest and our highest strategic priority — something that should be reflected both in our policies and in our
budgetary decisions. An effective global governance system
would need to be built upon
the recognition that states remain the primary mode of political and
social organization in the international sphere, but also upon the
recognition that new forms of social organization continue to evolve
and may ultimately displace at least some states. An effective and dynamic
international system will need to develop innovative ways to bring such new actors and organizations
within the ambit of international law and institutions, both as responsible creators of law and
institutions and as responsible subjects.
No impact to i-law---International law doesn’t prevent conflict or constrain nations
Hiken, 12 (Associate Director Institute for Public Accuracy, 7-17-’12 (Luke, “The Impotence of
International Law” http://www.fpif.org/blog/the_impotence_of_international_law)

Whenever a lawyer or historian describes how a particular action “violates international law” many people stop listening
or reading further. It is a bit alienating to hear the words “this action constitutes a violation of international law” time and time again – and especially at the end of a
debate when a speaker has no other arguments available. The statement is inevitably followed by: “…and it is a war crime and it denies people their human rights.”
A plethora of international law violations are perpetrated by every major power in the world each day,
and thus, the empty invocation of international law does nothing but reinforce our own sense of impotence

and helplessness in the face of international lawlessness. The U nited St ates, alone , and on a daily basis
violates every principle of i nternational law ever envisioned: unprovoked wars of aggression; unmanned drone attacks;
tortures and renditions; assassinations of our alleged “enemies”; sales of nuclear weapons; destabilization of unfriendly governments; creating the largest prison
population in the world – the list is virtually endless. Obviously one
would wish that there existed a body of international law
that could put an end to these abuses, but such laws exist in theory, not in practice. Each time a legal scholar points
out the particular treaties being ignored by the superpowers (and everyone else) the only appropriate response is “so what!” or “they

always say that.” If there is no enforcement mechanism to prevent the violations, and no military force with the power to

intervene on behalf of those victimized by the violations, what possible good does it do to invoke principles of “truth and
justice” that border on fantasy? The assumption is that by invoking human rights principles, legal scholars hope to reinforce
the importance of and need for such a body of law. Yet, in reality, the invocation means nothing at the present time, and goes

nowhere. In the real world, it would be nice to focus on suggestions that are enforceable, and have some potential to prevent the atrocities taking place
around the globe. Scholars who invoke international law principles would do well to add to their analysis, some form of action or conduct at the present time that
might prevent such violations from happening. Alternatively, praying
for rain sounds as effective and rational as citing
international legal principles to a lawless president, and his ruthless military.

Middle East war won’t escalate—regional militaries are too weak

Rovner 14 -- *John Goodwin Tower Distinguished Chair of International Politics and National Security,
Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of Studies at the Tower Center for Political Studies
@ Southern Methodist University, **Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at
the George Washington University

(*Joshua, **Caitlin Talmadge, Less is More: The Future of the U.S. Military in the Persian Gulf, The
George Washington University, http://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/less-more-future-us-military-persian-gulf)

Happily, however, the situation for the United States today is more like the 1950s than the 1970s. The major regional
powers all
suffer from serious shortcomings in conventional military power, meaning that none of them will be
able to seriously threaten the balance for the foreseeable future. Iran’s military has suffered greatly
from decades of war and sanctions. Iraq’s fledgling security services are almost exclusively focused on
internal problems. And Saudi Arabia, the richest country in the region, seems content to rely on a dense network
of defenses and proxies rather than pursue any real power projection capabilities. While there are reasons to
worry about internal stability, especially given the ongoing fight against ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), there is very little
chance of a major interstate war. Moreover, threats to oil shipping in the Gulf are real but not
overwhelming. All of this points to a simple and optimistic conclusion: the United States can protect its core interest in the free flow of oil
without having to commit to a large and enduring naval or ground presence to the Gulf.
 Bureau
Econ decline causes peace – multiple warrants
Clary 15 – Christopher Clary, PhD in Political Science from MIT, M.A. in National Security Affairs,
Postdoctoral Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 2015 (“Economic
Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” April 25th, Available Online
via SSRN Subscription, AIvackovic)

Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to
austerity pressures, which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2)
Economic crises also encourage strategic reassessment, so that leaders can argue to their peers and their
publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to
threat deflation, where elites attempt to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by a former
rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization, a process that is postponed during
periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic crises increase the political and economic benefit from
international economic cooperation. Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased
investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This search is made easier if tensions are reduced
with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders who are perceived as capable of
resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign
policy views. Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer conciliatory
policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing
historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice.

The economy’s resilient and no collapse is coming.

Mattson-Teig 18 (Beth, freelance business writer, “Economic Resilience Economists predict slow,
steady growth in 2018,” Jan/Feb 2018, CCIM, http://www.ccim.com/cire-
magazine/articles/2018/01/economic-resilience/?gmSsoPc=1, DOA: 9-9-2018) //Snowball

If there is one word that sums up the state of the U.S. economy these days, it's resilient. The prolonged economic growth
cycle hasn't been terribly exciting or robust, and at times, progress has been downright choppy. But it has proven to have staying power, and
economists are anticipating that the current economic cycle could turn out to be a record-breaker. The
economy has performed well
during the past year. Issues with North Korea and rampant tweets from President Donald Trump, as well as no results on
healthcare reform, immigration, or infrastructure spending, have not derailed it, notes K.C. Conway, CCIM Institute chief
economist for 2018 and director of research and corporate engagement for the Alabama Center for Real Estate at Culver House College at the
University of Alabama. “The economy has been pretty resilient, and I think the fundamentals are in place for the economy to stay
resilient,” he says. “Throughout this expansion, there
have been several curveballs thrown at the U.S. economy,” agrees Kevin
Thorpe, global chief economist at Cushman & Wakefield. Curveballs include Brexit; China's economic slowdown; volatility in the
stock market; highs and lows within market segments in tech and energy; as well as political uncertainty. Yet
the economic expansion has weathered those ups and downs. “There is a resiliency to this expansion in the U.S., that on the
commercial real estate side, you have to feel pretty confident about,” he adds. Barring any unforeseen disruption, January will mark the 102nd
consecutive month of the economic recovery, making it the third longest since World War II. The recovery from 1991 to 2001 was the longest at
120 months and from 1961 to 1969 the second longest at 106 months. Leading indicators suggest that the current cycle could reach and, even
exceed, those previous highs. The natural tendency is to look at the long-running recovery cycle and assume that, after eight
or nine years of growth, an end point in the cycle must be looming right around the corner. “Expansions don't die of natural
causes,” says Christopher Thornberg, Ph.D., founding partner of Beacon Economics in Los Angeles. “They don't just run out of steam
because they are old.” Generally, some shock occurs to the system that brings on a downturn. Despite the many conversations about this being
late in the cycle, there is no reason to expect a recession anytime in the near future, Thornberg says. There are
certainly issues in the economy, but there are no looming problems in the credit markets, no major oversupply, and no
problems related to too much borrowing or too much spending, he says.

Their Tonnesson ev goes aff – no escalation

Tønnesson 15 - Stein Tønnesson 15, Research Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East
Asia Peace program, Uppsala University, 2015, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,”
International Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311

Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current
understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and
economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions
can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and
drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or
unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade
wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1,
14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an
inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the
US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could
drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main
economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically
through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu,
2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis
of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy
analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and
their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously
fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence,
appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt
protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of
socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of
actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and
interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all
states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make
provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present
circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render
inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading
relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks,
provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen
consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the
world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two
great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third
party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to
intervene.

[their card ends]

The best way to enhance global peace is no doubt to multiply the factors protecting it: build a Pacific
security community by topping up economic interdependence with political rapprochement and trust,
institutionalized cooperation, and shared international norms. Yet even without such
accomplishments, the combination of deterrence and economic interdependence may be
enough to prevent war among the major powers. Because the leaders of nuclear armed nations
are fearful of getting into a situation where peace relies uniquely on nuclear deterrence, and because
they know that their adversaries have the same fear, they may accept the risks entailed by depending
economically on others. And then there will be neither trade wars nor shooting wars, just
disputes and diplomacy.

FBI credibility is down because of accusations of partisanship NOT operational

failures. —Homestead green.
Lucas 18 (Ryan, syndicated columnist covering the Justice Department for NPR, bachelor's degree from
The College of William and Mary, and a master's degree from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland,
1/22/18, “'Criminal Cabal'? FBI Fears Political Attacks May Imperil Work Of Field Agents,”
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579209787/criminal-cabal-fbi-fears-political-attacks-may-imperil-
work-of-field-agents)
It has been called a "criminal cabal" rife with corruption. It's been said that its leaders need to be taken out in "handcuffs." And its reputation,
one high-placed official has charged, is "in tatters." The FBI has come under criticism before, but the
ongoing barrage of allegations
has left its current and former officials shaken. It also has fueled concerns that the bureau's reputation
with the public could begin to crumble. "We're very concerned about the credibility of the FBI
because we're having to defend it on a daily basis and we've never had to do that before," said Chris Swecker, who finished
There's been plenty of controversies but never
his 24-year bureau career as an acting assistant director. "

accusations that the FBI has become a political tool for one party or another, or
one set of political beliefs or another." That is exactly the case, however, that
President Trump, Republicans in Congress and their allies have been making for
weeks — that "biased" investigators in the FBI and the Justice Department went
soft on Hillary Clinton and cooked up a scurrilous case against Trump with the
Russia investigation. The FBI views itself as apolitical and above the petty partisan squabbles of Washington. Taking incoming
fire from both Republicans and Democrats, FBI officials like to say, comes with the job. Past controversies have
largely revolved around the FBI's investigative or operational failures—
think Ruby Ridge, Waco or Sept. 11. The current criticism, on the other
hand, alleges that the FBI has in essence become a political crowbar to kneecap
the Trump campaign and White House. Those advocating this view can often be heard on Fox News. Host Jeanine
Pirro told viewers in December that "there is a cleansing needed in our FBI and Department of Justice," while Tom Fitton, president of the
conservative group Judicial Watch said "there was no distinction between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Department of Justice and the
FBI." Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox that "it's pretty appalling, the level of corruption we're beginning to see in the FBI." The
bureau's critics point to anti-Trump text messages sent by a senior FBI agent involved in the Clinton email investigation and the Russia probe.
They say those texts support their claims that the FBI is tainted by political bias. Special counsel Robert Mueller removed the investigator, Peter
Strzok, from the Russia unit once his messages came to light as part an internal investigation. Democrats say the efforts to discredit the FBI are
an attempt to distract from Mueller's investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. It's difficult to gauge
whether the allegations have gained traction with the American public. Anecdotally, at least, former agents say they've had to answer family,
friends and even strangers who have one question: what is going on with the FBI? "We all get asked that. Even FBI agents ask that to each
other. What's going on with the bureau? What do you know? Who do you talk to? What have you heard?" said Stephanie Douglas, a retired FBI
executive assistant director for the National Security Branch. Swecker said he was asked over the holidays whether the FBI had become a
political tool. "And what hurts, I think, is that in my conversations with neighbors and friends and family, there are some people who believe it,"
will have an impact on the agents on the street trying to conduct
Swecker said. "If enough people believe it, it
their investigation. They rely on people talking to them and believing in the credibility of the FBI."
Douglas, too, worries that the political allegations could hamstring field agents working cases that have
nothing to do with politics or Washington, everything from bank robberies and terrorism to white-collar
crime or kidnappings. "There may be some temporary impact. When people feel like an organization like the FBI becomes political, it
can impact the trust that certain people give the organization," she said. "Will that impact the public's ability to
cooperate with an investigation?" The political turmoil has bigger consequences for the 7th floor — the executive level — of the FBI's hulking
headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington than it has for the 56 field offices across the country. Still, officials worry about
the potential impact on work in the trenches. In office meetings, agents have raised the allegations and the public's
perception of the bureau, according to one FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal discussions. Agents
remain focused on their mission — protecting the public — regardless of the political winds, the official said. Neither FBI Director Christopher
Wray nor former leaders have defended Strzok's messages, but they make the case that special agents and analysts and attorneys are allowed
to have — and express — opinions. With 35,000 people at work across the Bureau, such views span the spectrum. But not only would it be
wrong to say the FBI is conservative or liberal, defenders argue, the point is that law enforcement officers are sworn to do their jobs without
any partisan considerations. "Obviously, FBI agents have political views," Douglas said. "But when it comes to dealing with investigations, it
doesn't really matter what your viewpoint is. The investigations are made by evidence, information, intelligence, and that pulls together the
facts that surround an investigation." Personal opinions do not factor into a successful probe, she said, but "some discretion does need to be
employed if you are in the midst of a very political investigation." The critic in chief One new wrinkle from periods of turmoil for the FBI is the
president using his own bully pulpit to go after the agency. Trump said in a December tweet that the FBI's reputation "is in Tatters—worst in
History!" He's taken aim at the bureau's deputy director, Andrew McCabe, as well as former director James Comey. Former FBI officials say the
criticism from the president and other politicians is short-sighted. "I think it's important for politicians to remember
that the FBI is a core institution of the United States government, and making its mission more difficult or harming its
overall credibility is not in the best interests of the country," said Konrad Motyka, a retired special agent and former
president of the FBI Agents Association. The key to that, former officials say, is for FBI workers to keep their heads down and do their jobs. "It's
important that the American people, regardless of their political affiliation, believe in the integrity of the FBI and the objectivity of the FBI," he
said.

Over policing and coerced confessions are an alt cause—Homestead in green.

Kamali 17 (Sara, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford,
Informants, Provocateurs, and Entrapment: Examining the Histories of the FBI’s PATCON and the NYPD’s
Muslim Surveillance Program. Surveillance & Society 15(1): 68-78.
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/index)

The FBI also uses deportation as a leveraging tool to recruit Muslims to spy on their own communities,
giving them the ultimatum of working with the FBI or facing deportation, or having a member of their families not
being able to come to the U.S. (Maher 2013). In “a radical disjunction between [pre- and post- 9/11] conditions of policing (McArdle 2006:
187),” the NYPD uses taxi shields as leverage to recruit informants from within New York City Muslim communities under duress. The NYPD
asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city’s Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be
susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort (Apuzzo and Goldman 2011).
Other police officers were dispatched in the New York City area to
Pakistani neighborhoods with the instructions “to look for reasons to
stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever
(ibid).” The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for
outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could
be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an
informant. This is called the “Al Capone approach” as explained by Wayne Gross, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Orange
County, named after Al Capone, the American gangster who rose to fame during the U.S. Prohibition in the early 20th century and was

Referring to 75 Title 18, Section 1001 of the

prosecuted for tax violations (Breinholt 2005).

federal criminal code, which covers the crime of lying to federal agents
(Cornell University Law School n.d.), if a terrorist charge does not apply,
then the officer “works with other agencies to find something like a tax
charge, immigration violation, or making false statements to federal
officials” (Mother Jones 2011). Many Muslim American terrorist defendants “whose crimes or affiliations it couldn’t prove in court” (op.
cit. Aaronson 2011) have been charged with violating Title 18, Section 1001 (Ashcroft 2001). The Legacy of the Muslim Surveillance Program

the NYPD’s Muslims Surveillance Program, has also

What would come to be known as

been viewed as violations of the civil rights and liberties of Muslim

Americans who were targeted. Specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection
Clause, which protects against “illegal, unreasonable search and seizure policies” (Chowdhury 2015), and the First Amendment rights to free
speech and freedom exercise of one’s religious beliefs (ACLU, Raza v. City of New York) were infringed upon. Some steps to protect the civil
liberties of Muslim Americans have been made. Since the election of Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York City in 2014, the Demographics Unit of
the NYPD which conducted much of the surveillance has been disbanded (op. cit. Apuzzo and Goldstein 2014). In 2016, there was also a
landmark settlement reached in two separate lawsuits brought against the NYPD; both in Raza v. City of New York and Handschu v. Special
Services Division, whereby the New York City Police Department has agreed to reforms designed to protect New York Muslims and others from
discriminatory and unjustified surveillance. As a further safeguard, the settlement installs a civilian representative within the NYPD to act as a
check on investigations involving political or religious activity (NYCLU 2016). Sunlight and Civil Liberties In 1932, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Louis D. Brandeis wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman (Brandeis
1932).” Decades later, in 2013, Edward Snowden, then a 29 year old American computer analyst, provided The Guardian and the Washington
Post with top-secret N.S.A. documents leading to revelations about U.S. intelligence gathering of phone and internet communications around
the world. Snowden’s greatest fear is of what he called “turnkey tyranny,” explaining to Greenwald in a video-recorded interview: The greatest
fear that I have regarding the outcome for America, of these disclosures, is that nothing will change. People will see, in the media, all of these
disclosures. They’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers, unilaterally, to create greater control over
American society and global society. But they won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their
representatives to actually take a stand in their interests. And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse, until, eventually,
there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy [original
emphases]. (Poitras and Greenwald 2013) Whether one considers Edward Snowden a traitor or a hero vigilante, his concerns, which some
dismiss as conspiracy theories, are actually valid, according to Bruce Schneier, an American computer security specialist: “All of us [are] being
watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest
dreams of George Orwell” (Schneier 2012, 2013). Because
of this increasingly complex circuitry between
transparency, secrecy, and intelligence creating counter-terrorism policies in the U.S., transparency
and accountability are needed now, perhaps more than ever. As part of good governance, the integrity of the
government is an important aspect of homeland security and effective counter-terrorism policies. The same communities being targeted are
also needed for support and intelligence. The use of informants by law enforcement and federal agencies to
catch and display alleged or would-be terrorists are an integral component, however unseemly, to
counter-terrorism strategies today. Providing incentives to recruit informants, pitting community members against each other, and
wielding egregious entrapment tactics, threatening a myriad of charges from immigration violations to tax fraud, to justify the war on terrorism
make up the reality of how terrorists are created and caught in the post-9/11 world. Domesticcounter-terrorism intelligence
capabilities should therefore focus on reinstating civil liberties as well as reinforcing judicial and
congressional oversight of intelligence operations. Government is made up of many elected officials
who are supposed to be held accountable at all levels. The issue of transparency is also what is needed
to build trust, because so often, much of government goings-on are not transparent, nor easily accessible or
understandable. As John Adams, second President of the United States, wrote, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge
among the people, who have a right … and a desire to know (Hill 2007: 42).” A “trust culture,” (Sztompka 1999) then, is an
essential ingredient in the building of a well-governed state, because citizens are able to debate and question
government policies, and have a sense of making a difference in decision-making processes (Lewicki and Tomlinson 2003). Democracy functions
at its best when citizens trust the process, creating an environment of care and investment, with the realization that the process of democracy,
representation works. This heightens participation, because citizens trust the government and thus expect results in policy-making and politics.
Establishing much-need trust between American citizens and the U.S. government can only happen
when there is transparency between officials and the people as well as accountability. American citizens, like
all citizens, need to trust their government, because citizens and government, just like trust and good governance, are in a mutually reciprocal
relationship. Trust is the sine qua non of good governance. Without
good governance, or a participatory, transparent,
and accountable government, in which the state, civil society, and the private sector work effectively
together, democracy cannot function, nor can national security, civil liberties, or economic prosperity be ensured. As
the 20th century Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot wrote in The Four Quartets, “We had the experience, but missed the meaning” (Eliot 1941).
Throughout the experiences of PATCON and the Muslim Surveillance Program, American citizens may have been
willing to scale back some of their civil liberties for national security purposes, but history has taught that this is detrimental to the core of what
it means to be American. Indeed, given the current climate of anxiety towards Muslim Americans as well as racial/ethnic minorities who are
now becoming the majority, history need not repeat itself to blight American values. The fear of Japanese Americans led to their internment
during World War II. The suspicions many have of Christian Right militants, anti-government Patriots, or Muslim Americans cannot lead to the
current surveillance policies must be re-thought for
same violations of civil liberties being repeated. Ultimately,
strengthening national security, ensuring economic prosperity, and upholding the legacy of civil rights,
which has drawn immigrants to America’s shores even long before Lady Liberty raised her welcoming torch in New York Harbor.

Zero risk of nuclear terrorism

*Conventional attacks better serve their interests, materials are locked down, and even when they
weren’t, nobody bothered to steal them

Cheryl Rofer 15, worked as a chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years, where she
directed programs in environmental remediation and plutonium storage; CEO of Nuclear Diner, an
expert blog on nuclear issues, “But What If The Terrorists Had A Nuclear Bomb?” Nov 18 2015,
https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/but-what-if-the-terrorists-had-a-nuclear-bomb/

The probability of terrorists having fission weapons or RDDs is vanishingly small. The consequences
could be enormous in the case of a fission weapon, much less in the case of an RDD. The fear stoked by repeated articles of
this type would be the greatest consequence of an RDD. A number of people at non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to
eliminating nuclear weapons spread fearful images: cities annihilated or paralyzed, tens of thousands dead. I sympathize with the ideal of
eliminating nuclear weapons, but I question whether fear and exaggeration are the way to sell that ideal. I’d rather work from the facts and slog
through the difficult actions that will be needed to eliminate nuclear weapons. Although I share their goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, I
cannot ally myself with those groups for a number of reasons. First, they ignore the realities of physically dealing with those weapons taken out
of service. Second, they ignore the international events that drive the perceived need for nuclear weapons. Third, their messaging is all wrong,
starting with that fear. Even if all nuclear nations decided to eliminate nuclear weapons this afternoon, those very physical objects, something
like 17,000 of them, would still exist. They contain dangerous materials that need to be handled safely, which means that physically eliminating
them will take some time. The facilities in which they are now decommissioned are aging and overloaded with work. But the NGOs argue for
closing down those facilities and against budgets for improving them. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea and subsequent rattling of nukes, the
US can’t unilaterally say we’re removing nuclear weapons from our arsenal. It’s nice to dream of a bold move that is reciprocated by Russia, but
it’s hard to believe that any of that can happen right now. The downside of such a move by the United States, both domestically and
geopolitically, is much to large for any president to take it. Fear in messaging is manipulative and develops an attitude of helplessness in the
people who receive it. It’s realistic to recognize the enormous destructiveness of nuclear weapons and agree that eliminating them from our
future would be a good thing. Fearing that one’s city may be nuked at any time seems less conducive to taking action towards eliminating them.
I would like to see the NGOs do some serious studies of what it will take to deal with the weapons taken out of service and then write and
support legislation for those measures. A few successes of that kind might do a lot more to gain supporters. Focus on Terrorists The focus
on
terrorist RDDs and real-thing fission weapons doesn’t make much sense in relation to historical terrorist
activity. Terrorists want the simplest way to get the greatest effect. Kalashnikovs and explosive
vests worked quite well in Paris. Or boxcutters for 9/11. From J. M. Berger, an expert on terrorism: Al Qaeda’s love of elegance
was a distraction. Terrorism is inherently improvisational. Occasionally terror groups discuss nuclear
weapons internally or threaten vague horrors. None I am aware of has shown any real intention
(acquiring materials, for example) of building an RDD or fission weapon. Jeffrey Lewis and Peter Zimmerman
figured up what it would take for a terror group to build a fission weapon: at least 19 people. Since current estimates for the Paris attacks are as
high as 20, the number to build a fission weapon is likely higher, and they
would include some very specific kinds of
expertise. Learning to handle a gun is much easier. Building an RDD would require less than a fission weapon, but it
still needs specialized materials. International programs have been collecting the radioactive sources that
would make the best RDDs. Hospitals are turning to accelerators to eliminate the radioactive sources that could be used. Although
recent articles have mentioned depleted (or even enriched) uranium as a possible RDD material, neither
is radioactive enough to be a threat. That’s another problem: reporters often don’t understand what they are writing about
and err on the side of sensationalism. Material for a fission weapon has always been hard to obtain.
Immediately after
the breakup of the Soviet Union, there were concerns about the security of materials.
The program sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, authors of the latest article, has locked down much
of that material. Most egregiously, chunks of plutonium metal were scattered across the Semipalatinsk
Nuclear Test Site, but they have been cleaned up. During the decade they lay out on the steppe,
nobody picked them up. The area is now patrolled by drones.
 Solvency
Doesn’t solve signaling – nobody believes Trump
Shepp 18 – writer at New York magazine (Jonah, “Trump’s Credibility Problem Is Now America’s,” New
York Magazine Daily Intelligencer, May 26 2018, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/the-
trump-administration-has-a-credibility-problem.html, jwg)

One of Republicans’ favorite critiques of former President Barack Obama during his time in office was
that he undermined American credibility on the world stage through his reticence to project U.S. hard power to its maximal
extent. The main and most compelling case for this critique was Obama’s 2013 warning to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he would face consequences if he
used chemical weapons against his own citizens. Assad did so anyway, and Obama declined to follow through on the threat, leery of getting the U.S. embroiled in
another messy Middle Eastern conflict or repeating the destabilizing consequences of our intervention in Libya. “Credibility”
was also bandied
about as a reason why it was wrong for Obama to withdraw U.S. soldiers from Iraq and attempt to draw
them down in Afghanistan as well, with right-wing hawks complaining that “the job was not done” in
these countries — though of course, the ever-changing nature of “the job” had always been the fundamental problem these entanglements. Obama was
likewise dinged by the right for not mustering a more forceful (that is, “credible”) response after Russia low-key invaded Ukraine, even if that threatened a direct
confrontation with Russia. Less than a year and a half into his term, President Donald Trump has done more damage to U.S. foreign
policy credibility than even the right-wing bogeyman version of Obama managed to do in eight years. Yet,
strangely, few of these credibility hawks seem particularly perturbed by his choices. Of course, Trump is guilty of some of the exact same

sins they pin on Obama, particularly in Syria, where the U.S. is still failing to hold Assad accountable for
his continued brutality. Yet ,he is also undermining our credibility in another, equally important way: by
diluting our allies’ confidence that the U.S. can be relied on to uphold its commitments. Take
for example his abrupt decision on Thursday to cancel a planned summit with North Korean
dictator Kim Jong-un over his country’s nuclear weapons program. The summit was the product of
Trump’s own misunderstanding and rash decision-making in the first place, and not in any way
coordinated with our allies or other key players in East Asia (i.e., China). Trump’s letter to Kim
announcing the cancellation was likewise uncoordinated and came as a surprise to Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing,
and even Foggy Bottom, from which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been touting the diplomatic
progress the administration was making a mere hour before the letter was published. (Welcome to the Trump State
Department, Mike. It isn’t going to be any better for you than it was for Rex Tillerson.) Right-wing pundits were quick to spin the letter as an example of Trump’s
muscular, dominating, alpha-male approach to negotiation. Trump’s (ghostwritten) book, The Art of the Deal, was referenced repeatedly. Forget that namby-pamby
consensus-building crap that comrade Obama trafficked in; this is how Real Men do diplomacy. North Korea responded respectfully to the letter, saying it was still
interested in talking to the U.S., and now the summit may or may not be back in the cards. (Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in held a surprise
meeting on Saturday, as well.) See, say the right-wing pundits: Trump’s abusive style of negotiating works. Don’t believe the nattering naysayers of the liberal
media. Aside from the facts that the summit could still get canceled again or end in failure, that NorthKorea might still be playing a long
game to embarrass the U.S., and that Trump probably could have achieved this turnaround without
making such a dramatic gesture, there’s a glaring problem with this line of argument. In business, sure, suddenly
pulling out of a deal in order to scare your counterparty into meeting your terms can work, sometimes. Imagine, however, how you might feel

if your business partner in a joint venture pulled such a stunt without asking, or even so much as
warning, you about it. Would you ever trust or work with that partner again? That’s precisely what Trump did on
Thursday to Moon, with whom he had met just two days before in Washington. The South Korean government was blindsided

by the announcement that the summit was canceled, and none too pleased to be treated this way
by its ally. Trump’s hardball tactics have undercut Moon’s efforts at reconciliation, whereas what
little enthusiasm China had for participating in sanctions against North Korea has waned. If
Trump’s strategy is to pressure Kim into making a deal, he has done a fine job of alienating the
regional partners he will need to apply that pressure effectively. In the right-wing critique of Obama’s foreign
policy, U.S. credibility is defined rather one-dimensionally, as the willingness to follow through on threats and to back up our words with hard power. But
credibility also means keeping your promises, especially to friends and partners, which the Trump
administration appears unwilling or unable to do. Is the U.S. actually committed to resolving the Korean situation diplomatically or not?
Right now, nobody in Seoul can really say for sure — and that’s a big problem, because they’re the ones who will suffer and die if the crisis spirals into war.
Trump has treated our allies no better when it comes to the other item on his foreign policy agenda this
year: Iran. The president withdrew the U.S. from the deal to contain Iran’s nuclear program —
effectively ensuring its demise — over the objections of every other country involved in making it,
including key American allies in Europe along with Russia and China. That he did so at the urging of Iran’s
enemies Israel and Saudi Arabia does not inspire confidence in foreign capitals that the U.S. is
committed to avoiding yet another catastrophic war in the Middle East. Trump’s threats to U.S.
credibility also include his unilateral withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and his reluctant
commitment to NATO’s common defense. Needless to say, the increasingly visible web of personal
and money connections between Trump and the Russian plutocracy also diminishes American credibility
in obvious ways, as even the suspicion that the U.S. president might have unsavory ties to Moscow could
lead other world leaders to second-guess his decisions. But to the right, none of this matters. To them, credibility means we do what
we threaten to do and nothing more, keeping our promises to allied countries only as those allies pay up or kowtow. This is in keeping with the contempt for
internationalism that forms a core principle of Trump’s self-centered, jingoistic ideology, which the GOP has with few exceptions wholeheartedly embraced. It is
certainly what you’d expect in a foreign policy directed primarily by National Security Adviser John Bolton, who despises the United Nations, has no interest in what
the rest of the world thinks, and openly favors military “solutions” in both Iran and North Korea. For
decades, the free world has operated
under the assumption that the United States will act as its leader, using its might to advance not
only its own interests but also those of its kindred nations and the international community writ large.
Under Trump, the world is finding that we can no longer be trusted to engage in consultation,
deliberation, or dialogue of any kind. Instead, we do whatever we want (or whatever he wants) with no real concern for the impact our
decisions have on other countries, be they allies or adversaries. When other countries behave this way, we have a word for it: We call them rogue states. How long
will our allies put up with this behavior before they simply stop believing a word we say? And how long will it take to repair that damage after the Trump era is
over?

Can’t solve relations- countries see the shelf life of white house policies as a week max
Walt 18 – (Stephen, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University;
4/10/18; America Can’t Be Trusted Anymore; https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/10/america-cant-be-
trusted-anymore/)

Which brings us to Donald Trump. The world is now dealing with a U.S. president who appears to have no
firm convictions or beliefs, the attention span of a hummingbird, and who apparently makes
important national security decisions on the basis of whatever fairytale he just saw on Fox & Friends. As
near as one can tell, he never saw a treaty or agreement signed by his predecessor that he liked, even though
he has trouble explaining what’s wrong with any of them. He just likes to talk about “tearing them up” no matter what the
consequences may be. Trump is also a serial fabulist who lies with facility and frequency yet has yet to pay any political
penalty for his disinterest in truth. Determined to outdo his predecessor in every way, Trump uttered six times as many
falsehoods in his first 10 months as president as Obama did in his entire two terms. Add to that the
frenetic pace of turnover within the White House and the cabinet, and you have an environment where
no policy utterance can be expected to have a shelf life greater than a week or two. Under these
conditions, why would any sensible government take America’s word for anything? Why would any halfway
smart adversary make substantial concessions to the United States in exchange for U.S. promises,
assurances, or pledges? Why offer up a quid in exchange for its pro quo? Based on its recent track record, and the
character of the current U.S. president, no adversary would concede a thing unless it were 100 percent certain the
United States would deliver as promised. “Trust but Verify” indeed. Given this situation, how long will it be before those with whom
the United States is negotiating start demanding intrusive verification procedures or other guarantees designed to ensure that America doesn’t
sign a deal and then tear it up a year later or demand that it be renegotiated? How
long before other important states decide
they cannot base their foreign-policy decisions on expectations or assurances from the United States
because Washington simply cannot be trusted to do what it says it will? There are already worrisome signs of
precisely this sort of trend. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people who trust U.S. leadership has
dropped from an average of 64 percent at the end of the Obama administration to roughly 22 percent
during Trump’s first year in office. Even more remarkably, a larger percent of people around the world have
confidence that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin will “do the right thing in world affairs” than the
current U.S. president. When you’re trailing those two ruthless operators, it’s time to start asking why nobody trusts you. To be
sure, this is not to say that nobody trusts anyone from the United States anymore. U.S. business leaders continue to strike mutually beneficial
deals with foreign counterparts; the beleaguered and understaffed diplomatic service continues to forge cooperative arrangements all over the
world; U.S. intelligence agencies continue to collaborate with foreign countries under the protective
umbrella of mutual confidence; and countless military-to-military engagements take place every day on
a basis of mutual respect and regard. Indeed, given the time, money, attention, and lives that the United States has expended to
reassure others about its credibility, it would be odd if other states had no confidence in Washington at all. It would be a vast
overstatement, therefore, to conclude that past U.S. opportunism or the unreliable character of Trump had led
others to conclude that the United States as a whole was totally unreliable. Nonetheless, acquiring a reputation
for being untrustworthy is costly. When trust disappears, reaching cooperative agreements inevitably
requires more intrusive and formal stipulations and arrangements (like the JCPOA or most multilateral trade
agreements) in an effort to cover every possible contingency and to make it easier to detect violations (and
thus to deter cheating). A lack of trust also encourages states to make worst-case assumptions about what
others will do and to prepare for those contingencies. The United States has troops in South Korea because it doesn’t trust
the North, and North Korea went to enormous lengths to build a nuclear bomb because it doesn’t trust the United States.
2NC
 Base

Link turns solvency.

Johnson, JD, 07
(Kevin, Law@UCD, Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink its Borders and Immigration Laws)

At the same time, however, the

United States has an immigration dark side. A mean-spirited, anti-immigrant
impulse has sporadically gripped the nation, particularly during times of social stress. During these
times, the U.S. immigration laws have been harsh, discriminatory, and aggressively enforced. Consequently,
U.S. law has barred many innocent groups of people from its shores for the very worst of reasons. The near-complete prohibition of
immigration from China, which lasted from the late nineteenth century until 1965, is perhaps the most famous example. The measures
taken by the federal government against Arab and Muslim noncitizens—and generally against all noncitizens—after
the tragic events of September 11, 2001, are the most recent.

1. Conservative media will quickly turn on Trump for perceived support for pro-
immigration policies --- earlier discussion of amnesty proves
CBS News, 1/26 – (“Trump's immigration proposal slammed by his base”, CBS, 2018,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-immigration-proposal-slammed-by-his-base-breitbart-
amnesty-don/)//AK

Fearing betrayal on a signature campaign issue, President Trump's loyalists across the
NEW YORK --

country are lashing out against his proposal to create a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million
"Dreamer" immigrants. Mr. Trump's proposal includes $25 billion for border security and significant changes to legal immigration long sought by
hard-liners. Several Democrats and immigration activists rejected it outright, accusing the president of holding "Dreamers" hostage to his hard-line immigration
agenda. Senior White House officials cast the plan as a centrist compromise that could win support from both parties and enough votes to pass the Senate. But it
comes with a long list of concessions that many Democrats, and conservative Republicans, especially in the House, may find impossible to swallow. His

supporters' focus on "amnesty" for Dreamers highlights how dug in the base is and how little room Mr.
Trump has to maneuver. Trump-aligned candidates from Nevada and Virginia rejected the notion outright. The president's most loyal
media ally, the conservative Breitbart News, seen as a barometer for his base, attacked him as "Amnesty
Don." And outside groups who cheered the hard-line rhetoric that dominated Mr. Trump's campaign
warned of a fierce backlash against the president's party in November's midterm elections.
"There's a real potential for disaster," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the far-right Center for Immigration Studies. "The
president hasn't sold out his voters yet. But I think it's important that his supporters are
making clear to him that they're keeping an eye on him." The consequences could be severe
for the GOP as it struggles to energize voters heading into the 2018 midterm elections, when
Republican majorities in the House and Senate are at stake. Recent Democratic victories in Alabama and Virginia suggest that the
GOP has cause for concern - especially as Mr. Trump's approval numbers hover near record lows. Protections for more immigration of these

young immigrants could trigger wholesale revolt by Mr. Trump's base in November, said Bob Dane, executive director of the
conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform. "There's widespread fear that if Mr. Trump capitulates to the

Democrats and fails to deliver on his campaign promises on immigration, there's not going to be any
more campaign promises for the GOP to make in the future, because the base will inflict a
scorched-earth policy in midterms," Dane said, noting that his organization has "a longstanding position of
opposing amnesty in any form, including the extension of the DACA protections." "DACA itself didn't have a pathway to citizenship," said Sen. Ted
Cruz, R-Texas, who battled Mr. Trump in 2016 for the GOP presidential nomination. "So I think it would be a profound mistake and not consistent with the promises
we made to the voters to enact a pathway to citizenship to DACA recipients or to others who are here illegally." Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said he supports a more
conservative, more sweeping immigration bill proposed by House members, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., which has won
strong support from House conservatives. House Speaker Paul Ryan has promised to push for support for that measure. Democrats were also raging. House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., blasted the plan as "an act of staggering cowardice which attempts to hold the Dreamers hostage to a hateful anti-
immigrant scheme." In a statement Thursday night, Pelosi said the framework was "part of the Trump Administration's unmistakable campaign to make America
white again." Democratic Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., urged Republicans to join together with Democrats to reach a bipartisan alternative. "Dreamers should not be
held hostage to President Trump's crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall," he said in a statement. Rep.
Michelle Lujan Grisham, D-N.M., who chairs the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the White House was using DACA recipients "as bargaining chips for sweeping
anti-immigrant policies." And Lorella Praeli, with the American Civil Liberties Union, called it "a hateful, xenophobic immigration proposal that would slash legal
immigration to levels not seen since the racial quotas of the 1920s, eliminate legal immigration channels for African countries, and spend $25 billion for a harmful,
wasteful border wall and an increase in Border Patrol and ICE agents." The public scolding from conservatives was aimed at a
president who has changed course under pressure before. Yet Mr. Trump has faced no greater test on a
more significant issue than this one, which dominated his outsider candidacy and inspired a coalition
of working-class voters that fueled his unlikely rise. Now, barely a year into his presidency, Mr. Trump can bend either
to the will of his fiery base or the pressure to govern and compromise . His leadership may determine
the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants and whether his party can improve its standing among a surging group of Hispanic voters. It may also

alienate those who love him most. "There's a Trump movement. And It's not necessarily about Donald
Trump," said Corey Stewart, a Republican Senate candidate in Virginia and a vocal Trump ally. "It's about the things that Donald
Trump campaigned and stood for during his campaign. Ultimately, every elected leader needs to stay true to the message
that they ran on. Otherwise, people will leave them." The passionate response underscores the Republican Party's
immigration dilemma in the age of Trump. Much of the country, including independents and moderate Republicans, favor protections for
thousands of young people brought to the country as children illegally and raised here through no fault of their own. But a vocal conservative

faction emboldened by Mr. Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric will never accept anything viewed as
"amnesty." And many view legal protection for these young immigrants as just that.

2. Trump’s base does not believe his spin, but they allow it only if it supports their
hardline stance on immigration
Buchanan 18 (Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer,,4-26-2018, "Donald Trump's base knows
he lies, and like him more for it: Mark Buchanan," Financial Review,
https://www.afr.com/news/politics/world/donald-trumps-base-knows-he-lies-and-like-him-more-for-it-
mark-buchanan-20180425-h0z8yo)//TVZ

Over the past two years, Donald

Trump has lied incessantly and brazenly, and trampled all over traditional norms
of respectable behaviour. Yet his supporters still admire him and, bizarrely, see him as an authentic
figure, honestly and honourably fighting for their interests. For many, it's difficult to fathom. But more than 50 years ago, an
American sociologist and political scientist predicted that extreme social conditions might make it possible for a vulgar, lying demagogue to appeal to a broad group
of ordinary people. Three psychologists have now run experiments reproducing the effect in a set of volunteers holding a mock election - demonstrating how
Trump's vulgarity can be a feature, not a flaw, and a key part of his appeal to a huge swath of America that feels abandoned by the economic and political
establishment. As Oliver Hahl of Carnegie Mellon and colleagues note, a survey taken after the 2016 US
Election found that Trump supporters don't believe many of his lies, especially his most egregious ones.
When Trump claimed that global warming is a Chinese hoax, most recognised it as false, but they didn't
much care. They saw his language as expressing deeper truths. As it turns out, the sociologist Seymour Lipset predicted that this
kind of disconnect could happen, triggered by what he called a "crisis of legitimacy". The legitimacy of democracy might be

undermined, Lipset envisioned, if a large part of society came to feel abandoned by the political
establishment. Or, if a group felt a loss of power as leaders shifted their favour to new social groups. The
white working class today -Trump's base - fits both descriptions, as policies furthering globalisation
and offshoring of jobs have robbed them of economic opportunity, and immigration and
demographic trends have visibly altered American society. Lipset suggested that a crisis of
legitimacy would have psychological consequences - and set the stage for a lying demagogue to be
perceived by many people as bravely speaking suppressed truths. In normal conditions, voters shun any candidate who
obviously lies and abuses widely shared social norms. But in a crisis, Lipset argued, disenfranchised voters may see such violations as a symbolic protest, and a
deliberate poke in the eye to the elites they have come to despise. This
would explain how many Trump supporters, ordinary
people, could actually cheer when he bragged about grabbing women's genitals, or mocked Senator
John McCain for having been shot down in the Vietnam War. This is not to say that Trump
supporters approved of his behaviour. Rather, they delighted in the profound irritation of the
press and the political establishment. Hahl and colleagues went further, with some experiments designed to assess how the political
landscape can affect people's perception of lies. They split volunteers into two groups, one of which they manipulated to feel marginalised, neglected by a powerful
establishment group. They then presented the groups with two candidates, one of whom blatantly lied and made misogynistic comments. The vulgar behaviour
repelled the "establishment" group, but actually attracted the marginalised group - irrespective of previous political leanings. Lying helped form a bond of solidarity,
by challenging the establishment's authority to define what was true or correct. From this perspective, Trump cleverly or by instinct
found a way to appeal to the vast left-behind of the white middle classes, and did so in part through
antagonism toward elites and disrespect for their norms. Pissing off elites cemented his bond with his
base. It's depressing that politicians' unthinking neglect of a large portion of society may have put us into such a dangerous spot. Then again, seeing Trump as the
symptom of a crisis brought about by social and political dysfunction can also bring hope. The shock of Trump, or something similar, may have been unavoidable.
And Trump's rise might signal the start of a necessary period of painful disruption and chaos, before we find a way to reverse decades of middle class social decay.
Most see Trump as the wrong man. But there may be times when, for a large portion of the voting public, the wrong man is the right man.

3. Immigration is the line they won’t cross – only thing that surrenders
unconditional support
Healey 17 – “President Trump finally finds a way to alienate his base, by flirting with Democrats on
DACA” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-trump-daca-deal-20170914-story.html; EG)
Who knew that deciding the fate of "Dreamers" would be trickier and more explosively
controversial for a Republican president than agreeing to raise the debt ceiling? President Trump won
plaudits for crossing up GOP leaders to summarily cut a deal with top congressional Democrats on three key fiscal issues: raising the debt
ceiling, keeping the government running past Sept. 30 and borrowing a metric megaload of dollars to help out storm victims. Hey,
Trump
got something done! He broke through the gridlock! But when he seemed to close in on another
bipartisan agreement — this time, to allow a group of immigrants brought into the country as
children to stay even though they're here illegally — all hell broke loose, at least among the anti-
illegal-immigration zealots who'd been a key part of his base. Part of the anger stemmed from
reports that Trump wouldn't demand money for his big, beautiful border wall in exchange for
protecting Dreamers from deportation. But another part was simply his willingness to let the Dreamers stay. To pick just one
example, check out what Ann Coulter, whose fervent support for Trump now appears to be about as reliable as Trump's support for anyone
else, tweeted Thursday: Ann Coulter @AnnCoulter At this point, who DOESN'T want Trump impeached? Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump ...They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own - brought in by parents at young age. Plus
BIG border security Trump may still be able to shoot someone while standing in the middle of 5th
Avenue without losing a single supporter, but he has found one line his base won't let him cross. Or
rather, a loud and possibly large portion of his base won't let him cross it. Another segment, including
those who are more conventionally Republican, actually like the idea of cutting Dreamers a break. After all,
America is the only country most of these folks have ever known, and our tax dollars have already been invested in their education and well-
being. Should Trump have seen this blowback coming? Maybe – he certainly played up the points during his campaign that President Obama's
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was reprehensible and that that a new border wall was nonnegotiable. But as both a candidate
and as president, Trump has spun like a top on so many issues it's hard to think of one where he's been resolute. And his core supporters
haven't flinched.
So why are they flipping out at the newest chapter in the Art of the Deal? Some observers
will argue that immigration-related issues lie at the heart of the economic nationalism that
defines Trumpism and that carried Trump into the Oval Office. In that sense, Trump couldn't afford to concede
anything on the Dreamers without obtaining something major from Democrats in return – to wit, money for the wall. That's part of it, no doubt.
But another part is the view that's spread over the past few decades that compromise itself is
a sign of weakness. Trump's deal on the debt ceiling was acceptable to his base because he didn't give up anything meaningful. The
debt ceiling increase, the temporary spending bill, the emergency appropriations for storm victims – those were all going to happen anyway.
But the outlines of a DACA deal that emerged Wednesday night seemed like a real compromise, one where both sides gave up something to get
something. It's worth remembering that Trump took a bit of flak for the debt-ceiling bill from conservatives who thought he caved too quickly
to Democrats' demands. The DACA talks drew a much louder version of that same complaint, this time
from Trump's base. After the debt-ceiling deal, some Trump supporters crowed that the president had finally sprung himself from the
chains imposed by the congressional GOP, and particularly the ball-and-chain tandem of House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But Trump's not in a position to triangulate freely, playing congressional
Republicans off of congressional Democrats. Having spent the first months of his tenure playing religiously to his base,
alienating much of the rest of the country, he now finds that the support of his base isn't as unconditional as

it seemed. There are lines he can't cross, and he just tripped over one of them.

1. Trump’s perceived as attempting to fulfill promises now

Bump 18
Phillip, Washington Post, “Trump’s effort to hold his base close for the midterms seems to be working — so far” June 20, 2018
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/20/trumps-effort-to-hold-his-base-close-for-the-midterms-seems-to-be-
working-so-far/?utm_term=.835b5143bd67//dmr
It’s important to remember, in case you’d forgotten, that just
as there is robust disapproval of Trump there is also
robust approval from a smaller segment of the population. We’ve noted before that the combined strong approval and
strong disapproval Trump has seen since taking office has been higher than we saw under his two predecessors, with the exception of the
bump Bush saw after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Trump
has fostered that, keeping a deliberate focus on his
base and ensuring that the promises he made to them are fulfilled . Whether his base would have wavered
anyway isn’t clear, but they haven’t. And so
now more than half of Republicans specifically plan to vote for
Republicans to show their support for him. Another way of looking at how that’s unusual is to consider the gaps between those
saying they want to cast a vote for or against the president and the gaps between the opposition and the president’s party.

2. Base cares about Trump’s stance on immigration, not success in Congress or

courts
Stopa 18 (Michael Stopa, co-host on the Harvard Lunch Club podcast, delegate for Donald Trump at
the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland, 2/27/18, “The Trump base is just fine with the
immigration stalemate in Congress”, The Hill, http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/375884-the-
trump-base-is-just-fine-with-the-immigration-stalemate-in-congress)/CWB

The Trump base is just fine with the immigration stalemate in Congress Once again the forgotten men and women of
America can breathe a sigh of relief. The Senate debate on a legislative fix for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) ended with all
three proposed bills being defeated. Meanwhile, two federal courts have blocked the Trump administration from
rescinding DACA, no doubt contrary to what the judges intended, relieving the pressure to push a legislative fix through Congress before March
5, the putative ending date of the program. So failing some unforeseen breakthrough, and somewhat reminiscent of the demise of the
ObamaCare repeal efforts, the president, Congress and the media appear to be preparing to move on to other
issues. The result is status quo ante. And many in the Trump base are just fine with that. The prospect of a grand
bargain that included President Trump’s “four pillars” of immigration reform was always a long shot.
Quite apart from the ordinary gridlock dynamic where ideological positions harden and no one is willing
to sacrifice principals or make concessions, negotiation on the immigration issue in particular is
encumbered by the fact that it is, for the most part, a zero-sum game, at least so it is perceived from the
Trump base side. The core voters who arguably won Trump the election, many in the working class, are
most incensed with the failure for a generation by their government to enforce the immigration laws.
They see schools become overcrowded with children who require remedial English and their property taxes go up. They see their jobs taken or
their raises postponed. They see emergency rooms deluged and their public parks overrun. Most crushing of all, they find it increasingly difficult
to teach their children why it is important to play by the rules when all those about them are trampling them. Consequently, when it comes to
government policy, this is the only question that really matters to these voters: Does it increase or decrease illegal immigration in our
communities? Note that this is true despite polls showing large majorities supporting a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Most Americans are
sympathetic toward those who find themselves in legal limbo through no fault of their own. But the
typical Trump voter would not
tolerate amnesty for any class of illegal alien if they suspected that it would exacerbate the core
problem or worse, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested, “invite a mad rush of illegality” to our
southern border.

1. Family separation doesn’t thump – trump felt the heat and pleased his base
Allen 6/20 (Jonathan Allen, 6/20/18, Jonathan Allen is a reporter who reported on Congress, the
White House and electoral politics in Washington for 15 years. He's a co-author of the New York Times-
bestselling "HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton" and a winner of the Dirksen and Hume
awards for his reporting on Congress, “Why Trump was forced to back down on family separation
policy”, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/why-trump-was-forced-back-down-family-
separation-policy-n885146) MKIM

Maybe President Donald Trump was right when he boasted that he could walk down Fifth Avenue in New York
shooting people and not pay any political price. But his desperate scramble to distance himself from his own
“zero tolerance” family-separation policy shows there is a point around the nexus of political sensitivity and

shame where he will change his own behavior. The president denies that he was forced to back down, but make no mistake: Trump
was pushed into abandoning his policy of separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. He created it, defended it
in dishonest terms and then suspended it under pressure. There is no evidence he believes the policy was wrong — when he tweeted about the
need to have compassion, he put “heart” in quotation marks — but it was clearly causing pain for him and his allies. When he pointed to reasons for eliminating the
policy, he zeroed in on appearances: "I didn't like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.” “The Republicans want security and insist on security for our
country. We will have that at the same time we have compassion and want to keep families together,” Trump said at the White House. “I’ll be signing something in
a little while that will do that.” In
issuing an executive order suspending the policy, Trump tried to cauterize a self-
inflicted political wound. It remains to be seen whether that will work or if the policy created an infection with long-lasting consequences for him and
his allies. Either way, it was a stunning about-face for a president who loves to dig in when he’s criticized. But few Republican soldiers wanted to get into the
trenches with him on a moral and political crisis of his own making. When it looked like he was holding small children hostage for
policy and political gain — to force Congress to approve his broader immigration agenda, deter future migrants from coming across the U.S.-Mexico border and

deliver on his immigration crackdown promise to his base — typically lockstep-loyal members of his own party balked. They
revolted because they found the policy revolting. “We should never play with the lives of these children,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Wednesday. And they knew
it was a political loser in the midst of a midterm election run, because two-thirds of Americans — and more than two-thirds of independent voters — opposed the
policy, according to a Quinnipiac poll. Even though roughly nine in 10 Republicans approve of the job Trump is doing, only 55 percent
favored the policy. Religious leaders, including some in the evangelical community at the core of Trump’s political base, condemned the administration’s actions.
Pennsylvania proves his base support has limits
Costa 3/13
Robert, Washington Post, “Pennsylvania vote shows that Trumpism has its limits — even in Trump
country” March 13, 2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pennsylvania-vote-shows-that-
trumpism-has-its-limits--even-in-trump-country/2018/03/13/fd57fb9a-ab8c-4f26-bee7-
a01bb4d159b2_story.html?utm_term=.6935829af445
The neck-and-neck result in Tuesday’s special congressional election in a reliably Republican Pennsylvania district
revealed that the appetite for President Trump ’s style of politics may have its limits in the land of
shuttered steel mills and coal mines that has been the core of his support base. The president went all
in for Republican candidate Rick Saccone, a seemingly safe bet in a district Trump had carried by 20 percentage points in 2016. Trump visited
there twice in recent weeks. He dispatched his eldest son. He sent top White House aides. Yet, with all that political capital on the line, the
president watched his favored candidate finish, in effect, in a tie in what should have been an easy win. The razor-thin vote count — three
months after Democrats picked up a U.S. Senate seat in deeply conservative Alabama and coming on a whirlwind day when Trump tried to
wrangle control of his administration by ousting his secretary of state — left Republicans feeling jittery just months ahead of the midterm
elections. And, with Democrat Conor Lamb coming close to a once unthinkable victory, other Democrats running this fall in Trump-friendly
districts may find a formula to boost their hopes of retaking the House. “We should be able to elect a box of hammers in this district. If we’re
losing here, you can bet there is a Democratic wave coming,” said veteran Republican consultant Mike Murphy, a Trump critic. Uncertainty now
pervades the party that Trump leads. Tuesday’s effective tie, coming in the aftermath of Trump’s ­aggressive push for steel and aluminum
tariffs that were backed by both Pennsylvania candidates, suggests the power of the president’s hard-line trade stance
to rally his voters is no longer a given .
1NR
 K
Resource and structural factors make growth unsustainable, technology
overwhelmingly doesn’t solve, and it’s try or die for the transition.
Trainer 16 – Ted Trainer, Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South
Wales, 2016 (“Sustainability – The Simpler Way Perspective,” Resilience, May 10th,
http://www.resilience.org/articles/General/2016/07_July/Sustainability%20The%20Simpler%20Way%20
Perspective.pdf, AIvackovic)

Firstly, let’s set the scene; The

deteriorating state of the planet. The resource base and environmental conditions
on which the present levels of global production and consumption are built are obviously deteriorating at
an alarming rate. Few if any would not be aware of this but it is important to briefly remind ourselves before focusing on how
impossible it would be for this base to sustain affluence and growth for all. A glance at the situation reveals that resources are
becoming more scarce and costly, including energy, productive land, minerals, food, fish, wood and
water, and ecosystems are being severely damaged. We are losing species, forests, land, coral reefs,
grasslands and fisheries at accelerating rates. A sixth era of massive biodiversity loss appears to
have begun. We are polluting the planet with excess carbon dioxide, nitrogen and many toxic
chemicals. The mass of big animals on the planet has declined sharply in recent decades, probably down by
90% in the sea. The World Wildlife Fund says that in general the quality of global ecosystems has
deteriorated 30% since about 1970, and its “Footprint” measure indicates that we are now taking biological
resources at a rate that would take 1.5 planets to provide in a sustainable way. (2014.) The reason for all
this massive resource depletion and damage to the environment is simply that there is far too much producing and
consuming going on. This is causing too many resources to be taken from nature and too many wastes to be dumped back into nature.
Now consider the limits case: Could everyone live as we do? The 10-15% of the world’s people living in regions
such as North America, Australia and Europe have per capita levels of resource use that are around 20
times the average for the poorest half of people. How likely is it that all the 9.7 billion people expected by 2050 could rise to the
present rich world level of resource use? If they did live as we do then world annual resource production and
consumption, and ecological damage, would be approaching 6 times as great as at present. Yet present levels of
resource use and environmental impact are far from sustainable. The World Wildlife Fund’s ”Footprint” analysis yields an even higher multiple.
They estimate that it takes about 8 ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in Australia.
So if 9 billion people were to live as we do we would need about 72 billion ha of productive land. But that is about 9 times all the available
productive land on the planet. Now add the absurdly impossible implications of economic growth. But the
foregoing argument has only been that the present levels of production and consumption are quite
unsustainable. Yet we are determined to increase present living standards and levels of output and consumption, as much as possible and
without any end in sight. In other words, our supreme national goal is economic growth. Few people seem to recognise the
absurdly impossible consequences of pursing economic growth. If we rich countries have a 3% p.a. increase in economic
activity until 2050 then our output, resource use and environmental impact will be around 4 times as
great as it is now, and doubling every 23 years thereafter. Now what if by 2050 all the expected 9.7 billion people
expected to be living on earth had risen to the “living standards” we in rich countries would then have given 3% economic growth. Total world
output, resource, use and environmental impact would be approaching 15 times as great as they are now … unless technical advance and
efficiency gains could greatly reduce them. (See below.) These multiplies must be the focal point in discussions of
sustainability. Grasping the magnitude of the overshoot and of the unsustainability is crucial here.
The numbers show that present, let alone probable 2050 rich world levels of consumption, are grossly unsustainable
and could never be extended to all people. But can’t technical advance solve the problems? Most people
hold the "technical fix faith", believing that technical advance will solve the resource and environmental problems and thereby
make it unnecessary for us to question the commitment to affluence and growth. When considering the following evidence
keep in mind that what we need is not just to stop increases in impacts as growth goes on -- we
need to reduce impacts dramatically before sustainable levels are reached. There is a very strong
case that technical advance is nowhere near capable of solving the sustainability problems facing us.
Note that many miraculous technical developments, e.g., in physics, astronomy, genetics, and medicine, are not so
relevant here where the focus is on the possibility of making big improvements in the efficiency and
energy costs of producing energy and materials, and of cutting ecological impacts. Following are some of the
main elements in the case. 1. Efficiency gains to date. It is not the case that technical achievements in the relevant areas have been
very encouraging. Ayres and Vouroudis (2009) note that for many decades the efficiency of production of electricity
and fuels, electric motors, ammonia and iron and steel has more or less plateaued. In many crucial areas such as
producing energy and minerals (below) the trend is towards worse efficiency, i.e., the need is for increasing inputs per unit of output. 2. The
deteriorating productivity growth rate. Technical advance is regarded as a major determinant of productivity
growth and that has been in long term decline since the 1970s. Even the advent of computerisation has had a surprisingly
small effect, a phenomenon now labelled the “Productivity Paradox.” In fact the UK productivity growth rate has recently has
gone below zero; i.e., productivity has actually deteriorated. (Weldon, 2016.) 3. Little or no “decoupling” is occurring for
materials or energy use. This is the most important issue; does recent history indicate that economic output has
been or can be separated from materials and energy use, so that growth can continue while resource demand falls? The “Tech-Fix faith” is
fundamentally dependent on the assumption that massive decoupling is possible. But all the evidence
seems to say that the amount of materials or energy needed to produce a unit of GDP in rich countries has
not improved much if at all in recent years. The box below refers to some of the evidence. Weidmann et al. (2014)
say “…for the past two decades global amounts of iron ore and bauxite extractions have risen faster than
global GDP.” “… resource productivity…has fallen in developed nations.” “There has been no
improvement whatsoever with respect to improving the economic efficiency of metal ore use.” Giljum et
al. (2014, p. 324) report in the world as a whole only a 0.9% p.a. improvement in the dollar value extracted from the use of each unit of
minerals between 1980 and 2009, and that over the 10 years before the GFC there was no improvement. “…not
even a relative
decoupling was achieved on the global level.” They point out that the picture would have been worse had
they included the many materials in rich world imports. Diederan’s account (2009) of the productivity of minerals
discovery effort is even more pessimistic. Between 1980 and 2008 the annual major deposit discovery rate fell from 13 to less
than 1, while discovery expenditure went from about $1.5 billion p.a. to $7 billion p.a., meaning the productivity of expenditure fell
by a factor in the vicinity of around 100, which is an annual decline of around 40% p.a. Recent petroleum figures
are similar; in the last decade or so the discovery rate has not increased but discovery expenditure more or less
trebled. (Johnson, 2010.) Schandl et al. (2015) say “ … there is a very high coupling of energy use to
economic growth, meaning that an increase in GDP drives a proportional increase in energy use.” “Our
results show that while relative decoupling can be achieved in some scenarios, none would lead to an absolute reduction in energy or
materials footprint.” In all three of their scenarios “… energy use continues to be strongly coupled with economic activity...” Alvarez found
that for Europe, Spain and the US, GDP increased 74% in 20 years, but materials use actually increased 85%.
(Latouche, 2014.) Similar conclusions re stagnant or declining materials use productivity etc. are arrived at by Aadrianse, 1997, Dittrich et
al., (2014), Schutz, Bringezu and Moll, (2004), Warr, (2004), Berndt, (1990), Smil, (2014) and Victor (2008, pp. 55-56). (Note that economists
often claim that the “energy intensity” of rich world economies is improving, but this is only because they fail to take into account the huge
amounts of energy used overseas to produce imports, and “fuel switching”; see Kaufman, 2004.) 4. There is ecological
deterioration in almost all domains. Technical advance has obviously not slowed, halted or
reversed overall damage to the planet’s ecosystems. The “Environmental Kuznets Curve” thesis is an
application of the decoupling claim to environmental impacts, asserting that as countries become richer
impacts increase for a time but then plateau and fall. There is little doubt now that the thesis is not
valid. Rich countries are in general not solving their most serious environmental problems. Alexander’s
review (2014) concludes that for the world as a whole, ”… decades of extraordinary technological development have
resulted in increased, not reduced, environmental impacts.” These many sources and figures show
the extreme implausibility of the tech-fix faith that in future technical advances will enable us to stop worrying about limits
and any need to dramatically reduce consumption or the obsession with economic growth. Conclusions on the limits to growth
case. In view of these lines of argument it is difficult to see how anyone could disagree with the basic limits to
growth case. Present ways are so grossly unsustainable there is no possibility of all people rising to the
living standards we take for granted today in rich countries, let alone those we are seeking. Again the most important
point is the magnitude of the overshoot. Most people have no idea of how far beyond sustainable levels of consumption we
are or how big the reductions should be. For decades many scientists and agencies are have been emphasizing the validity
and importance of the basic limits case. Sustainable ways that all could share appear to require us to go down to per capita rates
of resource consumption around 10% of those we have now. It follows from the above discussion that the only solution is to shift
to some kind of Simpler Way, i.e., to lifestyles, settlements and systems that make it possible for us to live
well on a small fraction of our present rich world levels, with no economic growth.