Frontline Short1. TPP inev—Obama has already shifted2. Its Guaranteed – even opponents are conceding

Werner, 6/24 – Erica, Reporter @ Associated Press, Boston Herald, 6/24/15, http://www.bostonherald.com/news_opinion/national/2015/06/senate_vote_moves_obamas_trade_agenda_to_brink_of_enactmentSome anti-free-trade groups , however, essentially conceded defeat . "Fast track makes it virtually certain that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), and other secret trade deals will become law ," said the "Internet-freedom" group Fight for the Future. Tuesday's Senate vote was as painful for the AFL-CIO and other unions as it was welcomed by the White House. Many corporate, agricultural and manufacturing groups cheered.

3. Political capital doesn’t exist and isn’t key to their DA- more likely winners winMichael Hirsch, chief correspondent for National Journal. He also contributes to 2012 Decoded. Hirsh previously served as the senior editor and national economics correspondent for Newsweek, based in its Washington bureau. He was also Newsweek’s Washington web editor and authored a weekly column for Newsweek.com, “The World from Washington.” Earlier on, he was Newsweek’s foreign editor, guiding its award-winning coverage of the September 11 attacks and the war on terror. He has done on-the-ground reporting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the world, and served as the Tokyo-based Asia Bureau Chief for Institutional Investor from 1992 to 1994. http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207

On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes, he will lay out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt reduction. In

response, the pundits will do what they always do this time of year: They will talk about how unrealistic most of the proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of how much “pol itical cap ital ” Obama possesses to push his program through. Most of this talk will have no bearing on what actually happens over the next four years. Consider this: Three months ago, just before the November election, if someone had talked seriously about Obama

having enough political capital to oversee passage of both immigration reform and gun-control legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after winning the election by 4 percentage points

and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—this person would have been called crazy and stripped of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) In his first term, in a starkly

polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to work without fear of deportation for at least two years. Obama didn’t dare to even bring up gun control , a Democratic “third rail” that has cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law. And yet, for reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “pol itical cap ital ”—

chances are fair that both will now happen . What changed? In the case of gun control, of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the

20 first-graders who were slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed

after another. Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners. Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.” As a result, momentum has appeared to build around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun

laws. But one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit

of compromise on immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this

turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal influence—his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27 percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29

at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the Republican Party’s recent introspection, and the realization by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party may be facing demographic

death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority. It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all. The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term. Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a better claim on the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But

the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your side.” The real problem is that the idea of pol itical cap ita l—or mandates, or momentum—is so poorly defined that presidents and pundits often get it wrong . “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political capital—some sense of

an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It almost never happens. In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political capital is a concept that misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It conveys the idea that we know more than we really do about the ever-elusive concept of political power, and it discounts the way unforeseen events can suddenly change everything. Instead, it suggests, erroneously, that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and

the size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history. Naturally, any president has practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will increasingly avoid any concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger. But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and gun-control issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth

about Washington that is kindergarten simple: You just don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “Winning wins.” In theory, and in practice, depending on Obama’s handling of any particular issue, even in a polarized time , he could still deliver on a lot of his second-term goals, depending on his skill and

the breaks. Unforeseen catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge disparity in the Hispanic vote. Some political scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass

legislation and run successful presidencies say that pol itical cap ital is , at best, an empty concept , and that almost nothing in the academic literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing, like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard

Bensel, a government professor at Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests. Winning on one issue often changes the calculation for the next issue; there is never any known amount of cap ital . “The idea here is, if an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he

wants, and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors” Ornstein says. “If they think he’s going to win, they may change positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon effect.” ¶ ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ¶ Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because he’s

aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the 1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main reasons for that mandate (in addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his exhaustive study of LBJ, The Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late 1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize Southern lawmakers’ support for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table [said that] the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of course, was what political capital was called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson didn’t worry about coinage, and he got the Civil Rights Act enacted, along with much else: Medicare, a tax cut, antipoverty programs. He appeared to understand not just the ways of Congress but also the way to maximize the momentum he possessed in the lingering mood of national grief and determination by picking the right issues, as Caro records. “Momentum is not a mysterious mistress,” LBJ said. “It is a controllable fact of political life.” Johnson had the skill and wherewithal to realize that, at that moment of history, he could have unlimited coinage if he handled the politics right. He did. (At least until Vietnam, that is.) And then there are the presidents who get the politics, and the issues, wrong. It was the last president before Obama who was just starting a second term, George W. Bush, who really revived the claim of political capital, which he was very fond of wielding. Then Bush promptly demonstrated that he didn’t fully understand the concept either. At his first news conference after his 2004 victory, a confident-sounding Bush declared, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. That’s my style.” The 43rd president threw all of his political capital at an overriding passion: the partial privatization of Social Security. He mounted a full-bore public-relations campaign that included town-hall meetings across the country. Bush failed utterly, of course. But the problem was not that he didn’t have enough political capital. Yes, he may have overestimated his standing. Bush’s margin over John Kerry was thin—helped along by a bumbling Kerry campaign that was almost the mirror image of Romney’s gaffe-filled failure this time—but that was not the real mistake. The problem was that whatever credibility or stature Bush thought he had earned as a newly reelected president did nothing to make Social Security privatization a better idea in most people’s eyes. Voters didn’t trust the plan, and four years later, at the end of Bush’s term, the stock-market collapse bore out the public’s skepticism. Privatization just didn’t have any momentum behind it, no matter who was pushing it or how much capital Bush spent to sell it. The mistake that Bush made with Social Security, says John Sides, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-followed political blogger, “was that just because he won an election, he thought he had a green light. But there was no sense of any kind of public urgency on Social Security reform. It’s like he went into the garage where various Republican policy ideas were hanging up and picked one. I don’t think Obama’s going to make that mistake.… Bush decided he wanted to push a rock up a hill. He didn’t understand how steep the

hill was. I think Obama has more momentum on his side because of the Republican Party’s concerns about the Latino vote and the shooting at Newtown.” Obama may also get his way on the debt ceiling, not because of his reelection, Sides says, “but because Republicans are beginning to doubt whether taking a hard line on fiscal policy is a good idea,” as the party suffers in the polls.¶ THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER¶ Presidents are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course, just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this,

too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health care law in his first term. But the real problem was that the plan was unpopular, the economy was bad, and the president didn’t realize that the national mood (yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout, aghast at the amount of federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention too far. So was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic fights over the debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with the country’s mood. Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care reform was that it distracted the government’s attention from other issues that people cared about more urgently, such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation with loopholes. Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room, the aides said. Weighing the imponderables of momentum, the often-mystical calculations about when the historic moment is ripe for an issue, will never be a science. It is mainly intuition, and its best practitioners have a long history in American politics. This is a tale told well in Steven Spielberg’s hit movie Lincoln. Daniel Day-Lewis’s Abraham Lincoln attempts a lot of behind-the-scenes vote-buying to win passage of the 13th Amendment, banning slavery, along with eloquent attempts to move people’s hearts and minds. He appears to be using the political capital of his reelection and the turning of the tide in the Civil War. But it’s clear that a surge of conscience, a sense of the changing times, has as much to do with the final vote as all the backroom horse-trading. “The reason I think the idea of political capital is kind of distorting is that it implies you have chits you can give out to people. It really oversimplifies why you elect politicians, or why they can do what Lincoln did,” says Tommy Bruce, a former political consultant in Washington. Consider, as another example, the storied political career of President Franklin Roosevelt. Because the mood was ripe for dramatic change in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was able to push an astonishing array of New Deal programs through a largely compliant Congress, assuming what some described as near-dictatorial powers. But in his second term, full of confidence because of a landslide victory in 1936 that brought in unprecedented Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Roosevelt overreached with his infamous Court-packing proposal. All of a sudden, the political capital that experts thought was limitless disappeared. FDR’s plan to expand the Supreme Court by putting in his judicial allies abruptly created an unanticipated wall of opposition from newly reunited Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats. FDR thus inadvertently handed back to Congress, especially to the Senate, the power and influence he had seized in his first term. Sure, Roosevelt had loads of popularity and momentum in 1937. He seemed to have a bank vault full of political capital. But, once again, a president simply chose to take on the wrong issue at the wrong time; this time, instead of most of the political interests in the country aligning his way, they opposed him. Roosevelt didn’t fully recover until World War II, despite two more election victories. In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these

shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But if he picks issues that the country’s

mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories than any of the careful calculators of pol itical cap ital now believe is possible, including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction. Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more mature Obama seems to be

emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly. If he can get some early wins —as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—that will create momentum , and one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins .” Obama himself learned some hard lessons over the past four years about the

falsity of the political-capital concept. Despite his decisive victory over John McCain in 2008, he fumbled the selling of his $787 billion stimulus plan by portraying himself naively as a “post-partisan” president who somehow had been given the electoral mandate to be all things to all people. So Obama tried to sell his stimulus as a long-term restructuring plan that would “lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth.” The president thus fed GOP suspicions that he was just another big-government liberal. Had he understood better that the country was digging in against yet more government intervention and had sold the stimulus as what it mainly was—a giant shot of adrenalin to an economy with a stopped heart, a pure emergency measure—he might well have escaped the worst of the backlash. But by laying on ambitious programs, and following up quickly with his health care plan, he only sealed his reputation on the right as a closet socialist. After that, Obama’s public posturing provoked automatic opposition from the GOP, no matter what he said. If the president put his personal imprimatur on any plan—from deficit reduction, to health care, to immigration reform—Republicans were virtually guaranteed to come out against it. But this year, when he sought to exploit the chastened GOP’s newfound willingness to compromise on immigration, his approach was different. He seemed to understand that the Republicans needed to reclaim immigration reform as their own issue, and he was willing to let them have some credit. When he mounted his bully pulpit in Nevada, he delivered another new message as well: You Republicans don’t have to listen to what I say anymore. And don’t worry about who’s got the political capital. Just take a hard look at where I’m saying this: in a state you were supposed to have won but lost because of the rising Hispanic vote. Obama was cleverly pointing the GOP toward conclusions that he knows it is already reaching on its own: If you, the Republicans, want to have any kind of a future in a vastly changed electoral map, you have no choice but to move. It’s your choice.

4. PC not real- it’s a myth- vote based on ideologyFrank Moraes is a freelance writer with broad interests. He is educated as a scientist with a PhD in Atmospheric Physics. He has worked in climate science, remote sensing, and throughout the computer industry. And he has taught physics. 1-8-2013 http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2013/01/political-capital-is-myth.html

Yesterday, Jonathan Chait metaphorically scratched his head: "Nominating Hagel Most Un-Obama Thing Ever." He can't understand this nomination given that (1) Hagel will be a hard sell and (2) Obama doesn't much listen to his advisers anyway. It is interesting speculation, but I wouldn't have even thought about it had he not

written, "Why waste political capital picking a fight that isn't essential to any policy goals?"¶ This brought to mind something that

has been on my mind for a while, as in posts like "Bipartisan Consensus Can Bite Me." I'm afraid that just like Santa Claus and most conceptions of

God, "Political Capital" is a myth . I think it is just an idea that Villagers find comforting. It is a neat narrative in

which one can straightjacket a political fight. Otherwise, it is just bullshit .¶ Let's go back to late 2004, after Bush Jr was re-elected. He said, "I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it." What was this thing that Bush intended to spend? It is usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this proves the point, but does anyone really think if Bush had decided to use his political

capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush's political capital didn't exist.¶ Let's look at

more recent events: the Fiscal Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because the people who voted for him demanded it. He won it because everyone knew that in the new year he would still be pres ident . Tax rates were going up. Boehner took the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold because of some magi c p olitical c apital that Obama could wave over him.¶ There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how politicians act. Even politicians in small safe

districts have to worry that larger political trends may end up making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that, they really don't care. If they did, then everyone in the House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated p olitical c apital . But they don't, because presidential elections have consequences -- for who's in the White House. They don't have much consequence for the representative from the Third District of California.

5. Zero risk of protectionismAhearn 9 [Raymond, CRS Specialist in International Trade and Finance, “The Global Economic Downturn and Protectionism,” March 23, 2009, http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/19395.pdf]

There are a number of reasons why the threat of a return to protectionist , beggar-thy-neighbor policies could be vastly overstated. Unlike the 1930s, today’s global economy has several strong firewalls to prevent governments from raising trade barriers that result in a cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation. These firewalls include more institutionalized obstacles to protectionism built into the WTO system, more policy instruments to address the economic slowdown, and a more interdependent and open world economy than existed in the 1930s. In addition, some in today’s media may tend to overstate the threat of protectionism by not always distinguishing between protectionist actions and protectionist pressures and/or by equating legitimate forms of protection with protectionism. The fact that there is ample room for increases in trade measures and barriers that are consistent with the rules and obligations of the WTO often may go unappreciated in some press coverage. These trade measures and barriers include increases in applied tariffs to bound rates, and imposition of countervailing and antidumping duties, so-called ‘defensive’ trade measures.4 Protection for limited periods of time and under prescribed conditions is built into the rules of the WTO as a political safety valve and as a recognition of the human and social costs that are associated with the often wrenching adjustments that accompany increased trade competition. Firewalls Against Protectionism WTO rules today serve to keep a lid on trade barriers of its 153 members through an elaborate set of mutual obligations and dispute settlement procedures. Unlike the 1930s when countries could impose higher trade barriers unilaterally without violating any international agreements or anticipating a foreign reaction, under today’s rules members can take their disputes to the WTO for settlement rather than engaging in reciprocal retaliatory actions. The fact that countries violating WTO obligations can face WTO-sanctioned retaliation helps constrain outbreaks of unilateral actions that could be mutually harmful.5 Pressures for protection are also dampened by a world economy that is much more interdependent and integrated than in the 1930s.6 Leading producers have become so international in their production operations and supply chains that they have developed a vested interest in resisting protectionism .7 Many industries that have faced import competition in the past – such as televisions and semiconductors—have found that international diversification or joint ventures with foreign partners are a more profitable way of coping with global competition than blocking goods at the border. In addition, many domestic industries have less incentive to ask for import restrictions because foreign rivals now produce in the domestic market, eliminating the benefits of trade barriers for domestic firms.8 Unlike the early 1930s, when governments took little responsibility for propping up financial institutions and were unable to pursue expansionary monetary policies due to fixed exchange rates under the gold standard, policymakers around the world today are adopting expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. These expansionary policies, in turn, have the capability of dampening protectionist pressures and demands that stem from job losses and related economic hardship with lower interest rates and increased expenditures on unemployment benefits and health care benefits.9 A related consideration is that today’s world economy is much more open than the world economy of the 1930s. Average tariffs on world trade have come down from the 50% range in the 1930s, to the 25% range in the 1980s, and to less than 10% today.10 Under these circumstances, it would require tremendous increases in protection to get the world back to anywhere near the conditions of the 19 30s , although a major increase in tariffs (e.g. a

doubling) would be disruptive even if it left tariffs well below the 1930s levels. Scorecard of Protective Measures To Date Empirical support exists for the view that existing legal, economic, and political firewalls are restraining today’s protectionist pressures. Most importantly, Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s Director General, reported in January 2009 that most WTO members have successfully kept domestic protectionist pressures under control “with only limited evidence of increases in trade restricting or trade distorting measures” taken during the last six months of 2008. This assessment was based on the first report of the WTO secretariat on the trade effects of the global economic crisis. The report found only “limited evidence” of an increase in tariffs, non-tariff barriers or trade-remedy actions by member countries, but noted that the most significant actions taken in response to the global crisis have involved “financial support of one kind or another to banks and other financial institutions and to certain industries, notably the automobile industry.”11 The WTO report notes tariff increases on selected products being implemented by India, Russia, Ecuador, and Ukraine. Countries adopting non-tariff measures include Indonesia (port of entry barriers) and Argentina (import licensing requirements). Argentina was cited for measures that attempt to boost exports of selected products. But the report indicates that there has been “no dramatic increase” in antidumping investigations in the second half of 2008 compared to first half of 2008, but raised the possibility of increased trade remedy actions in 2009.12 The World Bank, which has also been monitoring trade restrictions proposed and adopted since the beginning of the financial crisis, reached a conclusion similar to that of the WTO. Its initial report determined that there have been 47 trade restrictive measures imposed since the financial crisis began last summer, including 17 from G-20 countries, but that “these measures have probably had only marginal effects on trade flows to date.” In addition to the measures cited by the WTO, the World Bank report cited China’s import ban on various food products from the EU, and export subsidies provided by the EU, China, and India. Contrary to the WTO report, the World Bank report determined that “the number of antidumping cases (both investigations initiated and imposition of duties) surged in 2008.”13

Frontline Short1. US losing the war on terror

Miller ‘15Internally quoting Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. - Greg Miller - Intelligence reporter for the Washington Post; former national security correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and co-author of The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War against al Qaeda - “In campaign against terrorism, U.S. enters period of pessimism and gloom” – Washington Post - March 7 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-campaign-against-terrorism-us-enters-period-of-pessimism-and-gloom/2015/03/07/ca980380-c1bc-11e4-ad5c-3b8ce89f1b89_story.html

In congressional testimony recently, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. went beyond the usual litany of threats to say that terrorism trend lines were worse “than at any other point in history.” Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, commander of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Middle East, told participants on a counterterrorism strategy call that he regarded the Islamic State as a greater menace than al-Qaeda ever was. Speaking at a New York police terrorism conference, Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, said he had come to doubt that he would live to see the end

of al-Qaeda and its spawn. “This is long term,” he said. “My children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation will still be fighting this fight.” The assessments reflect a pessimism that has descended on the U.S. counterterror ism community over the past year amid a series of discouraging developments. Among them are the growth of the Islamic State, the

ongoing influx of foreign fighters into Syria, the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Yemen and the downward spiral of Libya’s security situation. The latest complication came Saturday, when the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria carried out a series of suicide bombings and reportedly declared its allegiance to the Islamic State. Unlike the waves of anxiety that accompanied the emergence of new terrorist plots over the past decade, the latest shift in mood seems more deep-seated. U.S. officials depict a bewildering landscape in which al-Qaeda and the brand of Islamist militancy it inspired have not only survived 14 years of intense counterterrorism operations but have also spread. Officials emphasize that their campaign has accomplished critical goals. In

particular, most officials and experts now see the risk of a Sept. 11-scale attack as infinitesimal, beyond the reach of al-Qaeda and its scattered affiliates. Still, the adjusted outlook contrasts sharply with the surge of optimism that followed the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and the dawn of the Arab Spring, which was initially seen as a political awakening across the Middle East that might render al-Qaeda and its archaic ideology irrelevant. Within months of bin Laden’s death, then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he was convinced “that we’re within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda.” President Obama echoed that view in subsequent years by saying that al-Qaeda was on “a path to defeat” and, more recently, that the then-nascent

Islamic State was analogous to a junior varsity sports team. Such upbeat characterizations have all but evaporated.

2. No link – targeted warrants, which plan allows, solve the terror disad just as well.

Wyden ‘14(et al; This amicus brief issued by three US Senators - Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Martin Heinrich. Wyden and Udall sat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and had access to the meta-data program. “BRIEF FOR AMICI CURIAE SENATOR RON WYDEN, SENATOR MARK UDALL, AND SENATOR MARTIN HEINRICH IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFF-APPELLANT, URGING REVERSAL OF THE DISTRICT COURT” – Amicus Brief for Smith v. Obama – before the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - Appeal from the United States District Court District of Idaho The Honorable B. Lynn Winmill, Chief District Judge, Presiding Case No. 2:13-cv-00257-BLW – Sept 9th, 2014 – This Amicus Brief was prepared by CHARLES S. SIMS from the law firm PROSKAUER ROSE LLP. Amici” means “friend of the court” and – in this context - is legal reference to Wyden, Udall, etc. This pdf can be obtained at: https://www.eff.org/document/wyden-udall-heinrich-smith-amicus)As members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, amici Senators Wyden and Udall have for years

participated in the oversight of government surveillance conducted under the Patriot Act that they knew would astonish most Americans. They sought to warn the public about those activities as best they could without disclosing classified information. They also co-sponsored an amendment to the Patriot Act’s reauthorization that sought to address the problem of government officials “secretly reinterpret[ing] public laws and statutes” and “describ[ing] the execution of these laws in a way that misinforms or misleads the public.” See 157 Cong. Rec. S3360 (daily ed. May 25, 2011) (introducing SA 384 to S. 990, 112th Cong. § 3 (2011)); see also 157 Cong. Rec. S3386 (daily ed. May 26, 2011) (statement of Sen. Wyden) (“The fact is anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act. Yet many Members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch.”); 157 Cong. Rec. S3258 (daily ed. May 24, 2011) (statement of Sen. Udall) (“Congress is granting powers to the executive branch that lead to abuse, and, frankly, shield the executive branch from

accountability”). Now that the government’s bulk call-records program has been documented and exposed, the executive branch has retreated from frequently repeated claims about its necessity and expressed an intent to end government bulk collection under section 215. Press Release, FACT SHEET: The Administration’s Proposal for Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program (Mar. 27, 2014), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/27/fact-sheet-administration-s-proposal-ending-section-215-bulk-telephony-m (“White House Press Release”). While Senators Udall, Heinrich and Wyden broadly support a policy aimed at ending the government’s indiscriminate collection of telephony metadata, they share a concern that there is no plan to suspend the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records in the absence of new legislation, which is not necessarily imminent. Meanwhile, the government

continues to defend its bulk call-record collection program vigorously against statutory and constitutional challenges in the courts. Amici submit this

brief to respond to the government’s argument that its collection of bulk call records is necessary to defend the nation

against terrorist attacks. Amici make one central point: as members of the committee charged with overseeing the

National Security Agency’s surveillance, amici have reviewed this surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through means that caused far less harm to the privacy interests of millions of Americans. The government has at its disposal a number of authorities that allow it to obtain the call records of suspected terrorists and those in contact with suspected terrorists. It appears to amici that these

more targeted authorities could have been used to obtain the information that the government has publicly claimed was crucial in a few important counterterrorism cases.

3. Terrorist can’t obtain and correctly deploy bioweaponsOuagrham-Gormley 14Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley is Assistant Professor of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University. She worked for a decade at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. She was for two years research director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies office in Kazakhstan and was founding editor of the International Export Control Observer, Cornell University Press, November 2014, “Barriers to Bioweapons”, http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100857780In both the popular imagination and among lawmakers and national security experts, there exists the belief that with sufficient motivation and material resources, states or terrorist groups can produce bioweapons easily, cheaply, and successfully. In Barriers to Bioweapons, Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley challenges this perception by showing that bioweapons development is a difficult, protracted, and expensive endeavor, rarely achieving the expected results

whatever the magnitude of investment . Her findings are based on extensive interviews she conducted with former

U.S. and Soviet-era bioweapons scientists and on careful analysis of archival data and other historical documents related to various state and

terrorist bioweapons programs. Bioweapons development relies on living organisms that are sensitive to their environment and handling conditions, and therefore behave unpredictably . These features place a greater premium on specialized knowledge. Ben Ouagrham-Gormley posits that lack of access to such intellectual capital constitutes the greatest barrier to the making of bioweapons . She integrates theories drawn from economics, the sociology of science, organization, and management with her empirical research. The resulting theoretical framework rests on the idea that the pace and success of a bioweapons development program

can be measured by its ability to ensure the creation and transfer of scientific and technical knowledge. The specific organizational , managerial, social, political, and economic conditions necessary for success are difficult to achieve, particularly in covert programs where the need to prevent detection imposes managerial and organizational

conditions that conflict with knowledge production.4. No-internal link, their own card (boot 13) cites incompetency

Boot ‘13Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2004, he was named by the World Affairs Councils of America as one of "the 500 most influential people in the United States in the field of foreign policy." In 2007, he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. From 1992 to 1994 he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. Boot holds a bachelor's degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley and a master's degree in history from Yale University. Boot has served as an adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the published author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present. From the article: “Stay calm and let the NSA carry on” - LA Times – June 9th - http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/09/opinion/la-oe-boot-nsa-surveillance-20130609

After 9/11, there was a widespread expectation of many more terrorist attacks on the United States. So far that hasn't happened. We haven't escaped entirely unscathed (see Boston Marathon, bombing of), but on the whole we have been a lot safer than most security experts , including me, expected. In light of the current controversy over the National Security Agency's monitoring of telephone calls and

emails, it is worthwhile to ask: Why is that? It is certainly not due to any change of heart among our enemies.

Radical Islamists still want to kill American infidels. But the vast majority of the time, they fail. The Heritage Foundation estimated last year that 50 terrorist attacks on the American

homeland had been foiled since 2001. Some, admittedly, failed through sheer incompetence on the part of the would-be terrorists. For instance, Faisal Shahzad, a

Pakistani American jihadist, planted a car bomb in Times Square in 2010 that started smoking before exploding, thereby alerting two New

Yorkers who in turn called police, who were able to defuse it. But it would be naive to adduce all of our security success to pure serendipity.

Surely more attacks would have succeeded absent the ramped-up counter-terror ism efforts undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community , the military and law enforcement. And a large element of the intelligence community's success lies in its use of special intelligence — that is, communications intercepts. The CIA is notoriously deficient in human intelligence — infiltrating spies into terrorist organizations is hard to do, especially when we

have so few spooks who speak Urdu, Arabic, Persian and other relevant languages. But the NSA is the best in the world at intercepting communications. That is the most important technical advantage we have in the battle against fanatical foes who will not hesitate to sacrifice their lives to take ours. Which brings us to the current kerfuffle over two NSA monitoring programs that have been exposed by the Guardian and the Washington

Post. One program apparently collects metadata on all telephone calls made in the United States. Another program provides access to all the emails, videos and other data found on the servers of major Internet firms such as Google , Apple and Microsoft. At first blush these intelligence-gathering activities raise the specter of Big Brother snooping on ordinary American citizens who might be cheating on their

spouses or bad-mouthing the president. In fact, there are considerable safeguards built into both programs to ensure that doesn't happen. The phone-monitoring program does not allow the NSA to listen in on conversations without a court order. All that it can do is to collect information on the time, date and destination of phone calls. It should go without saying that it would be pretty useful to know if someone in the U.S. is calling a number in Pakistan or Yemen that is used by a terrorist organizer. As for the Internet-monitoring program, reportedly known as PRISM, it is apparently limited to "non-U.S. persons" who are abroad and thereby enjoy no constitutional protections. These are hardly rogue operations. Both programs were initiated by President George W. Bush and continued by President Obama with the full knowledge and support of Congress and continuing oversight from the federal judiciary. That's why the leaders of both the House and Senate intelligence committees, Republicans and Democrats

alike, have come to the defense of these activities. It's possible that, like all government programs, these could be abused — see, for example, the IRS making life

tough on tea partiers. But there is no evidence of abuse so far and plenty of evidence — in the lack of successful terrorist attacks — that these programs have been effective in disrupting terror ist plots. Granted there is something inherently creepy about Uncle Sam scooping up so much information about us. But Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Citibank and other companies know at least as much about us, because they use very similar data-mining programs to track our online movements. They gather that information in order to sell us products, and no one seems to be overly alarmed. The NSA is gathering that information to keep us safe from terrorist attackers. Yet somehow its actions have become a "scandal," to use a term now loosely being tossed around. The real scandal here is that the Guardian and Washington Post are compromising our national security by telling our enemies about our intelligence-gathering capabilities. Their news stories reveal, for example, that only

nine Internet companies share information with the NSA. This is a virtual invitation to terrorists to use other Internet outlets for searches, email, apps and all the rest. No intelligence effort can ever keep us 100% safe, but to stop or scale back the NSA's special intelligence efforts would amount to unilateral disarmament in a war

against terrorism that is far from over.

5. No risk of bioterrorKeller 13 (Rebecca, 7 March 2013, Analyst at Stratfor, “Bioterrorism and the Pandemic Potential,” Stratfor, http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/bioterrorism-and-pandemic-potential)

The risk of an accidental release of H5N1 is similar to that of other infectious pathogens currently being studied. Proper safety standards are key, of course, and experts in the field have had a year to determine the best way to proceed, balancing safety and research benefits . Previous work with the virus was conducted at biosafety level three out of four, which requires researchers wearing respirators and disposable gowns to work in pairs in a negative pressure environment. While many of these labs are part of universities, access is controlled either through keyed entry or even palm scanners. There are roughly 40 labs that submitted to the voluntary ban. Those wishing to resume work after the ban was lifted must comply with guidelines requiring strict national oversight and close communication and collaboration with national authorities. The risk of release either

through accident or theft cannot be completely eliminated, but given the established parameters the risk is minimal . The use of the pathogen as a bio logical weapon requires an assessment of whether a non-state actor would have the capabilities to isolate the virulent strain, then weaponize and distribute it. Stratfor has long held the position that while terrorist organizations may have rudimentary capabilities regarding biological weapons, the likelihood of a successful attack is very low . Given that the laboratory version of H5N1 -- or any influenza virus , for that matter -- is a contagious pathogen, there would be two possible modes that a non-state actor would have to instigate an attack . The virus could be refined and then aerosolized and released into a populated area, or an individual could be infected with the virus and sent to freely circulate within a population . There are severe constraints that make success using either of these methods unlikely . The tech nology needed to refine and aerosolize a pathogen for a biological attack is beyond the capability of most non-state actors. Even if they were able to develop a weapon , other factors such as wind patterns and humidity can render an attack ineffective . Using a human carrier is a

less expensive method, but it requires that the biological agent be a contagion. Additionally, in order to infect the large number of people necessary to start an outbreak, the infected carrier must be mobile while

contagious, something that is doubtful with a serious disease like small pox. The carrier also cannot be visibly ill because that would limit the necessary human contact.

6. Durable fiat means no rollback

Court Capital Answers—2ac(--) Non-unique: Obamacare decision has angered conservatives:Carol E. Lee, 6/25/2015 (staff writer, “Obama Has a Good Week,” http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-has-a-good-week-1435253458, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)Tensions will continue between the two parties over health care. Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, said Thursday’s ruling wouldn't alter the Republicans’ dim view of the Affordable Care Act, but rather may strengthen their resolve to repeal the law. “This will simply increase the interest among Republicans in finding a preferable alternative to Obamacare,” he said. “It doesn’t change the fundamental Republican argument.”

(--) No spillover to specific cases—even if capital theory is true it doesn’t apply to individual decisions.(--) Turn: Activism:

A) Third-party doctrine is an example of judicial activismMark Fitzgibbons, 5/28/2015 (“FED’s Mass Data Collecting ‘Third-Party Doctrine’: A Judicial Fiction Unsupported by the Constitution,” http://cnsnews.com/commentary/mark-fitzgibbons/feds-mass-data-collecting-third-party-doctrine-judicial-fiction, Accessed 7/9/2015, rwg)The third-party doctrine, which is a judicial fiction unsupported by the Fourth Amendment’s text, and has been rejected in I believe seven states, was initially more limited to the bank records of one targeted crook at a time. It was not created to let government grab the records of all people held by all businesses all of the time. Lowry writes, “If the National Security Agency’s bulk-data program expires, the coroner should conclude that it was ‘death by bumper sticker.’” Well, better that than death to the Fourth Amendment by bumper-sticker application of the third-party doctrine. Proponents of mass, random harvesting of business-owned records have adopted the un-conservative position that this judicial doctrine construing the Fourth Amendment should forever trump public opinion and even the separation of powers. The people’s elected officials can overturn the court when the court is wrong. We are still, after all, a republic. That does not mean, of course, that the Constitution isn’t paramount law over even our elected representatives, who may not violate the Constitution with legislation. But it is also true that when judicial opinions favor government acts in violation of the constitutionally protected rights of the people, the black-robed ones are not the last word. The judicially created Fourth Amendment third-party doctrine is the product of judicial activism in favor of government power. Because it is not supported by the text, purpose or history of the Fourth Amendment, it may be overturned through our republican process, which involves the will of the people, bumper stickers and all.

B) Activism threatens the courts legitimacy:ABDULLAH BOZKURT, 4/13/2008 (“Judicial activism’s quarrel with legitimacy and democracy,” http://www.todayszaman.com/national_judicial-activisms-quarrel-with-legitimacy-and-democracy_139067.html, Accessed 7/9/2015, rwg)“This is judicial activism if not a judicial coup,” says Professor Ergun Özbudun, a teacher of constitutional law at Ankara’s Bilkent University. “There is no smoking gun in the indictment filed by the chief prosecutor with the Constitutional Court,” he adds. Judicial activism is a term adopted in the US to describe zealous judges who overstep their authority and conflict with the legislature’s power by making new law rather than interpreting existing legislation. The issue was constantly debated at the republic’s foundation, spearheaded by Alexander Hamilton in his famous “Federalist Papers” and Republican Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton argued that the judiciary would be least dangerous to political rights because it had no influence over the “sword or purse.” Jefferson, however, challenged the proposition, saying that exalting the judiciary over the executive and legislature would disgrace the judiciary and lead to its eventual degradation . The Jeffersonian prediction did not happen, thanks to the US Supreme Court mostly steering clear of politics and respecting the power of the legislative and executive branches. (--) Katz precedent has already been undermined:Orin S. Kerr, 2004 (Associate Professor, George Washington University Law School, Michigan Law Review, 102 Mich. L. Rev. 801, Accessed 7/7/2015, rwg)

Lewis R. Katz, In Search of a Fourth Amendment for the Twenty-First Century, 65 Ind. L.J. 549, 554 (1990) ("The Katz standard has been twisted to allow the government access to many intimate details about our lives."); Jonathan Todd Laba, Comment, If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Drug Business: Thermal Imaging, Emerging Technologies, and the Fourth Amendment, 84 Cal. L. Rev. 1437, 1454 (1996) (arguing that although post-Katz cases claimed to be applying the Katz test, "this show of loyalty to Katz has proven specious, for subsequent cases have undermined the promise of Katz"); Brian J. Serr, Great Expectations of Privacy: A New Model for Fourth Amendment Protection, 73 Minn. L. Rev. 583, 587 (1989) (arguing that "the entire course of recent Supreme Court fourth amendment precedent, which has narrowed significantly the scope of individual activities that are protected constitutionally, is misguided and inconsistent with the spirit of the fourth amendment."); Christopher Slobogin & Joseph E. Schumacher, Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and Autonomy in Fourth Amendment Cases: An Empirical Look at "Understandings Recognized and Permitted by Society", 42 Duke L.J. 727, 732 (1993) (arguing that some Supreme Court cases "do not reflect societal understandings" of when an expectation of privacy is "reasonable," and that "some of the Court's conclusions [about what expectations of privacy are reasonable] may be well off the mark"); Tomkovicz, supra note 99, at 647 (explaining that post-Katz cases "neither fulfilled the promises of Katz nor been consonant with an appropriately conceived fourth amendment core.").

(--) Turn: Winners win for the Courts—controversial decisions enhance the court’s legitimacy:

David Law, 2009 (Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Georgetown Law Journal, March 2009, 97 Geo. L.J. 723; “A Theory of Judicial Power and Judicial Review,” Lexis, rwg)

Part IV of this Article discusses a counterintuitive implication of a coordination-based account of judicial power. Conventional wisdom suggests that courts secure compliance with their decisions by drawing upon their store of legitimacy, which is undermined by decisions that are unpopular, controversial, or lack intellectual integrity. n25 Part IV argues that precisely the opposite is true : an unpopular or unpersuasive decision can, in fact, enhance a court's power in future cases , as long as it is obeyed. Widespread compliance with a decision that is controversial, unpopular, or unpersuasive serves only to strengthen the widely held expectation that others comply with judicial decisions. This expectation, in turn, is self-fulfilling : those who expect others to comply with a court's decisions will find it strategically prudent to comply themselves, and the aggregate result will, in fact, be widespread compliance. Part IV illustrates these strategic insights--and the Supreme Court's apparent grasp of them--by contrasting [*734] Bush v. Gore n26 with Brown v. Board of Education n27 and Cooper v. Aaron. n28

(--) No internal link: Capital doesn’t tradeoff between issues--Redish and Cisar, 1991 prof law @ Northwestern and Law clerk to US Court of Appeals, 1991

(MARTIN H. REDISH, prof law and public policy @ Northwestern; ELIZABETH J. CISAR, Law Clerk to Chief Judge William Bauer, United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, Dec 1991, “CONSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES: ARTICLE: "IF ANGELS WERE TO GOVERN" *: THE NEED

FOR PRAGMATIC FORMALISM IN SEPARATION OF POWERS THEORY.” 41 Duke L.J. 449)

Choper's assumption that the judiciary's institutional capital is transferable from structural cases to individual rights cases is no more credible. Common sense should tell us that the public's reaction to con- troversial individual rights cases-for example, cases concerning abor- tion,240 school prayer,241 busing,242 or criminal defendants' rights243- will be based largely, if not exclusively, on the basis of its feelings con - cerning those particular issues. It is unreasonable to assume that the public's acceptance or rejection of these individual rights rulings would somehow be affected by anything the Court says about wholly unrelated structural issues .

(--) Theory of institutional capital is wrong—votes are based on ideology and not institutional capital:

Cross and Nelson, 2001 Biz Law @ UT and PoliSci @ Penn State, (Frank B. Cross, Biz Law @ UT, Blake J. Nelson, Assis prof PoliSci @ Penn State, 2001, “STRATEGIC INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS ON SUPREME COURT DECISIONMAKING” 95 Nw. U.L. Rev. 1437)

The normative political model, sometimes called the attitudinal model, contends that judges make decisions so as to advance their political or ideological [*1444] policy ends, without regard to either the demands of the

normative legal model or the concerns of other institutions. n39 It is normative in that it assumes that judges are unconstrained and have single-peaked utility functions. In this model, judges decide so as to advance their ideological policy ends , without regard for the formal requirements of law (e.g., constraining precedents and text) and without

concern for the reaction of external entities. The political model may find support in legal sources beyond the legal realists and the contemporary critical legal theorists . n40 Supreme Court Justices are commonly characterized as "liberal" or "conservative" - political terms describing the ideological import of their

decisions. Significantly, this model of decisionmaking does not necessitate an extremely cynical view of judges, as the political model may reflect subconscious psychology and cognitive dissonance. n41 With the growth of clerk populations, it is easy for "the appellate judge to determine a result based on personal notions of fairness and right, and then to leave to the staff attorney the task of constructing reasons to support that result." n42 The political model can be descriptively accurate, even absent conscious judicial policymaking . In contrast to the normative legal model,

considerable empirical data supports the claims of the political model of judicial decisionmaking. Many studies have already been described in the legal literature. n43 Some prominent judges have taken issue with these studies and raised some

methodological challenges, n44 though the challenges are readily answered. n45 Perhaps [*1445] the most persuasive

evidence can be found in a meta-analysis of studies on judicial decisionmaking conducted by Dan Pinello. n46 He identified 140 research papers that empirically analyzed judicial decisionmaking by party affiliation. A majority of these papers reported data in a manner that could be incorporated in his meta-analysis, and he found that virtually every study showed a positive association between judicial voting and judicial ideology. n47 The studies together contained over 222,000 judicial votes , and the judges' political party explained thirty-eight percent of the variance in their voting.

(--) No link: no one pays attention to the court:Noah Feldman, 6/17/2012 ( professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard, “Supreme Court’s Super Mondays Don’t Serve Justice,” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-17/supreme-court-s-super-mondays-don-t-serve-justice.html, Accessed 7/28/2012, rwg)

The club of Supreme Court devotees (OK, junkies) likes to think of the first Monday in October as opening day, and the last Monday in June as game seven of the World Series. But many years, the series is a dud. Most of the cases are technical and unexciting, they enter the casebooks with little fanfare, and the public barely notices. This year will be the exception that proves the rule.

(--) Judicial capital is resilient – one controversial decision won’t destroy it.Grosskopf and Mondak, 1998 (Anke Grosskopf, Assistant Prof of Political Science @ Long Island University, & Jeffrey Mondak, Professor of Political Science @ U of Illinois, 1998, “Do attitudes toward specific supreme court decisions matter? The impact of Webster and Texas v Johnson on Public Confidence in the Supreme Court” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 51 no 3 633-54 September1998)

Opinion about the Supreme Court may influence opinion about the Court's decisions, but is the opposite true? Viewed from the perspective of the Court's justices, it would be preferable if public reaction to rulings did not shape subsequent levels of support for the Court. If opinion about the Court were fully determined by early political socialization and deeply rooted attachments to democratic values, then justices would be free to intervene in controversial policy

questions without risk that doing so would expend political capital. Consistent with this perspective, a long tradition of scholarship argues that the Supreme Court is esteemed partly because it commands a bedrock of public support, or a reservoir of goodwill, which helps it to remain legitimate despite occasional critical reaction to unpopular rulings (Murphy and Tanenhaus 1968; Easton 1965, 1975; Caldeira 1986; Caldeira and

Gibson 1992). The sources of this diffuse support are usually seen as rather stable and immune from short-term influences, implying that evaluations of specific decisions are of little or no broad importance. For instance, Caldeira and Gibson (1992) find that basic democratic values, not reactions to decisions, act as the strongest determinants of institutional support.

Condo ShortConditionality is a voting issue for deterrence - destroys 2ac strategy, causes argumentative contradictions that are unrealistic and decimates advocacy skills, which are the crux of debate. Counter interp – one dispo solves your offense

Congress CP Answers1) Agent counterplans are bad:A) They steal the entire AFF—they get back 8 minutes of arguments with a 10

second plan text.B) Creates a strategy skew can’t argue against ourselves.C) Voting issue for fairness & education.2) Doesn’t solve the Fourth Amendment: Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is on

the brink of collapse—only the courts can solve:Timothy Casey, 2008 (Associate Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, “RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure,” UC Davis Law Review, Lexis/Nexis, Accessed 6/25/2015, rwg)Recent cases demonstrate that our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is on the verge of collapse and will only survive if courts reclaim the original meaning and language of the Constitution. The next paradigm shift must include a departure from Katz's use of privacy language, and focus instead on the right of the People to be secure. Fundamental to the modern conception of personal security, and indeed one of the basic precepts of the Founding Fathers, is the idea that the government does not ensure the security of the People, but rather that the government embodies the interest against which the People must be protected. Reclaiming the original language of the Constitution by substituting a right to personal security for a reasonable expectation of privacy will simultaneously dispel the false notion that the Fourth Amendment protects individual interests in opposition to collective interests, and reaffirm the idea that only by protecting individual security will we increase our collective personal and national security.

3) Doesn’t solve the presidential powers advantage—extend our Casey evidence that the courts are key—Congressional legislation will fail.

4) Doesn’t solve democracy advantage because it isn’t modeled—extend our Krotoszynski evidence that the US Supreme Court is uniquely modeled.

5) PERMUTE: DO BOTH—CONGRESSIONAL AND COURT LED SOCIAL CHANGE IS THE BEST OPTION:

Araiza, 2005 Professor of Law @ Loyola Law School, 2005 (William, Tulane Law Review, February 2005, 79 Tul. L. Rev. 519; Lexis)Still, it is worth considering Brown's at best partial success and wondering whether integration would have been more successful if Congress had more aggressively assisted the Court . n110 Indeed, the steps Congress did take - most notably the conditioning of federal education funds on desegregation - helped quicken the pace of change . n111 This is not to say that integration would have occurred immediately, peacefully, and comprehensively had the effort been led by Congress . The anti-Brown rhetoric of segregationists , criticizing Brown as a judicial usurpation, n112 was largely opportunistic - that is, much, if not most, of that opposition was based on the rejection of integration itself, not the fact that integration was being "illegitimately" imposed by courts.(--) Legislatures need for re-election makes the courts better for the rights of the accused:Donald A. Dripps, 1993 (Professor of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Syracuse Law Review, “ESSAYS: CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, FOOTNOTE FOUR, AND THE THEORY OF PUBLIC CHOICE; OR, WHY DON'T LEGISLATURES GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE RIGHTS OF THE ACCUSED?” Accessed 7/8/2015, rwg)

For many years, commentators have decried the failure of American legislatures to promulgate statutory rules of criminal procedure. n1 With few exceptions, however, legislatures have done little by way of limiting the discretion of police and prosecutors, or requiring the criminal courts to observe procedural safeguards against

unjust conviction. By default, the judiciary has become the principal guardian of the rights of the accused . This long-standing situation invites two questions, one positive and the other normative. The positive question is why are legislatures indifferent or hostile to the rights of the accused? Why should a democratically-elected legislature be in favor of unreasonable searches, coerced confessions, unreliable identification evidence, or biased juries? As we shall see, legislatures in fact favor all of these things, and for compelling reasons of electoral survival. (---) Court will check the Congress—blocks solvency:Araiza, 2005 Professor of Law @ Loyola Law School, 2005 (William, Tulane Law Review, February 2005, 79 Tul. L. Rev. 519; Lexis)Yet congressional action is impeded by the very text that it could potentially rejuvenate. The fact that Congress's power is limited to "enforcing" the Equal Protection Clause means that that power is necessarily tied to the meaning of that provision. By itself this requirement is unremarkable: all it means is that when

Congress seeks [*524] to enforce the Equal Protection Clause, its action must have some link to the meaning of equal protection. But because the Fourteenth Amendment also includes a judicially enforceable component , questions about the acceptable range of congressional action inevitably require consideration of how the courts have understood that guarantee. In turn, if the meaning of the Amendment is thought to depend solely and completely on what the Court

says the Clause means - in other words, if we adopt a juricentric model - then lack of clarity in the Court's equal protection jurisprudence necessarily infects, and thus impedes, congressional attempts to breathe new life into it . (--) Courts clarification of Katz necessary as technology continues to advance:Ric Simmons, 2002 (Acting Assistant Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, Hastings Law Journal, “From Katz to Kyllo: A Blueprint for Adapting the Fourth Amendment to Twenty-First Century Technologies,” Accessed 7/8/2015, rwg)In deciding Katz, the Supreme Court took a dramatic step towards adopting a results-based test for applying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies. However, the language in Katz was sufficiently vague to muddle the distance that was traveled in that step. This ambiguity has created a troubling dissonance in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. It is now time for courts to clarify the mandate in Katz and confirm that the landmark case rendered irrelevant any consideration of the methods used in government surveillance. This clarification is becoming only more critical as technology continues to advance , allowing law enforcement officials access to more and more intimate information without any physical intrusion - and indeed without the target's knowledge. We must learn from the absurdity in the case law before Katz, and at the same time consider the implications of the surveillance technologies which will become more ubiquitous as time progresses. In this way both the [*1358] past and the future lead us to a better understanding of Katz - one which looks beyond the method of the search.

(--) Courts are better than the legislative branch at protecting personal information:William J. Fenrich, 1996 (Fordham Law Review, “NOTE: COMMON LAW PROTECTION OF INDIVIDUALS' RIGHTS IN PERSONAL INFORMATION,” Accessed 7/9/2015, rwg)In addition to these judicial attempts, many commentators have advocated legislation that would grant individuals legal rights in their personal information. n44 These commentators argue that the legislature is better equipped than a court to establish such a right, which would require that any person or institution must obtain the affirmative consent of a data-subject before disseminating to third-parties that data-subject's name, address, and/or telephone number. n45 Actual legislative proposals have been introduced in a number of state legis- [*958] latures over the past year. n46 Again, not one, however, has been successful. This Note argues that despite the theoretical appeal of a legislative solution to the issue of unauthorized dissemination of personal information , individuals should not wait for legislative action but rather should continue to litigate the issue in state courts. Courts are well suited to address the issue for two distinct but related reasons. First, when appropriate, state courts can extend and modify the common law to keep pace with technological and societal changes . Second, legislatures often are too beholden to special interests to thoughtfully and rationally consider certain questions. Courts, which possess greater independence than legislatures, must consider whether individuals should have legally enforceable rights in their names and personality profiles.