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Rate Setting CP

The United States federal government should establish all-payer rate-setting,

including global budgeting and administered by an independent, bipartisan
federal commission, in the United States.

Solves health care costs and lowers premiums

David Dayen 17, contributor to The Intercept and also writes for Salon, the Fiscal Times, the
New Republic, and more, “Single Payer, Meet All Payer: The Surprising State That is Quietly
Revolutionizing Health Care,” 7/24/17, https://theintercept.com/2017/07/24/single-payer-
meet-all-payer-the-surprising-state-that-is-quietly-revolutionizing-healthcare/
MARYLAND IS THE only state in America where all hospitals must charge the same rate for services to
patients, regardless of what insurance they carry. There’s some variance between hospitals, but every patient in a
particular hospital pays the same. Other states experience huge, seemingly random differences in hospital costs, depending on the
insurer (or lack thereof).
Maryland’s Health Services Cost Review Commission has set hospital reimbursement rates for over 40
years. The state obtained a federal waiver to include Medicaid and Medicare in its all-payer system, with the goal of keeping cost
increases below Medicare growth. And it’s worked, creating the lowest rate of growth in hospital costs in
America.
In 2014, to prevent hospitals from making up profit margins through volume, Maryland tweaked the
system, adding global budgeting . “The traditional way it worked, every hospital got a rate card,” said Joshua Sharfstein,
an associate dean at Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a former head of Maryland’s Health Department.
“Now you get a number, which is the total revenue for the year.”
this creates hospital incentives
Because the global budget doesn’t change based on the number of admissions,
toward better outcomes . “It makes the health system focused on keeping people healthy
rather than just treating illnesses,” said Vincent DeMarco, president of the Maryland Citizen’s Health Initiative, a state
advocacy group. That includes increased preventive treatment, using case managers to connect patients to primary care, eliminating
unnecessary tests, and encouraging good health outside the hospital walls.
Three years into global budgeting, the state is “meeting or exceeding” its goals, according to a January
Health Affairs study. Hospital revenue growth is well below counterparts nationwide, or the growth of
Maryland’s economy. Plus, state hospitals have saved $429 million for Medicare, more in three years than it
targeted for five. Most important, every state hospital (all of which are nonprofit) and every insurer in Maryland are on board with
the system.
If a centralized rate-setter bands every insurer together to negotiate prices, all payer can
functionally act like single payer in terms of bringing down costs . All payer reduces
hospital and insurer overhead , since billing costs are known in advance. And because the
Affordable Care Act caps the amounts insurers can take in as profits, lower hospital costs should flow back to the
individual in the form of smaller premiums .
This is why five countries — France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and The Netherlands — use all-payer rate setting
as the basis for their universal health care systems. These countries have been found to control costs far better
than America’s fragmented system.
The system only applies to hospital payments, not primary care doctors or clinicians. However, last year Maryland submitted a
“progression plan” to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with the goal of expanding the system by January 2019. That
would line up with the swearing in of Maryland’s next governor.
Other states have looked to Maryland as a model. Pennsylvania has adopted global budgeting for rural hospitals. And in the wake of
its single-payer failure, Vermont moved to an all-payer accountable care organization, where providers are paid based on health
outcomes for the population. “In
some ways it’s more radical [than single payer] if you’re able to
get the incentives right,” said Joshua Sharfstein. But the true test of Maryland-style all payer is whether it can support
universal coverage for every resident.
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Free Market CP

The United States federal government should shift health insurance to a free-
market system by:

 Removing regulatory and tax advantages for employer-provided group

health insurance

 Removing regulatory barriers to insurance market competition, including

limits on cross-state competition, mandates affecting the amount of services
covered by insurance, individual and employer mandates, and mandates
that insurers cover particular groups

 Reforming tort laws to decrease physician liability, and capping damages

 Repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010

 Ending state-level certificate of need laws

 Providing vouchers for Medicare recipients to participate in insurance

markets

 Repealing the 3 to 1 premium difference requirement, requiring states to

phase in this repeal over four years

 Subsidizing initial health-status insurance accounts for individuals with

pre-existing conditions. Subsidies should be phased out as the market
evolves and stabilizes.

Solves costs and increases coverage---the aff shuts down competition and leads to
worse health outcomes
Eric Schansberg 11, Professor of Economics at Indiana University Southeast, Ph.D. in
Economics, 2011, “Envisioning a Free Market in Health Care,” Cato Journal, Vol. 31, No 1.
Insurance Regulation
Another important area for reform would be three sets of policy proposals that would
dramatically reduce insurance regulation.
First, insurers are often prevented from competing with each other across state lines. Insurance from
out-of-state providers was greatly reduced by the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945. The Act followed a 1944 Supreme
Court ruling that insurance was classified as “interstate commerce” and could be regulated by federal antitrust laws. The Act gave
antitrust exemptions to the insurance industry and implicitly codified state insurance
regulations into federal policy. These restrictions need to be eliminated to promote competition,
increase choice, and reduce costs.
Second, in the current environment, it is very difficult to offer insurance services across state lines because of insurance
mandates that increase the number of services covered by insurance. This requirement results in
higher costs, less flexibility for consumers, and less ability for insurers to compete. A free-
market system would allow people and insurers to make mutually beneficial arrangements on
what insurance would cover.
All 50 states require insurers to either offer or include certain benefits in the insurance policies they offer (Bunce and Wieske 2009).
Some states, for example, require an insurer to include benefits for the treatment of alcoholism or treatment by a chiropractor,
regardless of whether any given person wants those features (Graham 2008b). More broadly, insurance companies are not allowed
to specialize in insurance for specific ailments (e.g., diabetes or cancer).
As a result of these mandates, one finds significant levels of market concentration in the
insurance industry within the states. In 38 states, the largest firm serves more than one-third of
the market and in 16 states more than half. In 47 states, the largest three firms serve more than
half of the market and in 36 states more than 65 percent (Robinson 2004). In 2008, the market
share of the five largest insurers was at least 75 percent in every state (Emmons, Guardado, and
Kane 2008).4
Third, states commonly mandate coverage for certain groups of people, again resulting in higher
costs and cross-subsidies from the healthy to the unhealthy, and from those who plan well for their futures to
those who do not. These restrictions come in a variety of forms. There are “guaranteed issue” mandates that require all insurers to
make insurance available to all applicants regardless of a change in health status. There are also “guaranteed renewal” mandates that
require insurers to renew insurance policies when the policy expires, and mandates to require insurers to cover additional persons—
for example, children up to 25 years of age (King 2009).
In addition, a number of states have substituted “community rating” for “risk rating” (Sloan and Conover 1998). “Strict” community
rating requires an insurer to charge each insured individual the same premium regardless of age, sex, health status, claims
experience, or other risk factors. “Modified” community rating allows an insurer to vary the premium based on age or another of
these factors, but not health status.
Bunce and Wieske (2009) find 2,113 state mandates nationwide on services and providers. Those
mandates are costly to insurers who respond by increasing premiums or leaving the
market , thus reducing competition and driving up prices. Evidence of this is seen in the remarkable cost
differences between similar policies in different states. For example, in 2005, the average individual paid $4,044 in New Jersey and
$3,996 in New York for health insurance, but only $1,188 in Iowa and Wyoming (Matthews 2005). More recently, minimum
coverage for a family of four cost $145 in Iowa versus $906 in Massachusetts (Armey 2009). A healthy 25-yearold male could
purchase a policy for $960 a year in Kentucky but would pay about $5,880 in New Jersey. An average family in Texas paid $5,501 a
year for coverage in 2006–2007, whereas an average family in New Jersey paid $10,398 (Bond 2009).
Parente and Bragdon (2009) report that the proportion of individual plans in New York decreased from 4.7 percent to 0.2 percent
from 1994 to 2007, while the national average increased from 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent. They attribute this to the guaranteed issue
and community rating mandates enacted by New York.
The overall costs of such regulations are even more staggering. Conover (2004) calculates $170
billion in benefits from such regulations but $339 billion in costs, a 2:1 ratio with a net social
loss of $169 billion —which costs the average family of four more than $2,200, enough to
implement the free-market reforms discussed earlier. Conover (2004: 1) further estimates that regulations are “responsible for more
than seven million Americans lacking health insurance or one in six of the average daily uninsured” and fi nds that “4,000 more
Americans die every year from costs associated with health services regulation (22,000) than
from lack of health insurance (18,000).
The market remedy here is to repeal all of these mandates and allow insurers to freely set rates based on risks. One should note that
some of these regulatory efforts are Band-Aids to deal with unfortunate outcomes in the current health care and health insurance
systems—e.g., pre-existing conditions. As described earlier, a deregulated and unsubsidized insurance environment would take care
of those problems.
Bast (2007) has two policy suggestions worth mentioning. First, he would eliminate the requirement that health insurers pay a very
high proportion of their claims within a certain period of time (see Bunce 2002). Second, as a second-best solution, he argues that
insurers should be allowed to offer temporary or permanent medical waivers for pre-existing conditions (see Wieske and Matthews,
2007).
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Consolidation DA

Strengthening the ACA accelerates market consolidation in health care

Christopher M. Pope 14, PhD, former Graduate Fellow in the Center for Health Policy Studies,
of the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity, at The Heritage Foundation, 8/1/14,
“How the Affordable Care Act Fuels Health Care Market Consolidation,”
http://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/report/how-the-affordable-care-act-fuels-health-
care-market-consolidation
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called Obamacare, accelerates the pernicious growth of
market consolidation in American health care.[1]
The national health care law reinforces the trend of providers, including doctors and hospitals,
to merge into large regional health systems that dominate local markets. The law also introduces
new rules and restrictions that will reduce the degree of competition in the insurance market.
This growth of monopoly power is not the result of free-market forces, but the deliberate product of public policy. Instead of
honestly budgeting in order to finance health care, policymakers have repeatedly sanctioned monopolistic hospital markets in the
hope that dominant providers will use higher revenues to cross-subsidize indigent and emergency care. The purchasing power of the
Medicare program has been increasingly employed by the federal government to shape the structure of the hospital industry, and its
payment rates are deliberately designed to give incumbent general hospitals an advantage over less expensive specialty facilities. At
the state level, policies such as certificate-of-need (CON) laws have been defended by local hospital
monopolies to prevent the construction or expansion of facilities by potential competitors.
Obamacare’s Impact. The ACA eliminates many of the essential competitive checks remaining
in the American health care system. Because the law relies so heavily on unfunded regulatory mandates to
finance the benefit structure, it is obliged to strengthen the power of incumbent providers to prevent
targeted competition from eliminating their profit centers. The provisions of the law attempt to
do so by:
Closing off alternatives to paying for health care by requiring individuals to purchase
comprehensive insurance .
Reducing the ability of insurers to compete with innovations in benefit design by requiring
standardized benefit packages.
Increasing the discriminatory subsidies that protect dominant hospitals from competition.
Limiting patient choices by using Medicare payment policies to drive doctors and other medical professionals into a small number of
integrated hospital systems.
The President’s health care reform therefore represents a concerted attempt to prevent competition in various aspects of health
insurance—including health benefits, provider networks, and cost. In the process, the law has become a fountain of federal
regulation. With the law’s individual mandate, forcing most Americans to purchase health insurance
regardless of cost, the power of insurers and providers to profit from a captive market is likely to
increase even further. The ACA adds to the array of regulatory instruments that attempt to
contain the damage of anticompetitive policies.
But, the way to increase provider responsiveness to the needs of patients is not through a second set of regulations that punishes
providers for doing what the first set of regulations encouraged them to do. In the absence of competition, highly integrated health
care providers tend to be irresponsive to patient needs, and reliant on crude bureaucratic instruments to prevent costs from
spiraling out of control. Rather than trusting monopolies to provide “uncompensated care” as desired, policymakers should remove
the shackles that have been placed on competition in health care, and transparently appropriate the necessary funds for the care that
they wish to subsidize.
Combating the Conglomerates. There is no shortcut for fixing the problem of monopoly power in American health care. It was
deliberately constructed, and policymakers seeking to reform it must take on a formidable set of entrenched practices and policies.
Specifically, they must: Eliminate unfunded mandates that are incompatible with competition;
repeal legal or regulatory restraints on market entry; retarget health care subsidies and tax breaks from
institutions to individuals; allow patients to shop around for less expensive options; and abolish health
care benefit mandates that create captive markets for providers regardless of value for money.

Consolidation causes financial collapse

Ken Blackwell 15, Senior Fellow with the Family Research Council, Masters from Xavier
University, 11/12/2015, Obamacare’s Creation of ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’ Insurance Companies May
Cause Financial Meltdown, https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/ken-
blackwell/obamacares-creation-too-big-fail-insurance-companies-may-cause-financial
At a recent Congressional hearing, Dr. Mandy Cohen of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services explained that almost
700,000 Americans have lost their health coverage because the insurance co-ops formed under
ObamaCare to foster competition couldn’t compete with “big, experienced players” in the
insurance marketplace.¶ Dr. Cohen was talking about the five major insurance companies that cover the vast majority of
Americans: Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, and Humana. If the ObamaCare co-ops continue to fold (a virtual certainty)
and the Aetna / Humana and Anthem / Cigna mergers take place (both probabilities), almost all Americans – and indeed America’s
entire healthcare system – will rely on just three insurance companies.¶ “My guiding principle is, and always has been that
consumers do better when there is choice and competition,” said President Barack Obama in 2009. “That’s how the market works.
In Alabama, almost 90 percent of the market is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance
goes up and quality goes down.Ӧ His analysis was quite right, of course. Unfortunately, his signature policy has exacerbated the very
problem he identified. Does anyone believe the co-op collapse and big insurance mergers will save consumers money or expand their
health care options? No chance.¶ It’s important to note that market-driven mergers and acquisitions are generally good for investors
and consumers, relative to the alternatives. But the present insurance industry consolidation is being driven by government policy,
not free markets.¶ Just as big a concern as the lack of competition, insurance industry consolidation will lead
America down a path eerily similar to the financial collapse of 2007 with three insurance
companies replacing “too big to fail” financial institutions and costly insurance payouts
replacing subprime mortgages.¶ By 2007 big lenders had become vehicles for implementing a
government policy promoting universal homeownership. Likewise, insurance companies are
now the vehicles for implementing government policy that promotes universal health coverage.
By 2007 millions of people had purchased homes they would not have otherwise been able to
purchase. Likewise, insurance companies today cover 18 million people who might otherwise
not have had insurance or even be insurable.¶ Making high quality health coverage affordable for
all is a laudable policy objective. Reasonable people can disagree as to whether the coverage ObamaCare makes available
is indeed high quality or affordable. Regardless, what happens if the ObamaCare model is unsustainable? Last month
Anthem stated that its ObamaCare business is underperforming and that pressure for keeping
premiums low is unrealistic. Meanwhile, the insurance industry lobby in Washington, DC is quietly advocating for
prescription drug price controls to cushion their bottom line at the expense of patient health and well-being, while simultaneously
seeking 20 – 40 percent premium rate increases in 2016.¶ As ObamaCare relies on a dwindling number of
insurance companies to administer the U.S. healthcare system, would the f ederal g overnment
hesitate to prop them up if – perhaps when – things go pear-shaped? The federal government seems
perfectly willing to pour money into its failed ObamaCare experiment. The co-op collapse alone will likely cost the
American taxpayer over $2 trillion .¶ With health insurance co-ops dropping like flies and
huge mergers in the offing, ObamaCare has created an environment in which the U.S. health
system is beholden to a small number of “too-big-to-fail” insurance companies creating risks
reminiscent of financial meltdown almost a decade ago.
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T

Interpretation---national health insurance exclusively means universal public

insurance programs administered by government---the plan must make the
government a payer in the insurance market, but not necessarily the single payer
Ellen M. Immergut 92, the Ford International Development Chair and Associate Professor of
Political Science for Public Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992, Health Politics:
Interests and Institutions in Western Europe, p. 46-47
Monopsony = “a market condition similar to a monopoly except that a large buyer,
not a seller, controls a large proportion of the market,” Investopedia
N ational h ealth i nsurance, the second type of program, implies a more active role for government.
Rather than subsidizing private arrangements , governments create public
insurance programs that citizens are required to join and to which employers are required to
contribute. The extent of government monopsony under national health insurance
depends upon four factors, each of which had been politically contested: the financing of the program, the
administration of the program, the percentage of the population covered by the program, and the type of
benefits provided.
National health insurance programs tend to be financed by payroll taxes, although governments often provide some supplemental
financing from general tax revenues. As these
are public programs required by government ,
governments are politically responsible for financing, but the monies collected are usually separate from general
tax revenues, and hence, considered "parafiscal." In most nations with national health insurance, the payroll tax rate is set by central
governmental authorities at the national level, but in some, the health insurance administration may set the payroll tax rates
independently. (In Germany, for example, they vary by region and by type of insurance fund.) In comparison with mutual society
legislation, the financial role of government is increased, but the financial pressure is somewhat attenuated by its parafiscal nature.
N ational h ealth i nsurance programs are public , yet the administration of the programs has often
been delegated to organizations on the border of the public and private realms. Many nations simply
converted the old, independent mutual aid societies into quasipublic carriers that were highly regulated by the government.
Important administrative issues have concerned the degree to which national health insurance carriers should be centralized - that
is, covering all occupational groups together or separately, and whether different insurance risks, such as health, old-age, invalidity,
unemployment and family allowances, should be covered by the same program or separate ones. In addition, the degree to which the
insurance carriers should retain their former independence as representatives of the insured, maintaining social insurance elections
and other forms of "self-administration," has been a political issue.
Government regulation under national health insurance affects consumers as well as the insurance carriers. National health
insurance programs are compulsory, not voluntary. Governments decide which groups are to be
covered by public insurance . Early health insurance programs were generally earmarked for low-income wage
earners. Later programs, especially those enacted after the Second World War, tended to include all salaried employees. Farmers
and other self-employed groups were often added in the 1950s. The compulsory health insurance of the United States - Medicaid and
Medicare - can be considered as a form of national health insurance. However, these programs are unusual in that they cover only
the aged and those falling below an income limit. Today, the
term " national " health insurance generally connotes
universal programs that cover entire populations at all ages for medical care . To
the extent that these government programs compel citizens to insure themselves, they cut into
the available clientele for private insurance policies . Depending upon who is compulsorily
insured and what types of health benefits are covered, the public programs determine how much
scope there will be for supplemental, private insurance.
The increased role of government as payor under national health insurance creates pressures to control the costs engendered by
providers such as doctors, hospitals, and manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical technology. Depending on the financing
and administration of the program, however, the incentive to control the price and supply of services will affect different actors.
N ational h ealth i nsurance introduces collective payment for health services , but the
type of monopsony that ensues depends upon how extensive the portion of the population covered by the program is,
how centralized the administration is, and whether the government itself or an administrative authority at one
remove from the government is in charge of payment.
Thus, national health insurance inevitably raises the issue of controlling payments to providers , but
these economic incentives are filtered through different financial and administrative arrangements. Of course, collective
payment through private insurers will raise the same issues. To the extent that private insurers band together
in a payor cartel, their ability to dictate terms of payment to providers will increase, as there will be fewer alternative buyers. If,
however, the collective payor is a government health insurance agency, political resources are added
to economic power and the threat of regulation is more imminent.

Violation---the plan facilitates access to private insurance

Vote neg:

1) Limits---including private insurance policies explodes topic limits by allowing

any aff that subsidizes, facilitates, or regulates private insurance to make it more
accessible---our interp’s key to mechanism limits.

2) Ground---only our interp guarantees the aff makes meaningful change from the
status quo---our ground is premised on the aff moving away from the current
private insurance system. Private and market strategies should be built-in neg
ground.
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Midterms

Democrats will win the midterms now by exploiting voter anger over GOP health
care proposals---the plan ensures continued GOP control
Jennifer Rubin 17, Washington Post columnist, 6/21/17, “Will the health-care issue tip 2018 to
the Democrats?,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/06/21/will-the-
health-care-issue-tip-2018-to-the-democrats/?utm_term=.113eabd519d6
While Republican flacks hype the results of the special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District and Democrats bemoan a loss
they likely should have expected, we know that the political landscape will change dramatically between now
and 2018. That’s good news for Democrats and reason for Republicans to avoid sitting back to admire their
victory in a Republican “9.5-plus” district.
As David Wasserman explains: “Last night’s results were far from a disaster for Democrats, and Republicans shouldn’t be
tempted to believe their House majority is safe. In fact, their majority is still very much at risk .”
For one thing, “unheralded Democratic tax expert Archie Parnell — who ran on a similarly conciliatory, post-partisan message but
generated a tiny fraction of the hype [Jon] Ossoff did — shockingly came within three points of Republican Ralph Norman in a
district President Trump carried by 18 points last November.” Special elections also tend to be “lagging — rather than leading —
indicators,” Wasserman writes. Most important:
If Democrats were to outperform their “generic” share by eight points across the board [as they
have in special elections] in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats . Of course, that won’t
happen because Republican incumbents will be tougher to dislodge than special election
nominees. But these results fit a pattern that should still worry GOP incumbents everywhere ,
regardless of Trump’s national approval rating and the outcome of the healthcare debate in Congress.
Put another way, Democratic candidates in these elections have won an average of 68 percent of the votes
Hillary Clinton won in their districts, while Republican candidates have won an average of 54 percent of
Trump’s votes. That’s an enthusiasm gap that big enough to gravely imperil the
Republican majority next November—even if it didn’t show up in “the special election to end all special elections.”
So which significant event(s) might tip the scales even further in Democrats’ direction, and which by
contrast would help Republicans hold on? Republicans need to deliver on health care , taxes and jobs
while also praying that an economic setback or further foreign conflicts do not unsettle the electorate. If you think they can
accomplish all that, then the GOP can rest easy.Of all of those issues, health care — which Republicans
used to gain majorities in the House and Senate — may be the most decisive because it is the most
personal (and hence most emotional) policy issue. Democrats , by contrast, need evidence that
Republicans cannot govern — or do not govern with voters’ interests in mind.
A good deal of imagination — if not self-delusion — would be required in order to imagine that the Senate can pass its secret health-
care bill and then agree with the House on a bill that can be jammed through via budget reconciliation (which requires a budget).
One has to get really creative to see that the result would be a health-care bill that the country likes.
With each iteration, the GOP health-care plan has gotten worse marks. To that point, Politico reports:
As the GOP-led Senate prepares to take up the measure, only 35 percent of voters surveyed approve of the bill passed by the House
last month. Nearly half of voters, 49 percent, disapprove of the bill. The other 16 percent don’t know or don’t have an opinion, the
poll shows.
POLITICO/Morning Consult polling indicates the bill has become less popular since the House advanced it in early May.
Immediately after the bill passed, slightly more voters approved of the bill, 38 percent. Opposition to the bill was lower, too,
immediately after the House passed it: 44 percent. . . .
Among Republican voters, 30 percent disapprove of the GOP health care bill. That is up from 15 percent of Republicans
disapproving in early May.
Moreover, independent voters disapprove of the bill by a 2-to-1 margin: 26 percent approve, versus 53 percent who disapprove.
Democrats, in other words, will have something in 2018 they don’t have now — a verdict on
Trumpcare. Republicans will either fail to pass something , despite the best efforts of the GOP to use
Medicaid savings to give the rich big tax cuts, or they’ll pass a bill along the lines we have seen. (Leaks from the
Senate negotiations indicate that the cuts to Medicaid could be even more severe in the Senate proposal.) That may take a

generic 8-point advantage for Democrats even higher .

In short, Republicans have to govern between now and 2018. Unless they miraculously
rethink their agenda and become legislatively adept , Democrats will have
concrete evidence to bolster their argument that the Republicans shouldn’t be left in
control.

Resounding Dem victory’s key to constrain Trump’s impact on the U.S. democratic
model
Ezra Klein 17, Editor-in-Chief, Vox, 2/7/17, “How to stop an autocracy,”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/7/14454370/trump-autocracy-congress-frum
There is nothing about the Trump administration that should threaten America’s system of
government. The Founding Fathers were realistic about the presence and popularity of demagogues. The tendency of political
systems to slip into autocracy weighed heavily on their minds. That power corrupts, and that power can be leveraged to amass more
power, was a familiar idea. The political system the founders built is designed to withstand these
pressures, and to a large extent, it has .
So why, then, are we surrounded by articles worrying over America’s descent into fascism or
autocracy? There are two reasons, and Trump is, by far, the less dangerous of them.
Trump has shown himself unconcerned with the norms of American democracy. He routinely
proclaims elections rigged, facts false, the media crooked, and his opponents corrupt. During the campaign, he flouted basic
traditions of transparency and threatened to jail his opponent. His tendencies toward nepotism, crony capitalism, and vengeance
unnerve. His oft-stated admiration for authoritarians in other countries — including, but not limited to, Vladimir Putin — speaks to
his yearning for power.
Amid all that, David Frum’s Atlantic cover story, “How to Build an Autocracy,” is a chilling read. “We are living through
the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the U nited S tates that anyone
alive has encountered,” he writes. The argument works because its component parts are so plausible. Frum does not
imagine a coup or a crisis. He does not lean on the deus ex machina of a terrorist attack or a failed assassination attempt. The picture
he paints is not one in which everything is different, but one in which everything is the same.
He imagines a Trumpian autocracy built upon the most ordinary of foundations : a growing
economy, a cynical public, a cowed media, a self-interested business community, and a compliant Republican
Party. The picture resonates because it combines two forces many sense at work — Trump’s will to power and the fecklessness of
the institutions meant to stop him — into one future everyone fears: autocracy in America.
But what Frum imagines is not an autocracy. It is what we might call a partyocracy — a quasi-strongman leader empowered only
because the independently elected legislators from his party empower him. The crucial sentence in Frum’s account is this
one: "As
politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on
presidents of the opposite party ."
I am a critic of America’s system of government. For all its genius, I believe it is more fragile, and less sensible, than civics textbooks
admit. I think the profusion of veto points makes governance too difficult, the disproportionate power given to small states is
indefensible, and the absence of any mechanism to resolve conflicts between different branches is dangerous.
But the danger of a demagogic, aspirational autocrat winning the White House is one problem the Madisonian constitutional order
is exquisitely designed to handle. The founders feared charismatic populists, they worried over would-be monarchs, and so they
designed a system of government meant to frustrate them.
The system showed its power this weekend, when Judge James Robart of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary
restraining order freezing enforcement of Trump’s immigrant and refugee ban. Trump raged before the ruling — “if something
happens blame [Robart] and court system,” he tweeted — but his administration complied with it. The spectacle of the president of
the United States seeing his signature program stopped by a district judge in Washington state ruled is a reminder of how many veto
points the system contains.
The judiciary, however, is not the branch of government with the most power or the most responsibility to
curb Trump’s worst instincts . That designation belongs to the US Congress .
The president can do little without Congress’s express permission. He cannot raise money. He cannot declare war. He cannot even
staff his government. If Congress, tomorrow, wanted to compel Trump to release his tax returns, they could. If Congress, tomorrow,
wanted to impeach Trump unless he agreed to turn his assets over to a blind trust, they could. If Congress, tomorrow, wanted to take
Trump’s power to choose who can and cannot enter the country, they could. As Frum writes, “Congress can protect the
American system from an overbearing president.” He just thinks they won’t.
Frum offers a persuasive account of why congressional Republicans are likely to fall before Trump’s will,
and he is probably right. But I want to make the argument that there is nothing inevitable about that : it is
not the system envisioned by the Constitution and it is not the system we would have if voters took
Congress’s enormous power seriously and were as interested in who ran it as in who ran the presidency.
And I want to shift the locus of responsibility a bit: if Trump builds an autocracy, his congressional
enablers will, if anything, be more responsible than him. After all, in amassing power and breaking troublesome
norms, Trump will be doing what the Founders expected. But in letting any president do that, Congress will be violating the role they
were built to play. We need to stop talking so much about what Trump will do and begin speaking in terms of what Congress lets him
do.
Donald Trump is a paper tiger. But the US Congress is a tiger that we pretend is made of paper. It is, at this point, taken for
granted that congressional Republicans will protect their co-partisan at any cost. It is, at this point,
expected that they will confirm Trump’s unqualified nominees, ignore his obvious conflicts of interest, overlook his dangerous
comments, and rationalize his worst behavior.
That expectation — and the cowardice it permits — is the real danger to American democracy.
How the founders failed
The framers of the Constitution were not infallible, and they were particularly wrong about a core feature of the government they built: They designed the American political
system believing it would, uniquely, resist the creation and influence of political parties. It did not.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which
in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
But even there, the cracks in the system showed. Washington’s warning against the dangers of parties was, in truth, an argument for the supremacy of his chosen political party.
Rather than the alternate domination of one faction over the other, he sought the sustained domination of his Federalist faction over all others. As historian Sean Wilentz has
argued, it was a “highly partisan appeal delivered as an attack on partisanship and on the low demagogues who fomented it. Washington’s address never explicitly mentioned
Jefferson or his supporters, but its unvarnished attack on organized political opposition was plainly directed against them.”
The framers’ mistaken belief that America’s political system would resist organized parties was consequential. Their vision of American government — a vision children are still
taught in civics classes — was that it would be balanced by competition among branches. The president, the courts, and the Congress would compete for power and prestige.
They would check each other naturally, as a byproduct of exerting and protecting their authority.
The reality of American government today is quite different. American politics is balanced by organized political parties competing across branches of government. The
president is checked not by Congress, but by the opposition party in Congress. The courts remain more independent — Judge Robart, it’s worth noting, was appointed by
President George W. Bush — but they are by no means untouched by partisan competition. Federal judges are selected through a political process driven by organized ideological
groups that vet candidates with the goal of ensuring predictable, friendly rulings in the future.
In normal times, this works well enough. These are not normal times. Congressional Republicans find themselves,
or at least feel themselves, yoked to Donald Trump — an abnormal president who hijacked their primary system and
mounted a hostile takeover of their party. Trump now holds them hostage: Their legislation requires his signature, their reelection
requires his popularity, and he is willing to withhold both.
And so the institution meant to check the president now finds itself protecting him. As Frum perceptively writes:
A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to
accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do:
their utmost not to find out about it.
But an absence of incentive should not be confused with an absence of responsibility. Trump does not, himself, have the
power to reinforce his rule with a web of corruption. Trump does not, himself, have the power to launch
fraudulent investigations of nonexistent voter fraud and then use the results to disenfranchise voters. Trump does not,
himself, have the power to confirm his Cabinet while refusing to put his assets into a blind trust. In these
cases, and others, Trump’s power exists at the pleasure of Congress . He can only do what they let him
do.
That Congress is not using its power is Congress’s fault , not Trump’s. Whatever danger Trump
poses to the system is their fault as much or more than his — it is their job, after all, to check an out-of-control president.
To put it differently, Trump deserves a bit less attention, and Rep. Jason Chaffetz deserves a lot more.
A case study of congressional abdication: Jason Chaffetz
Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee, is an eager investigator. He’s dug into Benghazi, Planned Parenthood, and Hillary Clinton’s
emails. And he was no fan of Trump’s. “I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president,” he said shortly after the Access Hollywood tapes were released.
The reason, he explained, was that he had a 15-year-old daughter, and he could not look in her the eye and defend what Trump said about women.
Like other Republicans, Chaffetz ultimately decided that beating Hillary Clinton was worth overlooking Trump’s transgressions, and he returned, reluctantly, to the fold. But like
other Republicans, Chaffetz expected Clinton to win the election. And he was ready. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up,” he
said in October. So that was Chaffetz weeks before the 2016 election — ready to launch a years-long investigation into the next president over email server management.
Last week, Chaffetz released the House Oversight Committee’s agenda for the next two years. It lists 43 items — none of which involve Donald Trump. Actually, that’s not quite
right. Chaffetz does intend to investigate the Office of Government Ethics, which Republicans believe has been too outspoken in its concern over Trump’s conflicts of interest.
So here, then, is Chaffetz after the 2016 election: planning investigations into those raising the alarm over Trump’s conflicts of interest, rather than actually investigating
Trump’s conflicts of interest.
There are obvious reasons for this. The danger for a House Republican in investigating Trump is that he’ll find something, and that something will be used by Democrats to win
back Congress and, ultimately, the White House. Chaffetz is also ambitious to move up in his party — he ran for speaker of the House after John Boehner stepped down in 2015,
and he knows that an overzealous investigation of a Republican president that puts both the Republican majority and conservative legislation at risk will doom his chances of
future advancement.
The Salt Lake City Tribune was appalled. “All that stuff about the constitutional separation of powers, each of the three branches of government keeping a wary eye on the other
two, doesn't mean very much if it is taken seriously only when Congress and the White House are held by different parties,” they wrote. The end of their editorial is worth
quoting, and considering:
The Constitution assumes that human nature will push officials of each branch of government to jealously guard their own powers, creating a balance that prevents anyone
getting up to too much mischief. But when elected officials are less interested in protecting their institution than in toeing the party line, it all falls apart.
It is Chaffetz’s job, more than it is anyone else’s, to hold Trump accountable, to demand that he govern in a transparent and ethical manner. And he has the power to do it. He
can subpoena administration officials and Trump’s business associates. He can make sure the media and the public have much of the information Trump refuses to release, and
he can make it costly for Trump to abandon longstanding norms around transparency, divestment, and governance. The American political system is prepared for the sort of
challenge Trump represents, and there are corrective powers in place.
But the
wielder of those corrective powers must want to use them. And Chaffetz doesn’t. His identity
as a Republican supersedes his identity as chair of the House Oversight Committee ,
or even as congressman from Utah’s third district.
This, and not Trump, is what poses a threat to American democracy. Here, in miniature, you can see the
problem we face: not a president who can’t be checked, but a president whose co-partisans don’t want to check him.
Partyocracy, not autocracy, is the danger. It is the danger now, and it is the danger in the future, when the
presidency might be held by a would-be strongman smoother and cleverer than Trump.
Trump’s bluster shouldn’t distract from Congress’s power
American politics is covered like an episode of The West Wing: The president is the main character, his top aides are the supporting
cast, and Congress acts and reacts in the background. But the reality is much the reverse: Congress holds the bulk of the
power, and the president and his aides must act and react in response to its whims. Trump can only pass the bills
Congress sends him, he can only staff his government with the nominees they confirm, and even
his executive actions routinely rely on authority Congress has handed over and could , at
any point, wrench back . The president is weak but public; Congress is strong but often ignored.
Congress is also a much more accountable institution than the White House. It is closer to the people it represents and more
sensitive to their frustrations. Every member of the House of Representatives is up for reelection in 2018 — and
if they believe their constituents want more out of them than to act as a blank check for
Trumpism, then more will be given . Already, there are signs that simply protecting the president may not prove
popular:
A recent poll by The Salt Lake Tribune and Hinckley Institute of Politics surveyed more than 600 voters, finding that 65 percent
were in favor of Chaffetz investigating Trump's conflicts of interest, while 31 percent were opposed, the Tribune reported.
It’s worth noting that there are 24 districts held by Republicans that voted for Clinton. If Democrats won
every one of those seats, they would take back control of the House . Congressional
Republicans know they cannot simply ignore public opinion. What they are hoping is that public
opinion ignores them — that those who are worried by Trump’s behavior disengage until
2020 , thinking that there are no real remedies until the next presidential election.
The problem America faces right now isn’t what Donald Trump will do, but what Republicans in
Congress will let him do . That is an unintuitive way to think in a polity that obsesses over the president’s every tweet
but barely shows up to vote in midterm elections. But it’s the reality.
This task is as urgent for Republicans as for Democrats — perhaps more so. In part, that’s true for reasons of legacy. The history
books will not speak fondly of Paul Ryan’s tax reforms if their cost was a presidency under which corruption flourished and crucial
norms of governance and transparency were abandoned.
But more optimistically, this is, for Republicans, a moment of opportunity. Nothing about the Trump administration is fixed. Few of
his Cabinet officials have been confirmed. Few of his priorities have been chosen. Little about his relationship with Congress has
been set. Both sides are feeling the other out. This is the point when they can set his presidency on a course that is safer both for
them and for the country.
Given Trump’s inexperience in government, it matters greatly what rules he believes
himself to be operating under . If he can’t act unethically at an acceptable cost, he won’t . If
he can’t confirm unqualified nominees, he will instead be forced to surround himself with qualified nominees. If he can’t govern
without actually cutting himself off from his businesses, he will cut himself off from his businesses or hand the presidency over to
Mike Pence, whom Republicans prefer anyway. If Trump’s worst instincts are curbed early, it makes it more likely that Republicans
will pass their policies, and less likely they are eventually engulfed by scandal or incompetence emanating from the White House.
But if Republicans in Congress abandon their constitutional role to protect their partisan interests, then they must be held no less
accountable than Trump.
There is much talk of the resistance to the Trump administration, and many protests happening outside the White House. But it is in
Congress members’ districts — at their town halls, in their offices, at their coffee shops — where this fight will be won or lost. This is
why it matters that the anti-Trump movement has begun adopting the tactics the Tea Party used to great success against President
Obama in 2010: Those tactics focused on congressional offices, and that’s why they worked.
They are working for liberals, too. Already, congressional Republicans are complaining that their phone lines are jammed, that their
town halls are swarmed, that protesters are, as Rep. Dave Brat said, “in my grill no matter where I go.” And already, congressional
Republicans are beginning to slow down on repealing Obamacare and peel off from Trump’s most unqualified nominees, like Betsy
DeVos.
But this is the beginning, not the end, of Trump’s opposition seeing Congress as the core
battleground. The real test will be in 2018 — Democratic turnout tends to plummet in
midterm elections, and overall turnout was historically low in 2014. The result, as political scientist Seth Masket writes, is
that Republicans are more afraid of their primary voters than general election voters. Their
behavior will change if and when that changes .
And that should change. It should change in 2018 , and it should change thereafter. Congress is more powerful than
the president. It comes first in the Constitution for a reason. The public should demand more of it, and care more who runs it.
But for now, the crucial question — the question on which much of American
democracy hinges — is not what Trump does. It is what Congress does . The danger posed by
Trump is one that America’s political system is built to protect against. But the officials charged with its protection need to take their
role seriously.
In the end, it is as simple as this: The way to stop an autocracy is to have Congress do its damn
job .

Shoring up the U.S. democratic model’s key to all aspects of U.S. leadership and
global liberal norms
James Traub 17, Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, 1/3/17, “Donald Trump:
Making the World Safe for Dictators,” http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/03/donald-trump-is-
making-the-world-safe-for-dictators/
Presidents keep returning to these formulations because Wilson was right about the relationship between
democracy and the modern world order. There’s another reason as well: At least since the end of World War II, the
idea that the United States stands for something more than its own self-interest has
underwritten its claims to world leadership . That idea is the basis of America’s “soft power.”
The Marshall Plan, to take the most famous example, did almost as much for the United States, by enhancing its global prestige, as it
did for its European beneficiaries.
So what happens if we abandon this tradition? The silver lining of Trump’s chilly agnosticism toward
democratic values might be this: No more hypocrisy. The Obama administration has shaken a finger at autocratic allies in the
Middle East without inflicting or even threatening serious consequences, thus offending foreign governments without mitigating
their brutalities. On the other side, Obama has halfheartedly supported Syrian rebels without making any effort to tip the scales of
the horrendous civil war there. Trump will deliver no lectures, and may openly join Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his alleged
campaign against Islamic extremism. Honesty bought at such a price, however, is a commodity not worth having.
President Trump might well feel more comfortable with the increasingly illiberal states of Eastern Europe — including Russia, the
fountainhead of anti-liberal doctrine — than with the social democratic West. One can all too easily imagine him launching a
fusillade of tweets at Atlantic allies who stubbornly persist in using the language of universal rights, including German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, who not-so-subtly warned the incoming president to abide by Western values. How long will it be, in fact, before
“Western values” can no longer be used as a taken-for-granted synonym for secularism, individual freedom, or tolerance for diverse
opinion?
But there’s a more subtle consequence to forswearing America’s traditional moral claims about its global role. The
U nited
S tates is able to serve as honest broker in disputes all over the world because it is not seen, as
for example China is, as a prop to existing regimes, however odious. Thus the Obama administration’s patient diplomacy
in Myanmar has given the United States influence with both new democratic leaders and the former military regime. What
happens if any of Trump’s favorite strongmen are overthrown or, God help them, voted out of office? What
influence will Washington have with the successor regime? How, more broadly, will America
compete with China’s growing soft power, or even Russia’s?
Putin’s greatest windfall in recent years has not been his stealth conquest of Crimea or winning the war in Syria for
Assad, but rather the growing eclipse of liberal values across the West . Trump’s election
is a crucial part of that bounty . (It seems increasingly clear that Putin deserves some credit for that outcome
thanks to Russia’s hacking of damaging emails from Democratic Party leaders.) The prestige of liberal democracy has not sunk so
low since the 1930s. Anti-liberal parties lead the polls in much of Western Europe and now govern in Hungary, Poland, and
Slovakia. It
is a matter of greater urgency today than it was after 9/11, that the U nited S tates act as a
beacon of, and spokesman for, democracy. Yet under a President Trump it will cede that role .
Who will inherit it? Germany, perhaps. But Merkel, gravely weakened by her open-door policy toward refugees, may well lose her
bid to return as chancellor in September. In any case, Germany is a lesser power that in any case has very strong historical reasons
for speaking softly and modestly.
If the U nited S tates does not lead in the promotion of democratic and liberal principles, as it has for the
last century, no one else will . And that vacuum will be filled by someone else whose values are
neither democratic nor liberal. Donald Trump’s promise to make American great again will have
descended to tragic farce .

Extinction
Chas W. Freeman 17, served in the United States Foreign Service, the State and Defense
Departments in many different capacities over the course of thirty years, past president of the
Middle East Policy Council, co-chair of the U.S. China Policy Foundation and a Lifetime Director
of the Atlantic Council, 3/9/17, “Reimagining Great Power Relations,”
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2017/0106/ca/freeman_greatpower.html
Across the globe, the lessened security that results from the erosion of rule-bound order has been
compounded by hysteria over attacks by terrorists. The spread of Islamophobia has paved the way for the revival of other forms of
xenophobia, like racism and anti-Semitism.Illiberalism looks like the wave of the future. We are
witnessing the consolidation of national security-obsessed garrison states.
Some sub-global powers—like Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China—are demanding deference to their
power by the countries in their "near abroad" or "near seas." They thus negate the near-universal sphere of influence that America
asserted during the so-called "unipolar moment" of worldwide U.S. hegemony that followed the Cold War. They are imposing their
own military precautionary zones ("cordons sanitaires") to manage and reduce external threats from other powers. This pushback is
resented by the United States, which— with no sense of irony, given its own insistence on exclusive control of the Americas—charges
them with attempts to project illegitimate "spheres of influence" beyond their borders.
By disavowing longstanding U.S. commitments, the Trump administration has inadvertently confirmed
foreign doubts about American reliability . Efforts to allay these concerns have garnered little credence.
The ebb of U.S. influence is forcing countries previously dependent on Washington's protection to make
unwelcome choices between diversifying their international relationships, decoupling their foreign policies from America's,
forming their own ententes and coalitions to buttress deterrence, or accommodating more powerful neighbors. Whatever mix of
actions they choose, they also boost spending to build more impressive armed forces.
Almost all countries still under U.S. protection continue to affirm their alliance with the United States even as they ramp up a
capacity to go it alone. Arms races are becoming the norm in most regions of the world. Global military expenditures grew by fifty
percent from 2001 to 2015.
Not long ago, geopolitics was largely explicable in bipolar terms of US-Soviet rivalry. After a unipolar moment, the political
and economic orders have gone fractal—understandable only in terms of evolving complexities at the regional or sub-
regional level. Intra-regional rivalries now fuel huge purchases by middle-ranking powers of state-of-the-art weaponry produced by
the great powers. No one should confuse increased weapons purchases with a deepening of alliance commitments.
So, for example, Saudi Arabia's arms purchases have tripled in the past five years. Trends in other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries are similar. At the same
time, the Gulf Arabs are reaching out to China, the EU, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, and Turkey and convening pan-Muslim coalitions against Islamist terrorism and Iran.
They have undertaken unprecedentedly unilateral and aggressive military interventions in places like Libya, Syria, and Yemen. As they have done so, the countries of the Fertile
Crescent—Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria—have drawn ever closer to Iran. Iraqi Kurdistan has become a de facto Turkish dependency.
Before a Western-supported coup ousted Ukraine's elected president2, that country wobbled between East and West but was on its way into the Russian embrace. The
Philippines has distanced it from the United States and bundled with China. So has Thailand. Myanmar and Vietnam, by contrast, are seeking partners to balance China. The
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have doubled down on their reliance on NATO, which they joined in 2004 to secure their independence from Russia. Cuba and
Venezuela look to Russia and China for support against ongoing American policies of regime change.
Meanwhile, international governance of trade and investment continues to devolve to the regional level and configure itself to supply chains. Examples include new trade pacts,
like the RCEP,3 the Pacific Alliance,4 and the Eurasian Economic Union;5 preexisting blocs like the GCC,6 Mercosur,7 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization;8 as well as
well-established confederations like the 27-member post-Brexit EU and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)9 . Each of these groupings has one or two
heavyweight members at its core, constituting a natural leadership.
Where such regional arrangements have been implemented, rules are made and enforced without much, if any, reference to external powers. Thus, the EU has had no role to
speak of in shaping relations between Canada, Mexico, and the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Conversely, the United States has had
very little say in decisions made in Brussels on rules for trade and investment in the EU and its associated economies. Given the Trump administration's aversion to
multilateralism, the United States will have no say at all in the standard-setting that will take place in either the RCEP or the 65-country pan-Eurasian economic community that
is beginning to emerge from China's "belt and road" initiative. Regionalism limits the reach of great powers. Bilateralism limits it even more.
The decentralization of authority over global economic, political, and defense issues represents a net loss of influence by the U.S. and other great powers over the evolution of the
international state system. But it presents both a challenge and an opportunity for middle-ranking powers. On the one hand, as U.S. and EU influence atrophies, they have an
expanding role in international rule-making. On the other, they are now subject to pressure from neighboring great powers that is unmoderated by any global rules.
Take Mexico as an example. This is a proud nation of nearly 130 million people, the world's 13th largest country geographically and its 11th most populous. It has the world's 11th
largest economy. By every measure, Mexico is a middle-ranking power. As such, even if it were not a member of NAFTA and the Pacific Alliance, it would have a significant voice
in the G-20, the WTO, the United Nations, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific.
Interdependence has mitigated but not erased historic Mexican resentment of domineering American behavior. Mexicans have not forgotten that the United States invaded their
country and annexed 55 percent of its territory in 1846–1848. But, since the entry into force of NAFTA in January 1994, Mexico's economy has become almost fully integrated
with the American economy through complex supply chains. Eighty percent of Mexican exports now go to the U.S. Mexico has become the United States' second largest export
market and its third largest trading partner (after China and Canada). It has also quietly transformed itself into a reliably pro-American bulwark against influences from extra-
hemispheric powers like Russia and China. It has proven the efficacy of economic opening and reform and has become an influential advocate of liberal economics as opposed to
the perennial statism and mercantilism of most other Latin American nations.
Now Mexico is faced with demands from the Trump administration to cooperate in dismantling its interdependence with the United States. At the same time, the U.S. president
is denigrating Mexicans, proposing to wall them out, and threatening to deport masses of undocumented migrants and alleged criminals to Mexico, whether they are Mexican or
not and whether Mexico has any legal reason to accept them or not. Not surprisingly, Mexican opinion is now hostile to the United States. Mexico's government has little leeway
for compromise. Surrender to American demands is not an option. But Mexico currently has little leverage over Washington.
So Mexico faces highly unwelcome choices. It can bargain as best it can on its own, risking its prosperity and stability on what is almost certainly a bad bet. It can seek leverage
over the United States by suspending cooperation against transit by illegal migrants and the supply of narcotics to American addicts. It can make common cause against the
United States by forming a global united front with other economies targeted by the Trump administration for their bilateral trade surpluses, like China, Germany, Japan, and
south Korea. It can adopt Cuban-style defiance of Washington's efforts to bring it to heel, allying itself with extra-hemispheric powers like China and/or Russia or Iran. Or it
could choose some mixture of all of these options. It is too early to predict what course Mexican-American relations will take in the age of Trump. They will be affected by many
factors, including the state of relations between the United States and other great powers – especially China and Russia.
Mexico is far from the only middle-ranking power now of necessity maneuvering between the world's great powers. Ukraine has yet to find its place between Russia, the EU, and
Turkey has distanced itself from the EU and America and formed an entente (limited
the United States.

partnership for limited purposes) with

Russia. Iran has reached out to India as well as Russia in order to
counter the U nited S tates and the Gulf Arabs. Saudi Arabia—once exclusively attached to the United States—is actively
courting China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and Russia. Pakistan is seeking to avoid having to choose between Saudi
Arabia and Iran. At the same time, it has accepted the task of coordinating the activities of a pan-Islamic military alliance that
implicitly counters both Iran and an ever more assertively Islamophobic India. To reduce dependence on the United States and the
GCC, Egypt is courting cooperation with Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Old global alignments are
everywhere giving way to more complex patterns.
Despite an unprecedented degree of interdependence between them, relations between the great
powers are also in motion . Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States are each one another's
largest or second largest trading partners and sources of foreign direct investment. They are linked to each other in global supply
chains, which tend to converge in and between large economies. All are members of the Bretton Woods legacy institutions – the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and WTO. These institutions earlier accommodated the rise of Japan. More
recently, they have lagged in reflecting the rapidly increasing weight of other non-Western economies in world trade and finance.
The formation of the "BRICS" group was a collective effort by Brazil, Russia, India, and China (soon joined by South Africa) to
develop institutions to reflect the current distribution of global commercial and financial power and contemporary governance
requirements. When Bretton Woods took place the world had just been crushed by World War II. America dominated the world
economy, justifying its preeminent role in global governance. Recent shifts in economic balances of power have not been reflected in
legacy institutions. Washington remains the nominal leader in them but finds itself increasingly sidelined as others feel obliged to
work around it. The Trump administration's skepticism about the value of the international economic institutions that earlier
generations of Americans created has accelerated the diminishment of U.S. managerial control over the global economy.
Similar erosion of U.S. primacy is evident in international politics. China, India, and Russia have met annually since 2002 to discuss
how to establish a multipolar world order in which U.S. unilateralism cannot hold sway. Antagonism between the
world's greatest powers is growing. With the United States pushing back against Russia in the West and China in the
East, the two are being nudged together to counter America.
To offset Sino-Russian partnership, Japan seeks rapprochement with India and Russia, leavening its longstanding exclusive reliance
on the United States. China, Europe, Russia, and the United States are also courting India, which is, as always, playing hard to get.
Meanwhile, China is reaching out to Europe and the EU is attempting to work with it to fill the leadership vacuum in the Asia-Pacific
created by the sudden U.S. abandonment of the economic leg of its "pivot to Asia." No region is immune from
realignment in its international relationships. Brazil's membership in the BRICS group symbolizes its cultivation of
relationships with emerging powers to balance those it has with the United States and middle-ranking powers in the Western
Hemisphere.
As a consequence of these trends, we are now well into a world of many competing power centers
and regional balances . Long-term vision and short-term diplomatic agility are at a premium. Neither is anywhere
evident. In their absence, territorial disputes rooted in World War II and Cold War troop movements and lines of control,
arms races (nuclear as well as conventional ), shifting balances of prestige, and the
reduced moderating effect of international organizations are helping to escalate alienation
and tension between the great powers.
The stakes are high . Trade wars that could wreck the global economy and degrade the
prosperity of all are now all too easy to imagine. Armed conflict could break out at any time
along the unsettled borders between China and India and China and Japan. The U.S. and Chinese navies
are maneuvering against each other in the South China Sea. The two countries appear to be headed for a military
confrontation over Taiwan. The Peloponnesian War and World War I remind us that squabbles between lesser powers
can drag their patrons into existential strife despite their better judgment.
Notwithstanding ample opportunity to do so, the U.S., EU, and Russia failed to craft a cooperative post-Cold War order to regulate
their interaction in Europe. There is no agreement on where NATO ends and Russia begins. We now face the possibility that it will
take an armed face-down to define a dividing line between them.
All great powers now share an avowed interest in containing Islamist terrorism and remediating its causes. Escalating antipathies
born of territorial disputes and Chinese and Russian opposition to U.S. primacy prevent cooperation to this end. The politically
expedient demonization of strategic rivals in democracies like the United States inhibits cooperation even where specific interests
nearly completely coincide. The same factors diminish the likelihood of cooperation on other matters where interests substantially
overlap —like Syria and Korea.
Meanwhile, U.S. deployments of ballistic missile defenses and the increasing lethality of American nuclear warheads have convinced
both Russia and China that Washington is reaching for the ability to decapitate them in a first strike. Russia and the United States
are in a nuclear arms race again. China seems to have been provoked to develop a second-strike capability that, like Russia's, will be
able to annihilate, not just maim America. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its
"Doomsday Clock" the closest to midnight since 1954 .
The risks the world now faces were not (and are not) inevitable . They are the product of lapses of
statesmanship and failures to consider how others see and react to us. The setbacks to America's ability to shape
the international environment to its advantage are not the result of declining capacity on its
part. They are the consequence of a failure to adapt to new realities and shifting power balances.
Raging against change will not halt it. Pulling down the frameworks and trashing the rules on which North
American and global prosperity were built is far more likely to prove counterproductive than
empowering. Buying more military hardware will not remedy the national strategy deficit. Gutting the foreign affairs agencies and
doubling down on diplomacy-free foreign policy will deepen it.
Americans are badly in need of a national conversation about their aspirations in foreign affairs and how to
take advantage of the changing world order to realize them. That conversation did not take place
during the run-up to the 2016 election . The inauguration did not mark an end to the chaos of
the presidential transition . Forty-eight days later, most government policy positions remain unfilled. Policy
processes have yet to be defined.
In the current atmosphere, slogans displace considered judgments, intelligence about the outside world is unwelcome, expertise is
dismissed as irrelevant or worse, and policy pronouncements appease the delusions of political constituencies instead of addressing
Congress has walked off the job . Some sort of order must eventually
verifiable realities. The
reassert itself in the U.S. government, but the prospects for intelligent dialogue about the implications for
American interests of developments abroad seem exceptionally poor.
But such dialogue cannot be deferred for another four years . It seems ever clearer that it will not
originate in Washington. It must begin somewhere. Why not here? Why not now?
 1NC
Kritik

National insurance is a technology of security---it promotes a collective national

identity in the face of external threats to Western life, which is inseparable from
violent security strategies and depoliticizes critique of the social order
Chris Zebrowski 16, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Loughborough
University, The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the Twenty-first Century, 2016, pp. 51-58
To a nation still very much steeped in war, the promise of a stable post-war period financed through the peace dividend provided
comfort, solace and hope. Less than a month after the last major raid of the London Blitz, which had devastatingly displayed modern
life's total exposure to modern total war, an interdepartmental committee, chaired by William Beveridge, commenced planning for
an ambitious scheme for post-war social security. Social Insurance and Allied Services popularly known as the Beveridge report —
was presented to Parliament in 1942. No doubt strongly influenced by the spectre of the Great Depression, the report spoke
powerfully to the forms of civil contingency expected to greet post-war administrations. It advocated compulsory social
insurance , social housing, public education, a national health service and a commitment to full employment to
ensure freedom from the 'Giant Evils' of want, squalor, ignorance, disease and idleness in post-war Britain. The document would
be widely recognized as the cornerstone for what would emerge, post-war, as an ambitious state programme for the
management of Civil Contingencies: the British welfare state.
The concurrent operation of these two great machineries of government has been difficult to reconcile within a common historical
account of the post-war period given the very different meanings commonly associated with their inceptions. Historical
narratives of civil defence and the welfare state regularly appeal, explicitly or implicitly, to
diametrically opposed teleologies of the modern liberal state. On the one hand, the welfare state is
taken to represent the culmination of a long project associated with the humanization of the
state wherein policies guided by raison d'état were marginalized and state interests aligned with those of the
nation which it serves Cold War civil defence, on the other hand, invokes a more sinister narrative of
the historical trajectory of the modern state: Advances in weaponry, paired with a conviction of their
necessity, raised the stakes of war so as to wager the existence of whole nations while persistently
underfunded civil defence programmes placated an anxious nation so as to keep it from turning against the official policy of
deterrence. But what if these projects were not so dissimilar? Could it be, as Foucault insisted, that an
indissociable relation exists between state biopolitics, aimed at the protection and
promotion of the species-life of the nation , and the emergence of a thanatopolitical
geopolitics wagering the continued existence of the nation (Foucault. 1998: 143)?
Rather than treating the coexistence of these two great machineries of governance as either coincidental or ironic. this chapter
argues that the security logic of these two albeit distinct machineries of security emanates from a
shared matrix of governmentality . We begin by examining the protective logic of security shared
by the welfare state and civil defence. Building on the analysis undertaken in the previous chapter, the logic of
protection enacted by these two great machineries of emergency governance is shown to derive from a common
problematization of public anxiety and the threat it posed to social order. Identifying this common logic
of security of course is not to reduce these two distinct machineries of governance to the same. Indeed, given the diverse
technologies and practices comprising these machineries of security governance this protective logic of security was in actuality
enacted in quite diverse ways both within and across these assemblages. By focusing on the distinct ways in which this protective
logic was differentially enacted by social insurance and civil defence machineries this chapter locates the composition of a
line of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 9—15: Deleuze. 1992) leading to the emergence a novel approach to the
government of anxiety and, ultimately, the origins of resilience.
In contrast to conventional resilience narratives which place the discovery of resilience in the 1970s, this chapter traces
the
origins of resilience to critiques of the protective logic of security enacted by post-war social
liberal security initiatives. This critique is traced to concerns surrounding the potentially demoralizing effects of social
insurance in debates leading up to the constitution of the British welfare state. Next, we show how this critique of protection was
mobilized in the wake of the Strath report, which demonstrated to policy-makers the genocidal potential of a thermonuclear attack
on Britain. to redirect investment from protectionist policies of civil defence, to "active defence" policies rooted in the idea of
deterrence. Rather than seeking to placate public fears, a policy of active defence required the development of new techniques of
security governance which would mobilize anxieties to encourage preparedness and maintain support for deterrence policies.
Eclipsing a security project rooted in the manufacture of a stoic citizenry, governmental techniques would
increasingly aim at the production of subjects acclimatized to dangerous worlds, confident in
their ability to overcome the risks they faced — even if those included thermonuclear war.
Freedom from fear: social insurance and the British welfare state
Of the diverse mechanisms comprising the welfare state social insurance has been recognized as
its quintessential technology (Dean, 2010; Ewald, 1986, 1991; O’Malley, 2004; Rose, 1996a). By spreading risks
across every member of the nation, social insurance permitted the contingencies inherent to
liberal capitalist societies to be managed without requiring a wholesale reform of the
economic and political order . In doing so, social insurance did more than just free citizens from the Great Evils of
want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness which stood in the way of 'social progress' (Beveridge, 1942: 6). Social insurance
sought to free liberal subjects from the fear of the future. Social insurance thus enacted a social
form of security: reinforcing the social bonds of the nation while simultaneously working to
manage both the risks and the fears which threatened their dissolution . In order to
better understand the role or technologies of government in promoting this notion of social security it is useful to draw on the
analyses of insurance conducted within governmentality literatures before moving on to examine the social and political context
which gave British social insurance its particular form.
Ewald (1991) describes insurance as an abstract technology which operates in relation to a calculative
rationality of risk. Risk, for Ewald, is not an objective condition (cf. Beck, 1992). It is a mode of rationalizing
uncertainty, a way of ordering reality, representing events and understanding dangers which makes them amenable to governance.
Of course, the ways in which risks are conceptualized and addressed vary markedly within and across different fields. Compare, for
example. the risks dealt with by social workers, epidemiologists and insurers (Dean, 2010: 217—27), It is therefore imperative that
risk be analysed in relation to the varied governmental techniques and political projects which invoke it in order to shape the
conduct of individuals and populations.
Risks are rendered calculable through actuarial sciences which 'produce' (Dean, 2010: 213) risks by
extrapolating the regularity of past instances of an event into the future to form probabilities of
its reoccurrence. With insurance, risk can then operate as 'a capital against whose loss the insurer offers a guarantee' (Ewald,
1991: 204). What is offered by insurance does not, and cannot, equal the loss suffered - indeed the loss of a limb, or a life, would be
incalculable (Ewald, 1991: 204). Rather, what is remunerated is an amount which has been contractually agreed upon with the
insurer to be paid out should a particular event materialize. For example. while the cost of an industrial accident to the individual is
itself incalculable, insurance ensures that one need not worry that the loss of one's ability to earn a
wage resulting from such an accident cascades into the bankruptcy of one's family. While
insurance cannot therefore protect one from harm, it can help to mitigate the financial
implications arising from an event's occurrence. It can ensure a degree of financial stability
in an uncertain world . Insurance thus provides the policy holder with a form of 'reparational security'
which mitigates financial exposure to a pre-specified event in order to ensure the continuation of a particular
lifestyle (Lobo-Guerrero, 201 1: 6, 911. For this reason, the security referent of insurance technology is not the
material body but a way of life (Lobo-Guerrero, 2011).
The financial security provided by insurance has ethical consequences. As a moral technology (Ewald, 1991: 207) insurance
helps to shape particular behaviours and subjectivities. Insurance provides a way of managing an uncertain
future. Through the purchase of insurance, subjects are compelled to understand their lives in an enterprising manner. They are
encouraged to adopt a disposition to the future that is both rational and calculative (Ewald, 1991: 207). This in turn imposes a
number of moral obligations on subjects with regards to their personal, familial and social responsibilities. The insurance industry
has long capitalized on invoking the responsibility of the policy owner for the well-being of their dependants to sell products such as
life insurance.
Purchasing insurance (the industry tells us) means no longer having to worry about the future. "Insurance…liberates man from fear"
(Ewald, 1991: 208):
One of the first and most salutary effects of insurance is to eliminate from human affairs the fear that paralyses all activity and
numbs the soul. Seneca says somewhere Rex est quit metuit nihil: he who fears nothing is a king. Delivered from fear, man is king of
creation: he can dare to venture; the ocean itself obeys him, and he entrusts his fortune to it.
(Chauffon as quoted in Ewald. 1991: 208)
Ewald thus refers to insurance as a 'liberator of action' (Ewald, 1991: 208). By immunizing the subject from the negative financial
implications of an event, insurance may encourage risk-taking and enable risky lifestyles. The disinhibition produced by insurance
has obvious advantages for the entrepreneur. Citing a passage from Gros, Ewald draws an affinity between the effects produced by
insurance and those of religion:
The global sense of security produced by our already fragmentary existing forms of insurance, and still more by its integral forms yet
to come, is like a transposition on to the earthly plane of the religious faith that inspires the believer. (Gros as quoted in Ewald, 1991:
208)
As an abstract technology, the spread of insurance is dependent on the extension of an ‘ insurantial
imaginary ’: "that is to say, on the ways in which, in a given social context, profitable, useful and necessary uses can be found
for insurance technology" (Ewald, 1991: 198). In contrast to the spread of private insurance, which rests on the ability of insurers to
actualize the abstract technology in innovative ways in order to render insurable. and thus profitable, new forms of risk, the
advent of social insurance, according to Ewald, represented 'the realization of a new form of
insurance, linked to the development of an insurantial imaginary which in this case is also a
political imaginary’ (Ewald. 1991: 198). In order to account for the specific ‘insurantial form’ (Ewald 1991: 198) which social
insurance took in Britain, it is therefore necessary to further inquire into the particular social and political context in which the
abstract technology of insurance was actualized.
In the UK, the evolution of social insurance was shaped to a considerable extent by the social and political environment of the Poor
Laws. By the end of the nineteenth century, the deterrent and moralizing discipline of the Poor Laws was increasingly perceived as
inadequate in addressing the various 'social' problems afflicting Britain's urban labouring classes such as disease, suicide, cyclical
unemployment and the working conditions of many industries. Nikolas Rose explains that 'the social' emerged as an 'invention of
the late nineteenth century that both sociology and welfare government constituted as their object and target' (Rose, 1996b: 56). The
social is not synonymous with society (Donzelo, 1979: xxvii). Rather it 'refers to a particular sector in which quite diverse problems
and special cases can be grouped together, a sector comprising specific institutions and an entire body of qualified personnel'
(Deleuze, 1979: ix). In Britain, empirical investigations spawned by the new Poor Law helped to gradually dissociate a distinctly
'social' domain from political and economic issues in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Poovey, 1995:8—13). In particular, the
application of statistical sciences to the 'avalanche' of information generated from institutions including workhouses, prisons and
hospitals. was instrumental in giving the sense that regularities existed in the appearance of events associated with social problems
such as reproduction, disease and mortality (Foucault, 2003, 2007; Hacking, 1982, 1990, 1991). By the late nineteenth century,
contingencies such as accidents, illness, unemployment and even death were increasingly seen as properties of statistical
distribution rather than negligence (Hacking, 1990). The gradual consolidation of a distinctly social domain gave rise to a vision of
society increasingly understood as a phenomenon displaying laws of statistical regularity. In turn, a variety of personal and
economic problems formerly subject 'to the hazards of struggle, charitable practices and repression' (Donzelot, 1979: 81) would be
redefined as social risks.
Social insurance arises from the application of the abstract technology of insurance to social
risks (Ewald, 1986. 1991). With the Beveridge report, social insurance would be mobilized as the principal means for combating the
'Giant Evils' of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness which stood in the way of the 'Road to Reconstruction' and 'social
progress' more generally (Beveridge, 1942: 6). The Beveridge report sought to review, integrate and extend across the entire social
body a number or pre-existing insurance schemes which had arisen in piecemeal fashion from the turn of the century, including
those already operating in the fields of old age pensions (1908), health (1912) and unemployment (1920). Its success rested on the
ability to portray poverty in a manner consistent with the rationality of insurance Drawing on a 'diagnosis of want' advanced
by inter-war social surveys (Beveridge. 1942: 8), Beveridge would portray
a variety of events including sickness,
unemployment, accident, retirement and death as risks which threatened the interruption or
loss of earning power (Beveridge, 1942: 120). In construing these problems as social risks, as opposed
to , say, problems endemic to the structure of capitalism , the Beveridge report encouraged the
application of insurantial technologies while side-lining more ambitious calls for a
restructuring of society itself . Social insurance would translate the 'abstract technology of
insurance' into a comprehensive political programme which would cover all the major risks and pay benefits at a
subsistence level as a benefit of national citizenship.
For Foucauldian analysts, social insurance was thus not only a response to the emergency of the social,
but a technology of solidarity (Ewald, 1986, 1991: 209-10). Rose explains:
It incarnates social solidarity in collectivizing the management of the individual and dangers
posed by the economic riskiness of a capricious system of wage labour , and the
corporeal riskiness of a body subject to sickness and injury, under the stewardship of a 'social'
State. And it enjoins solidarity in that the security of the individual across the vicissitudes of a life history is guaranteed by a
mechanism that operates on the basis of what individuals and their families are thought to share by virtue of their common sociality,
Social insurance thus establishes new connections and association between 'public' norms and procedures and the fate of individuals
in their 'private' economic and personal conduct. (Rose, 1996b: 48)

Mobilizing security around insurance constructs a vision of the US as a global

trustee---that enables development policy aimed at fostering neoliberal self-
reliance in the global South, along with violent security strategies to secure our
community against endless possible threats
Mark Duffield 7, Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Global Insecurities Centre,
University of Bristol, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of
Peoples, 2007, pp. 16-24
In distinguishing a biopolitics of development and underdevelopment, the great Asian tsunami emergency of December 2004 is
instructive. Despite the destruction being of a different order of magnitude, within twenty-four hours of the great wave, the world’s
leading reinsurance companies had estimated their losses as half the £14 billion incurred when Hurricane Charlie devastated Florida
in the summer of the same year (Harding and Wray 2004). Whereas the hurricane claimed twenty-five lives, the tsunami killed over
200,000. At the same time the great wave devastated whole communities, local industries and livelihoods around the Indian Ocean
rim. At the time of writing, many of these communities are still rebuilding their lives. For the reinsurers, the reason for
their limited financial exposure in the tsunami disaster was clear: ‘fewer people in the areas
affected by the huge sea surges are insured’ (ibid.). This distinction between life that is ‘insured’
as opposed to ‘non-insured’ provides a fertile metaphor for distinguishing the different but
connected biopolitical strategies that constitute ‘ developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’
populations respectively .
For insured life, as a general responsibility of government, an important factor in ameliorating the
contingencies of existence is a social insurance regime offering a range of compensatory
benefits supported from contributory payments and taxation (McKinnon 2004). Together with private insurance and personal
savings, as well as support from voluntary agencies, ‘developed’ life is promoted through a range of public
welfare bureaucracies, benefits and safety nets covering maternity, health, family support, education,
housing, employment injury, unemployment protection and pensions (Wood and Gough 2006). A system of public
infrastructure involving massified energy, transport, nutritional, retailing and environmental systems also underpins
these bureaucracies and safety nets. While plagued by issues of access and availability in the past, the idea of the
welfare state and what Nikolas Rose (2000) has called the ‘the social’ captured the spirit if not the extent of this
complex biopolitical architecture. At the moment, a neoliberal reworking of the social is well under way. In particular, a
shift of ethos has taken place from the collective to the individual, based on the encouragement of active and informed citizens who
take more responsibility for their own welfare choices (ibid.: 87–8, 159–60). The point being made here, however, is that the
expansion of publicly administered or regulated insurance-based welfare technologies is of great
significance. In terms of a comparative biopower, ‘underdevelopment’ is the fate of life existing beyond or
outside these insurance-based welfare systems.
Estimates suggest that within industrialized countries, on average 80 per cent of the workforce is included within a contributory
social insurance regime. In Africa or Asia, however, only a small minority are involved. Usually less than 10 per cent
of the population is covered and for a more restricted range of contingencies; globally, as little as 20 per
cent of the world’s population is regarded as having adequate social insurance (McKinnon 2004: 9–10). Conventional contributory
approaches fall far short of a universal reach ‘especially in developing countries’ (ibid.: 10). The non-insured life exposed by the
tsunami was similar to that regularly revealed in other humanitarian emergencies. That is, it existed in largely self-reliant
communities, predominantly organized around family and kinship and dependent on the smallscale ownership of land or property.
In the absence of insurance, resilience hinges on how adept and entrepreneurial such
communities are in maintaining their self-reliance and coping with the contingencies of their
exposed existence (Twigg 2004). In the global South ‘experience . . . reminds us of the central contribution of personal and
family resources to the universal need for security’ (Wood and Gough 2006: 1697). Within development policy, as will be
discussed further below, there is a longstanding, indeed, unconscious acceptance that non-Western
populations, except for basic needs and essential public goods, are essentially self-reliant in terms of their
general economic, social and welfare requirements, and, moreover, that development is essentially about improving self-reliance
through helping to meet basic needs. As a corollary, it is widely assumed that people in underdeveloped countries do not need the
sort of welfare safety-nets on which the more atomised populace of mass consumer society is dependent. In relation to this set of
developmental practices and assumptions, when self-reliance breaks down humanitarian assistance functions as a regime of
international social protection of last resort. As such, it comes complete with its own small print, inefficiencies and exclusion clauses
(Forman and Steward 2000; Marriage 2006). As a biopolitical regime, international development combines the protection of
humanitarian assistance with betterment through self-reliance.
To present development and underdevelopment biopolitically illustrates the systemic gulf in life chances that
separates insured and noninsured life. Compared with the compensated life styles of the West,
international statistics on the distribution of poverty, longevity and social exclusion (CPRC 2005),
together with the rising volume of humanitarian expenditure (Development Initiatives 2003), suggest that the developmental
assumption that a large part of humanity is capable of self-reliance makes for a cruel taskmaster.
Indeed, a state of emergency among self-reliant populations is now a permanent
condition . Rather than questioning the biopolitics involved, however, aid agencies usually infer that the emergency exists
because communities and peoples are not self-reliant enough. Consequently, each disaster initiates a fresh
developmental attempt to return the population concerned to a new and more resilient
condition of homeostatic self-reliance . This constant reproduction of the global life-
chance divide cautions against naively assuming that development is about narrowing this gulf,
for example by extending to Africa levels of social protection similar to those in Europe. The reality of development is, and always
has been, very different.
The enlightened self-interest that connects the security of mass consumer society with bringing the world’s non-insured life within
an effective developmental trusteeship is based on improving the self-reliance of those involved. Since decolonization, the dangers of
not doing this have been regularly cast as increasing the risk of international disorder. In particular, underdevelopment has the
Cumulative restrictions on
ability to foment all manner of destabilizing and illicit forms of global circulation.
international immigration , for example, have for decades been justified as resolving the problem
of the asymmetric demands made by non-insured migrants on European insurance-based
welfare systems (Duffield 2006). Rather than narrowing the life-chance gulf, development is better understood as attempting
to contain the circulatory and destabilizing effects of underdevelopment’s non-insured surplus life.
The divergence of insured and non-insured life
Regarding how the biopolitical divergence between development and underdevelopment emerged, Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that until the end of the nineteenth century, as a technology of trusteeship, development was usually regarded as a solution to
the social problems associated with the underdevelopment of capitalism within Europe (ibid.: 5). Apart from experiments involving former slaves, it was not until the early part of the twentieth century and, especially, following decolonization, that development took
on its present geographical and human focus, that is, as means of protection and betterment associated with former protectorates and colonies (see Escobar 1995). Having origins as a remedy for the problem of surplus population within Europe, development has
now assumed a similar role in relation to an international surplus population.
During the nineteenth century development within Britain emerged from a number of abolitionist, free-market radical, liberal and socialist strands. It combined, for example, Saint-Simonian and Comtian concerns with social breakdown and trusteeship, radical
antipathy to landed interests and liberal anxieties over the negative consequences of industrial capitalism. Cowen and Shenton (1996) have argued that concerns over the surplus population, presented at the time as the ‘agricultural question’, were prominent
between the 1870s and the First World War. Due to the increasing use of mechanization and growing livestock production, rural migrants were swelling the ranks of the urban unemployed, exacerbating unstable labour markets and exposing the limited amenities of
the towns. With radicals well represented in Parliament, the developmental approach to this problem took the form of an attack on landed interests and large-scale land ownership. Not only was it inefficient, it degraded the agricultural labour force. Both liberals and
radicals advocated land reform and its redistribution as a way of reabsorbing the surplus population. Land societies, for example, were formed for the purchase and redistribution of land in order to turn the surplus population into rentiers able to provide for their
own welfare independently of the state. Liberal and Chartist land societies, for example, fed into the earlytwentieth- century campaigns for smallholdings (ibid.: 258). The small-scale ownership of land and property was argued to encourage community cohesion,
local enterprise and, through the freedoms and responsibilities of self-reliance, political citizenship. At the same time, the induced labour shortage within the industrial areas would increase average wage rates, generating benefits for all workers. As Cowen and
Shenton cogently argue, it was a palliative doctrine of development that promoted rural colonization as a way of connecting surplus land with surplus population ‘and so eliminate the urban decay and destitution of British underdevelopment’ (ibid.: 260).
Such pressures exerted through Parliament eventually resulted in the 1909 Development Act. It proposed help and financial assistance to agriculture, rural industries, land reclamation, forestry, roads, inland navigation, harbours and fisheries within Britain. With a
rural bias, and not wishing to alarm industrial interests, the Act called for special attention to those sectors ‘which had little expectation of profit’ (ibid.: 28 5). The 1909 Act eventually petered out, being overtaken by other and more effective liberal solutions to the
problem of surplus population. As community-based development was moving overseas, in Britain it took a back seat. As argued in chapter 8, it would not come to the fore again until the 1960s. When it did so, this ‘internal’ development regime was concerned with
integrating communities of immigrant origin within British society. A number of factors help to explain development’s geographical relocation at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Mike Davis argues that the international ‘development gap’ first emerged in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, ‘when the great non-European peasantries were initially integrated within the world economy’ (Davis 2001: 1) Using the electric telegraph,
railways, steamships and photography, and taking in the Americas, Africa and the East, this economy now interconnected the prairies of America with the steppes of Russia. In placing the acquired territory under the control of competing colonial powers, the New
Imperialism tended to restrict this market. At the same time, from annexation flowed the responsibility of government. This responsibility gave the liberal problematic of security a new concern. As Ho bson argued, almost the whole of the regions appropriated by the
New Imperialism consisted of tropical or sub-tropical territories ‘with large populations of savages or “lower races”; little of it is likely, even in the distant future, to increase the area of sound colonial life’ (Hobson [1902]: 124). At the same time, by its acts and deeds
the British Empire had already shown itself to represent the very antithesis of the art of free government. As a consequence, imperial expansion ‘has increased the area of British despotism, far outbalancing the progress in population and in practical freedom
attained in our few democratic colonies’ (ibid.). The surplus population, initially internationalized in the scattered territories of freed slaves, and until now usually thought to be a problem of European underdevelopment, had been glimpsed as a global danger. In the
wake of two world wars, liberal opinion nurtured this global vision, first in the League of Nations and then in the United Nations.
Arising from a critique of the barbarity of the New Imperialism, Hobson’s remedy for the ‘lower races’ (which he always places within inverted commas) was that of educative trusteeship. In the years leading to the First World War, development found its way into a
complex of Fabian, liberal, idealist and radical opinion that, from different perspectives, arrived at ‘a common presumption that there was a natural African community of persons and producers, who had to be protected from the historical degradation of industrial
capital’ (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 292). This ‘Fabian nexus’ would grow to include liberal activists, Colonial Office officials, colonial governors and missionaries, and would eventually mature into the doctrine of Dual Mandate associated with indirect rule or, as Lord
Lugard calls it, Native Administration. In discharging the responsibilities of the ‘superior races’ to the ‘backward races’, indirect trusteeship favoured existing or natural rulers. It was based on the delegation of appropriate authority and administrative tasks to such
leaders, including the establishment of free courts, the provision of appropriate education ‘which will assist progress without creating false ideals; the institution of free labour and a just system of taxation; the protection of the peasantry from apprehension, and the
preservation of their rights to land, etc.’ (Lugard [1922] 1965: 58). Based on self-reliance, indirect rule was a developmental trusteeship (Cooke 2003). Through sympathetic and paternalistic guidance, together with local trial and error, it provided a framework
through which, in the fullness of time, the subject races could grow in social and political maturity (MacMichael 1934: 233–42). Chapter 7 returns to Native Administration when current policy on failed and fragile states is discussed.

Concerning the abandonment of development as a solution for Britain’s surplus population, it is relevant that Fabianism also
contained another strand: a remedy whereby the state acted as the trustee of capitalism as a system, taking
on ‘in the name of humanity’ the responsibility for the orderly redistribution of profit in excess
of that required for economic reproduction (Cowen and Shenton 1996: 270). Since state officials could be non-
sectarian, and their advancement ideally rested on the ability to increase social productivity in general, they had the
potential of becoming the trustees of society as a whole . Mixed with liberal and radical concerns, from
the 1880s there were growing political demands for more selective and less punitive poor law assistance and, especially, the
extension of such measures beyond relief to encompass the deserving poor: the sick, unemployed and aged, that is, those destitute
through no fault of their own. Demands were made for local and central government to improve the housing, sanitation and
nutrition of this group (Foucault [1975–6]). By the turn of the century many municipalities had begun to monopolize urban gas and
water supply. During the 1900s, for certain categories of the population, free school meals, old-age pensions, measures against child
abuse, legislation on the minimum wage, and housing and town planning acts limiting the spread of slums began to make an
appearance (Thane 1989).
In Britain the 1911 National Insurance Act introduced social insurance for the regularly employed, giving the worker entitlement
to health and unemployment benefit in exchange for compulsory weekly payments. Social insurance was intended to
build strong collaborative values within a state venture that mediated capital and
labour . The regular payments reminded workers of their obligation to save and exercise self-
help, while at the same time granting them ‘a contractual right to benefit’ (ibid.: 150). As Mitchell Dean
has argued, social insurance is not the only technology of social government, yet it is a particularly fecund one that
encounters risk at the level of population in a way that ‘both optimized solidarity and left
the individual free . To the extent to which it avoids the eugenic approach to social problems . . . it is a decisive and
exemplary illustration of the potential of liberal techniques of government’ (Dean 1999: 188). A
regulatory biopolitics continued to expand as a result of the social requirements and expectations generated by the First World War
and then, especially, by the Second World War. Britain’s 1944 Education Act provided general education, in 1945 family allowances
appeared and the National Health Service was formed in 1948. Such measures reflected a commitment to extend the benefits of
education, health and social insurance, previously reserved for the regularly employed, to the whole community. At the same time, it
reinforced the biopolitical tendency to foster the centralization of state power, in this case the growing control over local
government. This centralizing tendency is intrinsic to ‘the long-run liberal idea of equalizing opportunity’ (Thane 1989: 153). This
also serves as a reminder that the growth of the social was not always welcomed by those whose autonomy and independence were
being curtailed. While addressing the international situation President Truman of the United States announced a developmental
Point Four Programme in his 1949 inaugural address. His address signalled that the problem of surplus population was now
international in scope and, in so doing, he relaunched development and its security role in its contemporary interstate form. With
half the world’s population living in ‘conditions approaching misery’, for the first time in history ‘humanity possesses the knowledge
and skills’ to do the right thing and better this situation; moreover, the urgency of this moral obligation was underscored by their
poverty being a handicap ‘and a threat to both them and to more prosperous areas’ (quoted in Escobar 1995: 3). While today’s
politicians are still periodically rejuvenating this basic formula of enlightened self-interest in ‘new and improved’ ways, the
inauguration of interstate development concealed the contrast between the biopolitics of
developed and underdeveloped populations. The welfare state ameliorated the problem of
surplus life through social insurance and, in so doing, assisted the emergence of mass
consumer society. For populations in the former protectorates and colonies , however , as
will be seen in the following chapter, ideas of people-centred development continued to be framed in
relation to self-reliance based on small-scale land and property ownership operating at the level
of community. The continuing and widespread assumption of a self-reliant, natural economy is illustrated, for example, in the
International Monetary Fund’s post-Cold War futurology of global welfare regimes. In the former Soviet Union, where
modernization has already atomized households, it is felt that extended welfare safety nets are required. In less developed countries,
however, the extended family and community ‘operates relatively well as an informal social security scheme obviating the need for
the urgent introduction of large-scale public pensions’ (Kopits quoted by Deacon et al. 1997: 64). In other words, it avoids the need
for centralized social protection based on insurance or other guarantees.
From internal war to global instability
The biopolitics of insured and non-insured life are different but interconnected. They both act to address the
contingencies of life and so maintain population equilibrium. However, one supports the dependent consumers of mass society
through public/private technologies of insurance while the other attends to populations deemed to be self-reliant. Although
different, to borrow a phrase from Nasser Hussain, they are also temporally bracketed together. Rather than extending the
level of social protection enjoyed by insured life to its non-insured counterpart, development
is better understood as a
liberal technology of security for containing and managing the effects of underdevelopment. Since
decolonization, the security of the West has been increasingly predicated on establishing an effective
developmental trusteeship over the surplus population of the developing world. In addressing the
present conjuncture, this book offers a reflection on the significance of decolonization for the security of
the West and its relationship to the advent of unending war . While decolonization provided an
opportunity for the expansion of developmental technologies among an emergent world of peoples, it also constituted a threat in
terms of the new possibilities for global circulation that it made possible.

Vote negative to problematize the limits of political community

Vivienne Jabri 13, Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies, King's
College London, The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming politics/governing others in late
modernity, 2013, pp. 61-62
When the lens is placed on the limits of political community, the focus is not simply on how
these limits are constructed historically , but also on their power to reconstitute the
subject of politics . It is in this sense that the ‘international’ matters to the postcolonial subject, as we will see later in this
book, for the international, while certainly of the modern colonial order, is at the same time (and aporetically) constitutive of the
postcolonial subject. However, it is this very aporia that confers the potential of an authorial voice for the postcolonial subject, as we
will see in the next chapter.
In rendering the limits of political community the subject of international political theory, the
interesting question to ask is wherein lies agency in relation to the drawing and re-drawing of
such limits. A juridical approach to this question focuses on sovereign authority, while a historical-sociological approach
relocates the lens to practices of government and specifically the government of populations and their classification and
distribution.4 Both renditions of this Foucaultian-inspired distinction understand the capacity, or indeed
agency, to draw and redraw the limits of political community on the side of power. As we will see
below, another option we have in discerning or seeking out the agency to draw the limits of political community is to
relocate the lens towards the subject of politics , the subject who claims the right to politics.
The question of limits is not only of significance in the history of the postcolonial world, but is of particular salience
now in late modernity, when inside/outside distinctions can no longer be associated with the
boundaries of the state, but are manifest in corporeal terms, both in relation to the individual self
and in relation to populations. While the juridical rendition on the limits of political community is and continues to be a
defining factor in the constitution of the postcolonial subject, it is the ‘government’ of the postcolonial subject
and their capacity to draw and redraw the limits of political community that is core to any
critical discourse on the postcolonial international. It is in the context of these practices of government that the claim to
the right to politics must be understood.
The motivating force of events brings into sharp focus the seductions of the empirical domain, and especially when these concern
resistance and mass protest. How do we capture this moment in a discipline whose historic remit is defined in terms of the state,
international order, and material capabilities? This neo-realist rendition of the international has, of course, been long questioned
and indeed discredited, variously by constructivists, feminists, postcolonial, critical, and poststructural theorists. These latter
perspectives have rendered the international a political as well as a social domain, so that ‘people’, to borrow from Christine
Sylvester (1994), are as much part of the picture as states and institutional arrangements. However, the
problem has
never simply been one of ‘peopling’ international relations, nor simply one of adding non-
state actors to the so-called pluralist mix so that the relationships purportedly within the scientific
purview of the discipline are not confined to one set of relations defining the inter-state system. The
problem, rather, is one of interrogating the very limits of political community , how these
limits are historically defined, pre-determined, naturalised, and ultimately complicit in the
practices and discourses of inclusion and exclusion .
 Federalism
Uncertainty over federalism inevitable
Robert Levy 17, PhD in business from the American University, Chairman of Cato, director of
the Institute for Justice, the Foundation for Government Accountability, March/April 2017,
“Volte-Face: Federalism in the Age of Trump,” https://www.cato.org/policy-report/marchapril-
2017/volte-face-federalism-age-trump
In the aftermath of the Trump election, liberals seem to have rediscovered federalism — although
grounded less on principle than on the conviction that states’ rights might better serve the progressive
agenda. Not to be outdone, Republicans, who now control both legislative and executive branches, appear
willing to abandon federalist principles in favor of strong central government freshly
enabled to advance conservative preferences.
That role reversal is reflected in positions on issues such as drug legalization, tort reform,
sanctuary cities, and gun control — reinforced by flawed views of the Constitution’s Commerce
Clause, spending power, and the Second Amendment.
Let’s start with Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce . Marijuana in some form
is now legal in 44 states. But under federal law, the use, possession, sale, cultivation, and transportation of
marijuana is illegal. What say our conservative champions of federalism? Republican drug warriors — buttressed by
liberal Justice John Paul Stevens’s 2005 opinion in Raich v. Gonzales — have invoked the infinitely elastic
Commerce Clause to justify national prohibition. Indeed, Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized
President Barack Obama for not being tough enough on marijuana, saying “You have to have leadership
from Washington.” And White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed on February 23 that the Justice Department will be
doing more to enforce federal marijuana laws.
Never mind the warning from conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in Raich despite his
antidrug predilections. Thomas
wrote that Raich used marijuana that had never been bought or sold, had
never crossed state lines, and had no demonstrated effect on the national market. He added, if
Congress can regulate that under the Commerce Clause, then it could regulate
virtually anything — quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers.
Or consider tort reform — especially malpractice cases, in which the litigants are almost always from the same state.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a federal power to set rules that control lawsuits by in-state plaintiffs against instate doctors for
in-state malpractice. Some malpractice awards may be shocking, and the impact may be widespread. But not every national
problem is a federal problem. Nonetheless, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Tom Price, secretary
of health and human services, have pledged to include tort reform in their replacement for the
A ffordable C are A ct. They say frivolous lawsuits are inflating malpractice insurance
premiums, which raise health care costs. The remedy: nationalize malpractice relief. So much for the
federalist notion that the states should serve as 50 experimental laboratories.
Ditto when it comes to the spending power and sanctuary cities . Mayors in several cities —
including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York — have refused to cooperate with federal immigration
authorities in detaining and deporting illegal aliens. In response, President Trump has promised
to cut federal funding for those cities. That threat ignores two principles of federalism.
First, while federal law supersedes conflicting state law, and states may not impede federal
enforcement, neither the president nor Congress can commandeer state officials to execute
federal law. Second, the feds may not deny funding to states in a manner that essentially
compels cooperation. That’s how the Obama administration tried to force states to expand Medicaid — by withholding all
Medicaid funding if a state said no. The Supreme Court reminded the administration that a coercive condition imposed on receipt of
federal funds is incompatible with federalism and thus unconstitutional.
Their evidence about ACA challenges is from 2012 – 5 years prove the ACA is not
threatened

The only internal link between the ACA and coercion is about the NFIB which
made medicaid expansion optional – the plan doesn’t change that – their Suzuki
evidence, reading blue
Suzuki 13 (Georgina Jones Suzuki, J.D. Candidate, Boston University School of Law, 2014; B.S.
in Foreign Service, Georgetown University, 2007, Clearing the Air following National Federation
of Independent Business v. Sebelius: The Clean Air Act and the Constitutionality of Highway
Sanctions,” December, 2013, Boston University Law Review, 93 B.U.L. Rev. 2131)
On June 28, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the most anticipated opinion of the new
century, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB). n1 In a divided opinion, the Court upheld the
constitutionality of the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as the
Affordable Care Act (ACA). n2 One aspect of the ruling in the NFIB opinion, however, could have consequences for decades to come.
The Court ruled that the federal government cannot take away all of a state's Medicaid funding if
that state refuses to participate in the ACA's expansion of Medicaid . n3 According to the Court, such
conditional spending is impermissibly coercive in light of the federalism principles embedded in the Constitution. n4 Because the
Court had never before found a federal grant to be coercive, n5 this holding will likely embolden states to challenge conditional
federal grants under the Spending Clause. n6 [*2133] One such challenge will likely involve the Clean Air Act (CAA), n7 the
comprehensive federal law focused on air pollution abatement and control. Under section 179 of the CAA, n8 the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may impose highway fund sanctions on any state that has a deficient or incomplete State
Implementation Plan (SIP). n9 States have already turned to NFIB to argue that such measures are unconstitutional.
For example, in Texas v. EPA, n10 counsel for the State of Texas submitted a notice of supplemental authority to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, contending that
EPA's call to compel regulation of greenhouse gases
( GHGs ) is impermissibly coercive under the analysis set forth in NFIB. n11 More legal
challenges are likely to come, given strong antiregulatory sentiment throughout
the U nited S tates. n12 Such litigation raises the question: Are the CAA's highway sanctions constitutional following
NFIB? The question is an important one, as NFIB might have the effect of strengthening state power
and leverage, particularly in negotiations with the federal government over air pollution
regulation. n13 Given [*2134] that the NFIB opinion is relatively recent, however, academic literature currently provides few
answers. Most articles analyzing the constitutionality of section 179 predate the NFIB opinion, n14 and thus are outdated since new
challenges concerning the constitutionality of section 179 will likely turn on the arguments articulated in NFIB. Since NFIB, legal
academics have published a small number of online articles and blog posts analyzing the subject in a cursory fashion, with these
sources split on whether NFIB poses a serious threat to the CAA. n15 The emerging academic literature has instead focused on
conditional spending in general n16 or on areas beyond the CAA, n17 [*2135] and only two articles include some discussion of the
CAA. n18 Thus this Note adds to the legal debate by thoroughly assessing the constitutionality of section 179 through the lens of
NFIB. This Note argues that section 179 can - and indeed should - survive a facial or as-applied challenge
following NFIB. To lay the groundwork for this contention, Part I analyzes the evolution of the spending power doctrine and
explains how the NFIB decision shaped constitutional thinking on spending. Part II focuses on the CAA, discussing how EPA sets air
pollution standards, what the SIP process entails, and what kinds of sanctions are available to EPA. Part III then examines the
constitutionality of section 179 following NFIB and argues that courts can still find highway sanctions constitutional. Specifically, the
CAA offers an alternative to sanctions - namely, a Federal Implementation Plan (FIP) - and does not affect vulnerable populations.
In addition, states receive fewer federal dollars for highways than Medicaid. n19 States also had adequate notice of the spending
conditions, and section 179 sanctions are sufficiently related to air pollution and GHG abatement. Thus, section 179 can survive a
facial or as-applied challenge, and it should survive, since striking down section 179 would undermine the balance of power between
the federal government and states in the field of clean air protection. I. Evolution of the Spending Power Doctrine Article I, Section 8
of the U.S. Constitution, the "Spending Clause," states that "Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and
Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." n20 The Supreme Court
has interpreted the Spending Clause broadly, observing that "the power of Congress to authorize expenditure of public moneys for
public purposes is not limited by the direct grants of legislative power found in the Constitution." n21 In addition, the Court has
recognized that Congress may condition federal grants on states' compliance "with federal statutory and administrative directives" in
order to "further broad policy objectives." n22 Statutes containing conditional grants have therefore become commonplace. n23 But
given concerns that such conditional [*2136] grants may undermine state sovereignty through coercion, the Supreme Court has
moved to articulate limits, as demonstrated in NFIB. A detailed examination of NFIB and Spending Clause precedent is a necessary
first step before analyzing and distinguishing section 179 of the CAA. A. The Spending Power Doctrine Before National Federation of
Independent Business v. Sebelius Steward Machine Co. v. Davis n24 was one of the first cases that recognized Congress's power to
influence states through spending. n25 In Steward, the Court upheld a federal tax on employers that was abated if employers paid
into a state unemployment plan meeting certain conditions. n26 The Court declined to find spending conditions inherently
unconstitutional, but stated that "the point at which pressure turns into compulsion" is a "question of degree ... [and] perhaps, of
fact." n27 Later in Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman, n28 the Court confronted a case involving a state care facility
that failed to comply with a condition of the Developmentally Disabled Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 1975. n29 That Act
established a federal grant program [*2137] to help states create programs to care for the developmentally disabled, but conditioned
receipt of the federal funds upon compliance with a bill of rights. n30 The Court held that the Act did not create enforceable rights
and obligations, since the state care facility did not have adequate notice that the funds were conditional. n31 South Dakota v. Dole
n32 later provided the Court's key test on spending conditions. n33 In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that
conditioned a state's receipt of federal highway funding on its adoption of a minimum drinking age of twenty one. n34 The Court
articulated a four-part test for determining the constitutionality of spending conditions: (1) "the exercise of the spending power must
be in pursuit of "the general welfare,'" n35 (2) Congress must "unambiguously" n36 inform states of the conditions, (3) the
conditions must be related to "the federal interest in particular national projects or programs," n37 and (4) the conditions must not
violate any constitutional provision. n38 Relying on Steward, the Court also articulated a separate limitation: the conditions cannot
be "so coercive as to pass the point at which "pressure turns into compulsion.'" n39 Applying this four-part test, the Court found that
the federal law at issue in Dole was not coercive, as South Dakota would only lose five percent of its highway funding if it chose not
to raise the drinking age. n40 In the twenty-five years following Dole, however, courts did not apply rigorously the factors to strike
down spending conditions. n41 For example, lower courts found the "relatedness" prong to be easily satisfied, n42 and judges
applied the notice requirement leniently. n43 [*2138] After Dole, as part of the "Federalism Revolution" led by Chief Justice William
Rehnquist, the Supreme Court imposed limits on federal power through the Tenth Amendment, n44 which reserves powers not
delegated to the federal government for the states. n45 The Spending Clause, however, was excluded from the Federalism
Revolution, as the Court declined to recognize a Tenth Amendment limit in Spending Clause cases. n46 For example, in New York v.
United States, n47 the Court held that a federal statute requiring states to accept low-level radioactive waste or regulate in
accordance with the instructions of Congress was inconsistent with the Tenth Amendment. n48 By "commandeering" n49 states to
take actions on behalf of the federal government, the statute undermined accountability, as state officials faced "the brunt of public
disapproval" while federal officials remained "insulated." n50 The Court, however, recognized that conditional spending programs
can serve as a permissible means for influencing state behavior. n51 Similarly, in Printz v. United States, n52 the Court struck down
a federal law that commandeered state law enforcement officers to perform background checks on handgun buyers. n53 Printz,
however, did not implicate the Spending Clause. B. The National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius Opinion When
Congress passed the ACA, it expanded Medicaid in a number of ways. Most importantly, the ACA extended Medicaid coverage to all
citizens and legal residents with incomes up to 133% of the federal poverty level. n54 The ACA also requires the federal government
to pay 100% of the costs of newly eligible beneficiaries during the first three years of expansion, though this figure will be reduced to
95% in 2017 and to 90% in 2020. n55 The ACA itself does not give the federal government the power to withhold Medicaid funding
[*2139] if a state does not comply with the expansion; such authority existed prior to the ACA. Every state is required to submit to
the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) a State Plan detailing how the state will comply with the Medicaid Act, n56 and prior to
NFIB the Secretary of HHS had the authority to withhold funds if a State Plan was not in compliance. n57 In NFIB, however, the
Court held that the federal government cannot take away all of a state's Medicaid funding if that state refuses to partake in the
Medicaid expansion mandated by the ACA. n58 That portion of the NFIB opinion garnered the support of seven Justices, split
between the plurality opinion of Chief Justice John Roberts and the dissent jointly written by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony
Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. The Court in NFIB did not settle on one single
coercion analysis . The opinion of Chief Justice Roberts declined to articulate a clear-cut line for finding coercion,
instead ruling that the case before it was "surely beyond [that line]." n59 The Chief Justice found that
federalism provides limits on conditional spending , since it seeks to prevent the
federal government from gaining too much power and infringing on the liberties of the public. n60 The
Chief Justice also relied on the Court's anticommandeering cases, including New York and Printz, to argue that the same
accountability concerns should prevent Congress from indirectly coercing states. n61 Theplurality opinion provided
two broad reasons for finding the conditional spending obligations unconstitutionally
coercive. First, the Court characterized the inducement as "a gun to the head" n62 and "economic dragooning." n63 If the federal
government were to withhold Medicaid funds, a large amount of funding would be at stake, n64 as Medicaid spending constitutes
over twenty percent of the average state's budget. n65 Second, the plurality wrote that the Medicaid expansion constitutes a "shift in
kind, not merely degree," because the ACA transformed Medicaid from a "program to care for the neediest [*2140] among us" into a
"program to meet the health care needs of the entire nonelderly population with income below 133 percent of the poverty level." n66
The Court likened this shift to a unilateral modification of an existing contract, where states could not "voluntarily and knowingly
accept[] the terms of the contract." n67 Citing Pennhurst, the Justices were reluctant to find adequate notice, even though the
original Medicaid law contained a clause giving Congress the "right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision." n68 The
joint
dissent reasoned similarly to the plurality. The joint dissent agreed that the conditional
spending was unconstitutional, echoing the Chief Justice's concerns about federalism.
n69 It also argued that states did not have a meaningful choice, as Congress did not provide a "backup scheme." n70 The joint
dissent emphasized the amount and percentage of funding at stake for finding the conditions coercive. n71 The dissenters also wrote
that spending conditions must be "coercive in fact" to be found unconstitutional, n72 though the Justices declined to indicate where
the line between inducement and coercion might be. n73 Justice Ginsburg's opinion, which upheld the constitutionality of the
Medicaid expansion, challenged many of these arguments and assumptions. n74 [*2141] It remains to be seen how much bite NFIB
will have. NFIB may change little if it is merely an extension of Dole. That is, Dole held that the federal government cannot place too
much pressure on states, and the Medicaid expansion may simply be an example of that. n75 This might explain why Justices Breyer
and Kagan sided with the Chief Justice, in spite of their liberal leanings. n76 It is more likely, however, that NFIB has changed
the coercion analysis, even if it is now a more convoluted one. For example, the plurality's
characterization of the Medicaid expansion as a new program arguably reshapes the relatedness
factor in Dole. n77 In addition, the Court in NFIB appeared to make the amount or percentage of funds at stake an important
factor under the coercion analysis. n78 But the coercion test may be a narrow one, to be applied only when there are large amounts
of federal money, changed terms of participation, and separate programs tied into one package. n79 That is, the presence of just one
of these conditions may not be enough to find coercion, as all three of these conditions were central to the Chief Justice's more
narrow opinion. n80 Constitutional challenges surrounding the standards set by the Court will almost certainly arise, particularly
against section 179 of the CAA. II. Implementation of the Clean Air Act and Section 179 The
leading vehicle for
reducing air pollution in the U nited S tates is the CAA . The CAA is an example of cooperative federalism n81
as it authorizes the federal government to establish uniform national standards related to air pollution while providing states with
flexibility in how to achieve those standards. n82 The SIP process and EPA's authority to impose sanctions are important tools for
achieving compliance with National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), which set nationwide air pollution limits. n83 A
thorough [*2142] understanding of the statutory provisions and regulations related to SIPs, NAAQS, and section 179 is necessary to
distinguish the CAA in the post-NFIB era. A. State Implementation Plans Congress enacted the CAA to "protect and enhance the
quality of the Nation's air resources so as to promote the public health and welfare and the productive capacity of its population."
n84 The CAA gives EPA the authority to determine which air pollutants are reasonably anticipated to "endanger public health or
welfare." n85 The CAA does not specify how EPA must determine whether an air pollutant endangers public health and welfare. n86
EPA must publish air quality "criteria" that "accurately reflect the latest scientific knowledge useful in indicating the kind and extent
of all identifiable effects on public health or welfare which may be expected from the presence of such pollutant in the ambient air."
n87 If EPA finds that an air pollutant endangers public health and welfare, it must promulgate NAAQS, n88 which specify the
maximum allowable concentrations for that air pollutant, expressed in terms of concentration of pollutant in outdoor ambient areas.
n89 EPA must review existing NAAQS every five years and revise them if appropriate. n90 NAAQS currently cover six criteria
pollutants: sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, and lead. n91 Each air quality control region
within a state must attain and maintain the NAAQS for these six air pollutants. n92 An area is in "nonattainment" if it does not meet
- or causes a nearby area to not meet - the [*2143] NAAQS for that pollutant, n93 while an area is in "attainment" if it meets its
NAAQS for that pollutant. n94 NAAQS are implemented through SIPs, plans developed by states that include enforceable emissions
limitations for those air pollutants. n95 SIPs include timetables for compliance, plans for monitoring and analyzing ambient air and
reporting data to EPA, prohibitions against significant contributions to nonattainment in other areas, programs for issuing permits,
and assurances regarding adequate implementing resources. n96 SIPs must also provide for certain transportation-related measures
(for example, inspection and maintenance programs). n97 In addition, following EPA's promulgation of the Tailoring Rule, which
enabled regulation of GHGs from stationary sources under the Prevention of Significant Deterioration and Title V programs of the
CAA, n98 EPA required that SIPs provide adequate legal authority for regulating GHGs. n99 EPA must defer to states' particular
SIPs where possible, as well as consult state and local officials when establishing NAAQS. n100 In carrying out the CAA, EPA must
approve every SIP n101 and determine if a SIP is complete, both in terms of administrative information and technical support
information. n102 If EPA disapproves of a SIP, either in whole or in part, or finds it to be incomplete, EPA must impose a Federal
Implementation Plan (FIP) within two years to replace the SIP. n103 If EPA finds a SIP to be "substantially inadequate" [*2144] for
attaining NAAQS, preventing against interstate pollution transport, or complying with the CAA, the agency may require the state to
revise its SIP. n104 B. Sanctions Section 179 of the CAA directs EPA to impose automatic sanctions if the agency determines that a
state failed to submit a required SIP or revision, if EPA disapproves a SIP, or if EPA finds that a SIP is not being implemented. n105
Section 179 includes two kinds of mandatory sanctions. The first includes highway sanctions that specifically prohibit the U.S.
Department of Transportation from approving any projects or providing grants for projects funded under Title 23 of the U.S. Code.
n106 The sanctions apply to a variety of funding programs, including the Surface Transportation Program, the National Highway
System, the Interstate Maintenance Program, and the Highway Bridge Replacement and Rehabilitation Program. n107 Section 179,
however, exempts projects that have the principal purpose of improving safety. n108 In addition, section 179 exempts a variety of
projects related to clean air. n109 The second kind includes offset sanctions that require each ton of emissions from new or modified
major facilities under the New Source Review Program be offset by a reduction of two tons of emissions from existing sources. n110
Under its own regulations, EPA must impose offset sanctions eighteen months after finding that an area is noncompliant, and must
impose both offset and [*2145] highway sanctions if the problem is uncorrected twenty-four months after the finding. n111 The
sanctions remain in effect until EPA determines that the area is in compliance. n112 EPA may also impose discretionary sanctions,
which include highway and offset sanctions. n113 Unlike mandatory sanctions, which only apply to nonattainment areas,
discretionary sanctions can apply statewide, but EPA may not impose them until two years after it has made a nonattainment or SIP
determination. n114 Despite the availability of sanctions, EPA has rarely imposed them. n115 For example, between the passage of
the CAA Amendments of 1990 and October 1997, EPA found incomplete SIPs or rejected states' SIPs 855 times in total, but only
imposed sanctions in fourteen cases. n116 As of November 6, 2013, highway and offset sanctions were in effect in only one locale,
n117 and EPA stayed sanctions for four other locales in 2013. n118 Even though EPA has rarely imposed sanctions, section 179 is still
likely to face legal challenges following NFIB, necessitating a close look at its constitutionality. III. The Constitutionality of Section
179 Following National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius Following NFIB, some scholars
have expressed
concerns about the constitutionality of section 179, lending credence to Texas's
arguments before the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. According to Professor [*2146]
Jonathan Adler, section 179 is vulnerable because it ties two unrelated programs together - highways and air pollution. n119 The
amount of funds subject to sanctions is arguably substantial, and changes
to clean air regulations have
imposed new and unanticipated conditions on states. n120 Professor Samuel Bagenstos has echoed these
concerns, arguing that section 179 may be vulnerable, because it authorizes the federal government to take away funds from an
entrenched program if states do not participate in a separate and independent program. n121 Section 179 will raise particular
constitutional concern if the federal government withholds all federal highway funds from a state in response to stationary sources of
pollution. n122 Despite such concerns, section 179 could survive a facial or as-applied challenge. Two-to-one offset sanctions do not
pose any constitutional quandaries, because they regulate private pollution sources rather than states n123 and do not involve
federal grants. While highway sanctions do implicate the Spending Clause, they still can be found constitutional under NFIB's
coercion analysis. n124 The CAA can be meaningfully distinguished from Medicaid with regard to the availability of a backup
scheme, the programs at stake, the amount of spending, the notice provided, and the relatedness between the spending and the
federal conditions. n125 Thus, states can decline highway funding more easily than Medicaid funding. While no clear line exists
between coercion and noncoercion following NFIB, section 179 should fall on the side of the latter, particularly since invalidating
section 179 would do little to effectuate the goals of federalism. [*2147] A. Backup Scheme The CAA cannot be analogized to the
Medicaid expansion, as states have alternatives to following the federal government's commands. Rather than foregoing highway
funding altogether, states can instead petition EPA to implement FIPs. n126 EPA enacts FIPs to replace deficient SIPs; n127 no
statutory provision requires a SIP to take precedence where a state prefers a FIP. n128 While the text of section 179 is certainly
ambiguous on this possibility, n129 EPA may be willing to offer FIPs to states as an alternative to either compliance or loss of
highway funds. n130 EPA demonstrated its willingness to grant a FIP with the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), which covers
twenty-seven eastern states and protects downwind states from cross-border air pollution through a cap-and-trade system. n131
With the CAIR, EPA finalized a FIP to serve as a backstop and ensure timely emissions reductions in accordance with a deadline
established by a consent decree. n132 EPA finalized the FIP well before the deadline for states to submit their CAIR SIPs. n133 The
agency gave states the option of simply accepting the FIP, in lieu of ultimately revising their SIPs, so that states would not have to
expend additional time and resources. n134 EPA imposed the [*2148] FIP without any sanctions, and noted that the rule did not
indicate any concerns about states complying with the CAIR. n135 EPA emphasized that a desire to provide states with flexibility
guided its decision. n136 Thus, the example of CAIR underscores how EPA can finalize FIPs without finding deficient SIPs
beforehand. Although the CAA does not require EPA to impose a FIP upon petition, federal conditions do not become coercive
simply because states do not know that a FIP is available. n137 Indeed, nothing in NFIB suggests that had
the federal
government been willing to completely pay for and administer the Medicaid expansion
(instead of making states partially bear the costs of it after the first three years), that arrangement would have been
coercive. n138 The joint dissent opinion in NFIB even argued that the Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional because
Congress did not provide a "backup scheme." n139 Given the availability of a backup scheme in the case of the CAA, highway
sanctions arguably warrant different treatment, and section 179 can survive a constitutional attack. B. Programs at Stake Medicaid
and highway funding also differ in another material regard, as Medicaid provides entitlements to vulnerable populations. n140 In
fiscal year 2010, total federal Medicaid outlays amounted to 68% of all Medicaid spending. n141 The federal government matches
state funds, relying on Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentage calculations to determine the federal government's share of costs for
every state. n142 Prior to the expansion of Medicaid, the program covered several categories of low-income beneficiaries, including:
pregnant women and children under the age of six with family incomes at or below 133% of the federal poverty level (FPL), children
ages six through eighteen with family incomes at or below 100% of the FPL, elderly and disabled Supplemental Security Income
recipients, and parents and [*2149] caretakers meeting certain financial eligibility requirements. n143 Under federal Medicaid law,
states must cover inpatient/outpatient hospital care, physician care, family planning, home health (in cases where individuals
qualify for nursing care), and laboratory and x-ray services, among others. n144 In 2009, approximately sixty-two-million
Americans received Medicaid benefits. n145 Thus, because a large segment of the U.S. population depends on Medicaid for basic
health services, states cannot turn down Medicaid funds easily. In contrast, federal highway spending is not an entitlement program.
Federal highway dollars come from congressional authorizations and the Highway Trust Fund (the latter of which derives revenue
from excise taxes on motor fuels, trucks and trailers, and truck tires; taxes on certain vehicles; and interest). n146 In recent years,
the federal government has become an unreliable source of highway funding due to increased contentiousness over transportation
reauthorizations n147 and dwindling funds in the Highway Trust Fund. n148 Thus, some have proposed alternatives, such as toll
financing; private financing; a National Infrastructure Bank; and Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA)
financing where the federal government [*2150] provides secured loans, loan guarantees, and lines of credit. n149 Furthermore,
unlike Medicaid funds, the recipients of federal highway dollars typically consist of state and local governments and contractors,
rather than indigent populations. Thus, highway construction and other highway projects are optional programs for states, as
evidenced by states' ability to withstand construction delays, an all-too-common reality. n150 While budget shortfalls n151 may lead
some to characterize states as another category of "needy" recipients, states' abilities to tax their own citizens and collect revenues
give them greater resiliency to loss of federal funds. Although taxation is admittedly a politically unpopular choice, states have
succeeded nonetheless in increasing taxes without provoking backlash at the polls. n152 These differences make the loss of highway
funds more tolerable for states than the loss of Medicaid funds. In NFIB, the Supreme Court hinted that the unique characteristics of
Medicaid may have served as a reason for finding undue coercion. The Chief Justice wrote: "The States claim that this threat serves
no purpose other than to force unwilling States to sign up for the dramatic expansion in health care coverage effected by the Act.
Given the nature of the threat and the programs at issue here, we must agree." n153 While it is not clear exactly what the Court
meant, it is conceivable that the character of assistance provided by Medicaid played a role in the Chief Justices's opinion, and the
differences between Medicaid and highway funding warrant different treatment of the latter in any constitutional challenge. This
distinction supports the argument that section 179 is constitutional. C. Spending Another critical distinction between Medicaid and
highway funding concerns the amount and percentage of funding at stake. n154 In terms of total [*2151] dollars, states receive
substantially fewer highway dollars than Medicaid dollars. Specifically, the average state receives more than four billion dollars for
Medicaid every year, but only three-quarters of a billion dollars for transportation. n155 In addition, transportation funding
constitutes a smaller share of states' budgets than Medicaid. Medicaid accounts for 22% of the average state's budget, but
transportation accounts for less than 8% of the average state's budget. n156 Furthermore, the federal government pays for less than
one-third of states' transportation funding, but pays for two-thirds of states' Medicaid funding. n157 Even fewer federal dollars are at
stake in the case of highway sanctions since funds related to safety and air quality improvement, for example, are exempt from
sanctions, and only nonattainment areas are usually subject to sanctions. Little public data exist on the precise amount of funding
exempted from sanctions, but the government data that do exist provides some guidance. For example, three programs that would
likely qualify for safety exemptions are the Highway Safety Improvement Program, n158 the Railway-Highway Crossings Program,
n159 and the Safe Routes to School Program. n160 Out of the $ 37.5 billion apportioned for highways in fiscal year 2012,
approximately $ 1.5 billion went to these three programs. n161 An additional $ 2.6 billion went to [*2152] projects such as commuter
carpooling and vanpooling, guardrails, and safety rest areas, with the additional funding coming out of allocated funds for the
Interstate Maintenance, National Highway System, Surface Transportation, Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality, and Recreational
Trails programs. n162 Therefore, $ 33.4 billion (or $ 668 million per state) could have been subject to sanctions - a conservative
estimate given that additional money would likely qualify for exemptions. n163 Past data on sanctions also indicate that states stand
to lose a smaller proportion of highway funds than Medicaid funds. For example, on August 9, 2012, the Federal Highway
Administration (FHWA) announced that Imperial County, California would be sanctioned for nonattainment of particulate matter-
10 standards. n164 The sanctions only impacted $ 54 million out of $ 366 million in highway funding. n165 In 2004, issues with
Connecticut's motor vehicles emissions testing program threatened up to $ 230 million in federal highway funding, or fifty-two
percent of Connecticut's annual highway funding. n166 In addition, in the 1990s, Missouri sued the federal government over
sanctions that would result in the loss of $ 400 million in highway funding. n167 While these amounts may initially seem large, they
pale in comparison with the $ 4.5 billion received annually by the average state for [*2153] Medicaid. Thus, the CAA is
substantially less coercive than the Medicaid program at issue in NFIB. Discretionary sanctions,
however, would likely pose a greater constitutional quandary. The amount and percentage of federal dollars
subject to discretionary sanctions can be substantially higher; discretionary sanctions can apply statewide, while mandatory
sanctions can only apply to nonattainment areas. n168 Despite the availability of discretionary sanctions, however, EPA has instead
preferred to target sanctions at nonattainment areas within a state. n169 In addition, the statutory authority to impose discretionary
sanctions is found in a different section of the CAA, section 110, rather than section 179. n170 Thus, even if a court were to find
discretionary sanctions unconstitutional, that provision could be severed to preserve the mandatory sanction provision under
section 179. n171 Therefore, EPA can retain the ability to impose highway sanctions under section 179 regardless of any
constitutional attack on the discretionary sanction provisions. D. Notice The
best argument that the CAA
violates the Spending Clause turns on notice , and the argument may be articulated as follows. Since the
adoption of the CAA , air pollution limitations for the six criteria pollutants have grown
progressively stricter. n172 Such changes have arguably imposed new conditions on states ,
much like unilateral modifications to contracts. n173 Even though the CAA authorizes EPA to revise NAAQS, notice of these new
conditions may have been unclear, because states may not have been able to anticipate the new limitations set on criteria air
pollutants. For example, since highway projects take multiple years to complete, a state may find itself forced to comply with new
conditions imposed midway through a project. n174 Furthermore, EPA's
decision to regulate GHGs could be
said to have "radically altered states' obligations." n175 This argument presents a
daunting challenge to the constitutionality of section 179. [*2154] Nevertheless, a fine but critical
distinction between Medicaid and the CAA weakens this argument. When the federal government expanded Medicaid, it proceeded
via a new statute, the ACA. In contrast, when the federal government adopted stricter air pollution requirements, it proceeded via
regulations. Thus, in modifying the ACA, Congress had virtually unlimited authority to adopt any changes within the bounds of the
Constitution, but in modifying the CAA, EPA was constrained by the specific commands of the CAA's language. To illustrate,
Congress reserved the "right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision" of Medicaid - a broad authority too vague to provide any useful
notice. n176 In contrast, the CAA specifically gave EPA the authority to regulate pollutants that "endanger public health and welfare"
n177 and regularly revise NAAQS in accordance with scientific findings n178 - a far more specific command. While EPA certainly had
wide discretion within the bounds of the CAA to adopt varied policies, states cannot persuasively argue that they did not have notice
that EPA had the authority to adopt stricter air pollution requirements or regulate additional air pollutants. n179 These provisions
were critical components of the federal-state deal that sought to address the persistent environmental problems plaguing the
country. Therefore, instead of characterizing a change made under the CAA as a unilateral modification to a contract, a better
analogy might be that the CAA is like a contract between a principal and an agent, where an agent exercises significant discretion yet
still remains under the control of the principal. n180 Principal-agent relationships have an element of foreseeability, since principals
can establish the scope of the agent's actions in advance, even if the agent's specific actions cannot be known or anticipated at the
time of the parties' agreement. Likewise, the CAA put states on notice that the federal government would adopt stricter air pollution
limitations, and it is unreasonable to expect the CAA to remain "frozen in time." n181 Thus, states received sufficient notice of
federal conditions related to the CAA, distinguishing it from the facts of NFIB. E. Relatedness Given the Court's distinction between
the "old" and "new" Medicaid, NFIB is likely to increase judicial scrutiny over whether conditions are sufficiently [*2155] related to
spending for existing programs. n182 According to Professors Adler and Bagenstos, section 179 may not withstand such scrutiny,
because the CAA's requirements are separate and independent from the highway grant program. n183 For example, the CAA does
not specify how states should build or maintain highways, and the CAA also does not indicate how highways are to be used. n184
Further complicating matters, section 179 provides an exemption for highway funds targeting air pollution. n185 Nonetheless,
highway funding is sufficiently related to the CAA. Criteria air pollutants regulated under the NAAQS can be attributed to exhaust
from on-road vehicles. n186 Given that highway construction fosters urban sprawl and increased vehicle use, n187 the link between
highway funding and air pollution is strong. Furthermore, lower courts have rejected the argument that highway funding is
unrelated to the CAA, and those courts' analyses are still persuasive today. For example, after EPA found that Virginia failed to
comply with Title V of the CAA (which governs operating permits for stationary sources), Virginia challenged the constitutionality of
highway sanctions on the basis that they are unrelated to air pollution from stationary sources. n188 The Fourth Circuit held in
Virginia v. Browner that "the CAA as a whole is a comprehensive scheme to cope with the problem of air pollution from all sources.
Congress may ensure that funds it allocates are not used to exacerbate the overall problem of air pollution." n189 In another
challenge brought by the State of Missouri, a federal court similarly held that "Congress has stated its [*2156] desire that highway
construction be carried out in a manner that does not contribute to air pollution." n190 Moreover, highway sanctions are sufficiently
tied to federal efforts to reduce GHGs. The transportation sector is the largest source of GHGs (even considering the electricity
sector), contributing up to twenty-seven percent of U.S. GHG emissions. n191 One study found that the construction of one mile of
highway increases carbon dioxide emissions by over 100,000 tons over fifty years. n192 Extending the logic of Browner, it is not
problematic that the CAA regulates GHGs from stationary sources because GHGs from such sources contribute to the overall
problem of GHG emissions. Thus, a coherent connection exists between the CAA and highway funding, and section 179 can
withstand judicial scrutiny. Given
the precedential effect that an invalidation of section 179 could
have on areas of the law beyond environmental protection, courts should recognize the
broad and dangerous implications that striking down section 179 may have. For example, Title
VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids racial discrimination "under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."
n193 Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 contains an identical provision for sex discrimination. n194 If section 179 is
invalidated, Title VI and IX could also be vulnerable to constitutional attack, since antidiscrimination is arguably unrelated to
programs such as health care or education. Invalidation of Title VI and IX would be an alarming outcome, given the important role
played by the federal government in safeguarding individual liberties and the difficulty in addressing persistent problems such as
discrimination. Thus, courts should resist relying on the relatedness factor to completely revolutionize the spending doctrine in the
wake of NFIB. F. Federalism Concerns In
NFIB, the Court recognized limitations to the federal
government's Spending Clause powers in order to preserve separation of powers and,
thus, individual liberties. n195 Invalidating section 179, however, would frustrate, rather than further, these aims, since
the CAA already achieves an appropriate balance of power between the federal government and states. If courts were to strike down
highway sanctions, states would gain an undue amount of power [*2157] that would harm individual liberties through
environmental harms. Thus, from a normative perspective, courts should uphold the constitutionality of section 179. If
EPA
could no longer impose highway sanctions, the agency would have to rely on less
effective tools for implementing NAAQS - namely, FIPs. FIPs are difficult to implement because EPA
must take over state permitting programs and expend additional time and resources to promulgate FIPs - a significant burden
considering ongoing disputes over the federal budget and deficit. n196 Without a strong alternative like highway sanctions to
encourage state compliance, EPA would have difficulty enforcing NAAQS in recalcitrant states, especially where local industries
hostile to environmental regulations have substantial influence with state agencies or legislatures. n197 By
refusing to
achieve or maintain NAAQS, states can harm the health of not only their own citizens,
but also those of other states, given the borderless nature of air pollution and global
warming . n198 The problem may be especially compounded if a "race to the bottom"
occurs, where states lower environmental standards to attract business in response to
the federal government's inability to enforce a minimal federal standard. n199 Citizens cannot
fully enjoy their fundamental liberties when states refuse to regulate air pollution and GHGs. Thus, invalidation of section 179 would
make a "mockery" of cooperative federalism by "conscripting federal taxpayers into service for the recalcitrant states, thereby
substituting the Articles of Confederation in [the Constitution's] stead." n200 Challengers
may seek to invalidate
section 179 with the goal of correcting an alleged imbalance of power between the
federal government and states. While federal regulations certainly can be costly or burdensome for some states, the
CAA nonetheless achieves an appropriate division of power. The federal government only provides a floor for air pollution control,
while states enjoy wide discretion in implementing and enforcing these standards. The details that states must fill in are incredibly
important to state and local governance, particularly in land use and economic development. n201 In addition, [*2158] the federal
government has been quite responsive to state concerns, given the need for cooperation and the agency's hesitancy to provoke
political backlash. n202 The national political process also protects states' interests, given that federal legislators frequently guard
their states' interests by exerting pressure on EPA. n203 Thus, costs borne by states are not an abuse, rather, they are part of the
inherent "give and take" of cooperative federalism. These arguments demonstrate that section 179 poses no threat to the balance of
power, and accordingly courts should reject calls to strike down section 179 on federalism grounds. Conclusion In NFIB, the Chief
Justice remarked, "the States are separate and independent sovereigns. Sometimes they have to act like it." n204 In July 2013, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit took these words to heart, dismissing Texas's argument that EPA's GHG
program runs afoul of NFIB. n205 The court found that a construction delay of up to twelve months for new major facilities would
not be of the same magnitude as the cutoff of Medicaid funds in NFIB. n206 The court's opinion lends further credence to this Note's
argument that section 179 is constitutional under the Spending Clause. The D.C. Circuit 's statement, however, does
not definitively put the issue to rest , since the case turned on a construction ban rather than highway
fund sanctions. In addition, the D.C. Circuit only addressed the constitutional question briefly, and another circuit

could potentially hear a challenge . n207 Thus, the constitutionality of section 179 continues to remain an
open legal question. As discussed in this Note, while the expansion of Medicaid may have been an example of coercion, key
differences between the ACA and CAA warrant [*2159] different treatment for the latter. In the case of the CAA, states have an
alternative to loss of funding given the availability of FIPs. Highway funds are not an entitlement received by indigent populations,
and states receive substantially fewer funds for highways, both as a total amount and as a percentage of state budgets. States also
had notice of many of the conditions imposed for receipt of funding, and highway funds are sufficiently related to the goals of the
questions remain regarding the application and scope of NFIB, the
CAA. Thus, although

Court's new coercion analysis does not require invalidation of section 179. In addition,
the CAA achieves an appropriate balance of power between the federal government and states, and invalidation of section 179
would undermine cooperative federalism by tipping the scale too far in favor of states. Therefore, in
a facial or as-applied
challenge, courts should find that the legal arguments supporting the
constitutionality of section 179 weigh heavily in favor of upholding the CAA .

No issue spillover – federalism precedents are obsolete – governance is contingent

Yishai Blank 10, Senior lecturer at the Buchmann Faculty of Law, April 2010, FEDERALISM,
SUBSIDIARITY, AND THE ROLE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN AN AGE OF GLOBAL
MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE . Fordham Urban Law Journal,
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1724574
One of the hallmarks of our age is a realization - a product of objective discoveries and of ideological
transformations - that a growing number of contemporary problems and challenges require decision-
making and implementation at different territorial spheres and by different governmental (and
political) levels. n1 Immigration , climate change , labor standards , and the economic
crisis are high-profile examples of the fact that it is no longer possible - nor is it desirable - to
think, decide, and implement rules and policies only at the federal level or at the state
level or at the local level ; rather, it has become necessary to govern them at many levels of
government - sub-national, national, and supra-national - simultaneously. Yet, our legal systems and political institutions
have not yet adapted themselves to this realization and they do not reflect it fully or sufficiently. Furthermore, as I
argue in this Article, the two most dominant political theories that are supposed to offer a solution to this growing need of, and belief
in, multilevel governance - federalism and subsidiarity - are inadequate and incapable of doing so. And while both theories are
invaluable sources for inspiration for the creation of a legal (and political) system that will better fit our changing realization
regarding the multi-spheral (global, national, regional, and local) nature of human conflicts and contemporary challenges, I claim
two things regarding them: first, that they should be understood as distinct from each other (despite the fact that they are often
confused and not theorized as distinct political theories); and second, that subsidiarity is better fit for the task of articulating
multilevel governance, even if only as a tool for loosening the grip of federalism over our political and legal theory.¶ The growing
understanding of the need to govern and solve problems at various territorial spheres and by
multi-tiered governmental institutions should be read as manifesting three processes that have
become emblematic of our times: globalization, urbanization, and the shift from government to
governance. These three tectonic shifts involve fundamental material and ideological transformations that are reconfiguring
individuals, societies, and governments all over the world. And it is indeed the intersection of these three
phenomena that this Article identifies as the source of the need to rethink our current political-
legal models. Together, these processes require not only a new division of power between different
levels of governments in order to manage various resources more effectively, or [*511] in order to
tackle different challenges more efficiently; they suggest that it is imperative that we
conceptualize afresh the relationship between different territorial spheres - and therefore
between competing identities and political affiliations - and that we form new legal principles in
order to govern and regulate these new relationships. In this Article, I suggest that the theory of subsidiarity,
problematic and incomplete as it may be, might include some important ideas regarding the desirable relations between different
spheres of government, between different territorial spheres, and between different sites of identification (subjective and collective).

Impact empirically denied

Ridley 8/17/12 [Matt Ridley, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of The Rational
Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, “Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About
End Times,” http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all/]
In the 1980s it was acid rain’s turn to be the source of apocalyptic forecasts. In this case it was nature in the
form of forests and lakes that would bear the brunt of human pollution. The issue caught fire in Germany, where a
cover story in the news magazine Der Spiegel in November 1981 screamed: “THE FOREST DIES.” Not to be outdone, Stern
magazine declared that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying. Bernhard Ulrich, a soil
scientist at the University of Göttingen, said it was already too late for the country’s forests: “They cannot be saved.”
Forest death, or waldsterben, became a huge story across Europe. “The forests and lakes are dying. Already the damage may be
irreversible,” journalist Fred Pearce wrote in New Scientist in 1982. It was much the same in North America: Half of all
US lakes were said to be becoming dangerously acidified, and forests from Virginia to central Canada
were thought to be suffering mass die-offs of trees.¶ Conventional wisdom has it that this fate
was averted by prompt legislative action to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants. That
account is largely false. There was no net loss of forest in the 1980s to reverse. In the US, a 10-year
government-sponsored study involving some 700 scientists and costing about $500 million reported
in 1990 that “there is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forest

s in the United States and Canada due to acid rain” and “there is no case of forest decline in which acidic
deposition is known to be a predominant cause.” In Germany, Heinrich Spiecker, director of the Institute for
Forest Growth, was commissioned by a Finnish forestry organization to assess the health of European forests. He
concluded that they were growing faster and healthier than ever and had been improving
throughout the 1980s. “Since we began measuring the forest more than 100 years ago, there’s never been a
higher volume of wood … than there is now,” Spiecker said. (Ironically, one of the chief ingredients of acid
rain—nitrogen oxide—breaks down naturally to become nitrate, a fertilizer for trees.) As for lakes, it
turned out that their rising acidity was likely caused more by reforestation than by acid rain; one
study suggested that the correlation between acidity in rainwater and the pH in the lakes was very low.
The story of acid rain is not of catastrophe averted but of a minor environmental nuisance somewhat abated.

No impact to bioterror
Filippa Lentzos 14, PhD from London School of Economics and Social Science, Senior
Research Fellow in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College
London, Catherine Jefferson, researcher in the Department of Social Science, Health, and
Medicine at King’s College London, DPhil from the University of Sussex, former senior policy
advisor for international security at the Royal Society, and Dr. Claire Marris, Senior Research
Fellow in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King's College London, “The
myths (and realities) of synthetic bioweapons,” 9/18/2014, http://thebulletin.org/myths-and-
realities-synthetic-bioweapons7626
The bioterror WMD myth. Those who have overemphasized the bioterrorism threat typically portray it as an

imminent concern , with emphasis placed on high-consequence, mass-casualty attacks ,

performed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is a myth with two dimensions.¶ The first involves the identities of terrorists and

what their intentions are. The assumption is that terrorists would seek to produce mass-casualty weapons

and pursue capabilities on the scale of 20th century, state-level bioweapons programs. Most leading biological disarmament

and non-proliferation experts believe that the risk of a small-scale bioterrorism attack is very real and present. But they
consider the risk of sophisticated large-scale bioterrorism attacks to be quite small. This judgment

is backed up by historical evidence . The three confirmed attempts to use biological agents against humans in terrorist
attacks in the past were small-scale , low-casualty events aimed at causing panic and disruption rather than excessive death tolls. ¶

The second dimension involves capabilities and the level of skills and resources available to terrorists. The implicit assumption is that

producing a pathogenic organism equates to producing a weapon of mass destruction. It does not.
Considerable knowledge and resources are necessary for the processes of scaling up, storage, and
dissemination. These processes present significant technical and logistical barriers .¶ Even if a biological
weapon were disseminated successfully, the outcome of an attack would be affected by factors like the health of the people who
are exposed and the speed and manner with which public health authorities and medical professionals detect and respond to the resulting outbreak. A
medical countermeasures, such as antibodies and vaccination, can
prompt response with effective

significantly blunt the impact of an attack .

ILaw fails --- states will either inevitably cooperate, or ILaw can’t convince them to
Eric A. Posner 9, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
The Perils of Global Legalism, 34-6
34 ¶ Most global legalists acknowledge that international law is created and enforced by states. They believe that states are willing to

expand international law along legalistic lines because states’ long-term interests lie in solving global
collective action problems. In the absence of a world govern- ment or other forms of integration, international law seems like the only way for states to
solve these problems. The great difficulty for the global legalist is explaining why, if states create and maintain

international law, they will also not break it when they prefer to free ride. In the
absence of an enforcement mechanism, what ensures that states that create law and legal institutions
that are supposed to solve global collective action prob- lems will not ignore them? ¶ For the rational choice theorist, the answer is plain: states

cannot solve global collective action problems by creating institutions that

themselves depend on global collective action. This is not to say that international law is
not possible at all. Certainly, states can cooperate by threatening to retaliate against cheaters, and where international problems are matters of coordination rather
than confl ict, international law can go far, indeed.7 But if states (or the individuals who control states) cannot create a global government

or q uasi-g overnment institutions, then it seems unlikely that they can solve, in spontaneous fashion, the types of problems

that, at the national level, require the action of governments. ¶ Global legalists are not enthusiasts for rational choice theory
and have ¶ 35¶ grappled with this problem in other ways.8 I will criticize their attempts in chapter 3. Here I want to focus on one approach, which is to insist

that just as individuals can be loyal to government, so too can individuals (and their governments) be loyal
to international law and be willing to defer to its requirements even when self-i nterest does not strictly demand that they do so. International law
has force because (or to the extent that) it is legitimate.9 ¶ What makes governance or law legitimate? This is a complicated ques-
tion best left to philosophers, but a simple and adequate point for present purposes is that no system of law will be perceived as legitimate

unless those governed by that law believe

that the law does good — serves their interests or respects and enforces their values. Perhaps more is required than this — such as political
participation, for example — but we can treat the fi rst condition as necessary if not suffi cient. If individuals believe that a system of law

does not advance their interests and respect their values, that instead it advances the interests of others or is
dysfunctional and helps no one at all, they will not believe that the law is legitimate and will not
voluntarily submit to its authority . ¶ Unfortunately, international law does not satisfy this
condition , mainly because of its institutional weaknesses ; but of course, its institutional
weaknesses stem from the state system — states are not willing to tolerate
powerful international agencies. In classic international law, states enjoy sovereign
equality, which means that international law cannot be created unless all agree, and that international law
binds all states equally. What this means is that if nearly everyone in the world agrees that some global legal instrument would be benefi cial (a climate treaty, the

UN charter), it can be blocked by a tiny country like Iceland (population 300,000) or a dictatorship like North Korea.

What is the attraction of a system that puts a tiny country like Iceland on equal footing with
China? When then at- torney general Robert Jackson tried to justify American aid for Britain at the onset of World War II on the grounds that the Nazi Germany was the
aggressor, international lawyers complained that the United States could not claim neutrality while providing aid to a belligerent — there was no such thing as an aggressor in
international law.10 Nazi Germany had not agreed to such a rule of international law; therefore, such a rule could not exist. Only through the destruction of Nazi Germany could
international law be changed; East and West Germany could reenter international so-¶ 36¶ ciety only on other people’s terms. How could such a system be perceived to be
Because no world government can compel states
legitimate? ¶ There is, of course, a reason why international law works in this fash- ion.

to comply with inter- national law, states will comply with international law only when doing so
is in their interest. In this way, international law always depends on state consent. So international law must take states as they are, which means that little states,
big states, good states, and bad states, all exist on a plane of equality.
 Economy

Health care sector sustainable now

Kevin Speights 15, Journalist, former management consultant in the healthcare industry.
5/31/15, “A Stock Market Bubble In Healthcare Stocks?”
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/05/31/a-stock-market-bubble-in-healthcare-
stocks.aspx
Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY), for example, claims a price-to-earnings multiple of 50. AbbVie's (NYSE:ABBV) earnings
multiple currently stands at a whopping 58. Both drugmakers are at or near all-time high valuations.
However, neither Bristol nor AbbVie saw impressive earnings growth over the last year. That's true of most of the other top holdings
in the Health Care Select SPDR ETF. Soaring share prices and all-time high valuations combined with somewhat stagnant earnings
growth? It's not too difficult to argue that sounds like a recipe for a bubble.
Room to run?
On the other hand, three of the four largest stocks in the Health Care Select SPDR ETF have
experienced solid earnings growth . Net income nearly doubled over the last 12 months for
two of those companies -- Merck (NYSE:MRK) and Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ:GILD). Merck's
performance comes with an asterisk, though: the company generated $11.2 billion by selling its Consumer Care business.
Still, both companies prove the point that not all healthcare stocks are valued at lofty levels. Merck's earnings multiple of 15 isn't
very scary. And Gilead's P/E of less than 13 could be characterized as bargain territory by some.
Also, the market places much heavier emphasis on the future than it does the past, particularly in the healthcare sector. Most of the
healthcare ETF's top holdings have much more palatable valuations based on expected future earnings. Even seemingly sky-high
priced AbbVie claims a forward earnings multiple of only 13.
These bright prospects stem from solid products for many of these companies. AbbVie's Humira
continues to rake in billions, and its pipeline promises to make up from falling Humira sales
once the blockbuster loses patent protection. Meanwhile, Gilead's hepatitis C drugs Harvoni and Sovaldi have
absolutely dominated the market, raking in so much cash that the company initiated a dividend just to have something to do with it
all. And while Bristol and Merck are still feeling the effects of losing patent exclusivity for blockbuster drugs, both companies can
look forward to encouraging pipelines.
Mostly rational exuberance
Stock market bubbles occur when share prices surge well above what the fundamentals justify.
While some healthcare stocks probably are due for a serious pullback, I personally think that the
great performance for healthcare is based on mostly rational exuberance.
After all, there are some solid reasons why healthcare is booming. New drugs that achieve
results unheard of in the past are now on the market (i.e., Gilead's aforementioned Sovaldi and Harvoni, which
essentially cure hepatitis C). The baby boomer generation is aging, driving healthcare demand. Healthcare
reform has opened access to healthcare services for more Americans.
Will healthcare stocks double again over the next three years? Probably not. Exuberance does tend to fade over time. However, I
don't think a crash is imminent either. This likelihood of neither a double nor a bubble should make picking
specific stocks more important over the next few years. But I'd say that picking stocks in the healthcare industry gives investors a
better shot at solid returns than most other areas.

Economic crises don’t cause war

Christopher Clary 15, Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT, Postdoctoral Fellow, Watson
Institute for International Studies, Brown University, “Economic Stress and International
Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” April 22, 2015,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2597712
Do economic downturns generate pressure for diversionary conflict? Or might downturns encourage austerity and economizing
behavior in foreign policy? This paper provides new evidence that economic stress is associated with
conciliatory policies between strategic rivals. For states that view each other as military threats, the biggest step
possible toward bilateral cooperation is to terminate the rivalry by taking political steps to manage the competition. Drawing on
data from 109 distinct rival dyads since 1950, 67 of which terminated , the evidence suggests
rivalries were approximately twice as likely to terminate during economic downturns than they were
during periods of economic normalcy. This is true controlling for all of the main alternative
explanations for peaceful relations between foes (democratic status, nuclear weapons possession, capability imbalance,
common enemies, and international systemic changes), as well as many other possible confounding variables. This
research questions existing theories claiming that economic downturns are associated with diversionary war, and instead argues that
in certain circumstances peace may result from economic troubles .
Defining and Measuring Rivalry and Rivalry Termination
I define a rivalry as the perception by national elites of two states that the other state possesses conflicting interests and presents a
military threat of sufficient severity that future military conflict is likely. Rivalry termination is the transition from a state of rivalry
to one where conflicts of interest are not viewed as being so severe as to provoke interstate conflict and/or where a mutual
recognition of the imbalance in military capabilities makes conflict-causing bargaining failures unlikely. In other words, rivalries
terminate when the elites assess that the risks of military conflict between rivals has been reduced dramatically.
This definition draws on a growing quantitative literature most closely associated with the research programs of William Thompson,
J. Joseph Hewitt, and James P. Klein, Gary Goertz, and Paul F. Diehl.1 My definition conforms to that of William Thompson. In
work with Karen Rasler, they define rivalries as situations in which “[b]oth actors view each other as a significant political-military
threat and, therefore, an enemy.”2 In other work, Thompson writing with Michael Colaresi, explains further:
The presumption is that decisionmakers explicitly identify who they think are their foreign enemies. They orient their military
preparations and foreign policies toward meeting their threats. They assure their constituents that they will not let their adversaries
take advantage. Usually, these activities are done in public. Hence, we should be able to follow the explicit cues in decisionmaker
utterances and writings, as well as in the descriptive political histories written about the foreign policies of specific countries.3
Drawing from available records and histories, Thompson and David Dreyer have generated a universe of strategic rivalries from
1494 to 2010 that serves as the basis for this project’s empirical analysis.4 This project measures rivalry termination as occurring on
the last year that Thompson and Dreyer record the existence of a rivalry.5
Why Might Economic Crisis Cause Rivalry Termination?
Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to austerity
pressures , which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2)
Economic crises also encourage strategic reassessment , so that leaders can argue to their peers and their
publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to threat deflation, where
elites attempt to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple
threats, economic crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization , a process that is postponed
during periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic crises increase the political and economic
benefit from international economic cooperation . Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade,
and increased investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This search is made easier if tensions are
reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders who are perceived as capable of
resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign policy views. Collectively, these
mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic
normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing historical examples that these mechanisms
recur in practice.
2NC
K
 Framework---2NC
Security depends on actors who strip out political questions in favor of purely
technical debates over the delivery of goods by the government---sole focus on the
plan constrains the bounds of social life within narrow institutional parameters,
which forces students to internalize the terms of security and national identity
Michael S. Drake 10, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Hull, Political Sociology for a
Globalizing World, 2010, no page #
Ignoring the status of security as an ‘essentially contested concept’ in Gallie’s sense (1964), and
assuming its content as given in technical expertise rather than as political, Loader and Walker thus
posit a prior value of security as a public good that is a condition of social life , then
identify the state as the ‘prior’ agent of delivery and proceed to announce imperatives which
displace politics and the political from everyday life , with the explicit aim of
containing contention within the given institutional parameters of formal
political practice , though these are precisely the channels that have been disrupted by the politics of identity, new
social movements, representation, culture and globalization. The
parameters of the political thus become the
parameters of control , a new front line on which the task of security is to constrain and
contain the possibilities of social life within given limits , thus establishing set conditions for
living. Loader and Walker thus subordinate classical questions of the political – questions of how we should live – to the technical
prerequisites of security, its maintenance and guarantee.
The state provision of functions of security, we are told, is essential because ‘they entail the crafting of stable identities’ (Loader and
Walker 2007: 172), thus precluding hybridity, fluidity and creativity of identification. For Loader and Walker, identity, both personal
and social, must be indexed to the apparatus of the state lest it undermine the latter’s capacity to fulfil its functions in providing
security. The argument becomes doubly tautological when they discuss why the state is the best means for the provision of security,
since it appears that the state alone produces identities which constitute an environment that enables security (ibid.: 172–6). The
politics of self and social identity , in the sense of the contention and challenge of conventional forms, are thus
off-limits, illegitimate and even dangerous, since politics are to be restricted to the politics of
distribution (in their terms, the ‘delivery of public goods’). Restricting the political to such questions
means rolling back its parameters to exclude the contention of authority. As we have seen, that
contention is implicitly marked not only by 1968, but also by the revolts of 1989 and the reassertion of civil society as a space of
freedom against the determinations of the state, since the necessary attributes of the state’s provision of
security ‘require the priority of the state as a site of political identity over others to be
internalized ’ (ibid.: 181). The task of democratic governance then becomes the improvement of security, state and police, a
structural order of precedence in which the political – the question of how we should live – becomes conditional
on given technical prerequisites of how we must live, without any scope for challenging those
norms which are assumed, a priori, as given.
Once they have established this imperative of police security and the essential priority of the state in its legitimate provision, Walker
and Loader note four cautions against the untrammelled operations of security forces, which necessitate the civilizing of security,
but, whereas as security provides the condition for civility, democratic governance is clearly predicated on security, and these
‘pathologies’ are as much those of governance as of security (Loader and Walker 2007: 196–212). The risks are the tendencies of
policy drift to ‘professional paternalism’ (which indicates security-sector technocracy, the only one that is truly a risk or pathology of
security itself), to consumerism (particularly electoral pandering to populism), to authoritarianism (which can arise from either of
the former paths) and to fragmentation (in which either consumerist individuals or interest groups particularize security,
contravening its function as a common good). However, each of these is ultimately dismissed as a second-order concern, after
security, which is to say they are risks that must be taken, a conclusion in stark contrast to the imperative basis of security as an
essential and preconditional public good. The practice of civilizing security subsequently turns out to mean the use of the state and
its ordering capacities to constrain popular demands for security, which is in effect a further security function.
For Loader and Walker, police ordering operations and the security of the state apparatus that provides this function are the
precondition of democracy and politics, rather than vice versa, so that democratic governance of security is conditional on the
technical prerequisites of police security and the state, precluding social experiments in identification, representation and living
arrangements. In attempting to develop normative guidelines for securitization, Loader and Walker thus seem to have reconstructed
in abstract the logic of the security reflex which converts protest or resistance into terror, so they appear as an
ontological threat to the given order and its parameters of the political. Such forces of the creation of
identity and the opening of new possibilities for life can be understood as exercises of constitutive power, in contrast to the
constituted power of established institutions and given relations, but these are two moments of power, not two opposed forces; they
are incommensurable and therefore cannot be brought into ‘balance’ as security and liberty, a formulation which misunderstands
the contemporary political situation, reducing it to the dichotomy of norm and deviance.
When their order of precedence is extended to the global dimension, Loader and Walker are clear that security is not only prior to
society, but if necessary it must be imposed. In their reasoning, global security order could be established as a public good on the
basis of the shared understandings of national state security apparatuses quite regardless of the conventional requirements of
democratic consent or legitimation (2007: 262). However, if security is also enabling and even productive of identities, opportunities
for global identity formation and new forms of association would remain containerized within nation-states. The common
functions of states as security providers, and the technical expertise invested in that
provision , would establish an integrated grid of security for a subject which will internalize
the identity given by that grid , just as the national citizen is normatively expected to
internalize a love for their nation-state. The subject of global order is thus the subject of security, which is
constructed by channelling political action into given institutions and by controlling
the parameters of the political to maintain given constraints, producing a naturalized
antagonism to anything outside those parameters.
 Impact---2NC
Modern regime of life necessitates violent outbursts of death and zones of
exception
Zohreh Bayatrizi 8, Associate Professor Social Theory at Alberta University, Life Sentences:
The Modern Ordering of Mortality, 165-7
The drive to protect life against the threat of anarchic and disorderly death has significance not
only within national borders but also internationally . The United Nations measures ‘human development,’ in part,
in terms of longevity, health, and infant mortality, and, as a con sequence, international aid is often targeted to address high mortality rates in poor
countries. Moreover, provisions are made within international laws and conventions to protect all citizens of the
world against genocide, war crimes, and arbitrary killings. In
practice, however, the principle of the sanctity of life has
been upheld in a morally inconsistent manner. Beginning with Hobbes, the moral commitment to
the value of life has always been qualified and conditional: it has meant respect for
the life of some but not all people . Hobbes himself argues that the prohibition against war only
applies to civil wars — wars of ‘us’ against ‘us’ — and not wars aimed at the domination of ‘other’
peoples by ‘us’ (Leviathan, xx). By waging wars and colonial campaigns or by presiding over a
system of distribution of wealth in the world that leaves many to die from hunger, the
‘civilized,’ life-respecting countries of the West have, arguably, imposed more death on one
another or on the rest of the world than any of the vilest empires that history can remember. The
case of Terri Schiavo, which I first discussed in the introductory chapter of this book, is instructive. In the spring of 2005, when this conclusion was
originally being drawn up, a genocidal campaign was being waged in Sudan, many civilians were struggling with the ‘collateral damage’ of the war on
terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, and thousands of people in the world’s poorest countries were dying prematurely from easily preventable causes. As all
this was unfolding, the United States came to grips with a moral crisis over the question whether it was right or wrong to let one person, Terri Schiavo,
die after being in a persistent vegetative state for years. The pilot
who drops bombs from a safe distance is a national
hero, the terrorist who blows himself up is a coward, the child dying from hunger is a non-person , and
Terri Schiavo is a cause célèbre for a morally confused culture of respect for life. The writings of Foucault (1990, 2003), Agamben (1998, 2005), and
Bauman (1992, 1998), as well as those of postcolonial writers such as Balibar (2001), suggest that this
moral inconsistency is
integral to the dynamics of the Western culture of life and death. Foucault has argued that
racism and violence on a mass scale is inscribed in Western political order: ‘For millennia man remained
what he was for Aristotle: a living being with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence
as a living being into question’ (1990: 143). According to this view, the
Holocaust, as well as the looming possibility of a
nuclear war during the Cold War, both stemmed, ironically, from the modern Western political
imperative to take charge of life and how it is lived. Wars are no longer waged to defend the
sovereign, but rather, they are undertaken ‘ on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire
populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life
necessity : massacres have become vital’ (ibid.: 137). Similarly, today the ‘naked question of
survival’ (ibid.) is reinvoked to justify the actions of those who endanger the lives of thousands of civilians around the world in the
name of a pre-emptive ‘war on terror,’ undertaken to protect their own citizens and civilization from the
mere potential of terrorist, nuclear, and biological attacks at some uncertain point in the future.
In all of these cases, ‘the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of

the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence’ (ibid.). Giorgio Agamben and
Etienne Balibar explain this ironic contradiction in terms of the creation of categories of living non-
citizens (within national borders as well as on a global scale) and their subsequent exclusion
from participation in the politico-legal realm. Invoking the ancient figure of homo sacer — the person who
falls outside of legal and political protections and thus can be killed with impunity but not
sacrificed — Agamben argues that sovereignty ancient or modern, is characterized by the
exceptional right to define and exclude homo sacer or bare life from the politicolegal realm: ‘What is
at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide’ (1998: 165). Agamben describes the Nazi
concentration camps, as well as contemporary refugee camps in the heart of Europe and elsewhere, as zones of exception, which function to exclude
certain categories of people from the legal protections afforded ordinary citizens who are integrated in the political community (ibid.: 147). Balibar
has argued that under modern capitalist political-economic conditions, the whole world is
divided into life zones and death zones , the former occupied by the citizens of affluent, stable, and
mostly Western countries, while the latter host millions of the world’s inhabitants who are subjected

to various forms of extreme violence , including primarily, the lack of access to political participation, as well as being
subject to hunger, war, and genocide. For Balibar (2001: 10), although it is not always clear whether the life zones are responsible
for the creation of the death zones, what is less in doubt is that the existence of such zones is beneficial for the workings of Western capitalism, as they
leave millions of people too concerned with the naked question of survival to democratically participate in securing their political and economic rights
against global powers.
 Impact Calc---AT: Util/Case Outweighs
The traditional debate impulse to rely on body counts for impact calc is an example
of our impact---it relies on the continual imagination of external threats to the
social order and teaches students to be constantly searching for the best way to
describe those threats, instead of examining the structural conditions that enable
violence. This enables a system of governance that elides the endless war present
in incarceration, global policing, and more by insisting on narrow chains of
causality and the most catastrophic impacts possible
Kevin McDonald 13, Professor and Director of the Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing
at Victoria University, Our Violent World: Terrorism in Society, 2013, pp. 1-4
Among the most significant Of these changes are transformations in forms Of social and political violence, the kinds Of violence recently described by the philosopher Charles
Taylor as 'categorial', directed towards people whom the protagonists do not personally know (2011). Often such violence is contrasted to the violence that takes place within
personal relationships, but as we will see as this book develops, this distinction is not as clear as it once may have been. The chapters that follow attempt to explore a con- text
that has become increasingly evident, as violence that once appeared to be 'contained' by key dimensions of modern society is now
much more fluid, increasingly part of the flows making up a global world (Urry 2005). But such violence is not a
'thing' or an object. It is a form of agency, an embodied relationship and human experience. As such, it is a critical lens through which to

explore wider transformations of social life. On the Other hand, to separate violence from such
transformations profoundly limits our capacity to understand, and respond to , one of
the most urgent questions shaping the twenty-first century. ¶ The Surveillance Society ¶ Most of us are aware
of changing forms or potentials of violence through the growth of security and surveillance (Crelinsten 2009). Some
developments are obvious, such as airport security. Others are less so, such as passport tracking systems, internment camps ,

control orders and detention without trial, or erosion of the distinction between immigration
policy and security policy (Connolly 2005: 54). Some receive extensive debate in the press and social media, while Other developments are less discussed.
Over recent years, for example, states as different as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States have been engaged in the construction Of thousands Of kilometres Of walls
Global
along national bor- ders, a development that the political scientist Wendy Brown calls 'walling', something she contends is driven by 'waning sovereignty' (2010).

military expenditure, which had declined in the years following the end of the Cold War in 1989, expanded rapidly over the first
decade of the new century, increasing by some 49 per cent to reach US$1.53 tril- lion in 2009 (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2011).
New types of public surveillance involve pervasive but ambiguous categories Of 'pre-crime' as public policy seeks to identify groups and individuals 'at risk' of committing
criminal acts (Zedner 2007). The changing role of the criminal justice system has become evident in the
relentless increase in the number of people imprisoned in the world, a figure that reached some 10.65 million in 2009
(Walmsley 2010). ¶ Political theorists in particular have been aware of the ways these transformations 'resonate' , mutually

amplifying each other (Connolly 2005: 54). Brian Massumi (2007) argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a
new type of governance in complex societies, one shaped by a shift from a model Of prevention, which operates in an 'objectively knowable
world', to a model of pre-emption, which involves the attempt to wield power in a world based on uncertainty. Brad Evans (2010) points to the rise of

'consequentialist ethics' involved in this development, where forms of moral judgement framed in terms of 'right'
and 'wrong' are becoming redefined as calculations to determine whether a situation is
to be judged better or worse as a result of a course of action . These are not minor trans- formations. The
OECD argues that 'security' has become a major area Of economic activity, a driver Of modern economies (OECD 2004), while the sociologist David Lyon traces the contours of
this new social and
a surveillance society increasingly based on digital technologies (Lyon 2004). The political philosopher William Connolly argues that

political model involves an increasing mobilization of the population against

'unspecified enemies' (2005: 54). ¶ The Blurring of War and Peace ¶ One Way to think about this transformation is in terms Of a changing relationship
between peace and war. The historical sociologist Charles Tilly argues that the emergence Of modern societies from the seventeenth century to the Second World
War Saw violence moving in two directions: increasingly deadly inter-state confrontations and increasingly peaceful domestic societies, evident in the disarming Of populations
an increasingly clear separation between zones
and the rise Of peaceful forms Of protest and conflict (Tilly 2002, 2003). This constituted

of war and zones of peace, a separation that for the philosopher Immanuel Kant constituted the very basis Of modern society (Kleingold 2006: ix). This
account of the birth Of modernity locates violence beyond the borders of increasingly peaceful societies, and
to a significant extent has established itself as a structure of thought preventing any significant

exploration of the violence at the heart of modern societies, in particular the violence present
in colonial expansion , or in the extent of atrocities and extreme violence undertaken by the colonizers in the process Of decolonization (Bennett 2011).
Within this modern self-understanding, the capacity for extreme violence has always been
 associated with 'the Other with modern society, by definition, understood as being
inherently peaceful. ¶ The securitization we have referred to above signals two related transformations: the separation between war
and peace is becoming less and less clear, while the state's monopoly of violence is becoming less and less certain. Rather than
war being an external event, the cultural geographer Nigel Thrift argues that contemporary, globalizing societies have entered
an 'era of permanent and pervasive war ' (2011: 11), with war no longer understood as taking
place beyond borders, but across all areas of social life. This shift seems particularly evident when we 100k at urban design, where
we encounter not simply the increasing integration of blast proofing and other defensive systems into buildings, but the actual militarization of urban

space, evident in particular in contemporary military theory where older conceptions of 'battlefield' are giving way to new models of 'battle space' (see Graham 2012) where
the space of warfare becomes 'cotermi- nus with the space of civil society itself' (Dillon and Reid 2009: 128). This pattern is
evident in the extent that conceptions of urban security devel- oped in a warzone such as post-2003 Baghdad have established themselves as paradigms for policing and security
War, from this perspective, rather than being an activity
in the cities Of North American and Europe (Graham 2010). ¶

beyond the borders Of modern society, becomes instead a lens with which to conceive of
the core organization of such societies. The rise of war as a lens to frame social life has been particularly evident in military theory. William Lind,
for example, argues that the world has entered an age of 'fourth generation war', characterized by the loss Of the state's monopoly over the exercise Of War. Today states find
themselves at war with non-state opponents, wars he argues that states are losing. Writing in a respected journal, Lind argues 'invasion by immigration can be at least as
dangerous as invasion by a state army' (2004: 14). We do not need to embrace this type Of argument to rec- ognize that the twenty-first century has been shaped by an
awareness of a new vulnerability.
 Link---Economic Security
Economic securitization causes international intervention
Mark Neocleous 8, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, p95-
In other words, the new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between

economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa. As the doctrine of
national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to use perhaps its most

important power of all – its economic strength – in order to re-order the world . And this re-
ordering was conducted through the idea of ‘ economic security’ .99 Despite the fact that ‘econ omic security’ would
never be formally defined beyond ‘economic order’ or ‘economic well-being’,100 the significant conceptual con sistency between economic security and liberal order-building
also had a strategic ideological role. By playing on notions of ‘economic well-being’, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus‘human’ needs over military ones.
The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise of state power could thus
look decidedly liberal and ‘humanitarian’. This appearance helped co-opt the liberal Left
into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using notions such as ‘personal freedom’ and‘social equality’.101 Marx
and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products
chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102 In the
second half of the twentieth century this ability to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ would still rest heavily on the
logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security. The whole
world became a garden to be cultivated – to be recast according to the logic of security. In
the space of fifteen years the concept ‘economic security’ had moved from connoting insurance policies for working people to the desire to shape the world

in a capitalist fashion – and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these registers ever since, being used for the constant

reshaping of world order and resulting in a comprehensive level of intervention and

policing all over the globe . Global order has come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by the logic of
capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the
interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic, political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in
general and America’s core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international order as
Security politics thereby became the basis of a
capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but also‘secured’ everywhere.

distinctly liberal philosophy of global ‘intervention’, fusing global issues of economic

management with domestic policy formations in an ambitious and frequently violent
strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of American foreign policy.103 One face is the ‘good liberal cop’: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money
and help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the world’s nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even enjoy some prosperity. The other
face is the ‘bad liberal cop’: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own

social problems in ways that conflict with the interests of capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the
‘liberal moment’ becomes the moment of violence . This Janus-faced character has meant that through the mandate of
security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen fit to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of myriads of nations – those ‘rogue’ or ‘outlaw’ states on
there have been about 3,000 major
the ‘wrong side of history’.104 ‘Extrapolating the figures as best we can’, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,‘

covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations – all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or
modify the activities of other countries’, adding that ‘every covert operation has been rationalized in terms of
U.S. national security’.105 These would include ‘interventions’ in Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea,
Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, the Philippines, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iran,
Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the ‘60 or more’ countries identified as the bases of ‘terror cells’ by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106
The methods used have varied: most popular has been the favoured technique of liberal security – ‘making
the economy scream’ via controls, interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations . But a wide range of
other techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the
CIA’s ‘Health Alteration Committee’ whose mandate was to ‘incapacitate’ foreign officials; drug-trafficking;107 and
the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and
parties have been coopted into the project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi

collaborationist Vlasov Army for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine
democratically elected governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism flowed into Latin
America was because of the ideology of national security.108 Concomitantly, ‘national security’ has meant a policy of non-
intervention where satisfactory ‘security partnerships’ could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta, Chile, Iraq,
Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the five Central Asian republics that emerged with the break-up of the USSR, and China.
Either way, the whole world was to be included in the new ‘secure’ global liberal order. The result
has been the slaughter of untold numbers . John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in Angola which led to the deaths of over
20,000 people, puts it like this: Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the

hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed
– and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in
Note that the six million is
Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola – the operation I was part of – and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua.109

a minimum figure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other interventions, and that he was
writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of history. All of this has been more than confirmed by events in the
twentyfirst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the basis of the official National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President
Bush reiterated that the US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and
launched a new round of slaughtering to prove it. While much has been made about the supposedly ‘new’ doctrine of preemption in the
early twenty-first century, the policy of preemption has a long history as part of national security doctrine. The United States has long

maintained the option of pre-emptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national
security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction – and the more compelling the case for taking
anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110 In other

words, the security policy of the world’s only superpower in its current ‘war on terror’ is still
underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of ‘ economic
order’ . The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a ‘single sustainable model for national success’ based on ‘political and economic liberty’, with whole sections
devoted to the security benefits of ‘economic liberty’, and the benefits to liberty of the security strategy proposed.111
 Link---Disease
Their description of the pandemic and bioterror threat constructs a vision of a
limitless field of possible diseases that might arise, through their Mhyrvold and
Sanberg card which say any scientist, anywhere could be responsible for a
catastrophic bioterror attempt---that both extends security to every possible arena
and creates particular zones of vulnerability subject to violent control---that also
promotes counterproductive disease control policies like the closing of borders
and stockpiling of drugs
Sarah Sanford 16, Senior Research Coordinator at Public Health Toronto, PhD from the Dalla
Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, “Preparedness as a technology of
(in)security: Pandemic influenza planning and the global biopolitics of emerging infectious
disease,” Social Theory and Health, Volume 14, 2016, pp. 18-43
Our analysis sheds light on how pandemic influenza has been conceived of as a political problem by the WHO and, by extension, one
that requires a particular form of intervention. The texts analyzed here construct specific versions of reality that are
implicated in both the problematization of, and the solution to, a future pandemic. This in-depth
empirical work contributes to contemporary understandings of biopolitical regulation by exposing the organizing logic underpinning
preparedness, and by considering the possible implications of this imagining for intervention into a future global pandemic. The
construction of the natural features of the influenza virus in terms of its potential to transform
into the next pandemic virus and spread across multiple boundaries, necessitates the integration of
preparedness activities (characterized by flexibility and contingency) into everyday practice. Thus, the potentiality
and inherent uncertainty of the virus becomes at once the target of intervention and
representative of the underlying reasoning of response mechanisms.
Pandemic preparedness discourse operates as a technology of (in)security that renders the
uncertainty of pandemic emergence governable. The threat of pandemic influenza to the health of the global
population is conceived of, and responded to, through specification of the very features of the virus and its potential to disrupt
society in numerous ways. The construction of the virus, both in terms of its pandemic potentiality and
its capacity to transgress corporeal and territorial boundaries, is key in this regard; these features reveal the
interconnectedness of territories, and how such interconnectedness constitute zones of vulnerability to
pandemic emergence, and thus threats to global health.
This study contributes to recent critical social science work analyzing the framing of pandemic influenza and corresponding
preparedness and response mechanisms in terms of: securitization (Kamradt-Scott and McInnes, 2012); the extension of public
health intelligence activities beyond traditional means (French and Mykhalovskiy, 2013); understandings of ‘vulnerability’ by the
public and within national and sub-national planning (Stephenson et al, 2014); and the governing of uncertainty through potential
or future biosecurity threats (Samimian-Darash, 2013; Thomas, 2014). Our interpretation also resonates with other work that
critically examines technologies of security, which are presented as a panacea in environments
increasingly marked by insecurity (Aas et al, 2009). As Zedner (2009) points out, technologies of
security frequently result in greater insecurity for many individuals or social groups (for
example, checking of ID cards of immigrants and refugees). Similarly, we have demonstrated the mutually constitutive way in which
pandemic preparedness, as a technology of (in)security, discursively constructs new
vulnerabilities , increasing both the demand for security solutions and insecurity of those
deemed unable to protect themselves against emerging threats (for example, through the purchase of
pharmaceuticals or the stockpiling of non-pharmaceutical resources ).
Furthermore, we have analyzed the ways in which the molecular level of the ‘viral’ is discursively implicated in the organizing
logic of pandemic preparedness at the scale of the global population , which enables the
implementation of interventions at the national and transnational level (Raman and Tutton, 2010). The
‘natural’ potentiality of the virus implicates all viral strains in a future pandemic and
constructs multiple possibilities for the source and origin of emergence of the next
pandemic virus. The discursive linking of pandemic and non-pandemic viral activity poses a problem for risk governance; the
uncertainty that is constituted by these blurred distinctions creates a need for the continuous differentiation between these
possibilities. In this way, pandemic planning constitutes society as ‘insecure’ because of the ongoing possibility that ‘normal’ viruses
will transform and spread across bodies and territories, a threat that preparedness simultaneously aims to preempt in the objective
of global security. Thus, these viral
constructions also serve as a key technique in enabling the forms
and logic of preemption that characterize preparedness, and necessitate the continuity that drives
ongoing global pandemic influenza governance – if every influenza virus has the potential to transform and
become the pandemic virus, then preemptive intervention is required to respond to this risk.
The integration of pandemic into everyday processes is co-constituted with the viral object. The viral potentiality and
ubiquity of risk, which occurs in the interconnections or boundaries that constitute the social world, and in the viral
circulations that we know as ‘natural’, also expand the possibilities for the temporality and territory of
intervention . Risk is rendered governable through the ongoing engagement with the possibility of the exceptional pandemic,
rather than through the calculation of probabilities. This integration is most apparent in the 2005 restructuring of pandemic phases
to include the ‘normal’ state of, animal, infection (not necessarily accompanied by human infection). The logic of
preparedness, while still oriented toward a future event, is no longer focused on the prevention of specific or
isolated disease outbreaks or events by precluding certain risks that may lead to these undesirable outcomes (for
example, pandemic), but is rather focused on securing uncertainty through the regulation
and control of emergent risk via ongoing engagement and adaptation (Dillon, 2007; Lakoff, 2007).
In pandemic planning, biopolitical regulation targets not simply circulation characterizing the (human) population, but also as it
pertains to the ‘natural’ tendency of the influenza virus to circulate and expand. Of particular concern is the regulation of those
‘between’ spaces that present a potential conduit for transmission of the virus between bodies and species, as well as across
territories. While between spaces and the social relations that are implicated in their creation are constituted as sites of potential risk
because of possible viral transgression, and consequently as possible targets of surveillance and control, the final objective of this
form of regulation is not immobilization, or the restriction of circulation.
Instead, national bodies and other actors are called upon to account for shared or proximate borders that are
constituted as sites of vulnerability in terms of the possible spread of disease across such
boundaries. Response to viral threat is framed in terms of the mapping of vulnerabilities in a ‘society’ that is imagined largely
along organizational lines, for example, in terms of the interconnectedness of businesses or governmental ministries. Thus, much of
the reference to the restriction of movement involves the recourse to discretion on a case-by-case basis, and at various levels of
control is a crucial feature of global
governance (for example, national, local and individual). This
biopolitical regulation, which involves the calculation of ‘the extent to which life must be
incited to be free , or subjected to scrutiny and discipline’ (Kiersey, 2009, p. 41).
The construction of viral potentiality and expansion across social boundaries is complicated by the parallel functioning of epidemic
as operating ‘for’ or ‘against’ the people, a point that recognizes the processes of circulation as intrinsic to the population (Thacker,
2009). Preemptive responses to this threat allow for the ongoing distinction between desirable and undesirable forms of circulation.
The problematization of the pandemic influenza virus according to its potential to transgress boundaries and expand across states
and populations opens up multiple possibilities for intervention. For example, the positioning of risk in relation to animals
encourages the surveillance of animal populations that often culminates in culling, regardless of whether all of the animals are
infected. While such interventions are positioned as justifiable in order to manage viral circulation and potential disease outbreaks,
they may have significant economic consequences for those involved in the farming and trade of livestock. Moreover, intensive
surveillance may also result in the stigmatization of human bodies closely connected to
infected animals. Finally, the positioning of particular nations and pan-national regions (for
example, nations that are linked through proximity, shared borders or trade partnerships) as inadequate in the tracking
and containment of the natural mutability of the virus justifies certain exclusionary practices . For instance,
this construction legitimizes the closing of borders to protect against products and beings from these
‘uncontained’ regions, enacted as a last resort. It also justifies global surveillance and other
containment measures within national borders that aim to ensure the ‘global good’ while condemning those
nations unable or unwilling to undertake such preparedness activities.
At the global level, this mode of governance diverges from the disciplinary mechanisms that attempt to bring individuals in-line with
the norm, through various forms of expert knowledge (Lemke, 2011). Instead, uncertainty is taken as the given in terms of the
emergence of pandemic viral strains, and rather than prevent emergence, security mechanisms attempt to regulate this uncertain,
yet imminent, event. This securitization is to be achieved through a recourse to freedom (Lentzos and Rose, 2009), which allows for
the circulation of viral strains (among other entities) and responds primarily through the adaptation of existing infrastructure and
networks (for example, vaccine production networks) in order to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic. In line with Cooper’s
(2006) observation, discourse
concerning the potential threat posed by the virus entrenches
wealthy nations in the very process of emergence to the point of actualizing it
through the production of a global stockpile of anti-virals and other materials, with significant
consequences for economic profit from an unrealized event.3
Central to Foucauldian interpretations of security apparatuses is their position as ‘counterparts to liberal freedom and [as] the
condition for its existence. Security mechanisms are meant to secure and protect the permanently
endangered naturalness of the population, as well as its own forms of free and spontaneous self-regulation’ (Lemke,
2011, p. 47). Technologies of security are aimed at protecting the whole from the internal
threats that exist within the social body , which is always at risk. Our analysis illuminates how molecular
constructions operate in service of global security and freedom, in addition to the disciplinary mechanisms discussed earlier in this
article. The ubiquitous risk of a pandemic virus that could disrupt the ‘naturalness’ of circulation of living and non-living things (for
example, humans, goods, information) necessitates an ongoing response to all possibilities of viral activity in order to mitigate or
minimize disruptions within networks of circulation (for example, by targeting/accounting for advisories around social gatherings,
work/school attendance and travel). This is substantiated by predictions that illness because of a global pandemic could result in
GDP losses between 0.5 (£8.4 billion) and 4.3 per cent (£72.3 billion) in the UK alone (Smith et al, 2009). These estimates would
increase when accounting for changes in routine such as widespread school closures or prophylactic absenteeism (Smith et al, 2009;
Smith et al, 2011). Thus, the
threat to the imagined ‘whole-of-society’ is in the undesirable
disruption to the circuitous arrangement of global capitalism and the interruption of economic
and social functioning. The possible closure of borders, restriction of movement through quarantine and other measures, or
the cancellation of social events, in response to a transgressive virus threaten the neoliberal conception of individual rights and
freedoms that is so highly valued in the West.
 AT: Perm
Attempting to rehabilitate security remains locked within its terms---attempting to
redefine one example of a violent political order actively prevents resisting its very
foundation
Chris Rossdale 16, Teaching Fellow, International Relations, University of Warwick,
“Activism, resistance and security,” Chapter 14 of Ethical Security Studies: A new research
agenda, eds. Nyman and Burke, 2016, no page #
The previous two sections have highlighted a number of ways in which practices of resistance and activism engage the relationship
between ethics and security in different ways. In producing subjugated knowledges, revealing the exclusions and power relations of
established discourses, and engaging in security practices which seek to more directly respond to the
insecurity faced by ordinary people, they invite an ethical response to security and
insecurity. However, it limits our engagement with practices of resistance if we only see them as
exploring ‘better’ or ‘more ethical’ ways of providing security. The more radical challenge to
the politics of security comes when we see activism not simply as refusing particular orders of security,
but as resisting the very conceptual and political foundations of security . This final section
explores such an interpretation, looking at the ways in which the most substantive way to engage the relationships between ethics,
security, resistance and activism comes when we view practices of resistance as (at their best) working to deconstruct security. I
begin by outlining some of the arguments which suggest that the concept of security cannot so easily be
refashioned in a more ethical form and that thinking in terms of resistance might take us further. I then look
at how we might view such a resistance in the context of political activism, looking at some examples from anarchist activist groups.
A number of writers have argued that the concept of security is built around a series of images, codes and logics
which render it deeply problematic and a dangerous candidate for rehabilitation. They have pointed
out the ways in which our contemporary fascination with proliferating images of threat, danger and
response, grounded in desperate but impossible fantasies of control and mastery, tends towards authoritarian political
formations and the de facto legitimacy of dominant power relations (Edkins 2003; Campbell 1998: Shepherd
2008: 72–75). The pursuit of security serves to contain subjects within the existing order ,
promising protection in return for some level of compliance or obedience in a manner not dissimilar to a protection racket (Spike
Peterson 1992: 50–52). As Mark Neocleous notes, such dynamics serve to neutralise radical political
action , ‘encouraging us to surrender ourselves to the state in a thoroughly conservative fashion’ (2008: 4).
To understand how the pursuit of security intertwines with political authority, it is important to recognise the dependent
relationship between security and insecurity. Institutions and technologies of security can only function in a
context of insecurities, which they may identify and seek to pacify, but which they also need (and for which, of course, they
are often responsible). In Michael Dillon’s terms, ‘it is only because it is contoured by insecurity, and because in its turn it also
insecures, that security can secure’ (1996: 127). The nature and content of security depends on its particular relationship with
insecurity, with its exclusions and violences and particular (political) designations of threat. This regulative binary of
security/insecurity intersects with others that have similar effects, such as order/chaos, inside/outside and sovereignty/anarchy. All
of them regulate politics in a manner which cements the place of political authority. On the latter dichotomy, Richard Ashley’s
comments are pertinent:
On the one hand, the sign of ‘sovereignty’ betokens a rational identity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically
ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presiding over a coherent ‘self’, and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an
external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to its identical being. On the other hand, the sign of ‘anarchy’
betokens this residual external domain: an aleatory domain characterised by difference and discontinuity, contingency and
ambiguity, that can be known only for its lack of the coherent truth and meaning expressed by a sovereign presence. ‘Anarchy’
signifies a problematic domain yet to be brought under the controlling influence of a sovereign centre … whether it be an individual
actor, a group, a class, or a political community.
(1988: 230)
As he identifies the conservatising regulation at the heart of the sovereignty/anarchy dichotomy, so would I suggest that a similar
process is at work in the logic of security, privileging that which is rationally bounded, coherent and compliant, and necessitating the
pacification or pathologisation of that which is not.
Political imaginaries rooted in binary concepts limit our ethical landscape in a variety of ways. As
V. Spike Peterson argues:
[a]s long as we remain locked in dichotomies, we cannot accurately understand and are less likely to
transform social relations: not only do oppositional constructions distort the contextual complexity of social reality, they
set limits on the questions we ask and the alternatives we consider. True to their “origin” (Athenian
objectivist metaphysics), the dichotomies most naturalized in Western world views (abstract-concrete, reason-emotion, mind-body,
culture-nature, public-private) are both medium and outcome of objectification practices. Retaining them keeps us locked in to their
objectifying-reifying-lens on our world(s) and who we are.
(1992: 54)
In such a context, rather than seeking to rehabilitate security (and remain within this
security/insecurity dichotomy), it might be more productive to resist, displace or
deconstruct it .
This is not a simple prospect; refusing the social fantasy of security would, in Jenny Edkins’ terms, involve ‘facing,
on a day-to-day basis, questions many of us prefer to forget, if we can’, and ‘would involve a shift away from the notion of sovereign
state and sovereign individual … would entail the development of a new vision of political community, one
that was not based on the coming together of discrete participles to produce closed systems’ (2003: 368–369). While the
violent
politics of security is enacted through social institutions, it is also (as the discussion above shows) embedded in
categories of thought. The binaries of security/insecurity, order/chaos, sovereignty/anarchy and more impose a theoretical
domination which conditions political possibility in particular authoritarian ways. As such, the task of resistance might be to break
down such binaries. This may take place through mocking, subverting or outwardly refusing the closures such binaries
enact (Rossdale forthcoming-a; Rossdale forthcoming-b), or through embracing
the proliferation of definitions of
security as an aporetic space in which ‘to think and create new social, ethical and economic
relationships outside the oppressive structures of political and epistemological order’ (Burke 2007: 30–
31).
What I want to suggest here is that we can interpret many practices of activism and resistance as engaging in precisely this kind of
resistance to security/insecurity; that is, not just as affirming ‘more ethical’ securities (though they may also do this), but as
mounting a challenge to the conceptual and political order of security more generally. In a sense, this is not surprising, so often is
resistance framed as that insecurity, chaos and anarchy which necessitates securing, ordering and sovereign gestures. It is also an
unstable series of interventions, liable to recuperation within a set of security discourses which swiftly reposition challenge as threat.
Nonetheless, these resistances hold open
spaces for an ethical critique not only of particular orders
of security , but more generally of the ways in which security orders .
Econ Advantage
 AT: Russia

No risk of Russia war---neither side will escalate

Andrei Tsygankov 16, Professor at the Departments of Political Science and International
Relations at San Francisco State University, PhD from USC, “5 reasons why the threat of a global
war involving Russia is overstated,” Feb 19 2016, http://www.russia-direct.org/opinion/5-
reasons-why-threat-great-power-war-involving-russia-overstated
Experts and politicians are warning of high
The contemporary discussion of security interactions among major powers is depressing to participants and observers alike. us an increasingly

likelihood of a military conflict – possibly a nuclear one – between Russia and , on the one hand,

the U.S. or NATO ¶ In the West, many argue the dangers associated with a “resurgent”
, on the other.

Russia and vow to defend themselves from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “aggressive” actions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Last month, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter accused Russia of threatening the world order and starkly

¶ tensions have been growing

warned: “Make no mistake, the United States will defend our interests, our allies, the principled international order, and the positive future it affords us all.” The and have become

since the Ukraine crisis

especially high 2014 . Russian military flights over the Baltic and Black Sea in response to NATO’s active buildup on Russia’s European borders has done little to calm these fears. The Turkish decision to

possible military conflict with Istanbul and

shoot down a Russian warplane by claiming violation of its airspace in November 2015 revived the discussion of Moscow’s NATO, of which Turkey

alleged preparations to invade the Baltic States

is a member. More recently, the hype has been over the Kremlin’s ¶ and the West’s need to respond. In Russia, these
threats and discussions are taken seriously, and the responsibility for these security ten sions has been squarely placed on the Western powers. The frequently repeated charges are that the West and NATO have encircled Russia with military bases and refused to
recognize Moscow’s global interests. Russian media have actively discussed the U.S. National Security Archive’s Cold War documents on a nuclear attack against Russia and China declassified on Dec. 22, 2015. ¶ Last week, while attending the Munich Security
Conference, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev compared the contemporary security environment with the one that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis and reminded the audience of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s words that “foreign policy can kill us." ¶ In the
meantime, contradicting Medvedev, Russian experts often bemoan the fact that the Cold War was far more predictable and less dangerous than today’s multipolar world. What many have initially viewed as a generally positive transition from the U.S. “diktat” is now
presented as leading toward a great power war.¶ This increasingly apocalyptic mood on both sides reflects a growing international instability and breakdown of important communication channels between Russia and the West. Since the beginning of Ukraine crisis
and up until the G20 meeting in Antalya in December 2015, the two sides have barely interacted. Appalled by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for Ukrainian separatists, Western leaders pursued policies of sanctions and isolation, whereas the indignant
Kremlin has sought to demonstrate its indifference toward such policies. ¶ Only since Antalya have Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama resumed their attempts to regularly discuss issues of importance. Western and Russia military, too, severed their contacts

alarmist views and arguments are misplaced because

although the two sides have recently begun to coordinate their actions in the Syrian airspace. The aforementioned

they underestimate the dangers of the Cold War and overestimate those of today’s world ¶ .
Despite some attempts to present the Cold War as generally stable, predictable, and peaceful, this is not the time to feel nostalgic about it. Multiple crises from Berlin to Cuba and Afghanistan extended across much of the Cold War era. State propaganda on both sides
was reinforced by an intense ideological confrontation accompanied by drills and necessary preparations for a nuclear war. ¶ The Oscar-nominated film “Bridge of Spies” directed by Steven Spielberg reproduces some of that hysterical atmosphere in the United
States where the public was mobilized for any actions in support of the government. In the Soviet Union it was no different. For the world outside the West and the U.S.S.R., this was not a peaceful, but rather an increasingly chaotic and violent time – the conclusion

whatever
well documented by scholars of the Third World.¶ Why today's world is less dangerous than the Cold War ¶ Today’s world, while threatening and uncertain, is hardly more dangerous than the Cold War, for the following reasons. ¶ First,

the rhetoric, major powers are not inclined towards risky behavior when their core interests are
at stake. This concerns not only the nuclear superpowers, but also Turkey. The prospect of countries such as

confronting Russia's military should give pause even to

overwhelmingly superior Erdogan someone as hot-tempered as Turkish President Tayyip . Even if

¶ NATO has been careful to not be drawn into highly

Erdogan wanted to pit Russia against NATO, it wouldn’t work. So far,

provocative actions , whether responding to Russia seizing the Pristina Airport in it is by International

June 1999, getting involved on Georgia’s side or providing support during the military conflict in August 2008 by lethal military assistance and

for Ukraine. Unless Russia is the clear and proven aggressor, NATO is unlikely to begin support Turkey and

World War III .¶ Russia remains a defensive power aware of its responsibility for
Second,

maintaining international stability. Moscow wants to work with major powers, not against them .

¶ the U S has
Its insistence on Western recognition of Russia’s interests must not be construed as a drive to destroy the foundations of th e international order, such as sovereignty, multilateralism, and arms control. Third, nited tates

important interests to prevent regional conflicts from escalating or becoming trans-regional. Although its relative military capabilities are not where they

U.S. military and diplomatic resources are sufficient to restrain key regional
were ten years ago, the

players proxy wars are happening, but they are unlikely to

in any part of the world. Given the power rivalry across several regions, possible and indeed are

escalate ¶ . Fourth, unlike the Cold War era, the contemporary world has no rigid alliance structure. The so-called Russia-China-Iran axis is hardly more than a figment of the imagination by American neoconservatives and some Russia conspiracy-

minded thinkers. The world remains a space in which international coalitions overlap and are mostly formed on an ad hoc basis.¶ Fifth, with the exception of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Greater Syria (ISIS), there is no fundamental conflict of values and
ideologies. Despite the efforts to present as incompatible the so-called “traditional” and “Western” values by Russia or “democracy” to “autocracy” by the United States and Europe, the world majority does not think that this cultural divide is worth fighting for. ¶

Despite the dangers the world contains a number of important underappreciated ,

of we live in, it , even

checks threat talk may be a way to pressure the opponent

on great powers’ militarism. The coming from politicians is often deceiving. Such talk

into concessions rather than to signal real intentions. When such pressures do not
various political and military

bring expected results rhetoric of war subsides Then a dialogue begins.

, the and isolation .¶ Perhaps, the

increasing frequency of exchanges between Obama and Putin including since December 2015 - their recent

phone conversation following the Munich conference - suggest recognition that the record of a growing

pressuring has been mixed at best.

Russia
 AT: China
No China war
Bilahari Kausikan 16, Ambassador-at-large and policy adviser in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, and the Institute of Policy Studies' 2015/16 S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of
Singapore, “War is unlikely but distrust runs deep,” Feb 27 2016,
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/war-is-unlikely-but-distrust-runs-deep
This is not a question that should lend itself to facile answers. US-China relations defy simple characterisation. But it is certainly not "a

Clash of Civilisations". ¶ China could not have succeeded without the US. China's success is, in a very
fundamental way, also an American success, albeit a not entirely comfortable one for America. This perhaps adds in no small part to the complexity of the strategic adjustments
that are under way between the US and China. But whether it admits it or not, the US too has begun to adapt. There can be no "Clash of Civilisations" because we are now all
hybrids.¶ The inevitably irregular rhythms of economic growth ought to make us cautious about accepting simplistic characterisations of US-China relations as some variant of a
contrast between a rising China and a declining US. This posits a false dichotomy. China is certainly rising but the US is not in decline. All who have underestimated American
creativity and resilience have come to regret it. The changes in the distribution of power are relative, not absolute. The US is still pre-eminent in most indices of power and is
Before too long, China will reach a more
likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.¶ This is most obvious in the military realm.

symmetrical military equation with the US in East Asia. This will have very important implications for the maritime disputes in the
South China Sea. While military planners cannot ignore any contingency, war is not a very

probable scenario. Neither the US nor China is looking for trouble or spoiling for a
fight. The essential priorities of both are internal, not external . The most vital of all
Chinese interests is the preservation of Chinese Communist Party ( CCP) rule. Chinese leaders
sometimes talk tough. But they are not reckless .¶ As the sole global power, the US cannot retreat into complete isolationism.
Like it or not, the world will intrude and in East Asia specifically, there has been a fundamental consistency in US policy over the last 40 years or more that I expect will be
maintained.¶ But the political mood that has sustained contenders Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their unlikely presidential campaigns is disillusionment with
globalisation and working- and middle-class insecurity about their future in an increasingly unfamiliar and uncertain world. Whoever next occupies the White House will talk

and even act tougher. Butno American president can ignore the national mood, which is not for more
wars of choice .¶ If war between the US and China is highly improbable , is there or will there be a "new Cold
War" between the two? There will almost certainly be tense episodes. But I do not think this is

an appropriate metaphor to understand the US-China dynamic.¶ So where does all this leave us? I do not think it makes the strategic

adjustments any easier. But it does imply that the parameters within which the US and China must seek a new

accommodation are narrower than what we might have been led to expect by the media or the more
sensationalist sort of academic analysis .
 GPW
No future competition---it’ll be different than 19th-century multipolarity
Randall Schweller 11, Professor of Political Science and a Social and Behavioral Sciences Joan
N. Huber Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University, “Emerging Powers in an Age of Disorder”,
Global Governance 17 (2011), 285–297, Academia.edu
Let me end on a hopeful note. When India, China, Brazil, the European Union, Russia, Japan, and
possibly Turkey join the United States as members of the great-power club, we will have entered
the first truly global epoch of world politics . Past international systems that contained several
great powers were merely regional European systems, not global ones. Europe was the core; everything
else was considered the periphery. True, Japan and the United States eventually became poles, but they were minor
players that arrived late in the game. Europe was center court, where the top players competed with each other.¶ Compared with past
multipolar systems, the global nature of the coming world will afford the great powers more space
to maneuver without stepping on each other’s toes, making it relatively easy for them to carve
out mutually exclusive spheres of influence. Colliding territorial interests will be a less frequent and
intense problem than it was under old-style multipolarity. ¶ Related to the unique global character of the coming world, future
great powers will be much larger than past ones under European-style multipolarity. In terms of territory and population, India and
China dwarf France, Prussia or Germany, Britain, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. Only Russia and the United States—the two
continental-sized flank states—were comparable in size to India and China today, and they quickly outstripped their European
counterparts to become superpowers after World War II.¶ The supersized nature of the coming great powers will
produce a qualitative change in their expected behaviors. Unlike past great powers, they will not need
more territory or population to compete with each other; there will be no imperial
temptations for them to resist. Rather, the key to realizing their potential power will be internal
growth and consolidation—processes best facilitated by a quiescent international setting.
1NR
Topicality
 Overview---2NC

Only our interp gives meaning to the entire resolution---governments establish by

directly administering plans
Cynthia Reed Eddy 15, United States Magistrate Judge, 2/5/15, Raible v. Union Security
Insurance Company, Civil Action No. 2:14-cv-1307, http://www.boomerisablog.com/wp-
content/uploads/sites/315/2015/02/Raible-v-Union-Security-Insurance-Co.pdf
ERISA = the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974
“ERISA is designed to ensure the proper administration of pension and welfare plans, both during the years of the employee’s active
service and his or her retirement years.” Boggs v. Boggs, 520 U.S. 833, 839 (1997). In general, ERISA broadly applies to “any
employee benefit plan if it is established or maintained by an employer … or by an employee
organization … representing employees engaged in commerce …” 29 U.S.C. § 1003(a)(1)(2); see also 29 U.S.C. § 1002(1)
(defining “employee welfare benefit plan”). Notwithstanding this broad coverage, employee benefit plans that are
“governmental plans” are expressly exempted under ERISA. 29 U.S.C. § 1003(b)(1). “The term
‘ governmental plan’ means a plan established or maintained for its employees by the
Government of the U nited S tates, by the government of any State or political subdivision thereof, or by any agency or
instrumentality of any of the foregoing …” 29 U.S.C. § 1002(32).4
“In exempting governmental plans from ERISA, Congress ‘was concerned more with the governmental nature of public employees
and public employers than with the details of how a plan was established or maintained.’” Roy v. Teachers Ins. & Annuity Ass'n, 878
F.2d 47, 50 (2d Cir. 1989) (quoting Feinstein v. Lewis, 477 F.Supp. 1256, 1260 (S.D.N.Y. 1979)); see also Krupp v. Lincoln Univ., 663
F.Supp. 289, 292 (E.D.Pa. 1987) (observing that Congress intended the “governmental plan” exemption to apply to municipal and
state employees). Although the Court has not found any precedent in the Third Circuit interpreting the term “established” under 29
U.S.C. § 1002(32), other Circuits have constructed “established” broadly. See, e.g., Gualandi v. Adams, 385 F.3d 236, 243 (2d Cir.
2004). The Ninth Circuit has held that a government employer can establish a plan for its employees by purchasing a “plan offered
and administered by a private insurer,” and there is no requirement that the government “directly fund the plan.” Silvera v. Mutual
Life Ins. Co. of N.Y., 884 F.2d 423, 425-427 (9th Cir. 1989) (citing Gordon v. Bay Cnty Metro. Transit Auth., 860 F.2d 1079 (Table)
(6th Cir. 1988); Dyer v. Investors Life Ins. Co. of North America, 728 S.W.2d 478, 480 (Tex. App. 1987)). Additionally, the
Second Circuit has held that a “governmental plan” can be “ established ” if the government
employer exclusively funds the plan for its employees. Gualandi, 385 F.3d at 243-244 (citing Fromm v. Principal
Health Care of Iowa, Inc., 244 F.3d 652, 653-654 (8th Cir. 2001); Silvera v. Mut. Life Ins. Co. of N.Y., 884 F.2d at 425-427;
Feinstein, 447 F.Supp. at 1260).
 AT: Bodenheimer
The plan is an alternative to NHI---even regulated private insurance designed to
achieve universal access is still distinct
Verdon S. Staines 99, senior economist and project team leader for Croatia at the World Bank,
1999, A Health Sector Strategy for the Europe and Central Asia Region, p. 19
The challenge of achieving universal access to needed care at affordable prices requires
introducing suitable insurance (or other risk-pooling arrangements) and creating a mechanism to ensure
access to people who are poor as well as sick (such as relating premiums to ability to pay). In essence, the options are
either to establish national health insurance , to create a regulated system of
private insurance markets that guarantees access by consumers, or to develop a hybrid scheme of
mandatory public basic insurance and voluntary private supplementary insurance. Regulating
the insurance market, for example, might require banning such insurance practices as selecting consumers
on the basis of their risk status or health status; adopting medical underwriting practices that limit or deny coverage;
denying coverage or renewal of coverage to consumers; or setting prices in a discriminatory way. Regulation might
also require health insurers to cover a standardized package of health services. The objective would be to prevent insurers from
indirectly seeking to insure people in good health but not those in bad health. For example, by using techniques such as not covering
syringes so that diabetics will seek insurance elsewhere. A system of regulated private insurance designed to
achieve guaranteed access might also incorporate community rating and risk adjustment of premium
income.
Fism
 Acid Rain
No impact to acid rain - it's also easily reversible - most qualified study confirms
Lehr 7 Jay Lehr, PhD, is science director for the Heartland Institute. He is citing the National
Acid Precipitation Assessment Project. "Acid Rain, Nitrogen Scares Debunked," Feb 1,
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2007/02/01/acid-rain-nitrogen-scares-debunked
Perhaps the best example of the contributions of scientists to a large, complex issue is the National Acid Precipitation Assessment

Project (NAPAP). This project entailed hundreds of scientists working in small groups
over a period of 10 years at a cost of $550 million.¶ Scare Debunked¶ The NAPAP findings were
submitted to Congress in 1990. Because the study's findings minimized the impact of acid rain
caused by humans, Congress and the media completely ignored them.¶ The NAPAP study
found that among thousands of U.S. lakes, only 4 percent were somewhat acidic. One-
quarter of those were acidic due to natural causes, leaving only 3 percent somewhat
influenced by human activities.¶ The study found many of the Adirondack lakes were acidic when explorers first entered the region, and
likely contained few fish at the time. Logging the virgin forests prior to 1900 reduced the regional lake acidity. Acidity then rebounded with the decline of logging.¶
Perhaps the best news in the NAPAP report was that whatever the cause,
Simple Solution Available¶

overly acidic lakes can be easily and inexpensively corrected by the addition of lime. ¶
Attempting to reduce regional water acidity by targeting smokestack emissions through the Clean Air Act costs at least 1,000 times more than applying lime to the
Furthermore, the report minimized the effect of acid rain on
small proportion of lakes where the problem exists.¶

the erosion of buildings and statues, and found no basis for alleged widespread health
effects.

No oxygen crisis
Motl 8 – assistant professor of physics, Harvard University (Lubos, 8/19, The oxygen crisis,
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/08/oxygen-crisis.html)

Most mainstream media have abandoned almost all quality control in their science reporting that is now arguably slightly
below the image of science as presented in the leading pornographic magazines. The latest extreme example of this
observation comes from a Gentleman called Peter Tatchell, a political campaigner from the left wing of the Green party (a
description that probably makes Karl Marx a staunch conservative in comparison; he's been also denounced by the British
Parliament as a "homosexual terrorist" in 1994): The Guardian, China Daily He argues that there exists a more serious crisis
than the "CO2 crisis": the oxygen levels are dropping and the human activity has decreased them by 1/3 or 1/2, he says.
Wow. ;-) The reality is, of course, that the oxygen percentage in the atmosphere has been 20.94 or 20.95 percent for
thousands of years and probably much longer than that (see the historical graph on page 2 of Dudley 1998 that covers 600
million years). The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is so huge that the biosphere (and
fossil fuels which used to belong to the biosphere as well) is completely unable to change
this amount significantly. It may be useful to mention that the oxygen is only 1/5 of the atmosphere
and the atmosphere is just 1/1,200,000 of the mass of the Earth. However, the Earth is damn heavy, 6 x 10^{24} kilograms,
so the mass of the oxygen in the atmosphere is something like 10^{18} kilograms - about 150,000 tons per capita. Be sure
that we
can't burn that much oxygen even if everyone in the world were using a
private jet on a daily basis . ;-) There is a simpler way to see that man-made changes to the oxygen levels are
trivial and we will look at it now. Estimating the oxygen change For a schoolboy who is not skipping his science classes at
the elementary school, it shouldn't be difficult to see why we can't significantly influence the amount of oxygen in the
atmosphere. How can he do it? Well, he must realize that virtually all processes related to life and human activity -
breathing (by animals and plants) and burning (combustion) - exchange the atmospheric O2 molecules by CO2 molecules or
vice versa. Sometimes, one needs two O2 molecules and only produces one CO2 molecule but this subtlety won't change our
final result significantly. Virtually all other compounds participating in the relevant chemical reactions are either liquids or
solids which is why they don't influence the composition of the atmosphere and we will ignore them. When you realize what
the words above mean, you will see that the man-made decrease of oxygen (O2) is controlled by the increase of carbon
dioxide: they're inseparably linked to one another. The human activity has increased the CO2 concentration from 280 ppm
two centuries ago to 385 ppm today (the schoolboy should have seen these elementary numbers during his "CO2 crisis"
classes). Because many people don't know what the acronym ppm (parts per million) really means, even if they like to use it,
let me tell you that it is the same thing as 0.0001%. So the carbon dioxide went from 0.028% to 0.038%: the difference is
0.01% of the volume of the atmosphere. Because O2 and CO2 molecules occupy the same volume at a given pressure and a
given temperature (since pV = NkT), the decrease of O2 should be equal to the increase of CO2 if the molecules were
exchanged for one another: the oxygen should drop by 0.01% of the volume of the atmosphere. As we have already
mentioned, two oxygen molecules are replaced in typical "combustion" chemical reactions for one carbon dioxide molecule,
so the oxygen drop might be 0.02% instead of 0.01%. However, in the long run, there exist other processes
besides the combustion-like processes involving CO2 that we have considered - for example
processes involving deep ocean sediments - and these processes tend to restore the oxygen
levels (as well as the CO2 levels). At any rate, you see that the oxygen level

couldn't have decreased by more than 0.01% or so, from 20.95% to 20.94%, which is pretty much
exactly what was observed. We needed centuries or millenia to achieve this modest "goal". It is very clear that
even if we burned all forests, plants, animals, and fossil fuels in the world,
we couldn't get the oxygen levels below 20% (and maybe not even 20.9%). Evaluating the impact
Does the tiny decrease of oxygen levels change some important things? It doesn't. The
most "spectacular" change is that the wildfire risk decreases by something like 0.01%, too (and
maybe slightly more), as the oxygen levels drop. Because wildfires are somewhat unpopular and their decrease would be
good news, you won't read about it. ;-) At any rate, all these changes are negligible given the tiny change of the O2 levels.
Tatchell writes "I am not a scientist, but this seems a reasonable concern." It seems reasonable to whom? To me, worries
about the "oxygen crisis" seems to be a ticket for someone to be stored in a mental asylum. The point here is not whether
Tatchell is a scientist: he's clearly not. The question is whether he is dangerous enough a weirdo to be isolated from the
society. We won't be able to change the oxygen level in any significant way. Incidentally, while the overall amount of
oxygen in the atmosphere is essentially constant, the amount of oxygen in various parts of organisms
varies dramatically. For example, the human body must keep the concentration of this harmful-if-abundant gas around 5%
in most organs. Oxygen is not only a corrosive gas but also a metabolic poison under most cellular reactions. Its optimal
percentage depends on the life forms which is why the varying percentage of oxygen in amber - a point mentioned by
Tatchell - says absolutely nothing about the overall O2 volume.
 BioT

Terrorists lack tacit knowledge so they can’t deploy the technology effectively
Filippa Lentzos 14, PhD from London School of Economics and Social Science, Senior
Research Fellow in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College
London, Catherine Jefferson, researcher in the Department of Social Science, Health, and
Medicine at King’s College London, DPhil from the University of Sussex, former senior policy
advisor for international security at the Royal Society, and Dr. Claire Marris, Senior Research
Fellow in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King's College London,
Synthetic biology and biosecurity: challenging the "myths". Front Public Health. 2014 Aug
21;2:115, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4139924/
Synthetic biology, a field that aims to "make biology easier to engineer," is routinely described as leading to an
increase in the "dual-use" threat, i.e., the potential for the same scientific research to be "used" for peaceful purposes or "misused"
for warfare or terrorism. Fears have been expressed that the "de-skilling" of biology, combined with online access to the genomic DNA
sequences of pathogenic organisms and the reduction in price for DNA synthesis, will make biology increasingly accessible to
people operating outside well-equipped professional research laboratories, including people with malevolent intentions.
The emergence of do-it-yourself (DIY) biology communities and of the student iGEM competition has come to epitomize this
supposed trend toward greater ease of access and the associated potential threat from rogue actors. In this article, we identify five "myths" that
permeate discussions about synthetic biology and biosecurity, and argue that they embody misleading

assumptions about both synthetic biology and bioterrorism. We demonstrate how these myths are
challenged by more realistic understandings of the scientific research currently being conducted
in both professional and DIY laboratories, and by an analysis of historical cases of bioterrorism. We show that the

importance of tacit knowledge is commonly overlooked in the dominant narrative: the focus is on
access to biological materials and digital information, rather than on human practices
and institutional dimensions. As a result, public discourse on synthetic biology and biosecurity tends to
portray speculative scenarios about the future as realities in the present or the near future, when this is
not warranted . We suggest that these "myths" play an important role in defining synthetic biology as a "promissory" field of research and
as an "emerging technology" in need of governance.

Assembling gene fragments into a virus is impossible

Catherine Jefferson 14, researcher in the Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine
at King’s College London, et al., 9/18/14, “The myths (and realities) of synthetic bioweapons,”
http://thebulletin.org/myths-and-realities-synthetic-bioweapons7626
Building a dangerous virus from scratch is hard. DNA synthesis is one of the key enabling
technologies of synthetic biology. There are now a number of commercial companies that provide DNA synthesis services, so
the process can be out-sourced: A client can order a DNA sequence online and receive the synthesized DNA material by post within
days or weeks. The price charged by these companies has greatly reduced over the last 20 years and is now around 3 cents
a base pair, which puts the cost within reach of a broad range of actors. This has led to routine statements
suggesting that it is now cheap and easy to obtain a synthesized version of any desired DNA
sequence. There are however several challenges that need to be taken into account when assessing
the potential for misuse that inexpensive DNA sequencing might enable.
Even specialized DNA synthesis companies cannot easily synthesize, de novo, any desired DNA
sequence. Several commercial companies provide routine gene synthesis services for sequences of less than 3,000 base pairs, but
length is a crucial factor; the process is error prone, and some sequences are resistant to chemical synthesis. A number of
entirely new synthesized DNA fragments would have to be assembled to produce a full genome,
and, even if doing so were not already regulated by guidelines, simply ordering the full-length genome sequence
of a small virus online is not possible .
Ordering short DNA sequences and assembling them into a genome requires specialist expertise,
experience, and equipment available in academic laboratories but not easily accessible to an
amateur \

working from home.

For longer sequences, assembly of DNA fragments becomes the crucial step. This was the major
technological feat in the work conducted at the J. Craig Venter Institute that produced a “synthetic” bacterial genome, and the
Gibson assembly method developed for that project is now widely used. The description of that work, however, demonstrates how
the assembly of smaller fragments into larger ones and eventually into a functioning genome
requires substantial levels of expertise and resources , including those needed to conduct trouble-shooting
experiments to identify and correct errors when assembled DNA constructs do not perform as expected.
Constructing a genome-size DNA fragment is not the same as creating a functional genome . In
particular, ensuring the desired expression of viral proteins is a well-documented, complex
challenge.
 Ilaw
Eric A. Posner 9, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
The Perils of Global Legalism, 34-6

at the law serves their interests or respects and enforces their values. Perhaps more is required than this — such as political
does good —

participation, for example — but we can treat the fi rst condition as necessary if not suffi cient. If individuals believe that a system of law

does not advance their interests and respect their values, that instead it advances the interests of others or is
dysfunctional and helps no one at all, they will not believe that the law is legitimate and will not
voluntarily submit to its authority . ¶ Unfortunately, international law does not satisfy this
condition , mainly because of its institutional weaknesses ; but of course, its institutional
weaknesses stem from the state system — states are not willing to tolerate
powerful international agencies. In classic international law, states enjoy sovereign
equality, which means that international law cannot be created unless all agree, and that international law
binds all states equally. What this means is that if nearly everyone in the world agrees that some global legal instrument would be benefi cial (a climate treaty, the

UN charter), it can be blocked by a tiny country like Iceland (population 300,000) or a dictatorship like North Korea.

What is the attraction of a system that puts a tiny country like Iceland on equal footing with
China? When then at- torney general Robert Jackson tried to justify American aid for Britain at the onset of World War II on the grounds that the Nazi Germany was the
aggressor, international lawyers complained that the United States could not claim neutrality while providing aid to a belligerent — there was no such thing as an aggressor in
international law.10 Nazi Germany had not agreed to such a rule of international law; therefore, such a rule could not exist. Only through the destruction of Nazi Germany could
international law be changed; East and West Germany could reenter international so-¶ 36¶ ciety only on other people’s terms. How could such a system be perceived to be
Because no world government can compel states
legitimate? ¶ There is, of course, a reason why international law works in this fash- ion.

to comply with inter- national law, states will comply with international law only when doing so
is in their interest. In this way, international law always depends on state consent. So international law must take states as they are, which means that little states,
big states, good states, and bad states, all exist on a plane of equality.

Zero chance of compliance when it actually matters --- no enforcement

mechanism, and support for ILaw is inherently weak because it’s not made by a
legislature
Eric A. Posner 9, Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
The Perils of Global Legalism, 28-31
we need to be clear about just how limited international legal institutions are, compared to
Initially,

domestic legal institutions In all

. This point is famil- iar to international lawyers and political scientists, but it bears emphasis. Legislation without legislatures. the United States and other

countries law is made through legislation

, most . The public becomes aware of some problem — acid rain or spousal abuse or inadequate schooling or overdevelopment — and brings it to the
attention of legislators. Interest groups and other intermediary groups — churches, environmental orga- nizations, businesses — play a facilitating role. A legislator or governor or president proposes a bill and, if all goes well, the bill is voted on and enacted. Usually,
votes occur by majority rule; in practice, because of bi- cameralism, a president’s veto power, or the infl uence of money on politics, a supermajority will need to agree to the bill (or some watered down ver- sion of it). But, except in special circumstances, small groups

The institutional structure

of people will not be able to block it. whole ensures that proposed laws are — formal votes, hearings, elections, and so forth —

publicly debated and that affected people can make their voices heard so that the final
product will enjoy a fair amount of support At the same time, , even if not unanimous, and so will not be immediately overturned after the next election. the

majority rule
existence of ensures that the law can be
— or some level of de facto su- permajority rule that nonetheless falls well below a requirement of con- sensus — existing

revisited if it turns out not to have the desired effect. At the international level, no
and amended

such system exists. The U N lacks the power to enact legally

There is no inter- national legislature with general jurisdiction. nited ations General Assembly

binding rules. The Security Council power is limited does have the power to issue legally binding orders, but its . It does not have the power to issue legislation; its power is more

the consent of its five permanent

in the nature of executive and adjudicative — it can evaluate breaches of peace and order an international response.3 Because the Security Council can act only with

members interests rarely converge

— Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States — and the of those members

, the Security Council can rarely act effectively. And because most states have only a limited and indirect role in the Se- curity Council — they rotate onto the council occasionally, and they can depend on patrons to protect their interest — the Security Council lacks
the democratic legitimacy enjoyed by an ordinary domestic legislature. So how is international law made? Some international law emerges spontaneously, as custom, but when states seek to solve global collective action problems, they can do so only by creating
treaties. A state can be bound by a treaty only if it consents to it; thus, a treaty that will solve a global collective action problem requires the consent of all states, or all states that contribute to that problem. The unanimity rule is much more strict than the voting rules

of legislatures, and the result is that treaties are much harder to create than domestic law is, and usually end up imposing
weak obligations . A significant disadvantage the absence of settled infrastructure for for treaty making is

monitoring treaty behavior Amendment of a treaty requires

and revising treaty obligations when treaties turn out to have unintended consequences.

unanimous consent, which again is always hard to secure. The difficulty of amending treaties
makes states cautious about entering them in the first place , lest they be bound to obligations that rapidly turn out to be onerous and of limited value. For a
narrow range of issues, states have attempted to overcome these problems by creating permanent institutions. The WTO (World Trade Organization), for example, provides institutional support for negotiations over tariffs and other trade restrictions. But “policy”

states remain
changes — tariff lev- els, for example — require unanimity. Various international agencies — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and so forth — have vot- ing structures that do not require unanimous consent. But

free to withdraw from institutions if they do not serve their interests. By contrast, no one can
these

“withdraw” from a domestic legislature. In light of these problems, it might seem

miraculous that international law exists at all. And tens of thousands of treaties exist. Most of these trea- ties, however, are bilateral. Two states that seek to

bilateral
cooperate over a dis- crete issue of importance to them — the location of a border, the construc- tion of an embassy, extradition of criminals, treatment of tourists, and so forth — can easily do so, and their agreements are embodied in

treaties cannot solve global action problems

. These treaties ; they can only solve bilateral cooperation problems such as prisoners’ dilemmas. A rela- tively small number of multilateral
treaties exist, and most of these are regional. NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) is an example. These treaties facilitate cooperation among a small number of states over trade, regional pollution, regional security, and so forth.4 Only a few hundred

multilateral treaties
true solve coordination problems rather than
exist. In an earlier book, Jack Goldsmith and I argued that most of these treaties

global collective action problems Many have had no effect because states could not agree to . , in part

sufficiently strict obligations and because the collective action problem undermines
, in part

enforcement of such obligations.5 But even if we were excessively skeptical about their effectiveness, as our critics have argued, few people will deny that treaty making that requires unanimous consent of all states in the world is an

Effective lawmaking at the global level

extremely crude way to make global law and falls far short of what is routine and implicitly acknowledged to be essential for domestic policymaking.

requires a legislature No such international legislature exists, nor is

, just as effective lawmaking at a national level requires a legislature.

the creation of one on the horizon.