Solvency

1NC—Solvency Desegregation causes backlash—turns the affFeagin 2004 - Joe, Ella C. McFadden Professor at Texas A&M University, Fall, "Heeding Black Voices: The Court, Brown, and Challenges in Building a Multiracial Democracy", 66 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 57, Lexis

By the mid-1970s, however, renewed white resistance-often with a more disguised white-interest perspective-was working to end the slow movement to full desegregation of U.S. society. A more conservative Supreme Court has often led this

backtracking. n82 Legal scholar Jerome Culp has noted some ways in which the Supreme Court Justices have revealed a pervasive white-interest perspective in recent desegregation and affirmative action decisions: First, the interests of black Americans are not considered important enough to be examined or put into the constitutional calculus-the interest blindness assumption. Second, the assumptions regarding factual circumstances, e.g., legislative intent, economic or social policy of social actors, posit that the status quo circumstances of black citizens are fair-the status quo blindness assumption. n83 These are key dimensions of white-interest thinking today:

Generally ignore black-majority perspectives and interests whenever possible and assume or assert , in the

face of great evidence to the contrary, n84 that U.S. society is actually mostly colorblind. The end to two decades of desegregation efforts came in 1974 in a very influential Milliken v. Bradley decision, in which the majority of Justices (all white men) blocked a metropolitan-wide school desegregation plan combining the city of Detroit and its suburbs. n85 In his dissent to Milliken, Marshall noted that

after two decades of movement to desegregation, the Supreme Court was largely abandoning the goals and interests of African-Americans in eliminating the "badges" of slavery and segregation: "[o]ur precedents . . . firmly establish that where, as here, state-imposed segregation has been demonstrated, it becomes the duty of the State to eliminate root and branch all vestiges of racial discrimination and to achieve the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation." n86 In one incremental step after another, between the year of Milliken (1974) and the present, the Supreme Court and numerous other courts have retreated on earlier commitments to desegregate the schools "root and branch." Thus, in the key 1990s' cases of Board of Education of [*75] Oklahoma v. Dowell (1991) n87 and Freeman v. Pitts

(1992), n88 the Court decided to permit gradual, if covert, resegregation of schools where there was no longer legally imposed racial segregation. In cases dealing centrally with segregation and discrimination since the 1980s, white perspectives and interests are again taking precedence over the black interests and perspectives, which are likely well-known to white decisionmakers. The Roller Coaster of Desegregation: The Renewed Separate but Equal Policy After centuries of struggle, during the 1950s African-Americans were finally able to

force public school desegregation, yet white elites have generally controlled how desegregation was implemented. First, these white elites

worked for, or allowed, a decade of successful delay. Then, white officials grudgingly implemented desegregation plans that often eliminated many black teachers and principals-as well as many formerly black schools as critical community centers-while requiring more black than white children to engage in one-way busing to the newly desegregated schools. In these officially desegregated public schools, moreover, black (and Latino) children have often been mistreated and put into segregated tracks or classrooms. n89 Few officially desegregated schools have ever been fully desegregated in terms of teachers, counselors, administrators, curriculum, and extracurricular activities-because many white parents and politicians did not want them to be so. Indeed, they often fired black teachers and replaced them with white teachers in order to please white parents sending their children to newly desegregated schools. For a time, across the country, many black children were mixed into historically white schools by means of busing, yet since the 1980s executive branch decisions and 1990s federal court decisions backing off on meaningful desegregation, black children have actually been resegregated-and, increasingly, on a large scale. n90 The conservative white (plus one black conservative) Supreme Court now articulates a resuscitated "separate but equal" view, yet predominantly black schools are rarely funded to be fully equal with white schools in all important facilities. "Separate but equal," again permissible under recent federal court decisions, is still the transparent fiction that it was for long decades after the Plessy decision. [*76] Today,

large differences in per capita expenditures for children in predominantly white districts as compared with expenditures in districts predominantly comprised of children of color, are well documented, such as in a major 2001 report for the metropolitan

area of Milwaukee. n91 Today, the educational picture for many blackand Latino children remains bleak. For that reason, many black and Latino parents have called for more efforts to improve the quality of their schools even if that means less desegregation. n92 As key NAACP lawyer Robert Carter noted some time ago, predominantly black schools are often woefully inadequate and provide no tools that will enable poor blacks to become a part of the mainstream of the social, economic, and political life of the country. In the short run, we have to concentrate on finding ways of improving the quality of education in these schools, even if it means or results in less effort being expended on school integration. n93 Indeed, writing about the first desegregated education in the mid-1930s, Du Bois wrote that a black parent has a right to oppose any separation of schools by color, race, or class. . . . But . . . has no right, after he has made this academic pronouncement to send his own helpless immature child into school where white children kick, cuff or abuse him, or where teachers openly and persistently neglect or hurt or dwarf its soul . . . . Let the N.A.A.C.P. and every upstanding Negro pound at the closed gates of opportunity and denounce caste and segregation; but let us not punish our own children under the curious impression that we are punishing our white oppressors. Let us not affront our own self-respect by accepting a proffered equality which is not equality, or submitting to discrimination simply because it does not involve actual and open segregation . . . . n94 Du Bois was arguing for both meaningful school desegregation and for the black community's control of black children's schooling experiences. Some right-wing analysts of school desegregation, such as Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, have missed this important point in their discussions of the substantial proportion of African-Americans (but less than the majority)

who have questioned or resisted school desegregation. n95 While whites have [*77] opposed desegregation for racist reasons, the minority of African-Americans who have opposed it since the 1950s (and a majority supported it then as now) have questioned it because they feared that whites would implement desegregation in a way that would harm or destroy black institutions, such as black schools as traditional community centers, and that, as Du Bois suggests, white policy-makers would create desegregated situations where black children face hostile or unsupportive white parents, children, teachers, and administrators. In the past and present, African-Americans have supported community or school separation strategies mainly as a defense against white-imposed, institutionalized racism that has continued in ostensibly desegregated institutions. As constitutional scholar Roy Brooks has put it, "there is an important distinction between segregation and separation that the Thernstroms miss. Segregation is involuntary racial isolation designed to subordinate and stigmatize. Separation is voluntary racial isolation designed to create a safe and supportive environment in the context of racial

hostility." n96 Today, African-American parents face a severe dilemma in regard to education for their children.

Desegregated school settings, while holding out promise of better resources, often remain hostile or unsupportive places for black children. This is not what black leaders and parents had in mind for their children as they pressed hard in the courts and legislatures for full-fledged school desegregation. Moreover, since the 1980s, instead of making the schools truly desegregated and supportive learning environments, most federal officials-including many federal judges like the majority on the Supreme Court-have retreated from the moral position of Brown to a renewed acceptance of the "separate but equal" fiction as local school board policy- that is, to accept to the discredited racist notions imbedded in the 1896 Plessy decision. As a substantive review of segregation's history after Plessy reveals, such separate-but-equal policies do not generally work to improve school resources for children of color over the long term. n97 The reason that this remains true today is clear: Generally speaking, those children and parents presently with the least in the way of school resources are also in communities with the least clout over the mostly white politicians who control federal and state money that is absolutely necessary to creating school equality at the local level. Without substantial political and economic clout, getting state and federal [*78] officials to provide the great and disproportionate governmental resources that would enable concentrated-poverty schools to become equal to middle-class schools is highly unlikely. n98 Certainly, African-American children do not need white children in order to learn and thrive educationally, but in this still-racist society they will ordinarily get the full array of educational resources (human and material) that they need only if they are in school with children whose parents have this substantial economic and political clout-that is, children with middle-class and upper-middle-class white parents. n99

District court enforcement strips effectiveness and other decisions gut solvency Daniels and Pereira 2015 - George, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and J>D. from the University of California, Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law, and Rachel, Assistant District Attorney for the Office of the Philadelphia District Attorney and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, February, "May it Please the Court: Federal Courts And School Desegregation Post-Parents Involved", 17 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 625, Lexis

Brown I is one of the most highly celebrated opinions in American jurisprudence. We recognize today the sixtieth anniversary of the decision that heralded the promise of equality in educational opportunities that would serve to dismantle the system of oppression and legally sanctioned apartheid in this country. It was believed that through the holding, which guaranteed access to high quality education to all on equal terms, free of the stigma of racial identification, that the harms done to the hearts and minds of children subjected to such systems would not only secure their position in American society, but would also elevate all Americans. However, in spite of the celebration of the power of the federal judiciary to

attempt to advance the charge of equality among all men guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence, the reality of the impact of the desegregation cases is starkly grim. n5 Sixty years after striking down the legal precedent of racially separate but equal facilities and accommodations, American public schools have remained racially polarized and woefully unequal. The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ("Brown II"), which was intended to be a remedial

counterpart to Brown I, allowed the defendant school districts, who were the identified wrongdoers, the unique authority to provide their own solutions to the issue of school desegregation. n6 Rather than ordering a decree of a national standard

of school integration, the Court ordered local school boards to devise the remedies that would redress the harms inflicted upon the plaintiffs. "School authorities have the primary responsibility for elucidating, assessing, and solving these [school

desegregation] problems ... ." n7 The Supreme Court also charged lower [*627] federal district courts with the responsibility to determine whether the defendants fulfilled their duties toward integration based on local community standards: "Courts will have to consider whether the action of school authorities constitutes good faith implementation of the governing constitutional principles. Because of their proximity to local conditions and the possible need for further hearings, the courts which

originally heard these cases can best perform this judicial appraisal." n8 The federal judiciary experienced great difficulty with the enforcement of desegregation orders. Therefore, by 1991, the Supreme Court determined that school desegregation

lawsuits were not to be maintained by lower courts indefinitely. As a consequence of the Supreme Court's urgings to

eliminate desegregation orders as soon as possible, federal district courts have declared many districts "unitary" and have returned the schools to local control. A study conducted of federal district court opinions and the appeals

of those decisions found that in the decade from 1992 to 2002 all but one request to the court for unitary status was granted. n9 Concurrent with school districts' attempts to integrate schools through judicial orders, many districts, recognizing the value of

students attending desegregated schools, chose to pursue voluntary integration methods. n10 However, in 2007, the Supreme Court in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 struck down voluntary integration plans in effect by Seattle, Washington and Jefferson County, Kentucky public schools. n11 While districts under court order to

desegregate were not directly affected by this legal ruling, several districts ceased their voluntary integration plans as a result. The question remains: What are the academic consequences to children as a result of the Supreme Court's further insistence on the abolition of desegregation efforts?

Desegregation efforts fail in practice—students leave segregated districts or attend private schoolFeagin 2004 - Joe, Ella C. McFadden Professor at Texas A&M University, Fall, "Heeding Black Voices: The Court, Brown, and Challenges in Building a Multiracial Democracy", 66 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 57, Lexis

In 1967, thirteen years after the first Brown v. Board of Education decision, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. voiced great frustration with the lack of

progress in societal desegregation: "[e]very civil rights law is still substantially more dishonored than honored. School desegregation is still 90 percent unimplemented across the land. . . . Legislation that is evaded, substantially nullified and unenforced is a

mockery of the law." n1 Dr. King articulated the views of most African-Americans, views stemming from centuries of painful experiences with systemic racism in U.S. society. Thus, for more than a decade after Brown, white officials in southern districts defied the mandates and implications of Supreme Court and lower federal court rulings and, therefore, the black perspective on U.S. racism and racial change. Indeed, by 1960-1961 only a miniscule 0.16 percent of black

children were in school with white children in the South. n2 Today, a majority of white Americans still reject most of the black perspective on racial discrimination and desegregation in the United States , thereby openly mocking the

Brown decision and the civil rights laws passed since the 1960s. Not even half the country's black children today are in schools that are majority white, and there are increasingly fewer white children in public schools in our large central cities. n3 Even racially integrated schools are, as a rule, internally divided by ability tracking, a second-generation segregation

of white and black children. n4 In spite of white support [*58] in opinion polls for the ideal of a racially desegregated society, a substantial majority of whites have never supported that ideal in practice . n5

2NC—Hurts Minority StudentsBusing is unsustainable for the time and finances of parents – empirics showZimmer 16 (Amy Zimmer, Bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Yale University, Master’s degree in journalism from New York University & Reporter for DNAinfo New York, "4 Hours to Get to School? How Parents Can Fight Special Needs Busing Issues," DNAinfo New York 10-13-2016, accessed 7-12-2017, https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161013/morningside-heights/special-needs-students-busing-probems-nyc-schools)

Many special needs students spend hours on buses. Here's why and what parents can do. MANHATTAN — Duane Peek walked his young daughter to the bus for the first day of school, waving goodbye as the doors closed and she started her trip from their Morningside Heights home

to a Roosevelt Island school for students with special needs. Nearly four hours later and three hours after classes began, the 8-year-old girl finally arrived at her destination— the Child School. The return trips were just as bad, preventing his daughter from attending her after-school swim practice on West 118th Street despite the fact that classes ended at 2:30 p.m. It got so bad that the family finally yanked her off of the bus and started taking her to afterschool programs themselves, or hiring someone to do it. “They were not getting her there until after 6 p.m. Nobody should be on a bus that long,” Peek said, adding that they didn’t want to risk his daughter turning into a “big mess”

from being on the bus so long, especially given her sensory issues, ADHD and impulse control issues. But the current situation is unsustainable and "quite onerous" for their time and finances, he said. Peek’s complaints are not uncommon among the thousands of parents of students with special needs who ride city-contracted buses to public and publicly funded private schools across the city,

advocates say. Despite a rule that school bus trips within a borough should take no longer than 90 minutes and no longer than 115 minutes when going between boroughs, bus rides routinely take double that time or more, according to the grassroots group Parents to Improve School Transportation, or PIST. Companies that fail to adhere to the time constraints are supposed to be fined, according to Department of Education officials who said the DOE's Office of Pupil Transportation (OPT), which oversees buses, monitors companies to ensure they are compliant. DOE officials said they work tirelessly with bus companies, schools and families to ensure students receive safe and reliable transportation and that any concerns are addressed as quickly as possible. But they didn't respond to questions about how many complaints they've received about late buses or how many fines have been imposed. For parents who are struggling to cope with a seemingly impossible commute schedule, DNAinfo New York has rounded up what you

need to know about chronic bus delays and what can be done about them: The distance of your child's commute has no bearing on the length of his or her bus ride. Every year, advocates at INCLUDEnyc — a nonprofit that provides information and resources to parents of children with special needs — receive numerous complaints about school buses. The most common problem is the amount of time children spend traveling, which can be difficult for many students who have issues with sitting still “for any amount of time,” said Ruth DiRoma, the organization’s family educator who will be

giving a bus workshop open to all parents Thursday at P.S. 233 in Forest Hills. “Some of the pick-up times are extraordinarily early, since they’re picking up 10 or 11 kids, but it’s hard for little kids to be on a bus at 6:30 in the morning,” DiRoma said. “Part of the problem is traffic. The president might be in town. You get caught behind a garbage truck. There’s a fire.” Moreover, the distance students have to travel may have no bearing on their commute time. Some buses pick up and drop off at multiple schools, requiring students to wait for other students to be picked up and dropped off at different sites while they wait in their seats. Other buses are delayed when caregivers aren't at the designated location on time. Lastly, the city's OPT uses an "an archaic computer system” to determine which kids get put on which buses, which can mean roundabout journeys. For example, a bus ride two miles from Clinton Hill to a preschool in Park Slope used to take INCLUDEnyc’s Lori Podvesker's son two hours to complete. Now he travels 22 miles to a school in Long Island and it takes 40 minutes, she said.

Black families face heavier consequences for desegregation attempts – busing is designed to be more convenient for whitesJenkins 14 (Daisy Jenkins, Preident of Daisy Jenkins & Associates, LLC is a business consulting firm specializing in human resource services and expertise, "Did School Integration Fail Black Children?," American Renaissance 8-20-2014, accessed 7-12-2017, https://www.amren.com/news/2014/08/did-school-integration-fail-black-children/)

Back-to-school is just around the corner and 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, many children will be returning to “resegregated” schools. The anniversary year has prompted much investigation and analysis, most pointing toward waning enforcement of integration orders. But what if integration itself is part of the problem? As a young girl in Bainbridge, Ga., I attended segregated schools two years before the 1954 Brown ruling and six years after. My teachers and school administrators lived in our neighborhood and knew my parents. These educators had high expectations for us and were daily role models and cheerleaders for our success. I had a rich, balanced educational experience rooted in strong cultural awareness. Then we moved to Sacramento, Calif. It was 1960, and my parents were warned that the segregated schools were inferior to the integrated schools and that I would probably have to repeat eighth grade. It was true that my segregated school didn’t have the modern facilities and equipment available to white students on the other side of the tracks, but I breezed through ninth grade and performed equally well in high school. But still, something was lost. I had excellent teachers, but Black teachers and counselors disappeared from my academic life. Despite my good grades, my high school counselor had low expectations for my future, encouraging me to become a nurse’s aide or secretary. She didn’t think of me as college material. Fast-forward 60 years and a big question looms large: Is it possible

that integration was actually a major setback for Black educators and students? The reality is that Black families faced heavier burdens with the desegregation mandate than Whites. Black children spent more time commuting, Black schools were closed to make desegregation more convenient for whites (and to prevent their flight to the suburbs or private schools) and Black teachers and principals were fired when White and Black schools were merged. Estimates show that more than 82,000 Black teachers provided instruction to a Black student population numbering around 2 million in 1954. Within a span of 10 years, around 40,000 Black teachers lost their jobs. Ninety percent of Black principals lost their jobs in 11 Southern states. Today, increased public school closings across the nation disproportionately impact Black, Latino and poor students who lose their neighborhood

schools. Eighty-eight percent of the school closings in Chicago affect Black students. The decimation of Black educators has had a long-lasting impact. A study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that among 3.3 million teachers in American public elementary and secondary schools in 2012–where minority students are quickly becoming the majority–they were 82 percent White, 8 percent Hispanic, 7 percent Black and about 2 percent Asian. The loss of Black teachers means that many students have lost contact with their most impactful role models. As black educator Kevin Gilbert told the Associated Press, “Nothing can help motivate our students more than to see success standing right in front of them.” This lack of Black educators has meant that Black students are less valued in general. White teachers, typically women, who are educated in white neighborhoods and White universities, comprise the majority of educators in minority classrooms. Many are fantastic, quality teachers and a gift to all students. But many are ill-equipped to meet the educational needs of Black students. And studies indicate they treat Black children differently. {snip} It’s time for the Department of Education to address the long-term systematic inequalities of that biased desegregation model and launch a national recruitment campaign for Black teachers, especially men. We should also offer a student-loan forgiveness program for Black professionals proportional to the number of years spent teaching in inner-city classrooms. In the meantime, we should require cultural sensitivity training for non minority teachers who teach in predominantly minority classrooms and upgrade inner-city schools to the maintenance and technology standards of middle-class suburban schools. I’m a firm believer in a diverse learning environment for all students with updated facilities and technology. But it’s equally important for students to have community accountability and positive role models who look like them. {snip}

Busing fails – tremendous stress on bused students (fix tag later)Cornish 16 (Audie Cornish, Host and reporter for NPR, "Why Busing Didn't End School Segregation," NPR.org 10-6-2016, accessed 7-12-2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/06/496411024/why-busing-didnt-end-school-segregation)

I talked with Matthew Delmont, a history professor at Arizona State University who has literally written the book on why busing failed to integrate schools in America. So why did busing fail? A couple things happen that make it difficult to sustain busing programs into the '80s and

'90s. One is the tremendous amount of white flight that happens in cities like Boston, so there just simply aren't enough white students to go around to have meaningful school desegregation. This is true in Chicago, in

Los Angeles, in New York. The other thing that happens is busing placed a tremendous burden on black students and on students of color. In most cases, they were the ones that were asked to travel to the suburbs, travel sometimes to hostile neighborhoods . For many parents, that simply isn't worth it after a number of years. If not busing, what were the other ways that schools tried to desegregate in modern times? There were a couple of popular plans. One

would be magnet schools — trying to funnel resources into schools primarily in communities of color that would attract white students back to those schools. Those have received different amounts of success in different communities, but it's been a program that has some merit and has

been popular for good reason. Another would be to simply redraw zoning lines. I think one of the reasons that busing got so much attention is that it seemed very inconvenient. They're talking about busing kids a half-hour out of the city. In many communities, if you simply redraw the zoning lines you can accomplish school desegregation. It's still tremendously controversial, but it can still produce meaningful school integration in places that have tried it. For schools that have tried rezoning, taking race into account has led to trouble with the law. Exactly — there are two issues. One, the Supreme Court has consistently handed down decisions that say that race can't be the primary factor in drawing these school zoning lines. The court does not want to see race be the deciding factor in these

school desegregation issues. The other factor is simply a matter of political will and how much white parents will go for it. Unfortunately, it's the case that across the country, white parents simply don't want to send their kids to schools with large numbers of African-American or Latino students — even if they consider themselves to be liberal in theory, or in the abstract, they are in favor of integration. When push comes to shove ... they oppose any sort of meaningful school integration.

2NC—Court EnforcementCourts won’t enforceLopez & Burciaga 14 [Gerardo Lopez is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Utah, and Rebeca Burciaga is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at San Jose State University. October 20th, 2014. “The Troublesome Legacy of Brown v. Board of Education”. “Educational Administration Quarterly”, Issue 5, Volume 50. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0013161X14551410]

To this effect, we must keep in mind that the Brown decision was actually rendered in two distinct parts. The initial decision, often referred to as “Brown I” (347 U.S. 483), was handed down in 1954 and effectively declared the unconstitutionality of separate but equal schools—irrespective of whether the segregated schools were equal in every respect. In other words, racially segregated schooling facilities could never

be “equal” in the eyes of the law. The second decision, referred to as “Brown II” (349 U.S. 294), was handed down in 1955, to assist the school districts involved in the initial court case in determining how to best meet the spirit of the law while upholding sound constitutional principles in the process. It should be noted that several of these districts—along with various other school districts in numerous Southern states—had specifically requested exemption from the Brown desegregation mandate citing logistical complications and demographic barriers that they believed made it impossible to comply with the 1954 court ruling (Liu, 2004). Since these concerned school districts were located in different

states and cited unique challenges specific to their respective districts, the Brown II Supreme Court determined that the best course of action was to charge the lower courts with the judicial duty to oversee compliance with the law “with all

deliberate speed” (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1955). In other words, it was local school districts that were charged with determining the structure and pace of the desegregation effort, while the lower courts were given responsibility for ensuring the school district’s compliance (Alemán, 2013). Did Integration Work? Given the vagueness of the Brown II mandate, along with no uniform method for effectuating the requirements of the unanimous opinion in Brown I, desegregation efforts were slow to come. In effect, school districts found a juridical loophole to carry out the desegregation process at the pace they felt was most “deliberate” (Bell, 2005). Given

the absence of a court order, states could essentially take as little—or as long—as they wanted in order to desegregate their schools. As a result, in the years immediately following the Brown II decision, both the lower courts and the Supreme Court were forced to deal with a number of blatant violations of the desegregation mandate in addition to handling a number of cases whereby school districts minimally complied with the tenets of Brown I while simultaneously testing limits of Brown II (Wenger, 2004). To be certain, most states were not in any hurry to desegregate and followed the general principle of “state-neutrality” (Bell, 1979). This meant that states would neither block desegregation efforts outright, but would not actively encourage integration either.

2NC—White FlightBusing causes white students move farther away - empirics proveBorsuk 16 (Alan J. Borsuk, senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School, "40 years after desegregation ruling, core problems remain," Journel Sentinel 7-23-2016, accessed 7-12-2017, http://archive.jsonline.com/news/education/40-years-after-desegregation-ruling-core-problems-remain-b99765400z1-388029622.html/)

Busing is No. 2. Desegregation brought a large increase in the role of busing to move children to schools outside their own neighborhoods. To this day, busing remains a central part of the school landscape, long after desegregation itself pretty much faded out. It's the third remnant that is

most dispiriting: The problems desegregation aimed to solve have not, for the most part, gone away. In some ways, they are worse. In 1976, the MPS student body was about two-thirds white. Within five years, the white percentage was under 50%. Last fall, according to MPS, it was 13%. Where did all those kids go? The suburbs is the main answer. As for MPS schools, for a few years, there was a big push for diverse enrollments in many schools, including use of quotas by race in some. But even mandated integration faltered soon, largely because so many whites left the system . Today, the large majority of schools in the city, including private schools and non-MPS charter schools, predominantly have one racial or ethnic identity, black, Hispanic or white. With a short list of praiseworthy exceptions, there is little in Milwaukee that qualifies to be called integration in education. As for integration in the suburbs, quite a few schools that are closer to the city of Milwaukee have more diverse student rosters than they had a decade ago, not to mention four decades ago. That's due to a number of changes, including the demographic makeup of those suburbs, as well as the state's open enrollment law, which allows students from one school district to enroll in another district. But open enrollment actually has increased segregation. And many schools in farther-out suburbs remain predominantly white. The voluntary city-suburban racial integration program known as Chapter 220 is withering after a four-decade run. It's shrunk for years, and in 2015 the Legislature cut off new enrollment. At its height 22 years ago, just under 6,000 minority kids from the city

were attending suburban public schools, a substantial and all-voluntary example of integration. Maintaining an integrated balance in schools remains a challenge. To this day, as minority kids move into a district, there's a trend for white kids to move out. For a case study, Google "Sarah Carr Brown Deer" and read a thoughtful piece about trying to maintain racial balance

in a school district that has done an excellent job of handling issues related to changing racial makeup of its student population. Overall, if the goal of integration was to give all students equal chances of success and to close the gaps between white kids and minority kids, reality says desegregation failed.

Inter-district remedies encourage white flight and make it impossible to solve segregationMeinke ‘11Samantha Meinke, public speaker, media specialist https://www.michbar.org/file/journal/pdf/pdf4article1911.pdf Michigan Bar Journal

Milliken v Bradley brought the condition of education in Detroit to light. “The educational components [of Milliken II] did enhance educational opportunity in Detroit,” Roumell said. “Whether the issue was minority children or socioeconomic factors, the fact is the courts were on the forefront of the need to address urban educational needs.” But it didn’t improve Detroit’s plight. “Busing accelerated the out-migration of middle-class whites from the city to the suburbs, reducing the tax base and income to support local retail outlets, and creating housing vacancies,” said John Mogk, a professor emeritus of Wayne State University Law School who was appointed to the Detroit Board of Education by Gov.

Milliken to replace one of the four recalled pro-integration members. “If the Supreme Court had sanctioned a regional school integration plan ... white flight would have been discouraged and Metro Detroit would not be the most segregated region in the U.S. today.” Consequences of the case have made an impact across the nation. “Milliken

has made it very difficult, if not impossible, to have any really meaningful school desegregation in metropolitan areas of the country,” Baugh said. “What it basically said is segregation that is present, that is clearly related to government policy ... can’t be remedied by the courts. You can’t look at public education today and not wonder what would have happened if the court had decided this case the other way.”

Achievement Gap Advantage

1NC—Achievement Gap Advantage—GeneralThe aff can’t solve—school tracking and access to resources mean integration alone failsIreland 2007 - Corydon, Harvard News Office, March 22, "The achievement gap, a look into the causes", http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/03/the-achievement-gap-a-look-into-causes/

And there’s another unappreciated factor in the achievement gap, as measured by the “race gap and the income gap,” he added: parental depression. Up to 60 percent of impoverished parents feel “a steady drizzle of hopelessness” that makes reading and communication at home difficult. Diamond, on leave this year to be a Radcliffe Fellow, acknowledged the merit of Tough’s focus on parenting. “We should try to do everything we can to make a difference,” he said. But parenting practices alone can’t close the achievement gap, since the approach leaves out

a wider social context. “Concerted cultivation takes money, time, and know-how” — assets that are “embedded in networks” more available to white and middle-class parents, said Diamond. He used a Radcliffe lecture last week (March

14) to lay out his alternative views on the origins of the achievement gap, and how to close it. Family resources, money, class, nutrition,

and poor neighborhoods make a difference, said Diamond. But so do the “structural, institutional, and symbolic disadvantages” that greet black students at the schoolhouse door. One disadvantage is a school’s racially imbalanced tracking system, in which the best teachers end up teaching the highest-achieving — that is, predominately white —

students, he said. That is a material disadvantage for black students, who get less qualified teachers. It’s also a symbolic disadvantage: students perceive themselves as less capable because they get less challenging work and teachers have lower expectations for them. These disadvantages show up even in largely affluent suburban schools, where a third of black Americans (and 54 percent of Latinos) are enrolled, said Diamond. He’s one of a group of researchers mining data from a large multiracial sample: 40,000 students in grades six through 12, in 15 suburban U.S. school districts. By some measures, being schooled in suburbia narrows the achievement gap, said Diamond. White and black students have similar — and by national standards, high — graduation rates (95 percent and 86 percent, respectively). And most go on to college, including 80 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks. But that “good news,” said Diamond, is undercut by institutional imbalances. In

academic tracks at one representative high school, for example, 86 percent of whites were in the highest of three tracks; but more than 60 percent of black students crowded into the lowest. Even in stable, integrated suburban schools,

opportunity is distributed unequally, said Diamond.

Integration won’t solve the achievement gap—reduces it by less than one tenth the current gapHansen 2016 - Michael, Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at The Brookings Institution, January 8, "In Search of the Key to Closing Achievement Gaps", https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2016-01-08/the-academic-benefit-of-reducing-school-segregation-may-be-overblown

To the surprise of those of us on the research team, though, the estimated gains from equalizing access to effective teaching across all students was not nearly as large as we had expected: We estimated student achievement gaps in test scores could

be reduced by 2 percentile points in both subjects. This amounts to less than one-tenth of the current achievement gaps in either subject. What does this mean for integration? Well, inasmuch as the bulk of learning gains to integration are predicated on equalizing

access to teachers for all students, our findings suggest that integration would help in a modest way, but very large gaps in achievement would remain for disadvantaged students even in integrated schools. Given how difficult it is to

translate short-term learning gains into persistent gains across students, even if students went through all of grades K-12 in integrated schools, achievement gaps would be markedly narrowed but still very large. Given the large achievement gaps

that accompany students when they enroll in kindergarten, it is not too surprising that simply equalizing access to quality teachers (or

any other school resource) will not remediate those gaps. Under integration, however, at least U.S. schools would no longer be reinforcing these gaps students enter with.

No stem shortageTeitelbaum 2014 - Michael, Senior research associate with the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, March 19, "The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage",

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/

Everyone knows that the United States has long suffered from widespread shortages in its science and engineering workforce, and that if continued these shortages will cause it to fall behind its major economic competitors. Everyone knows that these workforce shortages are due mainly to the myriad weaknesses of American K-12 education in science and mathematics, which international comparisons of student performance rank as average at best. Such claims are now well established as conventional wisdom. There is almost no debate in the mainstream. They echo from corporate CEO to corporate CEO, from lobbyist to lobbyist, from editorial writer to editorial writer. But what if

what everyone knows is wrong? What if this conventional wisdom is just the same claims ricocheting in an echo chamber? The truth is that there is little credible evidence of the claimed widespread shortages in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. How can the conventional wisdom be so different from the empirical evidence? There are of

course many complexities involved that cannot be addressed here. The key points, though, are these: Science and engineering occupations are at the leading edge of economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world, and science and engineering workforces of sufficient size and quality are essential for any 21st century economy to prosper. These professional workforces also are crucial for addressing challenges such as international security, global climate change, and domestic and global health. While they therefore are of great

importance, college graduates employed in science and engineering occupations (as defined by the National Science

Foundation) actually comprise only a small fraction of the workforce. A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND

Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree. All have

concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more. Were there to be a genuine shortage at present, there would be evidence of employers raising wage offers to attract the scientists and engineers they want. But the evidence points in the other direction: Most

studies report that real wages in many—but not all—science and engineering occupations have been flat or slow-growing, and

unemployment as high or higher than in many comparably-skilled occupations. Because labor markets in science and

engineering differ greatly across fields, industries, and time periods, it is easy to cherry-pick specific specialties that really are in short supply, at least in specific years and locations. But generalizing from these cases to the whole of U.S. science and engineering is perilous. Employment in small but expanding areas of information technology such as social media may be booming, while other larger occupations languish or are increasingly moved offshore. It is true that high-skilled professional occupations almost always experience unemployment rates far lower than those for the rest of the U.S. workforce, but unemployment among scientists and engineers is higher than in other professions such as physicians, dentists, lawyers, and registered nurses, and surprisingly high unemployment rates prevail for recent graduates even in fields with alleged serious “shortages” such as engineering (7.0 percent), computer science (7.8 percent) and information systems (11.7 percent). Over time, new technologies, price changes, or sharp shifts in the labor market can create rapid rises in demand in a particular occupation. When that happens, the evidence shows that the market seems to adjust reasonably well. Entire occupations that were previously unattractive and declining, such as petroleum engineering in the 1980s and 1990s, have rather suddenly become attractive and high-paid—due to increased energy prices and new technologies for domestic extraction of oil and gas. Others, such as those linked to manufacturing

and construction—industries in which well over half of all engineers are employed—have declined over the same period. Surprisingly, some of the largest and most heavily financed scientific fields, such as biomedical research, are among those with the least attractive career prospects, as a recent blue-ribbon advisory committee reported to the Director of the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical Ph.D.s are unusually lengthy and often require additional years of postdoctoral training, yet after completion those with such degrees experience labor market demand and remuneration that are relatively low. Labor markets for scientists and engineers also differ geographically. Employer demand is far higher in a few hothouse metropolitan areas than in the rest of the country, especially during boom periods. Moreover recruitment of domestic professionals to these regions may be more difficult than in others when would-be hires discover that the remuneration employers are offering does not come close to compensating for far higher housing and other costs. According to the most recent data from the National Association of Realtors, Silicon Valley (metro San Jose) has the highest median house prices in the country, at $775,000—nearly four times higher than the national median. Far from offering expanding attractive career opportunities, it seems that many, but not all, science and engineering careers are headed in the opposite direction: unstable careers, slow-growing wages, and high risk of jobs moving offshore or being filled by temporary workers from abroad. Recent science Ph.D.s often need to undertake three or more additional years in low-paid and temporary “postdoctoral” positions, but even then only a minority have realistic prospects of landing a coveted tenure-track academic position.

2NC—Tracking Honors tracks prevent effective desegregation—continues to divert resourcesFeagin and Barnett 2005 - Joe, Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University, and Bernice, Departments of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 21, "Success and Failure: How Systemic Racism Trumped the Brown V. Board of Education Decision", https://www.illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2004/5/Feagin.pdf

One sees systemic discrimination in ostensibly desegregated schools in the widespread use by authorities of ability

tracking that creates “second-generation” segregation. In desegregated schools, most children of color learn in segregated classroom tracks with fewer resources and less rigorous teaching than tracks for allegedly “more talented” students,

most of whom are white because of bias in the selection process.120 Derrick Bell underscored this problem over two decades ago: “Extra money for special programs with better, higher-paid teachers follows white students into special, upper-track classes even within integrated schools, where most blacks are trapped in lower-track, generally ineffective and less expensive course offerings.”121 Tracking is well-remembered by students. In our interviews with people who attended desegregated schools, one white college student recounted his experience: I found out that even though we were always in mixed classes in elementary school, they were tracking us, like they had us divided into groups and were kind of watching us as we developed . . . . If you look at the racial mix of the classes, [the] honors track seemed to be predominately white

and the lower, like regular classes, would be predominately African American. . . . They’d be placed in the lower track so early on, that it was just impossible to break out of even if they had the ability level.122 Much research now shows that

tracking assigns students of color “unjustifiably and disproportionately to lower tracks and almost excludes them from the accelerated tracks; it offers them inferior opportunities to learn and is responsible, in part, for

their lower achievement.”123 Recalling this pattern, a middle-aged white teacher in our interview study recently commented: I remember in the fourth grade when the first time I actually had a black classmate. I specifically remember [him] reading along in class, and I think it was the word Nazi that came up. And I didn’t know what the word was, but he knew; and I was kind of impressed by that. By the time I got to high school, or even junior high, when I started getting separated from other students . . . the number of minorities dropped precipitously. So by the time I was in high school, in honors classes, there were perhaps you know some Arab or Indian students in those classes with me . . . . African

American and Latinos weren’t in those classes.124 Significantly, African American students often get placed in tracks lower than their measured abilities indicate, even as measured by the racially biased conventional tests. Students in higher tracks typically get more attention and better resources, often including more experienced teachers and more rigorous

instruction. Students in privileged tracks in early grades tend to perform better in later schooling, and thus over time “racially stratified tracks create a discriminatory cycle of restricted educational opportunities for minorities who are disproportionately assigned to lower tracks irrespective of their academic abilities.”125 Several early studies showed that desegregated school systems that eliminated or significantly reduced ability tracking had better achievement results than those that maintained or increased tracking.126 More recently, Roslyn Mickelson has summarized much school research: “[W]hen schools consistently employ practices to enhance equality of opportunity (including the elimination of tracking and ability grouping), desegregation brings clear, though modest academic benefits to black students and does no harm to whites.”127

2NC—Can’t Solve Achievement Gap The achievement gap precedes the classroom—proves the plan is insufficientKlein 2016 - Rebecca, Huffington Post Staff, February 24, "Study Explains The Sad Reason Behind The Achievement Gap In Science", http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/science-achievement-gap_us_56cce9f7e4b0928f5a6da204

The seeds of the achievement gap in science are planted before a child has ever set foot in an elementary school, according to a new study. The new report out this month looks to explain why white, upper-class eighth-graders tend to perform much better in

science than their low-income and minority peers. Unfortunately, the answer involves a series of factors beyond any child’s control. By the time they enter kindergarten, white, affluent students already have a much larger general knowledge of science than their minority classmates, the study shows. This gap follows white and black students beyond elementary school to middle school, where more affluent students substantially outperform their peers on measures of science achievement. The authors of the study — from Pennsylvania State University and University of California, Irvine — based their findings on a nationally representative sample of over 7,000 kids who entered kindergarten in 1998. Data on the children, maintained through the National Center for Education Statistics, was collected until 2007.

Social factors overwhelm schools in causing the achievement gapRothstein 2007 - Richard, research associate for the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, November 28, "What's causing the gap?", http://www.latimes.com/la-op-dustup28nov28-story.html

Disadvantaged students' low performance has many mutually reinforcing causes. We're the most unequal society in the industrialized world; it would be silly to expect academic performance to be equal when nothing else is. Every industrialized society has

achievement gaps. Ours are bigger because our economic system is more unequal. Educational debates are corrupted by insistence that schools alone can close achievement gaps. Certainly, better schools would lift achievement. Groups trying to improve schools, train better teachers and principals, improve curriculum and raise standards are essential. But, Russlynn, when you assert that

such improvements alone can close achievement gaps, you harm the very cause of equality you hope to advance. Closing gaps requires combining better schools with greater social and economic equality. On Monday, I gave one example of why better

schools alone can't do it, describing how low-income children have more frequent asthma, resulting in more school absence. Imagine two groups of children, identical except that one has high absenteeism from untreated asthma. When children in this group do come to

school, they are often drowsy from being awake at night. Without proper medical care, they can't suppress symptoms with inhalants, as more fortunate children do. The second group has adequate medical care and less absenteeism. If both groups have great teachers, curriculum and standards, they will still differ in average learning. Of course, good teachers will get higher average achievement from

children who are frequently absent than will inadequate teachers. But will good teachers get the same average achievement from the frequently absent that they get from healthier students? Certainly not. Because of normal human variation, some students with great absenteeism do have higher achievement than typical healthy children. And some healthy children have lower achievement

than typical children with great absenteeism. But on average, the two groups must have an achievement gap. Add to asthma the many other health differences between disadvantaged and middle-class children. Low-income children have more lead poisoning (they live in poorly maintained homes with peeling paint) and iron deficiency anemia; both of those lower IQ. The U.S. surgeon general reports that one-third of low-income children have untreated dental cavities; they're more likely to be distracted in class by toothaches. Low-income children have twice the rate of vision difficulties as middle-class children. You can't read well if you can't see well. All contribute to

achievement gaps. (Readers wanting references to research that documents these claims should e-mail me at riroth@epi.org.) It's not only health differences. Consider the intellectual environments of children whose parents are well educated and those whose parents are not. Children in the first group listen to complex language with larger vocabularies and are read to more often. They then attend school more ready to learn. Students from less literate homes will learn more from better teachers than from worse teachers. But will they achieve, on average, as much as children from more literate homes? Of course not. To believe otherwise is to think that learning during non-

school hours has no effect whatsoever. Consider other economic factors such as housing. Because urban rents have risen more rapidly than wages of working parents, low-income families move more than middle-class families. Some Los Angeles schools

serving disadvantaged children have 100% mobility (twice as many children pass through the school annually as the school's capacity). These schools are frequently disrupted by reorganizing classes; teachers have less time to learn students' individual strengths and weaknesses. Teachers must repeat lessons for newcomers who've missed school while their home lives were disrupted. Of course, good teachers can get higher achievement from transient students than inadequate teachers could. But can good teachers get the same average achievement from

transient as from stable students? Of course not. Statistical analyses attribute about 15% of the black-white

achievement gap to differences in residential mobility and 25% to differences to a few health factors .

Other socioeconomic inequalities and differences in school quality also contribute.

Can’t solveRothstein 2007 - Richard, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, November 26, "Mind the (achievement) gap", http://www.latimes.com/la-op-dustup26nov26-story.html

3. Improving average performance of disadvantaged students requires a combination of better schools and combating the social and economic disadvantages that affect learning. Improving schools takes more adequate funding and doing a better

job with the money schools have. But if we want to help students take advantage of better schools, we also need to get them to school in better health, from stable and adequate housing, from safe and secure communities, and with opportunities to develop their potential in early childhood and in after-school and summer hours. All of these contribute to

achievement. For example, black children are more likely to live in communities where environmental conditions generate much higher rates of asthma, so black children are absent from school more often for this reason alone. The best school

reform imaginable won't help students who can't benefit from it because they are not in class. Putting health clinics in schools serving low-income children could do wonders for their test scores.

Busing alienates students and takes attention away from ensuring quality educationLaw Jrank ‘11<a href="http://law.jrank.org/pages/10024/School-Desegregation-BUSING-DEBATE.html">School Desegregation - The Busing Debate</a>Those who oppose busing make a variety of different points against it, although they do not necessarily oppose integration itself. Opponents claim that busing serves as a distraction from

more important educational goals such as quality of instruction. Busing, they hold, too easily becomes a case of form over substance, in which the form of racial integration of education becomes of greater value than the substance of what is actually taught in schools. Critics of busing would rather focus on the environment in a school and in its classrooms than on achieving a particular number of each race in a school. Justice LEWIS F. POWELL JR. echoed these sentiments in an opinion to a school desegregation case, Keyes v. Denver School District, 413 U.S. 189, 93 S. Ct. 2686, 37 L.

Ed. 2d 548 (1973). In Keyes, he wrote that in an era of declining student achievement, it is wrong to turn the attention of communities "from the paramount goal of quality in education to a perennially divisive debate over who is to be transported where ." Critics also claim that busing causes white flight—where whites move their children from integrated public schools to private and suburban schools that are largely white—which results in an even greater disparity between white and black, rich and poor. According to this scenario, busing only exacerbates the current situation, making public schools and cities even more the exclusive province of the poor.Some noted experts on the issue of busing have concluded that although they favor a society that is racially integrated, the social costs of busing and the resulting white flight are too high. Others have sought a middle ground on the issue by arguing that judges should choose carefully the districts in which they decide to implement busing. For example, they claim that white flight is more likely to occur in communities and schools where whites form a small minority, and that as a result, busing has higher social costs in such districts.Another prominent complaint in the anti-busing opinion is that court-ordered busing programs represent an abuse of judicial power. According to this view, busing is an example of undesirable judicial activism. The large-scale social changes caused by transporting thousands of children many miles each day should be imposed only by an elected body of representatives such as a state legislature or Congress. Moreover, adherents of this view argue that supervising school desegregation programs only bogs down the courts and takes time away from other pressing legal matters.Critics of busing also point out that many times, the same court that requires busing does not provide guidance as to funding it, thereby creating financial headaches for school districts. Related to this issue is the claim that busing is too costly, especially when school districts are forced to purchase new buses in order to start a busing program. In financially strapped school districts, spending on busing sometimes takes away funding for other educational priorities.Some of those who oppose busing favor racial desegregation but do not view busing as a good way to achieve that goal. Instead, they support a

gradualist approach to social reform. According to the gradualist view, it will take generations to achieve the goal of racial desegregation in education and in society as a whole. Busing only interferes with the

overall goal of integration, because of the sudden and disruptive changes—including white flight—that it imposes on society.Others oppose busing on the ground that neighborhood schools are the best way to educate children. In this camp are both those in favor of racial integration in education and those against it. Neighborhood schools, it is argued, allow parents to have a greater influence on their child's education by making it easier, for example, to visit the school and speak with a teacher. Such schools also give children a sense of identity and instill pride in their community. Busing children to a school across town, they argue, will not inspire pride in their school. Advocates of

neighborhood schools also point to statistics that indicate that bused students are more alienated from their school and thus experience greater problems, including poorer academic performance and increased delinquency.

2NC—STEM Alt CausesTest score focus and school funding massive alt causesWeiss 2016 - Samantha, The Odyssey Online, June 13, "U.S. Kids Are Falling Behind Academically", https://www.theodysseyonline.com/us-kids-falling-behind

The United States ranks number eight on the human development index, which is explained as “a composite index measuring average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development-a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living”. Despite

ranking among the most developed countries, United States kids are falling behind academically, due to the emphasis on test scores. Programs such as No Child Left Behind have forced schools to push children through the system,

with or without the skills they were expected to learn. In addition, unprecedented cuts to education spending decrease the

abilities of schools. Cutting extra-curricular programming and non-academic classes saves schools money, but

minimizes the education experience of students at every level. The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development found in their 2009 Program for International Student Assessment that U.S. students ranked 25th among 34 countries in math and science, behind nations like China, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Finland. Since then, the gap has widened and can be seen in everyday measures, such as languages taught and adult literacy rates. Compared to other nations, whose rank on the human development index is much lower, the United States has unimpressive statistics. How can one of the most industrialized nations in the world hope to hold that status if its students are so

far behind in math and science? It’s no wonder that the US outsources much of its labor and now its STEM work to other nations.

Only six percent of students achieved the highest level of proficiency—eliminating the gap isn’t enoughVOA 2016 - VOA News, December 6, "US High School Students Fall Further Behind Global Peers, Survey Says", https://www.voanews.com/a/united-states-high-school-students-fall-further-behind-global-peers/3626169.html

U.S. high school students are falling further behind their global peers in mathematics and are treading water in reading and science, an ongoing survey on international education said Tuesday. The triennial report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that 15-year-old U.S. students ranked 40th in the world in math last year out of 72 countries or cities. The U.S. average math score of 470 was down 17 points from 2009, and 20 points below the average of the countries taking part in the survey, known as the Program for International Student Assessment. "We're losing ground — a troubling prospect when, in today's knowledge-based economy,

the best jobs can go anywhere in the world," U.S. Education Secretary John King said in a statement. Six percent of U.S. students who took the OECD math test had scores in the highest proficiency range, but 29 percent did not meet baseline proficiency.

2NC—No STEM ShortageThe STEM shortage is based in alarmism—there’s no shortage—wages proveCharette 2013 - Robert, Contributing Editor for IEEE Spectrum, August 30, "The STEM Crisis Is a Myth", http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened. It pretty much doesn’t matter what country you’re talking about—the United States is facing this crisis, as is Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, India…the list goes on. In many of these countries, the predicted shortfall of STEM (short for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workers is supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions. A 2012 report by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for instance, stated that over the next decade, 1 million additional STEM graduates will be needed. In the U.K., the Royal Academy of Engineering reported last year that the nation will have to graduate 100 000 STEM majors every year until 2020 just to stay even with demand. Germany, meanwhile, is said to have a shortage of about 210 000 workers in what’s known there as the MINT disciplines—mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology. The situation is so dismal that governments everywhere are now pouring billions of dollars each year into myriad efforts designed to boost the ranks of STEM workers. President Obama has called for government and industry to train 10 000 new U.S. engineers every year as well as 100 000 additional STEM teachers by 2020. And until those new recruits enter the workforce, tech companies like Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are lobbying to boost the number of H-1B visas—temporary immigration permits for skilled workers—from 65 000 per year to as many as 180 000. The European Union is similarly introducing the new Blue Card visa to bring in skilled workers from outside the EU. The government of India has said it needs to add 800 new universities, in part to avoid a shortfall of 1.6 million university-educated engineers by the end of the decade. And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the

opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers. To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering. In preparing this article, I went through hundreds of reports, articles, and white papers from the past six decades. There were plenty of data, but there was also an extraordinary amount of inconsistency. Who exactly is a STEM worker: somebody with a bachelor’s degree or higher in a STEM discipline? Somebody whose job requires use of a STEM subject? What about someone who manages STEM workers? And which disciplines and industries fall under the STEM umbrella? Such definitions obviously affect the counts. For example, in the United States, both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce track the number of STEM jobs, but using different metrics. According to Commerce, 7.6 million individuals worked in STEM jobs in 2010, or about 5.5 percent of the U.S. workforce. That number includes professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences as well as management. The NSF, by contrast, counts 12.4 million science and engineering jobs in the United States, including a number of areas that the Commerce Department excludes, such as health-care workers (4.3 million) and psychologists and social scientists (518 000). Such inconsistencies don’t just create confusion for numbers junkies like

me; they also make rational policy discussions difficult. Depending on your point of view, you can easily cherry-pick data to bolster your argument. Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM. The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates

who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field, according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University. The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM? Now consider the projections that suggest a STEM worker shortfall. One of the most cited in recent U.S. debates comes from the 2011 Georgetown University report mentioned above, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton of the Center on Education and the Workforce. It estimated there will be slightly more than 2.4 million STEM job openings in the United States between 2008 and 2018, with 1.1 million newly created jobs and the rest to replace workers who retire or move to non-STEM fields; they conclude that there will be roughly 277 000 STEM vacancies per year. But the Georgetown study did not fully account for the Great Recession. It projected a downturn in 2009 but then a steady increase in jobs beginning in 2010 and a return to normal by the year 2018. In fact, though, more than 370 000 science and engineering jobs in the United States were lost in 2011, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I don’t mean to single out this study for criticism; it just illustrates the difficulty of accurately predicting STEM demand and supply even a year or two out, let alone over a prolonged period. Highly competitive science- and technology-driven industries are volatile, where radical restructurings and boom-

and-bust cycles have been the norm for decades. Many STEM jobs today are also targets for outsourcing or replacement by automation. The nature of STEM work has also changed dramatically in the past several decades. In engineering, for instance, your job is no

longer linked to a company but to a funded project. Long-term employment with a single company has been replaced by a series of de facto temporary positions that can quickly end when a project ends or the market shifts. To be sure, engineers in the 1950s were sometimes laid off during recessions, but they expected to be hired back when the economy picked up. That rarely happens today. And unlike in decades past, employers seldom offer generous education and training benefits to engineers to keep them current, so out-of-work engineers find they quickly become technologically obsolete. Any of these factors can affect both short-term and longer-term demand for STEM workers, as well as for the particular skills those workers will need. The agencies that track science and engineering employment know this to be true. Buried in Chapter 3 of a 2012 NSF workforce study, for instance, you’ll find this caveat: “Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make.” So is there a shortfall of STEM workers or isn’t there? The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field. Of course, the pool of U.S. STEM workers is much bigger than that: It includes new STEM master’s and Ph.D. graduates (in 2009, around 80 000 and 25 000, respectively), STEM associate degree graduates (about 40 000), H-1B visa holders (more than 50 000), other immigrants and visa holders with STEM degrees, technical certificate holders, and non-STEM degree recipients looking to find STEM-related work. And then there’s the vast number of STEM degree holders who graduated in previous years or decades. Even in the computer and IT industry, the sector that employs the most STEM workers and

is expected to grow the most over the next 5 to 10 years, not everyone who wants a job can find one. A recent study by the

Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., found that more than a third of recent computer science graduates aren’t working in their chosen major; of that group, almost a third say the reason is that there are no jobs available. Spot shortages for certain STEM specialists do crop up. For instance, the recent explosion in data analytics has sparked

demand for data scientists in health care and retail. But the H-1B visa and similar immigrant hiring programs are meant to address such shortages. The problem is that students who are contemplating what field to specialize in can’t assume such shortages

will still exist by the time they emerge from the educational pipeline. What’s perhaps most perplexing about the claim of a STEM worker shortage is that many studies have directly contradicted it, including reports from Duke University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Rand Corp. A 2004 Rand study, for example, stated that there was no

evidence “that such shortages have existed at least since 1990, nor that they are on the horizon.” That report argued that the

best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce. In computing and IT, wages have generally been stagnant for the past decade, according to the EPI and other analyses. And over the past 30 years, according to the Georgetown report, engineers’ and engineering technicians’ wages have grown the least of all STEM wages and also more slowly than those in non-STEM fields; while STEM workers as a group have seen wages rise 33 percent and non-STEM workers’ wages rose by 23 percent, engineering salaries grew by just 18 percent. The situation is even more grim for those who get a Ph.D. in science, math, or engineering. The Georgetown study states it succinctly: “At the highest levels of educational attainment, STEM wages are not competitive.” Given all of the above, it is difficult to make a case that there has been, is, or will soon be a STEM

labor shortage. “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers.” “None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”

There’s a scientist glut now—wages are low and people can’t find jobsXie and Killewald 2012 - Yu, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, and Alexandra, Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, August, "Is American Science in Decline?", p115

One reason some scholars and observers question the common assertion about a shortage of scientists is their concern with job prospects for newly trained scientists. According to these scholars and observers, not only is there no shortage of

scientists in the United States, there is actually a surplus of scientists, largely resulting from immigration. In a 2010 article provocatively titled “The Real Science Gap,” science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly quoted economist Richard Freeman and other scholars denying that a science shortage exists. Benderly characterized the loud complaints about scientist shortages as “profound irony” at a time when “scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low- paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent

faculty positions that will never exist.”1 Instead of a shortage, opponents such as Benderly and Freeman argue that there is currently an oversupply, or indeed a glut, of scientists. According to the glut proponents, claims of a scientist shortage encourage practices likely to produce even more young scientists and attract an even greater fl ow of immigrant scientists at a time when there is already an oversupply relative to available jobs in science. In their view, the deterioration of labor market outcomes (in terms of training- related employment, job security, earnings, and autonomy) among scientists is the real deterrent to talented youths who may aspire to become scientists. Can we have too many scientists in America? The glut proponents distinguish the interests of today’s science stakeholders from those of

American science itself in the long term. An oversupply of young scientists may be good for employers, such as universities, high- tech fi rms, and se nior scientists, who can hire ju nior scientists cheaply to do labor- intensive scientifi c work today, but poor economic outcomes for young scientists send a negative signal to talented young Americans who are in a good position to choose among competing careers. Hence, as the argument goes, the lack of eco nom ical ly good jobs is the real threat to the long- term well- being of American science. Put another way, the short- term interest in lowering the labor costs of science today hurts the long- term interest of attracting scientifi cally gifted youths to science in the future, thus contributing to an eventual shortage of scientists. What is the evidence for this glut theory? The above- mentioned Benderly

article cited three specifi c points. First, wages of scientists have declined. Second, citing Science and Engineering Indicators 2008,

“three times as many Americans earn degrees in science and engineering each year as can find work in those fields.”2 Third, young scientists today need to spend many years in temporary and insecure postdoctoral positions before a very few of them become permanently employed researchers. In Chapter 4, we presented evidence that

scientists’ earnings relative to those of other highly trained professionals such as medical doctors and lawyers have declined since 1960. Even in absolute terms, scientists’ earnings have stagnated. In this chapter, we will review empirical evidence on Benderly’s last two points about scientifi c employment and postdocs. We turn fi rst to an examination of the claim that only one out of three recipients of science and engineering (S/E) degrees can fi nd work in science or engineering.

STEM in the U.S. isn’t falling behind and other factors more likely to create worker shortagesXie and Killewald 2012 - Yu, Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, and Alexandra, Associate Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, August, "Is American Science in Decline?", p129

Is American science in decline? Our answer is a qualifi ed no, based on a body of empirical evidence regarding its various aspects as presented in the preceding chapters. Taken as a whole, the evidence dispels the pessimistic myth that,

relative to its recent past since the 1960s, American science is in serious trouble. Specifi cally, we have found the following: (1) The scientist labor force in the United States has grown in size (Chapter 4). (2) Public interest in and support for science in American society have remained high (Chapter 5). (3) American high school students are doing more course work and performing better in mathematics and science than in the past, although their interest in attaining science education has shown a moderate decline (Chapter 6).

1NC—Cyberterror ImpactMinimal impact to cyberterrorism and it’s empirically denied. Friedman, ‘5 [Ben, Doctoral Candidate Pol. Sci. -- MIT, “Think Again: Homeland Security”, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3079&page=2]

“Terrorists Will Soon Mount a Crippling Cyberattack” Nonsense. Cyberattacks are costly and annoying, but they are not a threat to U.S. national security. Here, some historical perspective is useful. Alarmists warn that

cyberterrorists could cripple American industry. Yet, even during World War II, the Allied bombing campaign against Germany failed to halt industrial production. Modern economies are much more resilient. A 2002 Center for Strategic and International Studies report, for instance, notes that just because the U.S. national infrastructure uses vulnerable communications networks does not mean that the infrastructure itself is vulnerable to attack. The U.S. power grid is run by some 3,000 providers that rely on diverse information technology systems. Terrorists would have to attack a large swath of these providers to have a significant effect. That’s a

difficult task. Hackers, unlike summer heat waves and thunderstorms, have never caused a blackout. The U.S. water system is similarly robust, as is the U.S. air traffic control system. Although dams and air traffic control rely on communications networks,

hacking into these networks is not the same as flooding a valley or crashing a plane. Viruses and denial–of–service attacks are everyday occurrences, but they are not deadly. Most attacks pass unnoticed. Because terrorists aim to kill and frighten, they are unlikely to find these sorts of attacks appealing. Even if they do, they will merely join a crowd of existing teenagers and malcontents who already make cyberattacks a major business expense . The annual costs of viruses alone reportedly exceed $10 billion in the United States. A 2003 Federal Trade Commission report put the annual cost of identity theft, much of which occurs online, at more than $50 billion. Cybersecurity gurus have far more to worry about from traditional hackers than from terrorists.

2NC—Cyberterror ImpactThe threat of a cyber-attack is extremely low.

Scott Borg, January 21, 2012 “Threat of Future Cyber Attacks by Adversaries Remains Low” January 21, 2012. Scott Borg is the Director and Chief Economist of the United States Cyber Consequences Unit.

Will American adversaries respond to American improvement with serious cyber attacks? The short answer is, no. There could be some denial-of-service attacks on U.S. government Web sites, but these would probably be only a minor nuisance. And if they do happen, they might not be acknowledged or even noticed. Cyber conflicts between Hamas and Israel, beginning in 1999, and between Hezbollah and Israel, beginning in 2000, made virtually all political activists in the Middle East very aware of the potential of cyber attacks. Starting in 2001, senior al Qaeda leaders regularly said they would turn the Western superiority in information technology into a tool to bring down the West. In October 2001, an alleged al Qaeda operative, arrested in India, claimed that other members of the terrorist network had managed to get hired by Microsoft, so that they could build backdoors and bugs into the company’s new XP operating system. There is no evidence that al Qaeda operatives were actually able to do this. But after this news story was picked up by the international press, al Qaeda leaders and other ideological militants would certainly have been thinking about the possibilities. Beginning in early 2002, American intelligence officials repeatedly warned that computers belonging to al Qaeda associates had been used to access Web sites offering hacker tools and instructions. Imam Samudra, organizer of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, urged Muslim militants to start hacking into U.S. computers, both to steal money and to do damage.¶ Starting in 2002, however, government forces were very successful in hunting down potential al Qaeda cyber attack leaders. Imam Samudra was arrested in Indonesia in 2002 and eventually executed for his terrorist acts. Abu Anas al Liby was reported captured in Sudan in 2002, although American officials have since said that his whereabouts is still unknown. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and is currently being held at

Guantanamo Bay. Depriving al Qaeda of these leaders seems to have been a big setback to their cyber efforts.Cyber-attack threats are increasingly disappearing, strongly due to an increasing United States cyber-infrastructure.In March of 2005, Sir David Omand announced that British intelligence had surveillance reports indicating al Qaeda affiliates were preparing to use the internet and other electronic communication systems to cripple economic, medical, and transport networks. These attacks were either never launched or, more likely, were unsuccessful. Government forces had another round of successes in capturing al Qaeda cyber attack advocates in 2005. Younis Tsouli was arrested in the U.K. in 2005 and convicted of incitement to acts of terrorism in 2007. Mustafa Setmariam Nasar was captured in Pakistan in 2005. In 2006, many cyber attackers in the Arab world got caught up in a cyber campaign against Denmark, prompted by the Danish cartoon of Mohammed. This effort seems to have temporarily reduced other cyber attack activity originating from the Middle East. In December of 2006 and again in October of 2007, Web sites associated with al Qaeda announced the beginning of a "cyber Jihad," directed against Western banks and other important institutions. There were rumors and circumstantial signs of ambitious cyber attacks being mounted by al Qaeda during this period, but they don’t seem to have gotten very far. Since early 2008, there has been no sign of any sustained or sizeable effort on the part of al Qaeda to assemble a serious cyber-attack force. This suggests, at minimum, that they have not been recruiting cyber attackers very widely or aggressively. It is possible the al Qaeda has been developing cyber-attack teams from within its own ranks, but bringing them to a very high level

of capabilities without interaction with the wider hacker world would be difficult. Altogether, given its history and the lack of outward signs, it seems unlikely that enemies has developed significant cyber attack capabilities.

No impact to cyber war

Rid 12 (Thomas, writer for Foreign Policy, “Think Again: Cyberwar,” March, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/ articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar)

Time for a reality check: Cyberwar is still more hype than hazard. Consider the definition of an act of war: It has to be potentially violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. The cyberattacks we've seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus, simply don't meet these criteria. Take the dubious story of a Soviet pipeline explosion back in 1982, much cited by cyberwar's true believers as the most destructive cyberattack ever. The account goes like this: In June 1982, a Siberian pipeline that the CIA had virtually booby-trapped with a so-called "logic bomb" exploded in a monumental fireball that could be seen from space. The U.S. Air Force estimated the explosion at 3 kilotons, equivalent to a small nuclear device. Targeting a Soviet pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to European markets, the operation sabotaged the pipeline's control systems with software from a Canadian firm that the CIA had doctored with malicious code. No one died, according to Thomas Reed, a U.S. National Security Council aide at the time who revealed the incident in his 2004 book, At the Abyss; the only harm came to the Soviet economy. But did it really happen? After Reed's account came out, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region, where the alleged explosion supposedly took place, denied the story. There are also no media reports from 1982 that confirm such an explosion, though accidents and pipeline explosions in the Soviet Union were regularly reported in the early 1980s. Something likely did happen, but Reed's book is the only public mention of the incident and his account relied on a single document. Even after the CIA declassified a redacted version of Reed's source, a note on the so-called Farewell Dossier that describes the effort to provide the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an

explosion occurred. The available evidence on the Siberian pipeline blast is so thin that it shouldn't be counted as a proven case of a successful cyberattack. Most other commonly cited cases of cyberwar are even less remarkable. Take the attacks on Estonia in April 2007, which came in

response to the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial, the Bronze Soldier. The well-wired country found itself at the

receiving end of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that emanated from up to 85,000 hijacked computers and lasted three weeks. The attacks reached a peak on May 9, when 58 Estonian websites were attacked at once and the online services of Estonia's largest bank were taken down. "What's the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the

blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?" asked Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. Despite his analogies, the attack was no act of war. It was certainly a nuisance and an emotional strike on the country, but the bank's actual network was not even penetrated; it went down for 90 minutes one day and two hours the next. The attack was not violent, it wasn't purposefully aimed at changing Estonia's behavior, and no political entity took credit for it. The same is true for the vast majority of cyberattacks on record. Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life. No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the "wars" on obesity and cancer. Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber "war," actually do kill people. "A Digital Pearl Harbor Is Only a Matter of Time." Keep waiting. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon

Panetta delivered a stark warning last summer: "We could face a cyberattack that could be the equivalent of Pearl Harbor." Such alarmist predictions have been ricocheting inside the Beltway for the past two decades, and some scaremongers have even upped the ante by raising the alarm about a cyber 9/11. In his 2010 book, Cyber War, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke invokes the specter of nationwide power blackouts, planes falling out of the sky, trains derailing, refineries burning, pipelines exploding,

poisonous gas clouds wafting, and satellites spinning out of orbit -- events that would make the 2001 attacks pale in comparison. But the empirical record is less hair-raising, even by the standards of the most drastic example available. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command (established in 2010 and now boasting a budget of more than $3 billion), shared his worst fears in an April 2011 speech at the University of Rhode Island: "What I'm concerned about are destructive attacks," Alexander said, "those that are coming." He then invoked a remarkable accident at Russia's Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant to highlight the kind of damage a cyberattack might be able to cause. Shortly after midnight on Aug. 17, 2009, a 900-ton turbine was ripped out of its seat by a so-called "water hammer," a sudden surge in water pressure that then caused a transformer explosion. The turbine's unusually high vibrations had worn down the bolts that kept its cover in place, and an offline sensor failed to detect the malfunction. Seventy-five people died in the accident, energy prices in Russia rose, and rebuilding the plant is slated to cost $1.3 billion. Tough luck for the Russians, but here's what the head of Cyber Command didn't say: The ill-fated turbine had been malfunctioning for some time, and the plant's management was notoriously poor. On top of that, the key event that ultimately triggered the catastrophe seems to have been a fire at Bratsk power station, about 500 miles away. Because the energy supply from Bratsk dropped, authorities remotely increased the burden on the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant. The sudden spike overwhelmed the turbine, which was two months shy of reaching the end of its 30-year life cycle, sparking the catastrophe. If anything, the Sayano-Shushenskaya incident highlights how

difficult a devastating attack would be to mount. The plant's washout was an accident at the end of a complicated and unique chain of events. Anticipating such

vulnerabilities in advance is extraordinarily difficult even for insiders; creating comparable coincidences from cyberspace would be a daunting challenge at best for outsiders. If this is the most drastic incident Cyber Command

can conjure up, perhaps it's time for everyone to take a deep breath.

No cyber terrorism—tech complexity, image factor, and accident issue.

Conway 11 (Maura Conway, Lecturer in International Security in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University, 2011 (“Against Cyberterrorism: Why cyber-based terrorist attacks are unlikely to occur,” Communications of the ACM, Volume 54, Number 2, February, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via ACM Online)

Three Arguments Against Cyberterrorism In my opinion, the three most compelling arguments against cyberterrorism are: The argument of Technological Complexity ; The argument regarding 9/11 and the Image Factor ; and The argument regarding 9/11 and the Accident Issue. The first argument is treated in the academic literature; the second and third arguments are not, but ought to be. None of these are angles to which journalists appear to have devoted a lot of thought or given adequate consideration. In the speech mentioned earlier, FBI Director Mueller observed "Terrorists have shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills. And they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders, with an eye toward combining physical attacks with cyber attacks." That may very

well be true, but the argument from Technological Complexity underlines that 'wanting' to do something is quite different from having the ability to do the same. Here's why: Violent jihadis' IT knowledge is not superior. For example, in research

carried out in 2007, it was found that of a random sampling of 404 members of violent Islamist groups, 196 (48.5%) had a higher education, with information about subject areas available for 178 individuals. Of these 178, some 8 (4.5%) had trained in computing,

which means that out of the entire sample, less than 2% of the jihadis came from a computing background.3 And not even these few could be assumed to have mastery of the complex systems necessary to carry out a successful cyberterrorist attack. Real-world attacks are difficult enough. What are often viewed as relatively unsophisticated real-world attacks undertaken by highly educated individuals are routinely unsuccessful . One only has to

consider the failed car bomb attacks planned and carried out by medical doctors in central London and at Glasgow airport in June 2007. Hiring

hackers would compromise operational security. The only remaining option is to retain "outsiders" to undertake

such an attack. This is very operationally risky. It would force the terrorists to operate outside their own circles and thus leave them ripe for infiltration. Even if they successfully got in contact with "real" hackers, they would be in no position

to gauge their competency accurately; they would simply have to trust in same. This would be very risky. So on the basis of technical know-how alone cyberterror attack is not imminent, but this is not the only factor one must take into account. The events of Sept. 11, 2001 underscore that for a true terrorist event spectacular moving images are crucial . The attacks on the World Trade Center were a fantastic piece of performance violence; look back on any recent roundup of the decade and mention of 9/11 will

not just be prominent, but pictures will always be provided. The problem with respect to cyber-terrorism is that many of the attack scenarios put forward, from shutting down the electric power grid to contaminating a major water supply, fail on this account: they are unlikely to have easily captured, spectacular (live, moving) images associated with them, something we—as an audience—have been primed for by the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. The only cyberterrorism scenario that would fall into this category is interfering with air traffic control systems to crash planes, but haven't we seen that planes can much more easily be employed in spectacular "real-world" terrorism? And besides, aren't all the infrastructures just mentioned much easier and more spectacular to simply blow up? It doesn't end there, however. For me, the third argument against cyberterrorism is perhaps the most compelling; yet it is very rarely mentioned. In 2004, Howard Schmidt, former White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, remarked to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary regarding Nimda and Code Red that "we to this day don't know the source of that. It could have very easily been a terrorist."4 This observation betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and purposes of terrorism, particularly its attention-getting and communicative

functions. A terrorist attack with the potential to be hidden, portrayed as an accident, or otherwise remain unknown is unlikely to be viewed positively by any terrorist group. In fact, one of the most important aspects of the 9/11 attacks in New York from the perpetrators viewpoint was surely the fact that while the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center could have been accidental, the appearance of the second plane confirmed the incident as a terrorist attack in real time . Moreover, the crash of the first plane ensured a large audience for the second plane as it hit the second tower. Alternatively, think about the massive electric failure that took place in the northeastern U.S. in August 2003: if it was a terrorist attack—and I'm not suggesting that it was—but if it was, it would have been a spectacular failure.

Conclusion Given the high cost—not just in terms of money, but also time, commitment, and effort—and the high possibility of failure on the basis of manpower issues, timing, and complexity of a potential cyberterrorist attack, the costs appear to me to still very largely outweigh the potential publicity benefits. The publicity aspect is crucial for potential perpetrators of terrorism and so the possibility that an attack may be apprehended or portrayed as an accident, which would be highly likely with regard to cyberterrorism, is detrimental. Add the lack of spectacular moving images and it is my belief that

cyberterrorism, regardless of what you may read in newspapers, see on television, or obtain via other media sources, is not in our near future. So why then the persistent treatment of cyberterrorism on the part of journalists? Well, in

this instance, science fiction-type fears appear to trump rational calculation almost every time. And I haven't even begun to discuss how the media discourse has clearly influenced the pronouncements of policymakers.

1NC—Space ImpactNo arms racesDolman 12 (Everett, PhD and Professor of Comparative Military Studies @ US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies and Recipient of Central Intelligence’s Outstanding Intelligence Analyst Award, “ New Frontiers, Old Realities,” Spring, http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/2012/spring/dolman.pdf)

And in such circumstances, the United States certainly would respond. Conversely, if the U nited States were to weaponize space, it is not at all sure that any other state or group of states would find it rational to counter in kind. The entry cost to

provide the necessary infrastructure is still too high—hundreds of billions of dollars, at minimum. The years of investment needed to achieve a comparable counterforce capability—essentially from scratch—would provide more than ample time for the U nited States to entrench itself in space and readily counter preliminary efforts to displace it. The tremendous effort in

time and resources would be worse than wasted. Most states, if not all, would opt not to counter US deployments directly. They

might oppose American interests with asymmetric balancing, depending on how aggressively it uses its new power, but the likelihood of a hemorrhaging arms race in space should the United States deploy weapons first—at least for the next few years—is remote . This

reasoning does not dispute the fact that US deployment of weapons in outer space would represent the addition of a potent new

military capacity, one that would assist in extending the current period of American hegemony well into the future. Clearly this would be threatening, and America must expect severe condemnation and increased competition in peripheral areas. But such an outcome is less threatening than another, particularly illiberal authoritarian state doing so. Although there is obvious opposition to the current international

balance of power, the majority of states seem to regard it as at least tolerable. A continuation of the status quo is thus minimally acceptable, even to states working toward its demise.

1NC—Econ ImpactEven massive economic decline has zero chance of war Jervis 11

Robert, Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, December 2011, “Force in Our Times,” Survival, Vol. 25, No. 4, p. 403-425Even if war is still seen as evil, the security community could be dissolved if severe conflicts of interest were to arise. Could the more peaceful world generate new interests that would

bring the members of the community into sharp disputes? 45 A zero-sum sense of status would be one example, perhaps linked to a steep rise in nationalism. More likely would be a worsening of the current economic difficulties, which could itself produce greater nationalism, undermine democracy and bring back old-fashioned beggar-my-neighbor economic policies. While these dangers are real, it is hard to believe that the conflicts could be great enough to lead the members of the community to contemplate fighting each other . It is not so much that economic interdependence has

proceeded to the point where it could not be reversed – states that were more internally interdependent than anything seen internationally have fought bloody civil wars.

Rather it is that even if the more extreme versions of free trade and economic liberalism become discredited , it is hard to see how without building on a preexisting high level of political conflict leaders and mass opinion would come to believe that their countries could prosper by impoverishing or even attacking others. Is it possible that

problems will not only become severe, but that people will entertain the thought that they have to be solved by war? While a pessimist could note that this argument does not appear as outlandish as it did before the financial crisis, an optimist could reply (correctly, in my view) that the very fact that we have seen such a sharp economic down-turn without

anyone suggesting that force of arms is the solution shows that even if bad times bring about greater economic conflict , it will not make war thinkable .

2NC—Econ Impact Countries are too stable or it’s empirically deniedBazzi ‘11

(et al; Samuel - UCSD economics department - “Economic Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices”, November, http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4, ldg)

VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The state is not a prize?—Warlord politics and the state prize logic

lie at the center of the most influential models of conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest cases: fragile and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues. Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves (Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010) we regard the state prize

logic of war with skepticism.17 Our main political economy models may need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more abundant, and plausibly exogenous

independent variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-varying variables , like rainfall and foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the absence of evidence seriously. Do resource revenues drive state capacity?—State prize models assume that rising revenues raise the value of the capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw that a growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our findings are partly consistent with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the extractive commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large, consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel one another out. Opportunity cost: Victory by default?—Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is consistent with opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldn’t mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with psychological theories of stress and aggression (Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and anomie (Merton 1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be

needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other reasons for a null result.—Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks have no discernible effect on new conflict onsets , but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally believed . One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still conflict onset. In

poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A general problem of publication

bias? More generally, these findings should heighten our concern with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a number of published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly, alternative measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al.

2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a “file drawer problem” (Rosenthal 1979). Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results; but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a

robust result, it is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower threshold of evidence for initially significant results than ambiguous ones.20

2008 disproves conflict Barnett, ‘9

(Thomas P.M. columnist for World Politics Review, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis,” World Politics Review, 8/252009, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx, 9-26-11, zml)

So, to sum up: No significant uptick in mass violence or unrest (remember the smattering of urban riots last year in places

like Greece, Moldova and Latvia?); The usual frequency maintained in civil conflicts (in all the usual places);

Not a single state-on-state war directly caused (and no great-power-on-great-power crises even triggered); No great improvement or disruption in great-power cooperation regarding the emergence of new nuclear powers (despite all that diplomacy); A modest scaling back of international policing efforts by the system's

acknowledged Leviathan power (inevitable given the strain); and No serious efforts by any rising great power to challenge that Leviathan or supplant its role. (The worst things we can cite are Moscow's occasional deployments of strategic assets to the Western hemisphere and its weak efforts to outbid the United States on basing rights in Kyrgyzstan; but the best include China and India stepping up their aid and investments in Afghanistan and Iraq.) Sure, we've finally seen global defense spending surpass the previous world record set in the late 1980s, but even that's likely to wane given the stress on public budgets created by all this unprecedented "stimulus" spending. If

anything, the friendly cooperation on such stimulus packaging was the most notable great-power dynamic caused by the crisis. Can we say that the world has suffered a distinct shift to political radicalism as a result of the economic crisis? Indeed, no. The world's major economies remain governed by center-left or center-right political factions that remain decidedly friendly to both markets and trade. In the short run, there were attempts across the

board to insulate economies from immediate damage (in effect, as much protectionism as allowed under current trade rules), but there was no great slide into "trade wars." Instead, the World Trade Organization is functioning as it was designed to function, and

regional efforts toward free-trade agreements have not slowed. Can we say Islamic radicalism was inflamed by the economic crisis?

If it was, that shift was clearly overwhelmed by the Islamic world's growing disenchantment with the brutality

displayed by violent extremist groups such as al-Qaida. And looking forward, austere economic times are just as likely to breed

connecting evangelicalism as disconnecting fundamentalism. At the end of the day, the economic crisis did not prove to be sufficiently frightening to provoke major economies into establishing global regulatory schemes , even as it has sparked a spirited -- and much needed, as I argued last week -- discussion of the continuing viability of the U.S.

dollar as the world's primary reserve currency. Naturally, plenty of experts and pundits have attached great significance to this debate, seeing in it the beginning of "economic warfare" and the like between "fading" America and "rising" China. And yet, in a world of globally integrated production chains and interconnected

financial markets , such "diverging interests" hardly constitute signposts for wars up ahead. Frankly, I don't welcome a world in which America's fiscal profligacy goes undisciplined, so bring it on -- please! Add it all up and it's fair to say that

this global financial crisis has proven the great resilience of America's post-World War II international liberal trade order. Do I expect to read any analyses along those lines in the blogosphere any time soon?

Absolutely not. I expect the fantastic fear-mongering to proceed apace. That's what the Internet is for.

1NC—Heg ImpactU.S. primacy isn’t key to peace – their data is flawed Preble 10 – Christopher Preble, director of Foreign Policy Studies at the CATO Institute, August 3, 2010, “U.S. Military Power: Preeminence for What Purpose?,” online: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/u-s-military-power-preeminence-for-what-purpose/

Most in Washington still embraces the notion that America is, and forever will be, the world’s indispensable nation. Some scholars, however,

questioned the logic of hegemonic stability theory from the very beginning. A number continue to do so today. They advance

arguments diametrically at odds with the primacist consensus. Trade routes need not be policed by a single dominant power ;

the international economy is complex and resilient . Supply disruptions are likely to be temporary, and the costs of mitigating

their effects should be borne by those who stand to lose — or gain — the most. Islamic extremists are scary, but hardly comparable to the threat posed by a globe-straddling Soviet Union armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. It is frankly absurd that we spend more today to fight

Osama bin Laden and his tiny band of murderous thugs than we spent to face down Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. Many factors have contributed to the dramatic decline in the number of wars between nation-states; it is unrealistic to expect that a new

spasm of global conflict would erupt if the U nited States were to modestly refocus its efforts, draw down its military power , and call on other countries to play a larger role in their own defense, and in the security of their respective

regions. But while there are credible alternatives to the United States serving in its current dual role as world policeman / armed social worker , the foreign policy establishment in Washington has no interest in exploring them. The people here have grown accustomed to living at the center of the earth, and indeed, of the universe. The tangible benefits of all this military spending flow disproportionately to this tiny corner of the United States while the schlubs in fly-over country pick up the tab.

2NC—Heg ImpactNo data suggests a causal link between unipolarity and peace Fettweis 10 – Christopher Fettweis, Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, 2010, Dangerous Times? The International Politics of Great Power Peace, p. 172-174

The primary attack on restraint, or justification for internationalism, posits that if the United S tates were to withdraw from the world, a variety of ills would sweep over key regions and eventually pose threats to U.S. security and/or prosperity. These problems might take three forms (besides the obvious, if remarkably unlikely, direct threats to the homeland): generalized chaos, hostile imbalances in Eurasia, and/or failed states. Historian Arthur Schlesinger was typical when he worried that restraint would mean "a chaotic, violent, and ever more dangerous planet."69 All of these concerns either implicitly or explicitly assume that the presence of the United States is the primary reason for international stability, and if that presence were withdrawn chaos would ensue. In other words, they depend upon hegemonic-stability logic. Simply stated, the hegemonic stability theory proposes that international peace is only possible when there is one country strong enough to make and enforce a set of rules. At the height of Pax Romana between 27 BC and 180 AD, for example, Rome was able to bring unprecedented peace and security to the Mediterranean. The Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century brought a level of stability to the high seas. Perhaps the current era is peaceful because the United States has established a de facto Pax Americana where no power is strong enough to challenge its dominance, and because it has established a set of rules that are

generally in the interests of all countries to follow. Without a benevolent hegemon, some strategists fear, instability may break out around the globe.70 Unchecked conflicts could cause humanitarian disaster and, in today's interconnected world, economic turmoil that would ripple throughout global financial markets. If the United States were to abandon its commitments abroad, argued Art, the world would "become a more dangerous place" and, sooner or later, that would "redound to Americas detriment."71 If the massive spending that the United States engages in actually provides stability in the international political and economic systems, then

perhaps internationalism is worthwhile. There are good theoretical and empirical reasons , however , to believe that

U.S hegemony is not the primary cause of the current era of stability . First of all, the hegemonic-stability argument overstates the role that the United States plays in the system . No country is strong enough to police the world on its own. The only way there can be stability in the community of great powers is if self-policing occurs , if states have decided that their interests are served by peace. If no pacific normative shift had occurred among the great powers that was filtering down through the system, then no amount of international constabulary work by the United States could maintain stability. Likewise, if it is true that such a shift has occurred, then most of what the hegemon spends to bring stability would be wasted . The 5 percent of the worlds population that live in the United States simply could not force peace upon an unwilling 95. At the risk of beating the

metaphor to death, the United States maybe patrolling a neighborhood that has already rid itself of crime.

Stability and unipolarity may be simply coincidental . In order for U.S. hegemony to be the reason for global stability, the rest of the world would have to expect reward for good behavior and fear punishment for bad. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not always proven to be especially eager to engage in humanitarian interventions abroad. Even rather incontrovertible evidence of genocide has not been sufficient to

inspire action. Hegemonic stability can only take credit for influencing those decisions that would have ended in war without the presence , whether physical or psychological, of the United S tates. Ethiopia and Eritrea are

hardly the only states that could go to war without the slightest threat of U.S. intervention. Since most of the world today is free to fight without U.S. involvement , something else must be at work. Stability exists in many places

where no hegemony is present . Second, the limited empirical evidence we have suggests that there is little connection between the relative level of U.S. activism and international stability . During the 1990s the United States cut back on its defense spending fairly substantially. By 1998 the United States was spending $100 billion less on defense in real terms than it had in I990.72 To internationalists, defense hawks, and other believers in hegemonic stability, this irresponsible "peace dividend" endangered both national and global security. "No serious analyst of American military capabilities," argued Kristol and Kagan,

"doubts that the defense budget has been cut much too far to meet America's responsibilities to itself and to world peace."7' If the pacific trends were due not to U.S. hegemony but a strengthening norm against interstate war, however, one would not have expected an increase in global instability and violence.

Unipolarity causes policy failure – they can’t access any impact Glaser 11

Charles L. professor in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University and the director of the Elliott School’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, June 2011, “Why unipolarity doesn’t matter (much),” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 2, p. 135-147

A still different type of argument holds that unipolar powers tend to adopt expanded interests and associated goals that unipolarity then enables them to achieve. To the extent that these goals are actually in the unipole’s true interest, unipolarity is good for the unipole. In broad terms, this argument follows the claim that states’ interests and goals grow with their power. 19 These expanded goals can be attributed to

three different types of factors. 20 The first is a permissive structure, which allows the state to pursue more ambitious goals. The state’s interests do not change, but its increased ability to pursue them results in a redefinition of its goals. A state could have goals that were previously unachievable at acceptable cost; by lowering the costs, unipolarity places these goals within reach, enabling the state to make itself better off. A

unipole’s desire for a higher degree of security can be an example of this type of expanded goal, reflecting the means that it can wield. Second, the state can acquire new interests, which are generated by the unipole’s greater territorial and institutional reach. For example, a state that controls more territory may face new threats and, as a result, conclude that it needs to control still more territory, acquire still

more power, and/or restructure international institutions to further protect its interests. Third, the unipole’s goals can be influenced by

what is commonly described as human nature and by psychology. A unipolar state will be inclined to lose track of how secure it is and consequently pursue inappropriate policies that are designed to increase its security but turn out to be too costly and/or to have a high probability of backfiring. One variant of this type of

argument expects unipolar powers to conclude that they need to spread their type of governance or political ideology to be secure. These dangers can be reinforced by a tendency for a unipolar power to see its new interests, which are optional,

as necessary ones. The first two types of expanded interests and goals can make the unipole better off. The question here is whether the interests the United States might find within its reach due to its unipolar position are very valuable . With

respect to security, the answer is ‘no’ . For the reasons summarized above, the United States can be very secure in bipolarity,

and unipolarity is important only in an extreme and unlikely case. Other US goals , for example, spreading democracy and free markets, do not depend on unipolarity , at least not its military dimension. Instead, whether these liberal systems spread will depend most heavily on their own effectiveness. Regarding the down side, there does not appear to be an overwhelming reason that the United States cannot avoid the dangers of unipolar overreach. The Bush administration certainly proved itself vulnerable to these dangers and the United States is continuing to pay for its flawed judgments. Arguably, strands of overreach can be traced back to the Clinton administration’s emphasis on democratic enlargement, although the means that it chose were much more in line with US interests. 21 And the Obama administration’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan may well be an example of striving for too much security. Nevertheless, none of the basic arguments about unipolarity explain why these errors are unavoidable. The overreach claim is more an observation about the past than a well-supported prediction about the future. We do not have strong reasons for concluding that the United States will be unable to benefit from analyses of its grand strategy options, learning to both appreciate how very secure it is and at the

same time to respect the limits of its power. In sum, then, under current conditions, unipolarity does little to enable the U nited States to increase its security . Given the limited benefits of unipolarity and the not insignificant dangers of unipolar overreach , the United States will have to choose its policies wisely if it is going to be better off in a unipolar world than a bipolar one.

US leadership solves nothingWalt 16

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University, Foreign Policy, June 9, 2016, “Why Is America’s Foreign Policy Still Punching Above Its Weight?”, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/09/why-is-americas-foreign-policy-still-punching-above-its-weight/

These days, both proponents and critics of America’s omnipresent role in the world tend to portray U.S. foreign policy as the single most important factor driving world affairs . For defenders of global activism, active U.S. engagement (including a willingness to use military force in a wide variety of situations) is the source of most of the positive developments that have occurred over the past 50 years and remains critical to preserving a “liberal” world order. By contrast, critics of U.S. foreign policy both at home and abroad tend to blame “U.S. imperialism,” the “Great Satan,” or mendacious Beltway bungling for a host of evil actions or adverse global trends and believe the world will continue to deteriorate unless the United States mends its evil ways.

Both sides of this debate are wrong. To be sure, the United States is still the single most influential actor on the world stage. Although its population is only about 5 percent of humankind, the United States produces roughly 20 to 25 percent of gross world product and remains the only country with global military capabilities. It has security partnerships all over the world, considerable influence in many international organizations, and it casts a large cultural shadow.

The United States, in short, is hardly the “pitiful, helpless giant” that Richard Nixon once feared it would become. At the same time, it deserves neither all of the credit nor all of the blame for the current state of world politics . Let’s unpack these competing claims and see where each one goes astray.

For defenders of the U.S.-led “liberal world order,” America’s global role is the source of (almost) All Good Things. As Samuel P. Huntington put it more than 20 years ago, U.S. primacy is “central to the future of freedom, democracy, open economies, and international order in the world.” Or as Politico’s Michael Hirsh once wrote (possibly after one too many espressos), “the role played by the United States is the greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history.”

Hyperbole aside, that self-congratulatory worldview is almost a truism within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. In this version of recent world events, America’s “Greatest Generation” defeated fascism in World War II and then went on to found the United Nations, lead the global campaign for human rights, spread democracy far and wide, and create and guide the key economic institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc.) that have produced six decades of (mostly) steady economic growth. By leading alliances in Europe and Asia and deploying its military force far and wide, the United States has also ensured six decades of great power peace. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright captured this narrative perfectly when she famously said the United States was the “indispensable nation” that sees further than others do, and all three post-Cold War presidents embraced and endorsed that view as well.

There’s more than a grain of truth in some of these claims, but defenders of American “ leadership ” badly overstate their case . Yes, we’ve seen 60- plus years without a direct clash between major powers , but the nuclear revolution probably has as much to do with the reluctance of great powers to fight each other as with the global military presence of the U nited S tates. Moreover, as John Mueller has argued, the past few decades of peace may also be due to cultural and attitudinal changes occasioned by the destruction and brutality of the two world wars . Nor should we forget Europe’s own efforts to build a supranational organization — beginning with the original European Coal and Steel Community and culminating in the E uropean Union — that was explicitly intended to prevent a return to the bloodlettings of the past.

The point is that we do not really know why the past 60 years have been more peaceful than the decades that preceded them, but U.S. leadership was probably only one factor among several .

Furthermore , this peaceful “world order” was actually quite limited in scope and hardly covered the entire globe. As American historian Andrew Bacevich makes clear, the pacifying effects of U.S. leadership did not prevent costly wars in Korea or Indochina , did not prevent India and Pakistan from fighting in 1965 or 1971 , and did not stop millions of Africans from dying in recurring civil and international wars . The United States did help end the brief Middle East wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973, but it did little to prevent them from breaking out and didn’t get serious about genuine peace efforts until it helped broker the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in the 1970s. Washington did nothing to stop the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), and U.S. leaders actively fueled conflicts in Central America and Southern Africa when they seemed to serve broader strategic purposes. U.S. aid to the Afghan mujahideen may have helped bring the Soviet Union down, but it also helped wreck Afghanistan and gave birth to the Taliban and al

Qaeda. More recently, American “leadership” has produced failed states or worse in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. As an agent for peace , in short, the United S tates has a decidedly mixed record.

We should be equally cautious in crediting America with the past six decades of economic growth. To be sure, the original Bretton Woods institutions performed reasonably well in their day, and U.S. support for trade liberalization helped reduce global tariffs and fueled the post-

World War II recoveries. But U.S. “ leadership” of the world economy was hardly an unbroken string of successes : U.S. Middle East policy helped cause the punishing oil crises of the 1970s, and the 2008 financial crisis from which the world economy is still recovering began right here in the U nited S tates.

My point is not that the U.S. role in the world has been consistently negative; the point is that those who believe U.S. leadership is the primary barrier to a return to anarchy and barbarism are overstating America’s positive contributions . It is far from obvious, for example, that the United States needs to garrison the world in order to maintain a healthy U.S.

economy, because it is free to trade and invest wherever profitable opportunities arise. Or as Dan Drezner has noted: “The economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated in policy and scholarly circles.”

But if defenders of American hegemony give U.S. leadership too much credit, some critics of U.S. foreign policy make the opposite error. I’m often critical of U.S. foreign policy — and especially its overreliance on military force, indifference to the deaths it causes, self-righteous hypocrisy, and refusal to hold officials accountable — but my criticisms pale in comparison to those offered up by the extreme left and extreme right and by many foreign opponents. Blaming all the world’s ills on the United States is not merely factually wrong; it lets the real perpetrators off the hook.

For example, though it is clear that unthinking U.S. support has sometimes enabled allies to misbehave in various ways, these states acted as they did for their own reasons and not because they were following Washington’s orders. The United States did not want Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons or back the Taliban, for example, and it does not want Israel to keep expanding settlements or pummeling Gaza for no good reason. Nor did Washington want Saudi Arabia to spend millions of dollars spreading Wahhabi ideology or want other key allies to sign up for China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. U.S. leaders did not do all they could to stop these (and other) activities, but even a global superpower cannot control everything its allies do.

Similarly, the United States did not launch the uprisings against Muammar al-Qaddafi or Bashar al-Assad, did not start the long civil conflict in Yemen, and cannot be blamed for the Sunni-Shiite divide that is now polarizing the Middle East. The financial meltdown on Wall Street may have triggered the euro crisis, but the United States is not responsible for the foolish decision to create the euro in the first place, and Washington didn’t tell the Greek government to cook its books or tell German banks to make foolish loans. The Turkish, Polish, and Hungarian governments aren’t drifting toward authoritarianism today because Washington encouraged them, and they will almost certainly chart their own course no matter what U.S. leaders advise.

Instead of seeing the United States as all-powerful and either uniquely good or evil, therefore, it makes more sense to see it as pretty much like most past great powers. It has done some good things , mostly out of self-interest but occasionally for the benefit of others as well. It has made some pretty horrific blunders , and these actions had significant repercussions. It has done bad things for the usual reasons — overconfidence, ignorance, excessive idealism, etc. — and, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “just because it could.”

Intent Doctrine Advantage

1NC—Intent DoctrineFHA decision expanded intent standardHowe 2015 - Reporter at SCOTUSBLOG, June 25, "Disparate-impact claims survive challenge: In Plain English", http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/06/disparate-impact-claims-survive-challenge-in-plain-english/

Civil rights groups are breathing a little easier today, after the Court’s ruling in an important housing discrimination case. The question before the Court was whether claims brought under the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits housing

discrimination “because of” race, can be based on an allegation that a law or practice has a “disparate impact” – that

is, it has a discriminatory effect, even if it wasn’t motivated by an intent to discriminate. The distinction matters because it’s rare

for a lawmaker, landlord, or developer to admit that a law or practice is intended to be discriminatory; civil rights groups believe that disparate-impact claims are an important tool to ferret out more subtle examples of housing discrimination. The Court had agreed to review this question on two earlier occasions, but those cases settled before the Justices could

weigh in. Today, however, the Court did rule on the question, and it agreed with the federal government and civil rights

groups that the Fair Housing Act does allow disparate-impact claims – subject, however, to some potentially important restrictions. Let’s talk about the decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project in Plain English. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote today’s opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer,

Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. The Court drew parallels between the Fair Housing Act and two other antidiscrimination

statutes, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. It reasoned that it had interpreted both of those laws as allowing causes of action based on disparate impact when the text of the laws refers “to the consequences of actions” – that is, their effect – and such an interpretation would be consistent with the purpose of the law. And even if Congress didn’t use the exact same words in the FHA that it used in Title VII and the ADEA, the Court explained, the FHA nonetheless meets both of those criteria. Moreover, just like Title VII and the ADEA, interpreting the FHA to allow disparate-impact claims is also consistent with its purpose: eliminating discriminatory housing practices. Further evidence that Congress intended to make disparate-impact claims available under the FHA can also be found, the Court emphasized, in Congress’s 1988 amendments to the FHA. With all nine courts of appeals that had considered the question at that point having

agreed that disparate-impact claims are available under the FHA, Congress’s failure to make any changes to bar disparate-impact claims effectively amounts to an endorsement of the courts’ interpretation. Indeed, the amendments that Congress did make carved out exemptions from disparate-impact liability – exemptions that would not be necessary if Congress believed that the FHA did not allow disparate-impact claims.

Disparate impact claims cause confusion and rely on a judge’s specific interpretation—turns solvencyEissenstat 2016 - Katie, Oklahoma Law Review, Volume 68, Number 3, http://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=olr

Specifically, plaintiffs establishing prima facie claims of disparate impact discrimination rely on statistical disparities as key evidence.7 Unlike disparate treatment, disparate impact theory is a method of proving discrimination based on a

discriminatory policy or practice rather than proof of discriminatory motive. Because no clear test exists to determine when disparate impact has occurred, courts choose between two predominant methods: the four-fifths rule and statistical

significance tests.8 Unfortunately, these methods often produce opposite results.9 The conflicting nature of the tests allows judges to choose whichever test supports their subjective opinion and equalizing view of the claim—leading to a skewed sense of justice and confusion among the circuits.10 The First Circuit’s decision in Jones v. City of Boston creates further confusion in the already murky waters of disparate impact discrimination by rejecting federal employment agency guidelines. These guidelines require disparities sufficient to establish a prima facie case of disparate impact discrimination to be “practically significant.”11 If “practically significant,” the disparity is “sufficiently important substantively for the court to be concerned.”12 The court in Jones held a 1% difference in hair follicle drug testing between white and black police officers sufficiently established a prima facie case of disparate impact discrimination.13 This decision—in conjunction with recent employment discrimination cases— detrimentally impacts employers. Companies may now have to invest extensive time and resources to determine whether their employment practices and procedures create even small deviations among hiring practices.

Disparate impact analysis cause economic collapse and reentrench discriminationSandler and Jensen 2014 - Andrew, Chairman and Executive Partner of BuckleySandler LLP and Kirk, partner in the firm's D.C. office, February, "Disparate Impact in Fair Lending: A Theory without a Basis & the Law of Unintended Consequences", https://buckleysandler.com/uploads/1082/doc/Disparate_Impact_in_Fair_Lending.pdf

The Supreme Court’s repeated decision to rule on the validity of the disparate impact doctrine in the FHA context reflects the serious public policy concerns raised by continued application of the theory in certain housing contexts,

particularly from a lending perspective. Relying on disparate impact to establish discrimination in lending poses a real threat to market expansion and economic stability. Further, continued application of the theory could actually facilitate and institutionalize discriminatory practices and abate consumer protection efforts. Stifled Marketplace

The mortgage-lending market is sustained and advanced through innovation and growth. Exposing lenders to potential liability for lending activities based only on superficial statistical analysis showing a differential impact on a particular group without meaningful controls for objective lending qualifications hinders lenders’ ability to create new products and extend business operations, thereby stifling market expansion. Nontraditional mortgage products have

afforded access to mortgage financing to a wide spectrum of consumers that do not desire or otherwise qualify for a

traditional mortgage. However, even if policies associated with such products are applied neutrally to all consumers, a lender may be forced to stop offering the product in order to equalize the effects of their lending activities on minority and

nonminority borrowers. For example, certain loan products may be optimal for a limited subset of borrowers. If minorities are not proportionately represented in that subset of borrowers, offering the products—even on a

demonstrably fair and nondiscriminatory basis to all qualified borrowers—could increase the lender’s exposure to liability, despite the complete absence of discriminatory intent or conduct, solely because proportionately more nonminority borrowers qualify for the

product. Faced with the possibility of accusations of discriminatory lending, many lenders will choose not to offer such products, thereby depriving qualified borrowers, minority and nonminority alike, of good credit alternatives. An outcome-driven approach to assessing discrimination likewise creates unreasonable risk for lenders that might otherwise seek to expand into new markets. For example,

lending opportunities might be more limited in census tracts with greater minority populations, like urban areas, which increases lender exposure to accusations of redlining discrimination. A lender otherwise interested in growing its lending operations in an urban area with pronounced credit needs may thus choose not to do so because of the significant risk, effectively depriving all potential

borrowers in the community of the benefits of an additional loan source. Economic Instability Application of the disparate impact theory in fair lending matters also threatens to undermine traditional underwriting practices. The approach employed to determine whether discretionary loan pricing resulted in discriminatory impact focuses only on statistical outcomes, without regard

to the factors most reliable in predicting default, such as credit scores, loan-to-value ratios, and debt-to-income ratios. Reducing emphasis on those factors may lead lenders to place less emphasis on traditional underwriting criteria in an effort to

equally apportion mortgages among all groups of borrowers and avoid accusations of discrimination, notwithstanding that each group may not have precisely equal credit qualifications. For example, if a minority group is statistically less likely to qualify for a mortgage product or particular loan terms under a neutral policy, the lender would be forced to either stand by the policy and risk being accused of discrimination under a disparate impact statistical analysis or ease its underwriting standards to achieve equivalent market share among minority

and nonminority borrowers. The substantial financial and reputational costs associated with discrimination allegations could incentivize the latter option. If that choice is made, the likelihood of loan defaults with negative implications for borrowers and neighborhoods increase. Consumer Protection Risks Discretionary pricing, when used appropriately, protects mortgage lenders and borrowers alike. A traditional mortgage is not a realistic option for a large segment of consumers. Through market innovation, nontraditional mortgage products were created that afford high-risk consumers the opportunity to obtain

home loans. However, as discussed previously, continued use of the disparate impact theory could make lenders reluctant to offer mortgage products tailored to a particular type of borrower or set of circumstances, which

by their nature invite differential application and thereby a potential disproportionate effect. The impact of such a market change would be felt most substantially by high-risk consumers who rely on traditional products for access to credit. If fear of liability discourages lenders from creating and offering products suitable for such borrowers, a large segment of consumers could be effectively

denied access to responsible loan products. If this occurs other less reputable lenders will step in and fill the vacuum with loan products bearing far more problematic terms and costs. Thus, well-intentioned but misguided efforts to prevent

discrimination may in effect increase minority borrowers’ exposure to predatory lending practices. Facilitate

Discriminatory Practices Lastly, focus on equal ends rather than equal opportunity may actually facilitate discrimination by rendering quotas and preferential treatment as the only cost-effective means for limiting exposure to disparate impact liability. The Supreme Court has acknowledged that “[i]f quotas and preferential treatment become the only cost-effective means of avoiding expensive liability, such measures will be widely adopted.” 73 Further, the Supreme Court cautioned in the Title VII context that regulations which, as applied, give employers “little choice” but to adopt race-conscious measures can violate the Constitution.74

2NC—Expands Federal PowerIntent focus causes federal overreachClegg 2015 - Roger, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and J.D. form Yale Law School, September, Silver Linings Playbook: "Disparate Impact" and the Fair Housing Act", https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/supreme-court-review/2015/9/2015-supreme-court-review-chapter-6.pdf

The disparate-impact approach to civil rights enforcement is untenable as a matter of law and policy. It second-guesses

nondiscriminatory selection criteria and encourages race-based decisionmaking. Those are disturbing abuses of federal power at the expense of liberty and limited federal government. As a general matter, the presumption should be that the decisions of private, state, and local actors are no business of the federal government; an exception can be made in extraordinary circumstances of, for example, racial discrimination, but the disparate-impact approach is used precisely when racial discrimination has not been shown. And the problem is compounded here since it will be the federal government that is encouraging racial discrimination. While Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project unfortunately now allows this approach under the Fair Housing Act, it recognizes the problems with it, leaving the door open to future litigation that limits this approach under that statute, as well as to litigation that challenges or limits the approach under other statutes. And instead of leaving this matter to the courts and the uncertain course of future litigation, Congress should act to preclude or at least limit the disparate-impact approach.

Expands federal overreachClegg 2015 - Roger, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and J.D. form Yale Law School, September, Silver Linings Playbook: "Disparate Impact" and the Fair Housing Act", https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/supreme-court-review/2015/9/2015-supreme-court-review-chapter-6.pdf

During the course of this litigation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) did conveniently mint new regulations that endorse the disparate-impact approach, and the government argued that the Court should defer to the agency’s interpretation

of the statute. But, as Justice Alito’s dissent discusses, there are very good reasons why these regulations are entitled to little deference. It is interesting, by the way, that the majority opinion does not give such deference as a reason for its decision. First and foremost, the meaning of the statute is clear: only actual discrimination—“disparate treatment”—is banned. Further, the Fair Housing Act has been on the books since 1968, and during that time the executive branch has sometimes endorsed the disparate impact approach and sometimes not. For example, President Reagan explicitly rejected the approach in signing the 1988 amendments to the Act,53 and his Justice Department argued against it in a brief to the Supreme Court; the Bushes didn’t think much of it, either. The Obama administration, on the other hand, was attempting to game the system here; it orchestrated a rather shady deal with the City of St. Paul to get it to withdraw an earlier term’s petition for writ of certiorari that had been granted (the case had been fully briefed and was about to be argued), and meanwhile worked on promulgating new regulations. “We were afraid we might lose disparate impact in the Supreme Court because there wasn’t a regulation,” said Sara Pratt, a HUD

official.54 In any event, the principle of deference is trumped in this case by the “constitutional-doubt canon,” as

Justice Scalia calls this long honored principle in his book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.55 The Supreme Court has repeatedly acknowledged—and that includes all nine justices in this case—that a statute mandating the disparate-impact approach also can encourage race-conscious decisionmaking; this of course raises serious constitutional issues. (Note that the racial classifications that the approach would require in the FHA are more constitutionally

problematic than, say, the age classifications that the Court has accepted under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.) The approach raises further constitutional problems here by altering the state-federal balance in far-reaching ways .56 For

example, it renders race-neutral state rules—such as rules for preserving order in public-housing projects—suspect. The approach will also result in federal micromanagement of insurance practices, which is at odds with the McCarran-Ferguson Act—a point emphasized in a recent federal district court decision striking down the HUD regulations.57

2NC—FHA Ruling SolvesThe FHA ruling severely restricted the intent standardChappell 2015 - Bill, NPR Staff, June 25, "In Fair Housing Act Case, Supreme Court Backs 'Disparate Impact' Claims", http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/25/417433460/in-fair-housing-act-case-supreme-court-backs-disparate-impact-claims

Civil rights groups won a victory Thursday, as the Supreme Court ruled that claims of racial discrimination in

housing cases shouldn't be limited by questions of intent. The court affirmed a Court of Appeals decision in a case in

which a nonprofit group, the Inclusive Communities Project, said that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs

had contributed to "segregated housing patterns by allocating too many tax credits to housing in predominantly black inner-city

areas and too few in predominantly white suburban neighborhoods." The 5-4 ruling endorses the notion of citing disparate impact in housing cases, meaning that statistics and other evidence can be used to show decisions and practices have discriminatory effects — without proving that they're the result of discriminatory intentions. "Justice Anthony Kennedy surprised many legal experts by siding with the court's four liberals," NPR's Carrie Johnson reports. "Business groups had long sought to limit lawsuits over the 1968 Fair Housing Act." Reacting to the ruling, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says, "While our nation has made tremendous progress since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, disparate impact claims remain an all-too-necessary mechanism for rooting out discrimination in housing and lending." The majority wrote, "Recognition of disparate-impact claims is consistent with the FHA's central purpose" of ending discriminatory practices in housing. The justices wrote, "These unlawful practices include zoning laws and other housing restrictions that function unfairly to exclude minorities from certain neighborhoods without any sufficient justification." But the dissenting justices say that Thursday's ruling creates a legal liability that wasn't intended in the original 1968 law. The ruling brings clarity to an issue that had lingered in doubt: Are plaintiffs in housing discrimination cases required to prove an intent to discriminate? Or is it enough for them to show that some practices have an outsized negative effect on minorities? Two previous high-profile cases had been settled, as neither side was willing to risk a defeat in the Supreme Court. The court decided the case 5-4; Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion, as did Justice Samuel Alito, whose opinion was joined by Thomas, Chief John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia. "By any measure, the Court today makes a serious mistake," Alito wrote in his dissent, in which he said the majority opinion went too far in applying the Fair Housing law. Alito said Congress intended to cover disparate treatment — not claims of disparate impact. Adopted in 1968, the Fair Housing Act says that it is illegal to "refuse to sell or rent... or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race." He wrote, "The Court acknowledges the risk that disparate impact may be used to 'perpetuate race-based considerations rather than move beyond them.'" In a shorter dissent, Thomas said the foundation of the majority's ruling "is made of sand." Thomas said that the court's 1971 ruling in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case, which had authorized disparate impact claims, represented "the triumph of an agency's preferences over Congress' enactment and of assumption over fact."

2NC—Causes Court ConfusionUsing the intent standard causes confusion in application and can worsen problems—not fix themClegg 2015 - Roger, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and J.D. form Yale Law School, September, Silver Linings Playbook: "Disparate Impact" and the Fair Housing Act", https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/supreme-court-review/2015/9/2015-supreme-court-review-chapter-6.pdf

One would also expect that, if a statute contemplates use of the disparate-impact approach, it would answer some fundamental questions like how to measure the kind and degree of disparate impact that is required and what sort of rebuttal is needed.58 But there’s none of that. What’s more, the resulting problems are myriad and severe. For example,

what should decisionmakers do if a practice has a disparate impact in one location but not in another? It is astonishing to interpret a national civil rights statute in a way that makes conduct in one city illegal while allowing exactly the same conduct in another city, just because of the different racial makeup of the two cities. Or suppose the impact ebbs and flows over time? And what should landlords do if a policy (for instance, excluding violent felons as tenants) has an unfavorable disparate impact on potential tenants of a particular race, but is welcomed by the incumbent tenants who are predominately of that same race? And what if a practice is favorable for some racial minority groups (say, Asian Americans) but not for others (say, Latinos)—and, what’s more, the opposite is at the same time true for some minority subgroups (e.g., the practice is unfavorable for Hmong but favorable for Asian Americans more broadly)? Is there any way that a potential defendant could know that a policy will have a disparate impact on the basis of, say, religion (e.g., it turns out to favor most Jews over most Muslims)—and, here again, what if that policy’s disparate impact gets more complicated the more

one delves into it (Shiites do well with it compared to Hasidim)? And remember, also, that “majority” groups—whites and men and

Christians, for example—must be able to bring these lawsuits, too, or you’ve added an even greater equal-protection problem. Thus, for example, in the mortgage lending context: (a) a foreclosure policy may have no disparate impact on a particular group in pre-recession 2006, but a severe one in 2009; (b) an income requirement may have no disparate impact on Latinos in Nashville but a severe one in Denver; and (c) the use of, say, credit scoring may have a disparate impact on Latinos but not Asians, even if there’s no

disparate impact on Cubans but a severe one on the Hmong. Geographic disparities are especially problematic: Companies with identical policies in different locations could have very different liability risks , or the same company might be liable in one city but not in the other, but only if city-by-city data control rather than aggregate statistics. There’s an even more fundamental

problem, noted by Chief Justice John Roberts at oral argument59 and in both the majority opinion60 and Justice Alito’s dissent61: It is often hard to say whether the impact a practice has on a group is adverse or not. In fact, all three cases that the Court has taken recently illustrate this. In Magner v. Gallagher, was it bad for African Americans that landlords who disproportionately rented to blacks were being cited for violating safety and health code requirements? In Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, was the urban renewal there bad for African Americans? And in the present case, is it bad for African Americans that lowincome housing is being disproportionately located in black areas? Poor black people might prefer to have housing opportunities near where they already live rather than far away, and they could complain about the disparate impact of deliberately changing the system so that they had fewer such opportunities. Yes,

social engineers might prefer that blacks relocate to white areas, but that goal of greater integration might also be met in some cities or counties by encouraging non-blacks (not just whites, but also Latinos and Asians) to live in black areas.62 These problems make it difficult to decide not only whether there is a disparate impact in the first place, but also how to weigh properly the defendant’s rebuttal, which in the public housing context— versus,

say, employment—will often involve balancing myriad and hard-to-quantify interests. That is, it is relatively straightforward to ask an employer how a selection criterion will help hire more productive employees. But the reason for a particular zoning decision, for example, might involve all kinds of considerations: health, safety, aesthetics, traffic, money, nonracial politics, you name it.63 Two final points. First, it’s frequently asserted that we must allow “disparate impact” causes of action because actual discrimination—disparate

treatment—is difficult to prove. Indeed, this is the principal justification for the disparate-impact approach.64 But this is simply not true: The overwhelming majority of housing cases brought and won by the federal government are disparate treatment cases, as anyone who reads the Department of Justice’s press releases every day (as we do at the Center for Equal Opportunity) can attest. Within a month of the Court’s decision, the Obama administration posted press releases about successful disparate treatment housing cases—one involving “testers” (a particularly easy and available way to prove housing discrimination) and the other involving a defendant who had actually placed ads indicating illegal preferences.65 And Justice Alito’s dissent notes, correctly, “Disparate impact can be evidence of disparate treatment.”66 Relatedly, many on the other side argue that you need the disparate-impact approach in order to go after segregated housing patterns. These arguments, indeed, may have carried the day with Justice Kennedy.67 But of course that’s not true if the segregation stems from actual discrimination, proof of which can be reinforced by adducing the same sort of statistical evidence that is used in a disparate-impact case. But if there’s no actual discrimination, then using the disparate-impact approach raises all the usual problems noted above. For

example, how much racial balancing is to be required? What if the reasons for the racial imbalance reflect voluntary decisions or economic realities? What sort of remedies will be required (like deliberate assignments on

the basis of race), and what if those remedies end up hurting people (including minorities) on the basis of race? And so on. Finally, if racial imbalances in housing patterns are a result of voluntary choices by individuals, then it’s unclear why the government needs to fix that situation.

2NC—Vague StandardsConflicting results of significance tests create ambiguity—kills precedent and solvencyEissenstat 2016 - Katie, Oklahoma Law Review, Volume 68, Number 3, http://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=olr

The bare text of Title VII fails to indicate at what point a disparity becomes actionable.25 The Supreme Court simply states a plaintiff must show “that the tests in question select applicants for hire or promotion in a . . . pattern significantly different from that of

the pool of applicants.”26 In Watson v. Forth Worth Bank & Trust, Justice O’Connor wrote, “Our formulations . . . have consistently stressed that statistical disparities must be sufficiently substantial that they raise such an inference of causation.”27 Similarly, in Hazelwood School District v. United States, the Court held, “Where gross statistical disparities can be shown, they alone may in a proper case constitute prima facie proof of a pattern or practice of discrimination.”28 Aside from these vague

guidelines, no clear answer exists as to when a disparity becomes actionable.29 Therefore, courts evaluate whether an employment practice causes a disparity using two primary methods: the four-fifths rule and statistical significance tests.30 All of the federal employment agencies—including the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the Department of Labor, and the Department of Justice in Title VII enforcement—have adopted the Uniform Guidelines of Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP) to provide a uniform set of principles governing use of employment practices.31 Recognizing the unlikelihood of a particular employment practice causing merely isolated small disparities, the UGESP advocates for a “practical significance” requirement in determining whether a plaintiff can establish a prima facie case of disparate impact discrimination.32 The Guidelines further suggest the four-fifths rule as clear evidence of disparate impact discrimination, while still recognizing smaller disparities may nevertheless constitute a disparate impact if both statistically and practically significant.33 1. The Four-Fifths Rule Historically, courts relied on the four-fifths rule as the most popular test for evaluating disparate impact.34 The four-fifths rule finds a disparity actionable when one group’s selection rate—a group’s ability to successfully meet the criteria of the hiring or employment procedure—is less than four-fifths, or 80%, of another group’s selection rate.35 This “impact” of 80% or less demonstrates the existence of a “sufficiently substantial” disparity, meeting the requirement of “practical significance” outlined in the UGESP.36 To demonstrate, suppose female applicants allege a physical examination requiring all firefighters to successfully perform one hundred consecutive pushups before hire creates a disparity between genders. 80% of men in the applicant pool meet this requirement compared to only 60% of females. Dividing the female selection rate by the male selection rate (0.6/0.8), we find the selection ratio of females to males is 75%. Therefore, the impact is less than 80%—making the gender disparity claim actionable under the four-fifths rule.37 The advantages of the four-fifths rule are clear: it is an easy-to-calculate, simple test that puts responsible parties on notice of the relative balance an employer must achieve in its workforce to avoid liability.38 It evaluates the impact of the disparity and ensures

substantiality.39 Several courts, however, criticize the four-fifths rule for creating mixed results.40 Rather than directly

addressing causation, many courts believe the four-fifths rule sets a seemingly arbitrary and unachievable evaluation of impact difficult for plaintiffs to meet.41 This heavy critique indicates employers may no longer rely on the four-fifths rule when evaluating disparities in their hiring practices. Instead, many courts now look to statistical significance tests.42 2. Statistical Significance Tests While a wide variety of statistical significance tests exist, each serves the purpose of calculating the overall likelihood an observed disparity occurred due to random chance.43 Using this method, a disparity becomes actionable when one can be confident at a designated level—typically 95%—the disparity observed is not attributable to random chance.44 In other words, a plaintiff may establish a prima facie case of disparate impact discrimination if the test indicates at least a 5% disparity—approximately two standard deviations—in the relevant labor market, meaning

a roughly one-in-twenty chance the disparity occurred at random.45 Like the four-fifths rule, several courts heavily criticize statistical significance tests and the use of statistical regression analysis for similar varied and ambiguous results.46 First, courts

disagree over whether statistical significance tests directly evaluate causation. Many experts contend evaluation of chance

—statistical significance—relies just as much on inference as evaluation of impact—the four-fifths rule.47 Second, statistical significance tests vary wildly from one another.48 Furthering the problem, there is no established threshold of statistical significance.49 While most courts choose a confidence level of 95%, nothing restricts courts to this level, making it an imprecise standard.50 Third, judges are not equipped with the tools to evaluate the scientific nature of such tests.51 The variety of tests available allows litigants to act as amateur statisticians and manipulate numbers.52 Consequently, judges often subconciously favor whichever test matches their subjective

opinions.53 Finally, these tests are extremely sensitive to sample size; the larger the number of applicants, the greater chance the data will magnify even miniscule disparities.54 C. Consequences of Multiple Tests: The Circuit Split Because the four-fifths rule and statistical significance tests have different operative functions—one evaluating impact, the other evaluating chance—they often lead to conflicting results.55 With no direction other than ambiguous guidance provided by the Supreme Court that actionable disparities be “gross”56 or “sufficiently substantial,” lower courts freely choose whichever test allows their preferred party to prevail, often ignoring the UGESP standards employers, labor organizations, and many others rely upon.57 Some circuits continue to back the four-fifths rule as the proper method for evaluating causation under disparate impact theory, finding it a reliable indicator of “practical significance.”58 In 2012, the Tenth Circuit held that small differences in selection rates were not practically significant, even though, because of the large number of selections, a disparity in excess of four-and-a-half standard deviations occurred—more than twice the threshold needed for statistical significance.59 Likewise, the Seventh Circuit continues its reliance on the four-fifths rule, holding the 5% standard utilitzed by the majority of statistical significance tests

“arbitrary.”60 According to the Seventh Circuit, it is the judge's role—relying on evidence examined by a trained statistician—to determine whether a particular significance level is too low to make the study worthy of consideration by the fact finder.61 The Supreme Court’s decisions in Castaneda v. Partida62 and Hazelwood School District v. United States prompted a shift toward judicial reliance on statistical significance tests when evaluating causation under disparate impact theory.63 Because such tests create “[a] precise method of measuring the significance of . . . disparities,”64 the Court held use of these seemingly decisive assessments proper. When examining large sample sizes specifically, the Court noted an inference of discrimination generally arises when the disparity is “greater than two or three standard deviations.”65 Coupled with the EEOC’s recognition of the value of statistical significance tests over the four-fifths rule when dealing with large or small amounts of data, the Castaneda and Hazelwood decisions struck a chord with many members of the judiciary. Now, several courts shun the four-fifths rule— looking instead to statistical significance tests as a more exact means of evaluating disparities.66 Despite the Court’s disclaimer that it did not intend computations of “two or three standard deviations” required as strict procedure, many lower courts have done just so.67 In Moultrie v. Martin, the Fourth Circuit held, “[I]n all cases involving racial discrimination, the courts of this circuit must apply a standard deviation analysis such as that approved by the Supreme Court in Hazelwood before drawing conclusions from statistical comparisons.”68 While other circuits have declined to follow such an extreme conclusion, many plaintiffs successfully rely on these decisions to support utilization of “statistical significance” and statistical regression analysis as primary methods for establishing or disestablishing disparities.69 The Third Circuit explicitly rejected the four-fifths rule in 2010.70 Regardless of the size of the difference between groups' outcomes, the Third Circuit found demonstrations of statistically significant differences sufficient to establish disparate impact.71 Like the First Circuit in Jones, 72 the Third Circuit held a plaintiff’s demonstration of statistically significant disparity sufficient to establish a prima facie case of disparate impact discrimination.73 In addition, many other circuits similarly hold statistical significance tests sufficient for demonstrating a legally significant adverse impact, even when the

data fails the four-fifths guideline.74 The conflicting results of these two methods allow well-meaning judges to decide claims based on preference rather than any real, objective standard—often leading to varied and conflicting precedents among the circuits.75 The First Circuit in Jones further complicates this problem not only by outright rejecting the four-fifths rule as a valid alternative to the statistical significance tests but also by rejecting the “practical significance” requirement on the speculative premise the difficulty in its application outweighs any of its benefits.76

2NC—Statistics Cause ProblemsStatistical analysis is not science—certain conclusions cannot be drawn—also leads to manipulationEissenstat 2016 - Katie, Oklahoma Law Review, Volume 68, Number 3, http://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=olr

Because a statistically significant disparity is not meaningful on its own, it is disconcertingly incapable of accurately depicting legal burdens of proof.133 Statistical models are not perfect pictures of reality; they are approximations, nothing more.134 Statisticians—who rely on a series of assumptions that would concern a lawyer if he were more

keenly aware of them—do not consider in their calculations the obligation of attorneys to prove an assertion by a preponderance of the evidence. Conversely, lawyers—who do not have to deal with the statistical concept of a “null

hypothesis”—often phrase inappropriate questions to statisticians without fully considering this reality.135

Statistics derived from inappropriate models provide useless answers.136 By holding any non-random disparity—no matter how insignificant—to be an actionable disparity, the First Circuit ignores the functional reality of statistics.137 As stated by one

exasperated statistician, “No statistician or other scientist should ever put himself/herself in a position of trying to prove or disprove discrimination.”138 The trier of fact is to resolve disputed factual questions as best as it can, and the decision-making task should not be delegated to statisticians and other experts by trusting “superficially impressive methods whose seeming objectivity does not withstand analysis.”139 Judges and

juries often will not recognize that an expert’s reference to statistical proof as “highly significant” does not necessarily indicate that a substantial effect exists, which leads to a dangerous and misplaced reliance that outweighs the limited value of this

testimony.140 Furthering the problem, litigants often manipulate statistics to support a variety of positions.141 Therefore, these seemingly objective tests often serve as clever disguises for parties to mask their very subjective views .142 Professor Richard Primus explains two different schools of thought among judges which lead to the decision to choose one test over the other.143 One view sees disparate impact as an “evidentiary dragnet designed to discover hidden instances of intentional discrimination.”144 The other view sees disparate impact as a “more aggressive attempt to dismantle racial and [other] hierarchies.”145 Where there is no proof of ill-intent on behalf of the employer, judges who view disparate impact as a means of disclosing employers who secretly harbor loathsome feelings toward a protected class are much more likely to choose whichever statistical test favors the defendant (Primus’s first view).146 Judges who view disparate impact as a “grand way of leveling the playing field between different groups of people” are more likely to penalize the employer and find a statistical disparity if the plaintiff can satisfy either test (Primus’s second view).147 Therefore, strong evidence exists supporting the notion

judges may use statistical tests to further their equalizing opinions of disparate impact theory.148 Several other areas of law criticize the utilization of statistics when interpreting evidence, specifically its use in criminal jury trials, class-action litigation,

environmental policy, and more.149 While statistics are seemingly precise, innocuous methods for evaluating data, misunderstandings of how the science operates lead to harmful conclusions. By rejecting a “practical significance” requirement, the First Circuit places a heavy burden on employers who must now protect against even insignificant disparities that may result from isolated employment practices or procedures.150

1NC No Court ModelingNo modelingLaw & Versteeg 12—Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law @ Washington University & Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law @ University of Virginia [David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, “The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,” New York University Law Review, Vol. 87, 2012

The appeal of American constitutionalism as a model for other countries appears to be waning in more ways

than one. Scholarly attention has thus far focused on global judicial practice: There is a growing sense, backed by more than purely anecdotal observation, that foreign courts cite the constitutional jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court less frequently than before.267 But the behavior of those who draft and revise actual constitutions exhibits a similar pattern.

Our empirical analysis shows that the content of the U.S. Constitution is¶ becoming increasingly atypical by global standards. Over the last three decades, other countries have become less likely to model the rights-

related provisions of¶ their own constitutions upon those found in the Constitution. Meanwhile, global adoption of key structural

features of the Constitution, such as federalism, presidentialism, and a decentralized model of judicial review, is at best stable and

at worst declining. In sum, rather than leading the way for global¶ constitutionalism, the U.S . Constitution

appears instead to be losing its appeal as¶ a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere. The idea of adopting a constitution may still trace its inspiration to the United States, but the manner in which constitutions are written increasingly does not.

If the U.S. Constitution is indeed losing popularity as a model for other countries, what—or who—is to blame? At this point, one can only

speculate as to the actual causes of this decline, but four possible hypotheses suggest themselves: (1) the advent of a superior or more attractive competitor; (2) a general decline in American hegemony ; (3) judicial parochialism; (4) constitutional obsolescence; and (5) a creed of American exceptionalism .

With respect to the first hypothesis, there is little indication that the U.S. Constitution has been displaced by any specific competitor. Instead, the notion that a particular constitution can serve as a dominant model for other countries may itself be obsolete. There is an increasingly clear and broad consensus on the types of rights that a constitution should include, to the point that one can articulate the content of a generic bill of rights with considerable precision.269 Yet it is difficult to pinpoint a specific constitution—or regional or international human rights instrument—that is clearly the driving force behind this emerging paradigm. We find only limited evidence that global constitutionalism is following the lead of either newer national constitutions that are often cited as influential, such as those of Canada and South Africa, or leading international and regional human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Although Canada in particular does appear to exercise a quantifiable degree of constitutional influence or leadership, that influence is not uniform and

global but more likely reflects the emergence and evolution of a shared practice of constitutionalism among common law countries.270 Our findings suggest instead that the development of global constitutionalism is a polycentric and multipolar¶

process that is not dominated by any particular country.271 The result might be likened to a global language of constitutional rights, but one that has been collectively forged rather than modeled upon a specific constitution.

Another possibility is that America’s capacity for constitutional leadership is at least partly a function of American “soft power ” more generally .272 It is reasonable to suspect that the overall influence and appeal of the United States and its institutions have a powerful spillover effect into the constitutional arena. The popularity of American culture, the prestige of American universities, and the efficacy of American diplomacy can all be expected to affect the appeal of American constitutionalism, and vice versa. All are elements of an overall American brand, and the strength of that brand helps to determine the strength of each of its elements. Thus, any

erosion of the American brand may also diminish the appeal of the Constitution for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the Constitution itself. Likewise, a decline in American constitutional influence of the type

documented in this Article is potentially indicative of a broader decline in American soft power.

There are also factors specific to American constitutionalism that may be¶ reducing its appeal to foreign audiences. Critics suggest that the Supreme Court has undermined the global appeal of its own jurisprudence by failing to acknowledge the relevant intellectual contributions of foreign courts on questions of common concern,273 and by pursuing interpretive approaches that lack acceptance elsewhere .274 On this view, the Court may bear some responsibility for the declining influence of not only its own jurisprudence, but also the actual U.S. Constitution: one might argue that the

Court’s approach to constitutional issues has undermined the appeal of American constitutionalism more generally, to the point that other countries have become unwilling to look either to American constitutional jurisprudence or to the U.S. Constitution itself for inspiration.275

It is equally plausible, however, that responsibility for the declining appeal of American constitutionalism lies with the idiosyncrasies of the Constitution itself rather than the proclivities of the Supreme Court. As the oldest formal constitution still in force, and one of the most rarely amended constitutions in the world,276 the U.S. Constitution contains relatively few of the rights that have become popular in recent decades,277 while some of the provisions that it does

contain may appear increasingly problematic, unnecessary, or even undesirable with the benefit of two hundred years of hindsight.278 It should therefore come as little surprise if the U.S. Constitution ¶ strikes those in other countries–or, indeed,

members of the U.S. Supreme Court279–as out of date and out of line with global practice .280 Moreover, even if the Court were committed to interpreting the Constitution in tune with global fashion, it would still lack the power to update the actual text of the document.

Indeed, efforts by the Court to update the Constitution via interpretation may actually reduce the likelihood of formal amendment by rendering

such amendment unnecessary as a practical matter.281 As a result, there is only so much that the U.S. Supreme Court can do to make the U.S. Constitution an¶ attractive formal template for other countries. The obsolescence of the Constitution, in turn, may undermine the appeal of American constitutional jurisprudence: foreign courts have little reason to follow the Supreme Court ’s lead on constitutional issues if the Supreme Court is saddled with the interpretation of an unusual and obsolete constitution.282 No amount of ingenuity or solicitude for foreign law on the part of the Court can entirely divert attention from the fact that the Constitution itself is an increasingly atypical document.

One way to put a more positive spin upon the U.S. Constitution’s status as a global outlier is to emphasize its role in articulating and defining what is unique about American national identity. Many scholars have opined that formal constitutions serve an expressive function as statements of national identity.283 This view finds little support in our own empirical findings, which suggest instead that constitutions tend to contain relatively standardized packages of rights.284 Nevertheless, to the extent that constitutions do serve such a function, the distinctiveness of the U.S. Constitution may simply reflect the uniqueness of America’s national identity. In this vein, various scholars have argued that the U.S. Constitution lies at the very heart of an “American creed of exceptionalism,” which combines a belief that the United States occupies a unique position in the world with a commitment to the qualities that set the United States apart from other countries.285 From this perspective, the Supreme Court’s reluctance to make use of foreign and international law in constitutional cases amounts not to parochialism, but rather to respect for the exceptional character of the nation and its constitution.286

Unfortunately, it is clear that the reasons for the declining influence of American constitutionalism cannot be reduced to anything as simple or attractive as a longstanding American creed of exceptionalism. Historically, American exceptionalism has not prevented other countries from following the example set by American constitutionalism. The global turn away from the American model is a relatively recent development that postdates the Cold War. If the U.S. Constitution does in fact capture something profoundly unique about the United States, it has surely been doing so for longer than the last thirty years. A complete explanation of the declining influence of American constitutionalism in other countries must instead be sought in more recent history, such as the wave of constitution-making that followed the end of the Cold War.287 During this period, America’s newfound position as lone superpower might have been expected to create opportunities for the spread of American constitutionalism. But this did not come to pass.

Once global constitutionalism is understood as the product of a polycentric evolutionary process, it is not difficult to see why the U.S. Constitution is playing an increasingly peripheral role in that process . No evolutionary process

favors a specimen that is frozen in time. At least some of the responsibility for the declining global appeal of American constitutionalism lies not with the Supreme Court, or with a broader penchant for exceptionalism, but rather with

the static character of the Constitution itself. If the United States were to revise the Bill of Rights today—with the benefit of over two centuries of experience, and in a manner

that addresses contemporary challenges while remaining faithful to the nation’s best traditions—there is no guarantee that other countries would follow its lead. But the world would surely pay close attention. Pg. 78-83

2NC – No Court Modeling

No judicial modeling—extend Law & Versteeg—prefer this ev which is the most recent and cites studies—foreign courts don’t cite SCOTUS decisions anymore—our constitution is viewed as obsolete.

No one cites the US for anything---there are too many other countries to look to---*but the SQ solves their impacts because other countries reject excessive Presidentialism now Mila Versteeg 13, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Model, Resource, or Outlier? What Effect Has the U.S. Constitution Had on the Recently Adopted Constitutions of Other Nations?, 29 May 2013, www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/05/model-resource-or-outlier-what-effect-has-the-us-constitution-had-on-the-recently-adopted-constitutions-of-other-nationsUnsurprisingly, attempting to gauge one constitution’s “influence” on another involves various conceptual and methodological challenges. To illustrate, a highly generic constitution may be

generic because others have followed its lead, because it has modeled others, or simply by coincidence. That said, if two constitutions are becoming increasingly dissimilar , by definition, one cannot be following the other. That is, neither is exerting influence on the other (at least not in a positive way).

This is the phenomenon we observed in comparing the U.S. Constitution to the rest of the world; based on the rights index, the U.S . has become less similar to the world since 1946 and, with a current index of 0.30, is less similar now than at any point during the studied

period. This phenomenon has occurred even among current American allies; among countries in regions with close cultural and

historic ties to the U.S. (namely, Latin America and Western Europe); and among democracies. Only among common law countries is constitutional similarity higher than it was after World War II, but even that similarity has decreased since the 1960s.

Rights provisions are not the only constitutional elements that have lost favor with the rest of the world ; structural provisions pioneered by American constitutionalism—such as federalism, presidentialism, and judicial review—hav e also been losing their global appeal .

For instance, in the early 20th century, 22 percent of constitutions provided for federalistic systems , while today, just 12 percent do.

A similar trend has occurred for presidentialism, another American innovation. Since the end of World War II, the percentage of countries employing purely presidential systems has declined, mainly in favor of mixed systems, which were a favorite of former Soviet bloc countries.

Finally, though judicial review is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, it has proved the most popular American structural innovation. But though the popularity of judicial review in general has exploded over the past six decades, most countries have opted for the European style of review (which designates a single, constitutional court which alone has the power to nullify laws inconsistent with the constitution) over the American model (in which all courts are empowered to strike unconstitutional laws). In 1946, over 80 percent of countries exercised American-style constitutional review; today, fewer than half do.

Reasons for the Decline

It appears that several factors are driving the U.S. Constitution’s increasing atypicality . First, while in 2006 the average national constitutions contained 34 rights (of the 60 we identify), the U.S. Constitution contains relatively few—just 21—and the rights it does contain are often themselves atypical.

Just one-third of constitutions provide for church and state separation, as does the U.S. Establishment Clause, and only 2 percent of constitutions (including, e.g., Mexico and Guatemala) contain

a “right to bear arms.” Conversely, the U.S. Constitution omits some of the most globally popular rights, such as women’s rights, the right to social security , the right to food, and the right to health care .

These peculiarities, together with the fact that the U.S. Constitution is both old and particularly hard to amend,

have led some to characterize the Constitution as simply antiquated or obsolete.

Modeling fails – constitutions must be endogenousMila Versteeg 13, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Model, Resource, or Outlier? What Effect Has the U.S. Constitution Had on the Recently Adopted Constitutions of Other Nations?, 29 May 2013, www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/05/model-resource-or-outlier-what-effect-has-the-us-constitution-had-on-the-recently-adopted-constitutions-of-other-nations

As I describe above, our article conceptualizes a “generic constitution”—that is, one that contains the 25 most popular global constitution rights elements—but we do not suggest that a “generic” constitution is an “ideal” constitution or that it otherwise should serve as a model for the United States or other countries. To the contrary,

I tend to resist the notion that constitutional design based on a standardized template is generally desirable. Rather, I

adhere to the view that constitutions should be written with popular input and tailored to the needs, traditions, values, and interests of the society they govern . There is no “one-size-fits-all” constitution.

Indeed, history and the literature have documented the adverse effects of foreign values being inserted into a citizenry that is unprepared to accept them . As an example, most f ormer British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean received the exact same bill of rights upon independence , rights which were taken from the European Convention on Human Rights. In most cases, these bills of rights, oblivious to the deep ethnic tensions and persistent poverty, became a grand failure.

Even if they are right the US has influence – specific decisions aren’t modeled – just the foundations of our systemKlug, Law Professor at the University of Wisconsin, 2K (Heinz, “MODEL AND ANTI-MODEL: THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION AND THE ‘RISE OF WORLD CONSTITUTIONALISM,’” Wisconsin Law Review, 2000 Wis. L. Rev. 597)

Before discussing the various ways in which the American experience has served as a constitutional model, it is important to specify what serves

as the model. The model is not merely the constitutional document and its amendments; it is also, more importantly,

the ideas and institutions of American constitutionalism - popular sovereignty, federalism, the separation of powers, and judicial review - as well as the over two hundred years of constitutional jurisprudence that has flowed from the

Constitution. It is this vision of the United States Constitution, as an elaborated text with a history of structural, institutional, and

jurisprudential changes, that allows us to understand the place of the United States Constitution as the backdrop or wallpaper before which subsequent constitutional stories, from constitution-making to constitutional adjudication, have evolved. I must also clarify my use of the idea of a model. By model I mean a general source of ideas, concepts, examples, and even specific constitutional arguments rather than a mere reproduction or copy of what has occurred or is contained in the United States Constitution or

constitutional jurisprudence. Caution at the notion of a constitutional model is also important. The pure adoption of a ny particular model or example does not guarantee any particular outcome . This problem is clearly evident in the experience of the United

States in the Philippines, despite the aim of the United States to establish a different form of colonial relationship. After obtaining formal control from Spain through the Treaty of Paris in 1898 and after over fifty years of "tutelage" designed to establish an American form of

government, the efforts of the United States seem to have achieved little more than a system of institutional charades, cast aside as soon as they

no longer served those in power. From the passage of the 1934 Philippine Commonwealth and Independence Act,

which provided that the Constitution should "include a [*600] bill of rights and establish a "republican form

of government'"; to the subsequent adoption of the 1935 Constitution by a Philippine constitutional convention and the wholesale adoption of American case law , which seems to have been used as binding precedent; the experience produced no more than a symbolic manifestation of U nited States constitutionalism. As Andrzej Rapaczynski

argues, "politically speaking, the cloning of America did not effectively protect the Philippines from a dictatorship,

and even the best commentators could not see why the result was not what the Americans had intended." 5 Despite this failure to clone, the United States constitutional experience has served as a model, in my more general sense of the concept. As a general model it has served a number of distinct functions. On the one hand, the American constitutional experience offers examples of a range of structural features, whose evolution and impact may be observed over two centuries. These structural features include the transformation of the political idea of the separation of powers into a working constitutional principle; the creation of a federal system providing for the division of powers between a central government and its constituent regions; and finally, the creation of a range of institutional mechanisms for checking and balancing the exercise of governmental power, which provided

political adversaries multiple sites for raising and contesting issues. On the other hand, the American experiment has raised the banner of individual rights and through a long and wavering jurisprudence demonstrated how vast areas of political conflict may become judicialized. Although often criticized as a legalization of politics, the creation of a popular rights consciousness among citizens of the United States has indeed inspired advocates of human rights and is reflected most clearly in the adoption of international human rights instruments and the post-1945 emergence of an international human rights culture. Although less common, the specific doctrines of United States rights jurisprudence have at times served as a direct model abroad. A significant example of this is the influence of free speech doctrines flowing from the First Amendment

of the United States Constitution on the common law based freedom of speech jurisprudence in Israel n6 and Australia. n7 However, instead of specific constitutional doctrines, particular institutional forms, or even specific constitutional rights, it has been the ideas and broad structural

innovations of American constitutionalism that have found the greatest resonance among constitution-makers and interpreters.  [*601]   From the development of a single fundamental law, incorporated within one written document, to the distribution of public power among different geographic and institutional levels of government, the experience of American constitutionalism has provided a vast experiment to which constitution-builders abroad could turn. With subsequent waves of constitution-making these constitutional forms have evolved - both in the United States and abroad - to provide further elucidations of the original American model that could be relied upon by subsequent waves of constitution-makers.

Modeling fails – different cultures and resourcesJeremy Rabkin 13, Professor of Law at the George Mason School of Law. Model, Resource, or Outlier? What Effect Has the U.S. Constitution Had on the Recently Adopted Constitutions of Other Nations?, 29 May 2013, www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2013/05/model-resource-or-outlier-what-effect-has-the-us-constitution-had-on-the-recently-adopted-constitutions-of-other-nations

Even when people are not ambivalent in their desire to embrace American practices , they may not have the wherewithal to do so, given their own resources. That is true even for constitutional arrangements . You might

think it is enviable to have an old, well-established constitution, but that doesn’t mean you can just grab it off the shelf and enjoy it in your new democracy. You might think it is enviable to have a broad respect for free debate and tolerance of difference, but that doesn’t mean you can wave a wand and supply it to your own population . We can’t think of most constitutional practices as techniques or technologies w hich can be imported into different cultures as easily as cell phones or Internet connections.

1NC—Balkans ImpactMutual interests prevent warCouloumbis and Ramaj, 7 (Theodore,- prof @ U of Athens scholar for the Southeast Europe Project @ Woodrow Wilson International Center. Ergys,- graduate of the Public and International Affairs department at George Mason University and, currently, a research assistant at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars “Debalkanizing the Balkans with the Kantian Theory of Democratic Peace “ http://ahiworld.org/pdfs/Debalkanizing.pdf)

This study focuses on the post-communist Balkans and juxtaposes the positions of what its authors call the “recidivist” and “transitionist” schools of thought. The thesis of the recidivists is that war is a deep characteristic of the Balkans and is destined to recur in the future. The transitionists, on the contrary, posit that war is a product of economic, political and social underdevelopment rather than being specific to particular geographic regions or cultures. Siding with the cautiously optimistic approach of the transitionists, the authors of this study employ a variation of Bruce

Russett’s Kantian peace theory and attempt to apply it to the post-communist Balkans. Given the evidence of convergence (political, economic, and social) between the post-communist Balkans and the rest of the Euro-Atlantic region, the

authors conclude that a sustained period of growth, cooperation and peace can be projected. Major problems, such as state fragmentation, inflation, unemployment, corruption, underground economies, organized crime and Islamist terrorism will not disappear soon in the Balkans. But an environment of consolidated democracy, advanced and

liberal economy, and the promise of a common institutional roof over the whole Balkan region will act as a gradual

and sure fire remedy for such and other ills.

2NC—Balkans ImpactBalkan war won’t happen–regional powers have incentives to cooperate and relations are too solidBURNS 2006 (Nicholas, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, U.S. Department of State, “Knocking on NATO’s Open Door,” Feb 19, http://zagreb.usembassy.gov/issues/060221.htm)

A decade ago, the countries of Southeast Europe were reeling from the impact of Europe's bloodiest war in half a century. With the determined intervention of NATO, genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia were brought to an end; a few years later in Kosovo, NATO again

intervened to end ethnic cleansing in the region. Southeast Europe seemed to some a tangle of intractable inter-ethnic conflicts in which only massive international peacekeeping deployments could keep the warring parties apart. But the United States and its friends in the region looked to tell a different story: one that would require friends to make hard choices for

the sake of a peaceful and prosperous future for their people. Today's story is indeed different, in part thanks to the tremendous

efforts of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia. The region's nascent democracies have largely normalized their relations. Peacekeeping contingents have downsized, and a return to war is unlikely. The region is not only increasingly stable, but it contributes to international coalitions that work to end conflicts elsewhere. Southeast Europe is on the path to changing from being a consumer to a provider of security. On February 13 in Washington, the United States hosted the Foreign Ministers of Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to discuss recent accomplishments of these members of the Adriatic Charter, or "A3." Founded in May 2003, the A3 brings Albania, Croatia and Macedonia into a partnership with the United States to advance their individual and collective candidacies for NATO and other Euro-Atlantic institutions. Serbia and Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina were present as observers. At the meeting, we reviewed A3 progress on their individual NATO Membership Action Plans, and sought ways to bring NATO membership closer. We also shared lessons learned from deployments in international coalitions. Finally, we recommitted ourselves to our cooperation as friends and, if reforms continue to meet necessary standards, full Allies in the greatest Alliance in history: NATO. Not so long ago, such goals would have been impossible to imagine. The countries of the region have worked hard to gain this

new status. With fresh memories of war and dictatorship, the A3 partners share a resolve to strengthen their democratic institutions, market economies and human rights, and to fight corruption and crime. The path to NATO and the European Union promotes a positive cycle of change: the more candidate countries do to pursue reforms required for membership, the more support they get for the accession process. Though difficult, the reforms are key to lasting peace and prosperity in the region.

The international community will check conflict escalation.Wolff 06 [Stefan, PhD & German political scientist, Ethnic Conflict, p. 138]

This link of prevention, management, and settlement is part of the reason why the international community has, since the end of the Kosovo conflict, been more successful in the western Balkans, and it contains important lessons. Success crucially depended on a number of factors—a developed institutional framework and a set of policies that enable decisions to be made quickly, to provide adequate funds and personnel, and to cooperate and coordinate activities are some of them. Another factor is the effectiveness of the policies employed: in the western Balkans, for example, EU-imposed conditionality is so much more effective vis-à-vis countries where the promise of closer association with, and potential accession to, the EU is credible and where both political elites and the general public are ready to make compromises in order to attain what many believe to be a panacea for all their problems. This leverage often does not exist elsewhere because there is no clear long-term commitment to a particular country or region, but rather an ad hoc and often belated response to an emerging crisis, a lack familiarity with, and sensitivity towards, the situation on the ground and no credible intelligence sources. Comparing the situation in Macedonia with that in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Rwanda in the early 1990s illustrates this point.

1NC—Democracy ImpactDemocracy doesn’t cause peace – statistical models are spurious and don’t assume economic growth

Mousseau, 12 (Michael – Professor IR Koç University, “The Democratic Peace Unraveled: It’s the Economy” International Studies Quarterly, p 1-12)

Model 2 presents new knowledge by adding the control for economic type. To capture the dyadic expectation of peace among contract-intensive nations, the variable Contract- intensive EconomyL (CIEL) indicates the value of impersonal contracts in force per capita of the state with the lower level of CIE in the dyad; a high value of this measure indicates both states have contract-intensive economies. As can be seen, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.80) is negative and highly significant. This corroborates that impersonal economy is a highly robust force for peace. The coefficient for DemocracyL is now at zero. There are no other differences between Models 1 and 2, whose samples are identical, and no prior study corroborating the democratic peace has considered contractintensive economy. Therefore, the standard econometric inference to be drawn

from Model 2 is the nontrivial result that all prior reports of democracy as a force for peace are probably spurious, since this result is predicted and fully accounted for by economic norms theory. CIEL and DemocracyL correlate only in the moderate range of 0.47 (Pearson’s r), so the insignificance of democracy is not likely to be a statistical artifact of multicollinearity. This is corroborated by the variance inflation factor for DemocracyL in Model 2 of 1.85, which is well below the usual rule-of-thumb indicator of multicollinearity of 10 or more. Nor should readers assume most democratic dyads have both states with impersonal economies: While almost all nations with contract-intensive economies (as indicated with the binary measure for CIE) are democratic (Polity2 > 6) (Singapore is the only long-term exception), more than half—55%—of all democratic nation-years have contract-poor economies. At the dyadic level in this sample, this translates to 80% of democratic dyads (all dyads where DemocracyBinary6 = 1)

that have at least one state with a contract-poor economy. In other words, not only does Model 2 show no evidence of causation from democracy to peace (as reported in Mousseau 2009), but it also illustrates that this absence of democratic peace includes the vast majority—80%—of democratic dyad-years over the sample period. Nor is it likely that the causal arrow is reversed—with democracy being the ultimate cause of contract-intensive economy and peace. This is because correlations among independent variables are not calculated in the results of multivariate regressions: Coefficients show only the effect of each variable after the potential effects of the others are kept constant at their mean levels. If it was democracy that caused both impersonal economy and peace, then there would be some variance in DemocracyL remaining , after its partial

correlation with CIEL is excluded, that links it directly with peace. The positive direction of the coefficient for DemocracyL informs us that no such direct effect exists (Blalock 1979:473–474). Model 3 tests for the effect of DemocracyL if a control is added for mixed-polity dyads, as suggested by Russett (2010:201). As discussed above, to avoid problems of mathematical endogeneity, I adopt the solution used by Mousseau, Orsun and Ungerer (2013) and measure regime difference as proposed by Werner (2000), drawing on the subcomponents of the Polity2 regime measure. As can be seen, the coefficient for Political Distance (1.00) is positive and significant, corroborating that regime mixed dyads do indeed have more militarized conflict than others. Yet, the inclusion of this term has no effect on the results that concern us here: CIEL ()0.85) is now even more robust, and the coefficient for DemocracyL (0.03) is above zero.7 Model 4 replaces the continuous democracy measure with the standard binary one (Polity2 > 6), as suggested by Russett (2010:201), citing Bayer and Bernhard (2010). As can be observed, the coefficient for CIEL ()0.83) remains negative and highly significant, while DemocracyBinary6 (0.63) is in the positive (wrong) direction. As discussed above, analyses of fatal dispute onsets with the far stricter binary measure for democracy (Polity = 10), put forward by Dafoe (2011) in response to Mousseau (2009), yields perfect prediction (as does the prior binary measure Both States CIE), causing quasi-complete separation and inconclusive results. Therefore, Model 5 reports the results with DemocracyBinary10 in analyses of all militarized conflicts, not just fatal ones. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyBinary10 ()0.41), while negative, is not significant. Model 6 reports the results in analyses of fatal disputes with DemocracyL squared (after adding 10), which implies that the likelihood of conflict

decreases more quickly toward the high values of DemocracyL. As can be seen, the coefficient for DemocracyL 2 is at zero, further corroborating that even very high levels of democracy do not appear to cause peace in analyses of fatal disputes, once consideration is given to contractintensive economy. Models 3, 4, and 6, which include Political Distance, were repeated (but unreported to save space) with analyses of all militarized interstate disputes, with the democracy coefficients close to zero in every case. Therefore, the conclusions reached by Mousseau (2009) are corroborated even with the most stringent measures of

democracy, consideration of institutional distance, and across all specifications: The democratic peace appears spurious , with contract-intensive economy being the more likely explanation for both democracy and the democratic peace.

2NC—Democracy ImpactDemocracy doesn’t solve war Shah 2008 – editor of globalissues.org (Anup, 11/30. “Democracy.” http://www.globalissues.org/article/761/democracy)

Democracy (“rule by the people” when translated from its Greek meaning) is seen as one of the ultimate ideals that modern civilizations strive to create, or preserve. Democracy as a system of governance is supposed to allow extensive representation and inclusiveness of as many people and views as possible to feed into the functioning of a fair and just society. Democratic principles run in line with the ideals of universal freedoms such as the right to free speech. Importantly, democracy supposedly serves to check unaccountable power and manipulation by the few at the expense of the many, because fundamentally democracy is seen as a form of governance by the people, for the people. This is often implemented through elected representatives, which therefore requires free, transparent, and fair elections, in order to achieve legitimacy. The ideals of democracy are so appealing to citizens around the world, that many have sacrificed their livelihoods, even their lives, to fight for it. Indeed, our era of “civilization” is characterized as much by war and conflict as it is by peace and democracy. The twentieth century alone has often been called “the century of war.” In a way, the amount of propaganda and repression some non-democratic states set up against their own people is a testament to the people’s desire for more open and democratic forms of government. That is, the more people are perceived to want it, the more extreme a non-democratic state apparatus has to be to hold on to power. However, even in established democracies, there are pressures that threaten various democratic foundations. A democratic system’s openness also allows it to attract those with vested interests to use the democratic process as a means to attain power and influence, even if they do not hold democratic principles dear. This may also signal a weakness in the way some democracies are set up. In principle, there may be various ways to address this, but in reality once power is attained by those who are not genuinely support democracy, rarely is it easily given up.

Democratic peace not true – Other factors account for peace between democraciesStephen M. Walt 99; Professor of Political Science and Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division at the U of Chicago., Foreign Affairs January, 1999 / February, 1999

Critics of the democratic-peace hypothesis make two main counterarguments. Their first line of attack holds that the apparent pacifism between democracies may be a statistical artifact: because democracies have been relatively rare throughout history,

the absence of wars between them may be due largely to chance. Evidence for a democratic peace also depends on the time

periods one examines and on how one interprets borderline cases like the War of 1812 or the American Civil War. Critics also note that strong

statistical support for the proposition is limited to the period after World War II, when both the U.S.-led alliance system and the Soviet threat to Western Europe's democracies discouraged conflict between republics. A

second challenge focuses on the causal logic of the theory itself. Democratic-peace proponents often attribute the absence of war between republics to a sense of tolerance and shared values that makes using force against fellow republics illegitimate. (As noted above, Weart's version of this argument emphasizes the tendency for republics to see similar states as part of their own "in-group.") If this

theory is true, however, there should be concrete historical evidence showing that democratic leaders eschewed violence against

each other primarily for this reason. But critics like Christopher Layne have shown that when democratic states have come close to war, they have held back for reasons that had more to do with strategic interests than shared political culture. These cases suggest that even if democracies have tended not to fight each other in the past, it is not because they were democracies.

Democracy doesn’t solve peace – Lurking variables.Waltz 2k Kenneth Waltz, Research Assoc. of the Inst. of War and Peace Studies and Adj. Prof. at Columbia U, 2000 (International Security, Spring, p. 5, Structural Realism After the Cold War) (MHHARV6424)

Every student of international politics is aware of the statistical data supporting the democratic peace thesis. Everyone has also known at least

since David Hume that we have no reason to believe that the association of events provides a basis for inferring the presence of a causal relation. John Mueller properly speculates that it is not democracy that causes peace but that other conditions cause both democracy and peace. Some of the major democracies--Britain in the nineteenth century and

the United States in the twentieth century--have been among the most powerful states of their eras. Powerful states often gain their ends by peaceful means where weaker states either fail or have to resort to war . Thus, the American government deemed the democratically elected Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic too weak to bring order to his country. The United States toppled his government by sending 23,000 troops within a week, troops whose mere presence made fighting a war unnecessary. Salvador Allende, dem ocratically elected ruler of Chile, was systematically and effectively undermined by the United States, without the open use of force, because its leaders thought that his government was taking a wrong turn. As Henry Kissinger put it: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." That is the way it is with democracies--their people may show bad judgment. "Wayward" democracies are especially tempting objects of intervention by other democracies that wish to save them. American policy may have been wise in both cases, but its actions surely cast doubt on the democratic peace thesis. So do the instances when a democracy did fight another democracy. So do the instances in which democratically elected legislatures have clamored for war, as has happened for example in Pakistan and Jordan.

1NC—ConsequencesYou should evaluate the consequences of the aff—any alternative condemns millions to sufferingIsaac 2 (Jeffrey C., Prof of Polisci and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life @ Indiana U, “Hannah Arendt on human rights and the limits of exposure, or why Noam Chomsky is wrong about the meaning of Kosovo,”)

What does Arendt mean here? She does not attribute primary responsibility, either causal or moral, for the rise of totalitarianism to these

intellectuals, who were basically without power. But she does imply that they were guilty of a serious intellectual and indeed

ethical failure, connected to the fact that while brilliant they were also cynical. Disgusted with bourgeois hypocrisy and its double standards, they abandoned standards altogether . Revolted by the impoverishment of social relationships, they abandoned all sense of genuine solidarity with fellow citizens or human beings. It was not simply that they lacked any clear sense of the actual consequences of their rage against liberalism.

They also failed to offer, or to stand by, any moral values. They were enemies of hypocrisy rather than partisans of liberty. They lacked any "sense of reality"--any sense of their responsibility for the common world inhabited by men and women, and any sense of the role of their own ideas as potential sources of human good or evil. The theme of the conjunction of intellect and evil recurs again in the concluding sections of Origins, this time in connection not with the

irresponsibility of intellectuals as such, but with the relentless logic of totalitarian ideologies. There is, she argues, not simply a dogmatism but a cruelty inherent in the totalistic explanations furnished by such ideologies . Such cruelty derives from the complete independence of totalitarian ideologies from "all experience." Totalitarian thinking reduces all that is unique, novel,

or contingent to the simple terms of its own purported truth. All experience becomes reducible to the terms of that truth , and is forced, not simply politically but also intellectually, to conform to these terms. This accounts for what Arendt considers the most terrifying feature of totalitarian thought, its "stringent logicality." Ideological thinking, she argues, "orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality" (Arendt, 1973: 471). The ideologue, Arendt maintains, demands a consistency that is inconsistent with "the realm of reality." She does not deny that logic is a method of ordering concepts, or that consistency may be an intellectual virtue. But she maintains that such consistency is not and cannot be a defining quality of the world. The world is too complex, too pluralistic, to admit such consistency. It consists of the disparate experiences, beliefs, and convictions of diverse individuals and groups. And it consists of complex situations that admit of difficult and often tragic choices. The demand for consistency in such a world is too monistic. It is an intellectual conceit--and a conceit specific to intellectuals--to imagine that inconsistency or contradiction is the world's most profound problem, and that the resolution of such inconsistency by logical methods is the most important intellectual-cum-political task. For the elimination of inconsistency may well threaten the elimination of situational ambiguities and differences of opinion that are endemic to the

human condition. And, more to the point, t he world's most profound problem is not inconsistency or ambiguity or even hypocrisy. It is the infliction of harm and suffering on humans by other humans , and the consequent denial of elemental human dignity to the vulnerable and dispossessed. It is, in short, the denial of freedom to human beings. The "stringent logicality" of ideological thinking not only fails to make this suffering a primary concern; it actually exacerbates this suffering, through its own cruel lack of political responsibility, and through its tendency to gravitate toward cruel and unsavory causes that seem noble because of their relentless ideological consistency (see Shklar, 1984). I want to be clear about this. Arendt is talking about totalitarian ideologies, principally Nazism and Stalinism. She is not arguing that all of those who turn "logicality" into a supreme virtue are quasi totalitarians. But in criticizing totalitarian modes of thinking, she also makes a more general point: that "strict logicality," whatever its intellectual merits, can be hostile to

other and more important human values. Intellectuals, she believes, are peculiarly liable to ignore this, for they often inhabit an imaginary world of pure ideality, in which ideas, especially their own ideas, predominate . This is the peculiar unworldliness of the intellectual. It is the source of much brilliance. But if intellectuals want to be social critics then they must become worldly , They must appreciate the irreducible complexity and plurality of the world (see Arendt, 1971: 50-54).

2NC—Util—CP FramingAnd the counterplan changes how to evaluate ethical acts—if two actions are both ethical the ONLY moral option is to choose the one that causes least harmFinnis 1980 (John, Prof of Law and Legal Philosophy, Natural Law and Natural Rights, p 111-112)

The sixth requirement has obvious connections with the fifth, but introduces a new range of problems for practical reason, problems which go to the heart of ‘morality’. For this is the requirement that one bring about good in the world (in one’s own life and the lives of others) by actions that are efficient for their (reasonable) purpose(s). One must not waste one’s opportunities by using inefficient methods. One’s actions should be judged by their effectiveness, by their fitness for their purpose, by their utility, their consequences… There is a wide range of context s in which it is possible and only reasonable to calculate, measure, compare, weigh, and assess the consequences of alternative decisions. Where a choice must be made it is reasonable to prefer human good to the good of animals. Where a choice must be made it is reasonable to prefer basic human goods (such as life) to merely instrumental goods (such as property). Where damage is inevitable, it is reasonable to prefer stunning to wounding, wounding to maiming, maiming to death: i.e. lesser rather than greater damage to one- and-the-same basic good in one-and-the-same instantiation. Where one way of participating in a human good includes both all the good aspects and effects of its alternative, and more, it is reasonable to prefer that way: a remedy that both relieves pain and heals is to be preferred to the one that merely relieves pain . Where a person or a society has created a personal or social hierarchy of practical norms and orientations, through reasonable choice of commitments, one can in many cases reasonably measure the benefits and disadvantages of alternatives. (Consider a man who ha decided to become a scholar, or a society that has decided to go to war.) Where one is considering objects or activities in which there is reasonably a market, the market provides a common denominator (currency) and enables a comparison to be made of prices, costs, and profits. Where there are alternative techniques or facilities for achieving definite objectives, cost-benefit analysis will make possible a certain range of reasonable comparisons between techniques or facilities. Over a wide range of preferences and wants, it is reasonable for an individual or society to seek to maximize the satisfaction of those preferences or wants.

CRA CP

1NC—CRA CPThe United States federal government should pass the Civil Rights Act of 2008. The Civil Rights Act of 2008 enforces a disparate impact standard to discrimination—solves the affSuthammanont 2010 - Victor, J.D. from NYU Law School, 2009/2010, "Rebalancing the Scales: Restoring the Availability of Disparate Impact Causes of Action in Title VI Cases", http://www.nylslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2013/11/54-1.Suthammanont.pdf

The Civil Rights Act of 2008 then amends the various civil rights statutes to correct the effects of various Supreme Court decisions from the past three decades. With respect to Title VI, the Civil Rights Act of 2008 adds two new subsections to section 601 after the text of the original statute.161 Of these two subsections, subsection (b) prohibits “[d]iscrimination (including exclusion from participation and denial of benefits)” which can be proven by disparate impacts on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and for which the state fails to provide a reason “related to

and necessary to achieve the nondiscriminatory goals of the program[.]”162 The recipient of federal funds may also be found to have discriminated “if a less discriminatory alternative policy or practice exists, and the covered entity refuses to adopt such alternative policy or practice.”163 Each policy or practice must separately be shown to cause a disparate impact, except where the processes are not capable of separation for analysis.164 If there is intentional discrimination, necessity of achieving the goals of the program is not a defense.165 Section 602 of Title VI would also be amended. The Civil Rights Act of 2008 adds a new subsection (b) to section 602 stating: “Any person aggrieved by the failure of a covered entity to comply with this title, including any regulation promulgated pursuant to this title, may bring a civil action.”166 This language creates a private right of action to enforce regulations under section 602 of Title VI, directly overruling the result in Sandoval. 167 The Civil Rights Act of 2008 then creates a new section 602A outlining the recovery available under Title VI. 168 The remedies available depend on the manner of claim brought by the plaintiff.169 For a claim of intentional discrimination, a plaintiff may recover both equitable relief and damages, including punitive and compensatory damages, attorney’s fees, and costs.170 For claims based on disparate impact, a plaintiff is only entitled to equitable relief, attorney’s fees, and costs.171 Section 602A also explicitly notes that claims may be brought under the implementing regulations.172 This scheme adopts the remedies that Justice White would have allowed in Guardians Association. 173

2NC—SolvencyImplementing the CRA of 2008 solvesSuthammanont 2010 - Victor, J.D. from NYU Law School, 2009/2010, "Rebalancing the Scales: Restoring the Availability of Disparate Impact Causes of Action in Title VI Cases", http://www.nylslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2013/11/54-1.Suthammanont.pdf

Disparate impact causes of action were available to plaintiffs for over thirty years before the Supreme Court decision in Sandoval. In addition to upsetting the expectations of those who required the protections of Title VI, the Court’s jurisprudence generally has reflected a thumb on the scales of justice in favor of the status quo . Congress should act to undo this imbalance to help remediate past discrimination and prevent present discrimination. Legislation similar to the proposed Civil Rights Act of 2008 is a positive step in rebalancing the scales.

2NC—A2: Strike DownCongress has authority under the Spending ClauseSuthammanont 2010 - Victor, J.D. from NYU Law School, 2009/2010, "Rebalancing the Scales: Restoring the Availability of Disparate Impact Causes of Action in Title VI Cases", http://www.nylslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2013/11/54-1.Suthammanont.pdf

Congress’s authority to pass Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 most likely arises under the Spending Clause of the Constitution.174 The amendments to that Title in the Civil Rights Act of 2008 would derive from the same grant of authority. Congress spending power is limited by case law.175 Congress must exercise the spending power for “the general welfare.”176 Conditional grants of funding must be unambiguous so that states knowingly accept the conditions attached.177 In addition, conditions on federal funding may be impermissible if they are unrelated to “the federal interest in particular . . . programs”178 or if prohibited by constitutional provisions.179 These requirements are merely for Congress to condition the receipt of federal funds; for Congress to require a state to waive

sovereign immunity, other considerations may come into play.180 Insofar as Congress wishes to stop state actors from discriminating, it has power under section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to pass legislation to achieve those ends.181 Congress also has the power to abrogate states’ Eleventh Amendment immunity from suit to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.182 This power, however,

is limited by the scope of protections in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.183 The Court has held that legislation under section 5 must “exhibit congruence and proportionality between the injury to be . . . remedied and the means adopted to that end.”184 This restriction has invalidated congressional abrogation of state immunity under the ADEA185 and the ADA. 186 Congress specifically authorized private actions under Title VI against the states in 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-7.187 Courts have held that section 2000d-7 both abrogates state immunity under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment and is the required waiver of immunity for a state to receive federal funding.188 Despite this authority for revising Title VI, given the Court’s recent hostility to civil rights actions against the states, the validity of the Civil Rights Act of 2008 should be examined in detail. A state challenging an implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 2008 could do so by at least three methods. The first method would be by challenging Congress’s authority under the Constitution to create a disparate-impact cause of action under section 601 of Title VI and a cause of action to enforce regulations promulgated under section 602. The second method would be for a state to challenge whether 42 U.S.C. section 2000d-7 is an adequate notice of waiver to a state for that state to waive sovereign immunity. The third method would be for a state to challenge whether Congress’s abrogation under section 2000d-7 is valid as applied

to the new causes of action. Congress’s power to pass the Civil Rights Act of 2008 is very likely valid under the Spending Clause. Congress has wide power under the Spending Clause to condition the receipt of federal money.189 In amending Title VI, Congress certainly would be legislating for “the general welfare.”190 There is a strong federal interest in antidiscrimination law, as evidenced in the Constitution.191 Congressional conditioning of federal money is unambiguous in Title VI. 192 There seem to be no other constitutional bars to allowing disparate-impact claims under the Spending Clause, especially considering the mandate given to Congress to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment.193 As to the prohibition of “coercion” by Congress,194 it is unlikely that any withdrawal of federal funding would be so severe as to constitute coercion,195 particularly where Congress is not obligated to give money to the states in the first instance.

Title VII proves it’ll be upheldSuthammanont 2010 - Victor, J.D. from NYU Law School, 2009/2010, "Rebalancing the Scales: Restoring the Availability of Disparate Impact Causes of Action in Title VI Cases", http://www.nylslawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2013/11/54-1.Suthammanont.pdf

Also, Congress’s power to create disparate-impact causes of action has been upheld in the Title VII196 and ADEA context.197 While it may be argued that Title VII and the ADEA were passed (insofar as they regulate private employers) under the

Commerce Clause, and Title VI was passed under the spending power, the rationality standard under which both powers are reviewed, absent a separate constitutional prohibition, is similar enough to presume that importing a statutory disparate-impact cause of action into Title VI is permissible.198