1NC – T

“United States” refers to the fifty states and DC

Oxford No Date – Oxford Dictionaries, No Date ("United States," Oxford Dictionaries, Available online
at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/united_states, Accessed 03-20-2018)

A country occupying most of the southern half of North America and including also Alaska and the
Hawaiian Islands; population 321,800,000 (estimated 2015); capital, Washington, DC. Full name United States of America. The US is a
federal republic comprising fifty states and the Federal District of Columbia. It originated in the American War of
Independence, the successful rebellion of the British colonies on the east coast in 1775–83. The original thirteen states which formed the Union
drew up a federal constitution in 1787, and George Washington was elected the first President in 1789. In the 19th century the territory of the
US was extended across the continent through the westward spread of pioneers and settlers (at the expense of the American Indian peoples),
and acquisitions such as that of Texas and California from Mexico in the 1840s. After a long period of isolation in foreign affairs the US
participated on the Allied side in both world wars, and came out of the Cold War as the world's leading military and economic power

“In” means throughout

Words and Phrases 59, 1959 (p. 546 (PDNS3566)) Thomson West
In the Act of 1861 providing that justices of the peace shall have jurisdiction
“in” their respective counties to hear and
determine all complaints, the word “in” should be construed to mean “throughout” such counties. Reynolds v. Larkin, 14, p. 114,
117, 10 Colo. 126.

Vote neg for limits and ground – allowing affs to regulate outside the US justifies
changing CJR over obscure land possessions and foreign nations, which unbearably
expands the neg’s research burden and moots core politics DAs and states CPs
 1NC
PROSWIFT passes now and solves space weather, but fights can derail it
Busalacchi 9/10/20 – Antonio Busalacchi is the president of the University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research ("Congress needs to finalize space weather bill as solar storms pose heightened
threat” The Hill, 9/10/20, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/515840-congress-needs-to-
finalize-space-weather-bill-as-solar-storms-pose)

The COVID-19 pandemic has left us more dependent than ever on advanced information and
communication technologies, with many businesses and schools relying on a range of remote services. In this environment, building
resilience to potential threats that can disrupt society's essential daily activities is critical.

For this reason, it is heartening to see Congress advancing

legislation to better protect the nation from solar storms
that spew millions of tons of charged matter toward Earth . Such space weather events can distort GPS
signals, scramble satellite operations, and disable communications and power systems, with serious
consequences for our economy and armed services — a particularly major concern as the Pentagon prepares for future
space-based conflicts.

Significant space weather events occur every decade or so with far-reaching and destructive consequences .
A powerful solar storm in 1989 cut off power to millions of Canadians, and major storms in 2003 affected more than half of Earth-orbiting
spacecraft. Just three years ago, solar flares caused radio blackouts for hours during critical emergency response efforts to approaching
hurricanes in the Caribbean and nearby regions.

A solar superstorm poses even greater risks. The

so-called Carrington Event in 1859, which ignited fires in telegraph
offices, would have catastrophic impacts on today's society, potentially resulting in widespread damage
to power grids, communication networks, and other technologies that would take weeks, months, or
even years to repair. Even before COVID-19 led to an increased reliance on e-based technologies, the National Academy of Sciences
estimated that such an event could result in as much as $2 trillion in damages — or more than 10 times the costs of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite a growing array of advanced satellites that monitor the sun, forecasters cannot accurately
predict when a major storm will erupt from the sun and begin its one- to four-day journey toward Earth .
Observations provide only limited information about where the storm will hit and its potential for damage until it is within about a half-hour of
Earth. This does not leave satellite operators and utility managers with sufficient notice to fully shield vulnerable electronics and power down
critical hardware.

To improve its forecasting capability, the nation needs to invest in a new generation of space- and ground-based
instruments that can provide continual measurements of magnetic fields throughout the solar atmosphere. These measurements would
alert us to conditions that are conducive for storms and help us determine whether an incoming storm will penetrate our atmosphere and
target certain regions on Earth, or harmlessly glance off.

Scientists are also working toward more advanced computer models of the sun. One of their primary goals is to stimulate the buildup of energy
in twisted magnetic fields within the solar atmosphere, enabling forecasters to predict when the fields will erupt and spew tons of charged
particles toward Earth.

Fortunately, Congress is starting to take action on this important issue. The Senate last month unanimously passed
legislation to improve scientific understanding and forecasting of space weather. The Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather
to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow (PROSWIFT)
Act would break down barriers between the nation's
researchers and forecasters, coordinate the efforts of key federal agencies, and establish an integrated
strategy across the federal government to address space weather research and observational needs.
This legislation, appropriately, has strong bipartisan support. Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Cory
Gardner (R-Colo.) co-sponsored the Senate bill. In the House of Representatives, Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) is
working with eight co-sponsors on both sides of the aisle to advance the measure.

Our solar
forecasting capabilities at present are comparable to terrestrial weather prediction before the
Second World War when communities had little warning of incoming storm s. Since then, government agencies,
private companies, and university researchers have collaborated on landmark advances in weather prediction, which have saved countless
lives, fostered economic growth, and supported military operations.

We have now arrived at a pivotal moment in forecasting solar storms. At a time when society is more dependent than ever on advanced e-
based technologies, the PROSWIFT Act lays out a clear road map for bringing together expertise in government, the private sector, and
academia to forecast these damaging events. If
Congress and the administration successfully enact the legislation,
this predictive capability will provide a critical safeguard for America's economic competitiveness and
national security, and for the business and school technologies that we have all come to rely upon.

With just months remaining on the calendar of the current Congress, the House must provide the final
passage of this important legislation.

New CJR measures get bogged down in partisanship and inertia

Binder 6-8-2020, PhD, professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution (Sarah, “Congress can’t easily pass police reforms,” News Times,
https://www.newstimes.com/opinion/article/Congress-can-t-easily-pass-police-reforms-
15321834.php)//BB

Widespread national outrage over the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has renewed
public demand for Congress to address police misconduct and remedy racial injustice in the United States. New polls
show strong bipartisan support for police reform and sympathy for nonviolent protesters. What’s more, there are green shoots of
bipartisanship for some policing reforms, such as weakening the legal shield that protects police accused of misconduct and curtailing transfers
of excess military equipment to local police forces. Still, reformers
on Capitol Hill face a tough road , especially if and when
media attention to the protests wanes. Differences between and within the parties — coupled with the

underrepresentation of blacks in the Senate — raise barriers to legislative action. Even symbolic
measures that express outrage over Floyd’s death face a heavy slog. Media and public attention will probably wane The
news media have increasingly covered episodes of police misconduct in recent years. But even intense media focus — and public interest —
inevitably fades. Decades ago, economist Anthony Downs called this the “issue attention cycle”: A startling event — like police killing Michael
Brown, Eric Garner or George Floyd — provokes a surge in media attention and public demand for action. But when the difficulty of reform
becomes clear, reporters move on to the next big crisis and public interest wanes. Social issues that don’t directly harm most people are
especially prone to the cycle. That helps explain why coverage of past episodes of police misconduct against racial minorities usually dwindles
and Congress fails to act. True, a Republican-led Congress and President Donald Trump in 2018 enacted significant criminal justice reform that
addressed some racial disparities in sentencing, but that’s probably because conservatives — not street protesters — pushed Republicans to
act. The president could snuff out flickers of bipartisanship House Democrats are likely to move quickly this month; the Republican Senate,
probably not. The 53-member Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is working (so far largely remotely, given the coronavirus pandemic) on dozens
of measures to address police misconduct, racial inequities in local policing and the deep roots of racial discrimination. Democratic leaders have
yet to decide how they will advance the measures. One option would package the reforms into a single “messaging” bill to signal Democrats’
commitment to addressing these issues. Alternatively, leaders could bring a series of narrower bills to the floor, a tactic that would both force
Republicans to go on record multiple times for or against each reform but also give any wavering swing-district Democrats a chance to break
with more liberal colleagues. But opposition
from Trump would surely compel House Republicans to oppose the
Democrats’ measures, likely leaving the bills dead on arrival in the GOP-led Senate . True, there are glimmers of
GOP support for some measures, notably Sen. Tim Scott’s, R-S.C., push to create and fund a national registry of police misconduct. But absent
support from the president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is less likely to put issues of police and race
on the Senate floor, especially if measures divide Republicans into rival camps. And although some Republicans rebuked the president
for his administration’s use of force against peaceful protesters to clear space for a photo op, few GOP senators appear eager to legislate. Nor is
there currently much electoral pressure on the House or Senate Republican conferences to act: One-quarter of GOP voters report that race
relations will be a major factor in their vote this fall (compared with half of Democrats and a third of independents). Black voices are diminished
in the Senate Racial disparities between the two chambers also raise obstacles. House lawmakers formed the CBC in 1971 with just 13
members. Today, the racial makeup of the House reflects the proportion of blacks in the United States — roughly 13 percent. Lawmakers’ race
and ethnicity matters in how members represent their constituents, as evidenced by the CBC’s swift legislative efforts to address issues raised
by the killing of Floyd and other victims of police brutality. Not so in the Senate. Studies of Senate malapportionment typically emphasize the
overrepresentation of rural interests. And given the whiteness of rural states, black interests are decidedly unrepresented in the Senate. Just
one Republican and two Democrats are black. Racial
disparities in the Senate make it less likely that issues addressing
racial inequities will make it onto the Senate’s agenda , particularly when Republicans control the chamber.

That eats up valuable floor time that’s needed for the bill
Raju & Foran 6-16-2020 (Manu Raju and Clare Foran, CNN reporters Key Senate Republican pushes
back on GOP leaders: 'Bad decision' to wait a month on police reform, CNN,
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/policing-reform-congress-latest/index.html)//BB

Senior Senate Republicans signaled on Monday that the chamber may have to wait at least a month to take up
policing overhaul legislation -- a timeline that sparked criticism from Tim Scott, the GOP senator leading the effort amid
demands across the country for urgent action in the wake of episodes of police brutality. GOP leaders suggested that there is
little time for the Senate to take up the bill, given that other major priorities -- such as an annual defense
bill -- are bound to eat up precious floor time and since the policing bill has yet to be officially introduced, but they indicated
after meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that they might still seek a vote before the July 4 holiday.

PROSWIFT is critical to successful forecasting and mitigation of solar storms

Perlmutter 1-9 [Ed Perlmutter, U.S. Representative for Colorado's 7th congressional
district, citing Dr. Antonio Busalacchi, President of the University Corporation for
Atmospheric Research (UCAR), January 9, 2020. “Perlmutter’s Space Weather Bill Takes
Important Step Forward with Committee Passage.”
https://perlmutter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4774]
Washington, D.C. - U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter’s (CO-07) bipartisan legislation aimed at expanding the scientific
understanding and forecasting of space weather today passed the House Science, Space and Technology Committee on a
voice vote. H.R. 5260, the Promoting Research and Observations of Space Weather to Improve the Forecasting of Tomorrow ( PROSWIFT)
Act builds upon previous efforts to coordinate critical research and operational needs to improve our
understanding of space weather and better prepare for its impacts. “This issue first came to my attention over four years
ago from CU-Boulder’s Dr. Dan Baker who provided testimony about the dangers of space weather events on the electric grid. Space
weather can cause significant damage to our infrastructure and our economy, and we need to make
sure we are all working together to have the best research which informs the best modeling and
forecasting possible,” said Perlmutter. “I appreciate the support of Rep. Mo Brooks for his help pushing for this bipartisan legislation and
Chairwoman Johnson for her support and moving this bill forward.” Specifically, the bill helps break down barriers between
the research community and operational forecasters by encouraging sharing of information and
requirements to improve the pipeline of new observations, technologies, models, and forecasts, and
encourages consideration of new perspectives from the academic community, commercial space
weather sector, and space weather forecast end users. For the first time, the bill clearly delineates the roles and
responsibilities of the key federal agencies involved in space weather, including NOAA, NASA, NSF, DOD, FAA, Interior and OSTP. The bill
would also require the first ever space weather user survey to understand the needs of users of space weather products
and incorporate those needs into an integrated strategy across the federal government to address space
weather research and observational needs. In a letter of support for the PROSWIFT Act, Dr. Dan Baker, Director of the
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder stated, “…The call to increase our space weather
forecasting and mitigation capabilities was amplified by the National Academies Decadal Survey in Solar and Space Physics in 2012, and again
through the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Space Weather Action Plan that was released in October 2015. Through these calls, it
has become a national imperative to streamline the mechanisms designed to help develop and maintain a
forecasting system that not only help to predict space weather events, but to respond to them. We believe
the PROSWIFT Act will provide a collaborative framework for the federal government and its agencies to work
together alongside academic, international and commercial space communities to advance this critical undertaking.” Dr. Antonio
Busalacchi, President of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) also voiced support in a letter stating, “ HR 5260 will
enhance the integration of existing national efforts to understand, predict, prepare for, and mitigate space weather
and will strengthen economic and national security as a result. HR 5260 lays out a clear road map for the space weather
enterprise which consists of the public, private and academic sectors, and in so doing will enable better research to operations transitions that
will benefit all communities that rely on technology both on the ground and in space that can be affected by these sun-driven events.”

Severe space weather is inevitable and risks extinction though nuclear miscalc,
resource wars, economic collapse, grid failure, and pandemics
Loper 19 [Dr. Robert D. Loper, Ph.D. from the Air Force Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor of
Space Physics, Spring 2019. “Carrington-class Events as a Great Filter for Electronic Civilizations in the
Drake Equation.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ab028e/meta]
Eastwood et al. (2017), the National Academy of Sciences (2008), and the Royal Academy of Engineering (2013) outline the potential economic
impacts of severe space weather. In particular, major direct impacts from a Carrington-class CME could be outlined
as including the following. 1. Power grid failure due to destruction of large transformers by geomagnetically
induced currents. The large transformers in question here generally cost about $1 million per unit and require about 18
months to manufacture, ship, and install. The National Academy of Sciences (2008) report estimates such a power grid failure
would cost $1–2 trillion per year6 and last four to ten years. 2. Outages or failures of LEO (low Earth orbit) space
assets due to enhancement of the inner Van Allen belt. A severe solar storm can also cause ionospheric uplift which
can dramatically increase satellite drag (Tsurutani et al. 2012). Additionally, LEO spacecraft operation could be
disrupted by solar energetic protons (SEPs) generated in the shock of the CME passage through the solar wind (Royal Academy of
Engineering 2013). 3. Outages or failures of GEO (geosynchronous equatorial orbit) space assets due to enhancement of the outer
Van Allen belt or due to SEPs generated in the shock of the CME passage (Royal Academy of Engineering 2013). 4. GPS outages due to
GEO spacecraft outages or failures, or GPS degradation due to ionospheric uplift and enhancement, potentially lasting several days
or longer. 5. Communications outages due to high-frequency and ultrahigh-frequency radio blackouts, as
well as cellular communication network and internet collapse due to extended power outages beyond
the limits of generators and stored fuel. In particular, although optical fiber cables are the foundation of much of the global
communication network, electrical power is still needed to power optical repeaters and transmitters (Royal Academy of Engineering 2013). 6.
Increased radiation doses to astronauts and airline passengers (Royal Academy of Engineering 2013). This is more of a risk for long-haul airline
flights or manned spaceflight. Major
indirect effects could include, but are by no means limited to, the following: 1.
water and waste water shortages due to reduced or eliminated pumping from power grid failure; 2. fuel
shortages due to reduced or eliminated pumping from power grid failure, which could result in
transportation stoppages; 3. food shortages due to transportation stoppages, which could contribute to increased
death rates and incite rioting and/or looting; 4. reduced hospital care due to water shortages and power outages,
which could contribute to increased death rates and rates of infection; and 5. a years-long power grid
and internet degradation or outage might irrevocably damage the global economy, in turn greatly
prolonging the time to restore the power grid beyond the estimate of four to ten years . If one recalls major
disasters caused by terrestrial weather events like hurricanes Katrina (New Orleans, 2005) and Maria (Puerto Rico, 2017), one can imagine the
sorts of major effects on people and life in those areas. The most striking
difference is that, whereas humanitarian aid came to bear on
these disasters, a Carrington-class event would be a global catastrophe with little or no aid forthcoming.
Much greater loss of life could result, and our civilization could be driven back to a much more fractured and pre-electronic one. For the
purposes of another planet’s Drake equation, our
civilization would be eliminated from the calculation. Conversely, another
planet whose electronic civilization were struck by a Carrington-class CME would be eliminated from our calculation. Riley
(2012)
estimates the probability of another Carringtonclass event occuring within the following decade at
about 12%. This estimate preceded the solar storm of 2012, but a good rule of thumb would be to
estimate this to be the probability of having a Carrington event during any given solar cycle. Love (2012) and
Kataoka (2013) have calculated probabilities in rough agreement, but there are a wide range of probabilities in the literature, ranging from once
per 60 years (Tsubouchi & Omura 2007) to once per 500 years (Yermolaev et al. 2018). This work will retain the result of Riley (2012), which is
also used in National Academy of Sciences (2008) and Royal Academy of Engineering (2013). This roughly agrees with the “once in
a century” designation usually given to the Carrington event . Royal Academy of Engineering (2013) indicates that this
designator is not well understood given the relative lack of data, but also that there are several tens of Carrington-class CMEs every century
that either miss Earth or have lesser impact due to a northward orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field. As shown in Figure 1, such a
CME has a very wide angular extent (in the 2012 July event, the CME extended in about a 135° arc from the Sun), which could strike Earth in
three out of eight occurrences. There is also some indication that a
solar storm could trigger other Great Filter events.
Knipp et al. (2016) outlines a solar storm in 1967 May that nearly triggered a nuclear war, as American radar
operators initially mistook a solar storm for Soviet jamming. It might also be possible that a Carrington-class event
could unleash or exascerbate an infectious disease due to reduced hospital care at a critical time, resulting in
a pandemic.
 1NC
Dems will win the Senate now – but it’s not inevitable
Schoen 7-12-2020 (Doug, “Can Democrats dominate this fall?,” The Hill,
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/506976-can-democrats-dominate-this-fall)//BB

In several Senate races, Democratic challengers are favored to beat the Republican incumbents,
signaling an opportunity to flip Republican seats . Only one Democratic seat, Alabama, is a likely pickup
for the Republicans, while there are around five seats that Democrats have a chance to win in Maine,
Arizona, Montana, Colorado, and North Carolina . This is especially the case in Arizona, where coronavirus cases
have been skyrocketing and the hospitals have almost reached full capacity. Trump is trailing Biden by seven points in the state, according to a
recent New York Times survey, despite Trump winning Arizona by four points in 2016. In the Senate race, incumbent Republican Martha
McSally has fallen behind her Democratic challenger Mark Kelly by about seven points. In North Carolina, Democratic
challenger Cal Cunningham, a former state senator and lieutenant colonel with the United States Army Reserve, leads the
Republican incumbent Thom Tillis by nearly ten points, according to a survey by Public Policy Polling. In Montana, former
Democratic Governor Steve Bullock leads incumbent Republican Senator Steve Daines by four points, according
to a survey by University of Montana. Moreover, Democrats also have a significant edge in the House . They hold a
national generic ballot lead of eight points, as 50 percent of voters said they would support the Democratic candidate in their district, while
only 42 percent of voters said they would support the Republican candidate, according to a recent survey by Monmouth University. Given
their advantage, if the election were held today, it seems likely that Democrats would win the White
House and the Senate, while maintaining control of the House . But we are still months away from the
election, and it is entirely possible that the circumstances could change in the coming days. To be sure, both
parties have risk factors. Democrats may move even further to the left or be positioned that way by this fall.

The plan’s a political life-raft for incumbent Senate Republicans

Levine 7-1-2020, analyst @ Politico w/ John Bresnahan (Marianne, “Senate Republicans can’t catch a
break,” Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/01/senate-republicans-all-news-has-been-
bad-347178)//BB

The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers sparked a national outpouring of anger over
racism and police brutality, with protestors taking to the streets in numbers not seen since the Vietnam
War. Trump has responded to these events with a n harsh reaction that many Republicans disavowed, ordering the
violent clearing of Lafayette Park of peaceful demonstrators so he could take a photo op with a Bible. Trump has also tweeted and later deleted
a video with a supporter cheering “White power!” and repeatedly used a racist term to describe Covid-19, more troubling behavior that left
Republicans scrambling for cover. On top of that, a new scandal has emerged over alleged Russian bounties paid to the Taliban to
kill U.S. soldiers. The New York Times and Associated Press reported that Trump was aware of the allegations for months but took no action,
forcing Republicans to respond to yet another Trump-related uproar. “The optimist in me would say the odds of us getting a break in the future
are greater because we’ve had such a run of bad luck,” joked Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who served in the House GOP leadership when
Republicans there lost the majority in 2006. “I think it may very well work out that way.” This seemingly unending
barrage of bad
news has made what was already going to be a tough cycle for Senate Republicans even more difficult .
They’re in real danger of losing their six-year-old majority to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the
Democrats, who have gotten their favored candidates lined up in key races, including Arizona, Colorado,
North Carolina, Iowa and Kentucky. If something doesn’t change for Senate Republicans
soon, they could be facing real problems in November, according to political handicappers.
Flipping the Senate solves climate change
Cama, '19 (Timothy Cama covers politics and lobbying, with a focus on political campaigns, money in
politics, lobbying and influence at E&E News. He previously worked at The Hill covering energy and
environment policy, covered highway safety and environmental regulation at Transport Topics and
worked at numerous local newspapers. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and Simon’s
Rock and is a native of northeastern Pennsylvania, "CAMPAIGN 2020: 7 Senate races to watch on energy
and environment," E&E News, 12-20-2019, https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061847217, accessed 7-2-
2020, SShaf)

While the 2020 presidential race rages on, the year's Senate election cycle is shaping up to potentially shift
environmental, energy and climate change policy in a dramatic way. Democrats and their allies think they can
flip their current 47 seat minority into a majority, bringing them a giant step closer to passing major climate
change legislation. There are 45 Democrats in the Senate, but two independents caucus with the party. "[President] Trump and [Senate
Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.] are actively putting our health at risk, allowing more dirty pollution in our air and water,
and denying climate change, while the climate crisis is getting worse," said Pete Maysmith, senior vice president for campaigns at the
League of Conservation Voters. "The 2020 elections are our last best chance to combat the climate crisis , so we
both can and must get a new majority leader in there," he said. For the Republicans, 2020 is a year to defend
their majority, which has reinforced Trump's regulatory rollbacks while confirming administration officials
and judges. If a Democrat wins in the presidential race but Republicans keep the Senate, the GOP led by
McConnell would be a firewall against the House and president. Here are seven races that are key to seeing
how energy and environmental policy shakes out during the next decade. Alabama The Senate GOP's best shot at building on
its majority — or stopping the Democrats from taking the reins — in 2020 is in deep-red Alabama. A switch in the chamber's
control would mean McConnell, who has resisted allowing votes on climate change and other Democratic priorities,
would no longer set the agenda. Sen. Doug Jones (D), a former prosecutor, won an upset in a special 2017 election against
controversial Republican nominee Roy Moore. The seat opened up when Jeff Sessions (R) resigned to become Trump's attorney general. Now
Sessions, who was a vocal climate change skeptic in the Senate, wants his seat back. Moore is also running, as are Rep. Bradley Byrne, former
Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville and several other Republicans. There has not been much polling, but what's been done
shows Sessions with a big lead. In a poll released last week commissioned by his campaign, he had the most support, 44%, of GOP primary
voters. Tuberville was a distant second at 21%. Thus far, candidates in the primary have tried to make the race primarily about allegiance to
Trump and conservative values. "I was there for the Trump agenda every day, I was there, there's no doubt about it. I was the first Republican,
the first senator to endorse him," Sessions said on Fox News last month when he launched his campaign. Environmental groups and energy
interests are thus far taking a wait-and-see approach on the Alabama race. Jones has mostly toed the Democratic Party line — except in some
votes such as judicial nominees and confirming Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — so his allies are likely to jump in to help him if the race gets
close. 2016 presidential result: Trump 62.1%, Hillary Clinton 34.4% Last Senate race result: 2017 special election, Jones (D) 50%, Moore (R)
48.3% Arizona In the Grand Canyon State , retired astronaut Mark Kelly is the leading Democrat running for the seat held
by Sen. Martha McSally (R). McSally lost the 2018 race for Arizona's other seat to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D), but Gov. Doug Ducey (R) appointed
her to replace the late Sen. John McCain (R). She faces a special election on Election Day. Kelly
frequently speaks about the need
to fight climate change coming from the scientific perspective, linking it to his career as an engineer and
scientist. He's earned the backing of the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund and 314 Action, an organization that works to elect
scientists. "We've got to figure out a way to get from fossil fuels to more renewable energy. And I think we've got a decade or so to figure it out,
but we can't wait," he said in a recent appearance on ABC's "The View." He also spoke about how he could see the impacts of climate change
from multiple space shuttle missions, including deforestation from wildfires. Kelly's been leading on the money front, having raised nearly $4
million more than McSally. McSally was a top target for environmental groups in 2018, and she has continued to be a target in the Senate. For
example, weeks after being sworn into the Senate, the Environmental Defense Action Fund ran an ad criticizing her vote to confirm Andrew
Wheeler to be EPA administrator. "Martha McSally voted to put a former coal lobbyist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency, a coal
lobbyist who wants to undermine limits on mercury and other toxic chemicals that can hurt our kids," the ad said. McSally sits on the Energy
and Natural Resources Committee and has used that post to further her energy priorities. She is a co-sponsor of two bills to incentivize energy
storage and is the leading sponsor of a bill meant to streamline renewable energy permitting on federal land. She was the lead sponsor this year
of bipartisan legislation to authorize the Interior Department to implement drought contingency plans for the Colorado River. And she joined
Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the Energy Committee in voting to boost funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. 2016
presidential result: Trump 48.1%, Clinton 44.6% Last Senate race result: 2018, Sinema (D) 50%, McSally (R) 47.6% Colorado Colorado is, in
many ways, ground zero for energy and environment battles in the 2020 Senate race . Sen. Cory Gardner (R) won his
last race in 2014 in part on a clean energy message. On the one hand, he stood in front of a wind farm and argued he was a "new kind of
Republican" who supports action against climate change. But opponents say he hasn't lived up to his promises and has instead stood with
the GOP and Trump in backing environmental rollbacks and supporting the fossil fuel industry. To a degree, he
has embraced that label. He has been outspoken against the Green New Deal, labeling it "radical" and "socialist." He released an ad in
October presenting himself as an ally to the oil and natural gas industry who would push back against Democrats'
attempts to further regulate it. "Don't let the radical left destroy Colorado jobs," it declares. The leading contender in the Democratic
primary now is former Gov. John Hickenlooper. He entered the race in August after his moderate campaign for president failed to take off.
Hickenlooper is also a critic of the Green New Deal, saying aspects such as the job guarantee are unnecessary. He touts his history on the issue,
including negotiating with the oil and gas companies on methane standards as governor. The industry is a major presence in Colorado and key
to its economy. Andrew Romanoff, former speaker of Colorado's state House, has emerged as the chief progressive challenger to Hickenlooper.
He's embraced the Green New Deal and has released an ad on climate this week depicting a post-apocalyptic future in Colorado while
highlighting current climate impacts. "This is not the stuff of fiction, or some far-off threat," he says in the ad. "A catastrophe of our own
creation. A climate crisis that condemns our children to an ever-hotter planet." Romanoff earned a key endorsement in the race from the
Sunrise Movement. 2016 presidential result: Clinton 48.2%, Trump 43.3% Last Senate race result: 2016, Michael Bennet (D) 50%, Darryl Glenn
(R) 44.3% Maine One of the biggest Senate races of the year could come out of the Pine Tree State. Sen. Susan Collins (R), long an outspoken
moderate and advocate for climate change policy, is running for reelection in what would likely be her most competitive election fight yet. Her
leading opponent is Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon (D). Collins has long bucked the GOP on climate. She's been harshly critical of Trump's
actions, such as repealing the Clean Power Plan and exiting the Paris Agreement, and has been a leading sponsor on environmental legislation.
In the past, her position as a leading Republican on environmental issues has earned her the endorsement of groups such as the League of
Conservation Voters Action Fund. But in November, LCV abandoned Collins and got behind Gideon. If Gideon wins, it will likely come down to
Collins' numerous votes to confirm some of Trump's more controversial nominations, including Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Supreme
Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The Kavanaugh vote is particularly contentious because many activists believe he will be environmentally
destructive. "Protecting our environment and fighting climate change are some of the most pressing challenges we face," Gideon said in a
statement. Collins is making climate change and clean energy key parts of her campaign and her time in the Senate before the election. She was
the only Republican to sign a letter earlier this month to Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, saying that despite Trump's actions to exit the Paris Agreement, the United States is still committed to fighting climate. Collins
is also the lead GOP sponsor of legislation to extend a tax credit incentive for offshore wind energy. 2016 presidential result: Clinton 47.8%,
Trump 44.9% Last Senate race result: 2018, Angus King (I) 54.3%, Eric Brakey (R) 35.2%, Zak Ringelstein (D) 10.4% Massachusetts In the deep-
blue Bay State, Sen. Ed Markey's (D) main hurdle to a second full term is a primary challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D). Kennedy, at 39, is
much younger than the 73-year-old Markey. Kennedy has made a name for himself for loudly standing up for LGBT people, immigrants and
others, and comes from a well-known political family. Markey, meanwhile, is focusing his defense largely on his climate change activism. He
chaired the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming from 2007 to 2011 and played a major role in both the
successful Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and the unsuccessful American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Nowadays,
Markey is best known as the lead Senate sponsor of the Green New Deal. "We need a new agenda; that's what the Green New Deal is," Markey
said at a November forum with opponent Shannon Liss-Riordan that Kennedy declined to attend because he believed it should have been in
2020 and held in a minority neighborhood. "It's meant to create a political revolution in our country that will change the way in which people
view these issues," Markey said. Environmental groups have lined up behind the incumbent, including the Sunrise Movement and the League of
Conservation Voters. Kennedy has taken on some environmental justice battles in recent weeks, including fighting a proposed electricity
substation in East Boston and a natural gas compressor station in Weymouth. 2016 presidential result: Clinton 60%, Trump 32.8% Last Senate
race result: 2018, Elizabeth Warren (D) 60.3%, Geoff Diehl (R) 36.2% Michigan Sen. Gary Peters could be in the sleeper contest in the 2020
Senate cycle. Six years ago was a blowout year for the GOP, and Peters was the only new Democrat to win. He has been an ally for
environmentalists and said he supports "aspects" of the Green New Deal, though he hasn't signed on as a co-sponsor to the resolution.
That's enough for conservatives to slam him, though not enough for climate activists such as the Sunrise Movement, which organized a sit-in at
his Lansing office. The Restoration political action committee, a group backed by Illinois businessman Richard Uihlein, has already put nearly $1
million into efforts to unseat Peters, using disputed arguments about the Green New Deal. "Is it the 1.4 million fewer jobs you support, or the
part where we abolish gasoline cars, or airplanes, or red meat?" a voice-over says in a television ad the group produced, a question directed
toward Peters during a February forum. "How about the $40,000 extra it'll cost each family?" The incumbent was one of LCV's first
endorsements of the 2020 Senate cycle. John James, a businessman who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D) last year, is the
leading Republican candidate and has the National Republican Senatorial Committee's support. Bob Carr, another businessman, is also running.
2016 presidential result: Trump 47.5%, Clinton 47.3% Last Senate race result: 2018, Stabenow (D) 52.3%, James (R) 45.8% North Carolina
North Carolina is a swing state, so any attempt by Democrats to take the Senate majority likely runs
through the Tar Heel State. Sen. Thom Tillis (R) is running for a second term. Former state Sen. Cal Cunningham
has the support of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and LCV. State Sen. Erica Smith is also running. Thus
far, Tillis' main hurdle has appeared to be the GOP primary. While he has Trump's support, the state's Republicans have been skeptical about
him, and a crowd at a Trump rally in September booed when Tillis came to the stage. Tillis' leading rival for the nomination was businessman
Garland Tucker, but he dropped out this month. Rep. Mark Walker, a conservative Republican, also toyed with running against Tillis but decided
against it; Walker said Trump indicated he would support him in a 2022 Senate run. Beyond LCV's endorsement of Cunningham, energy and
environmental groups might jump more fully into the race once it ramps up. A September poll from left-leaning Public Policy Polling found he
had just a 33% approval rating and would lose to Cunningham by 2 percentage points. LCV's lawmaker scorecard gives him just 7%, and
environmental groups see climate as a major issue of interest in the coastal state with a big tourism
industry. "Taking on climate change is going to be a priority of mine because of the impact it's having right here in
North Carolina," Cunningham said in an ad earlier this year that highlighted increasingly severe hurricanes and other climate-linked
impacts in the state. The Trump administration's now-paused plan to allow offshore drilling along the entire Atlantic Coast was unpopular in
North Carolina, and Tillis' support for drilling and refusal to denounce the plan could also play into the race. 2016 presidential result: Trump
49.8%, Clinton 46.2% Last Senate race result: 2016, Richard Burr (R) 51.1%, Deborah Ross (D) 45.4%

Extinction – latest studies

Sprat and Dunlop 19 (David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, *Research Director for Breakthrough National
Centre for Climate Restoration and co-author of Climate Code Red: The case for emergency action;
**member of the Club of Rome AND formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive,
chairman of the Australian Coal Association, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company
Directors, and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading,
"Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach," Breakthrough National Centre for
Climate Restoration, 5-30-2019,
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_90dc2a2637f348edae45943a88da04d4.pdf, Date Accessed: 7-5-
2019, SB)

2050: By 2050, there is broad scientific acceptance that system tipping-points for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a
sea-ice-free Arctic summer were passed well before 1.5°C of warming, for the Greenland Ice Sheet well
before 2°C, and for widespread permafrost loss and large-scale Amazon drought and dieback by 2.5°C.
The “hothouse Earth” scenario has been realised , and Earth is headed for another degree or more of
warming, especially since human greenhouse emissions are still significant. While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by
2050, the increase may be 2–3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by
more than 25 metres. Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global
population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of
human survivability. The destabilisation of the Jet Stream has very significantly affected the intensity and
geographical distribution of the Asian and West African monsoons and, together with the further slowing
of the Gulf Stream, is impinging on life support systems in Europe. North America suffers from
devastating weather extremes including wildfires, heatwaves, drought and inundation. The summer
monsoons in China have failed, and water flows into the great rivers of Asia are severely reduced by the loss
of more than one-third of the Himalayan ice sheet. Glacial loss reaches 70 percent in the Andes, and
rainfall in Mexico and central America falls by half. Semi-permanent El Nino conditions prevail.
Aridification emerges over more than 30 percent of the world’s land surface. Desertification is severe in
southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the
south-western United States. Impacts: A number of ecosystems collapse, including coral reef systems, the Amazon
rainforest and in the Arctic. Some poorer nations and regions, which lack capacity to provide artificially-cooled environments
for their populations, become unviable. Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in
West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia, which together with land
degradation and rising sea levels contributes to 21 perhaps a billion people being displaced. Water
availability decreases sharply in the most affected regions at lower latitudes (dry tropics and subtropics), affecting about two
billion people worldwide. Agriculture becomes nonviable in the dry subtropics. Most regions in the world see a
significant drop in food production and increasing numbers of extreme weather events, including heat
waves, floods and storms. Food production is inadequate to feed the global population and food prices
skyrocket, as a consequence of a one-fifth decline in crop yields, a decline in the nutrition content of food
crops, a catastrophic decline in insect populations, desertification, monsoon failure and chronic water
shortages, and conditions too hot for human habitation in significant food-growing regions. The lower reaches of the
agriculturally-important river deltas such as the Mekong, Ganges and Nile are inundated, and significant sectors of some of the
world’s most populous cities — including Chennai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai,
Lagos, Bangkok and Manila — are abandoned. Some small islands become uninhabitable. Ten percent of
Bangladesh is inundated, displacing 15 million people. According to the Global Challenges Foundation’s Global Catastrophic
Risks 2018 report, even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated due to sea-
level rise, and In high-end scenarios “the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high
likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end”. 22
 CP
The Executive Branch of the United States should create a sub agency that implements
criminal justice reform in commander discretion of sexual assault in the United States
Executive has broad authority over military and can create new agencies to serve
certain purposes.
Constitution Annotated No Date – Constitution Annotated, No Date ("ArtII.S2.C1.1.2 Commander
in Chief Power: Doctrine and Practice," , Available
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artII_S2_C1_1_2/

While congressional compliance with the President’s demand rendered unnecessary an effort on his
part to amend the Price Control Act, there were other matters as to which he repeatedly took action
within the normal field of congressional powers , not only during the war, but in some instances prior to
it. Thus, in exercising both the powers which he claimed as Commander-in-Chief and those which
Congress conferred upon him to meet the emergency, Mr. Roosevelt employed new emergency
agencies, created by himself and responsible directly to him, rather than the established departments or
existing independent regulatory agencies.16

Constitutional Status of Presidential Agencies

The question of the legal status of the presidential agencies was dealt with judicially but once. This was
in the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Employers Group v.
National War Labor Board,17 which was a suit to annul and enjoin a directive order of the War Labor
Board. The Court refused the injunction on the ground that the time when the directive was issued any
action of the Board was informatory, at most advisory. In support of this view the Court quoted
approvingly a statement by the chairman of the Board itself: These orders are in reality mere
declarations of the equities of each industrial dispute , as determined by a tripartite body in which
industry, labor, and the public share equal responsibility; and the appeal of the Board is to the moral
obligation of employers and workers to abide by the nonstrike, no-lock-out agreement and . . . to carry
out the directives of the tribunal created under that agreement by the Commander in Chief.18 Nor, the
Court continued, had the later War Labor Disputes Act vested War Labor Board orders with any greater
authority, with the result that they were still judicially unenforceable and unreviewable. Following this
theory, the War Labor Board was not an office wielding power, but a purely advisory body, such as
Presidents have frequently created in the past without the aid or consent of Congress. Congress itself,
nevertheless, both in its appropriation acts and in other legislation, treated the presidential agencies as
in all respects offices.19
 1NC – T
Sentencing refers to the oral announcement of a sentence
US v Carpenter 9 (United States v. Carpenter, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 67775 (E.D. Va. Aug. 4, 2009),
https://definitions.uslegal.com/s/sentencing/)//BB

"Sentencing" is defined as the "oral announcement of the sentence." “Whether the court acts on its
own or on the suggestion of a party, the court may correct a clear sentencing error within seven days
after the imposition of sentence.”

Violation – the aff changes charges brought to court and administrative punishments
levied by military officers.

Vote neg to preserve limits and ground – anything else justiies changing any subset of
punishments in the US or the types of charges levied against specific individuals.
 OFF
The National Governors’ Association should inform the White House that state
cooperation with federal initiatives, will be contingent upon the United States barring
judges who adjudicate civil cases from sentencing criminals
The CP solves by forcing federal follow-on AND is an aggressive use of uncooperative
federalism
Heather Gerken 17, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School, JD from the University of
Michigan Law School, AB from Princeton University, and Joshua Resevz, JD from Yale Law School, BA in
Political Science from Yale University, now Civil Attorney with the Appellate Staff at the United States
Department of Justice, “Progressive Federalism: A User’s Guide”, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas,
Number 44, Spring 2017, https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/44/progressive-federalism-a-users-
guide/ [language modified]

Progressives have lost power in Washington. Every national institution now lies in the hands of the Republican Party. Given the
slim chances of Democrats’ winning back Congress in 2018, many think that the best progressives can do is hunker down
for the next four years, blocking legislation on the Hill and challenging it in court. It’s a depressing picture for those on the left. No one
wants to be a member of a party whose “victories” are all in the kill, whose only role in national politics is that of the gadfly.

But if progressives can simply look outside the Beltway, they will find that they still have access to one of
the most powerful weapons in politics: federalism. Using the power they wield in states and cities across the
country, progressives can do a good deal more than mourn and obstruct. They can resist Washington overreach,
shape national policies, and force the Republicans to compromise. Cities and states have long been at the
center of the fight over national values. And it’s time progressives recognized that federalism isn’t just for conservatives.

Unfortunately, the moment one mentions federalism many progressives stop listening. The language of “states’ rights” has an ugly history, invoked to shield slavery and Jim Crow. Federalism’s
checkered past led political scientist William H. Riker to remark in 1964 that “if one disapproves of racism, one should disapprove of federalism.” Even today, many progressives think of
federalism as a parochial anachronism, better suited for stymieing change than for effecting it.

But they are making a mistake. This is not your father’s federalism. These days, state and local governments are often led by dissenters and
racial minorities, the two groups progressives think have the most to fear from federalism. And this has allowed them to not only take
advantage of the enormous power that federalism confers within their own cities and states, but to affect
national debates, influence national policy, and force national actors to the bargaining table.
Their success shows that federalism is a neutral and powerful tool for change, not an intrinsically conservative quirk of U.S. government.

The call for progressive federalism is not a new one. In 2004, Duke law professor Ernie Young invited liberals to come to the “Dark Side” and embrace the power of the states. (And one of the
authors of this essay has spent more than a decade arguing—including in the pages of this journal— that federalism doesn’t have a political valence.) But having a Democrat in the White
House was just too tempting for most progressives. They turned their attention to Washington while neglecting what was going on in California, Massachusetts, or New York City. We suspect
that most progressives aren’t even aware that the Democrats have lost 27 state legislative chambers since 2008. But perhaps the 2016 election will help progressives shake loose the notion
that D.C. is the center of the political universe.

Needless to say, though, the

devil is in the details. So below we offer a “user’s guide” that identifies four ways that progressive
leaders—from Jerry Brown and Bill de Blasio to small-city mayors—can push back against federal policy and force
compromise. And, in doing so, we hope to persuade even the most fervent nationalist to become a fan of federalism. While we fashion
this as a progressive user’s guide, it could, in theory, work just as well for conservatives should they lose the presidency in 2020. That’s precisely
the point.

Types of Resistance

We often forget that the federal government’s administrative capacity is modest, relatively speaking. Excluding
the military, it employs just short of three million personnel. Its 2015 budget (excluding defense, Social Security, and mandatory spending
obligations) was less than $600 billion. Together, state and local governments [swamp] dwarf these figures,
with more than 14 million workers and a combined budget of more than $2.5 trillion.

Because of this, Washington can’t go it alone. When Congress makes a law, it often lacks the resources
to enforce it. Instead, it relies on states and localities to carry out its policies. Without those local
actors, the feds cannot enforce immigration law, implement environmental policy, build infrastructure,
or prosecute drug offenses. Changing policies in these areas—and many more—is possible only if cities
and states lend a hand. This arrangement creates opportunities for federal-state cooperation. But it also allows for
“uncooperative federalism”: State and local officials can use their leverage over the feds to shape
national policy.

This means that states can shape policy simply by refusing to partner with the federal government. This
form of resistance involves more than mere obstruction. It allows progressive states to help set the federal agenda by forcing
debates that conservatives would rather avoid and by creating incentives for compromise. When
states opt out of a federal program, it costs the federal government resources and political capital.
That’s why President Trump has a lot more incentive to compromise with Democrats in
Sacramento than with those on the Hill.

Uncooperative federalism solves warming.

Jean Galbraith 17, Assistant Professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School, JD from the
University of California-Berkeley School of Law, Order of the Coif, BA in Social Studies and the
Comparative Study of Religion from Harvard University, “Book Review: Cooperative and Uncooperative
Foreign Affairs Federalism, Foreign Affairs Federalism: The Myth of National Exclusivity”, Harvard Law
Review, 130 Harv. L. Rev. 2131, Lexis
D. Climate Policy

Mitigating climate change is a challenge for all levels of government -- international, national, state, and
local. As Glennon and Sloane note, some states and cities have embraced climate change mitigation measures (pp. 62-
63). In doing so, states have often coordinated with each other and with foreign counterparts in both practical and
[*2149] expressivist ways (pp. 62-63). California's efforts are exceptionally notable. State legislation requires sweeping
emissions reductions; California and Quebec have sought to integrate their cap-and-trade programs; and California
has spearheaded a coalition of state and local governments around the world who have committed to climate policy. California even sent a
large and high-profile delegation to the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris in 2015.

The issue of climate policy is a rebuttal to all three of the "myths" identified by Glennon and Sloane. It is self-evidently a matter of both
domestic and foreign affairs; states and local governments are acting in this space; and some states and local governments are doing so in
progressive ways. The actions of state and local governments in this space invite constitutional inquiry. Can
California constitutionally regulate carbon emissions, enter into a highly formalized agreement with Quebec and softer
agreements with other subnational governments, and send delegations to international negotiating conferences?

Yet focusing exclusively on these questions would lead to a highly incomplete sense of the legal scope of California's power to act. For although
Glennon and Sloane do not mention it, California is acting amidst a welter of federal laws, regulations, and other executive branch actions
applicable to climate change. In 2007, in a lawsuit brought by liberal states against the EPA, the Supreme Court held that the federal Clean Air
Act applies to greenhouse gas emissions. This Act explicitly delegates authority to California to pursue stronger emissions [*2150] measures
for new motor vehicles than are undertaken at the federal level and in general involves states in the Act's enforcement through cooperative
federalism.

During the Obama Administration, state and local government efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were not
only congruent with the aims of the Clean Air Act (as interpreted to apply to greenhouse gases), but also with the goals of the
executive branch. The EPA during the Obama Administration applauded and sought to facilitate state and local efforts. Its leading rule on
climate change mitigation measures, known as the Clean Power Plan, explicitly gave states substantial autonomy in crafting their own
approaches, although this rule is currently facing a court challenge brought by states that oppose federal efforts to regulate emissions. The
Obama White House expressed approval of the transnational coalitions that California and other state and local governments have joined in
seeking to address climate change.

All this positive reinforcement will presumably diminish or disappear under the Trump Administration. The Trump
Administration may even try to roll back climate change mitigation efforts by progressive states and cities, in
addition to undermining or reversing Obama era regulations and international commitments. If it does so, however, the
legal questions that such efforts would raise probably have fairly [*2151] little to do with the constitutional issues posed by traditional
foreign affairs federalism. Instead, they would center on administrative law -- around the interpretation of the Clean Air Act and the
laws and norms that govern regulatory practice -- as they had already come to do by the end of the George W. Bush
Administration.

***

These four illustrations are far from unique. Sometimes state and local government activity in relation to foreign affairs occurs
against a backdrop of federal inaction, as is the case with the incorporation of unratified human rights treaties into the municipal
law of progressive cities. But interaction is far more common, sometimes cooperative and sometimes full of
contestation. The executive branch approves of and provides some support for states and cities seeking to promote tourism or encourage
exports abroad. The federal government collaborates with states in determining U.S. international negotiating positions with respect to
insurance. In private international law, the federal government has shown strong interest in using state law rather than federal law to
implement certain treaties. And all levels of government deal with security -- both traditional and cyber -- and interact with each other over it.
To understand what is going on, we must focus on the political branches as much as (or even more than) the courts. And we must think not just
in terms of constitutional law, but also in terms of international law, administrative law, and state law.

[*2152] III. COOPERATIVE AND UNCOOPERATIVE FEDERALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

As foreign affairs federalism becomes increasingly interactive, how much will it resemble cooperative and uncooperative federalism in the
domestic context? At the very least, scholarship on cooperative and uncooperative federalism as a domestic matter, especially work focused on
the political branches, provides a valuable starting point for understanding foreign affairs federalism today. This scholarship offers
insights into how the federal government can incentivize state and local governments to help advance federal interests, how these
state and local governments can in turn influence and resist federal policy, and how Congress and the executive branch
can each use state and local action to build power at the expense of the other branch. These broad themes manifest themselves
in the foreign affairs context as well. Yet the foreign affairs context brings some additional complexities because of its ties to international
law and global governance and because it comes with stronger presidential powers. This leads to certain differences between
cooperative and uncooperative federalism in the realm of foreign affairs, in terms of both how practice proceeds and of
what doctrine should be.

A. Structural Implications

The interactions between the federal government and state and local governments in relation to foreign affairs mean that federal policy shapes
state and local policy. By providing assistance, financial and otherwise, to the sister-cities program, the federal government makes it easier for
cities to participate. By signaling its support for state "Buy American" laws, Congress encourages them -- and the Department of Transportation
incentivizes them even further by refusing to participate in contracts governed by state "Buy American" laws that are less strict than the federal
ones. In the context of immigration and climate change, the federal government incentivizes (and sometimes comes close to forcing) state and
local action in support of federal policy. All of these examples in the foreign affairs context reflect an "increasing concentration
of power at Washington in the instigation and supervision of local policies," just as cooperative federalism arrangements do in the
domestic context.

In work focused on the domestic context, Heather Gerken shows that the
interactive nature of modern federalism also
provides state and local governments with ways to influence federal policy. State and local actors exercise
"the power . . . of the servant," which offers the [*2153] chance "not just to complain about national
policy, but to help set it." In shaping federal policy, these actors are not simply employing the traditional tools of process
federalism; rather, it is their role in administering federal policy that gives them a say in the shape that this implementation will take. Yet the
scope of this role also limits what they can do: "power dynamics are fluid; minority rule is contingent, limited, and subject to reversal by the
national majority." In related work, Gerken and Jessica Bulman-Pozen elaborate on the ways in which state and local governments
can
engage in "uncooperative federalism," including by resisting federal policies that they are charged with
enforcing.

Building on the core insight that state and local governments can help shape federal policy through their roles in
implementing federal law, Bulman-Pozen further shows that these interactions can affect the distribution of
power between Congress and the executive branch. In a pair of articles, she describes the ways in which state and local activities can
strengthen the powers of one branch against the other. The more that Congress invites or effectively requires state and local participation in
the administration of a federal statutory regime, the more these actors can serve as checks on the executive branch's power to implement this
regime. On the flip side, such shared roles in implementing previously enacted statutory schemes can empower the executive branch and
subnational executive actors to work together in ways that crowd out the current Congress.

[*2154] Similar dynamics can occur with respect to foreign affairs federalism. Indeed, some of the examples that Gerken and Bulman-Pozen
focus on are issues that have transnational implications. With
regard to climate, for example, they show how states have used
the power of the servant to try to shape federal policy, including efforts by conservative states to push
back against the federal regulatory scheme and by progressive states to make it stronger. Bulman-Pozen also
uses climate as an example of how "federal and state executives negotiate without Congress" once a broad statutory scheme is in place. Some
payoffs for the foreign affairs context here are simply derivative: the
more that state and local governments enhance or reduce
federal efforts to mitigate climate change, then the more or less the United States does with respect to
addressing this global problem. But other implications relate specifically to how the United States engages internationally.
Continuing with the climate context, the extent to which President Obama could make commitments on behalf of the United States during the
negotiations for the 2015 Paris Agreement was largely limited by the scope of the Clean Air Act, since he had no realistic chance of getting new
congressional legislation that would advance his goals with respect to climate. But since California and other progressive state and local actors
were doing more than what the Clean Air Act required, President Obama could take this into account in setting the target to which the United
States was committing with respect to climate change mitigation. President Obama's option set was thus enhanced by state and local action in
the climate context.

Extinction
Dr. Yew-Kwang Ng 19, Winsemius Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technological University, Fellow
of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Member of Advisory Board at the Global Priorities
Institute at Oxford University, PhD in Economics from Sydney University, “Keynote: Global Extinction and
Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective Altruism”, Global Policy, Volume 10, Number 2, May 2019,
pp. 258–266

Catastrophic climate change

Though by no means certain, CCC causing global

extinction is possible due to interrelated factors of non-linearity,
cascading effects, positive feedbacks, multiplicative factors, critical thresholds and tipping points (e.g.
Barnosky and Hadly, 2016; Belaia et al., 2017; Buldyrev et al., 2010; Grainger, 2017; Hansen and Sato, 2012; IPCC 2014; Kareiva and Carranza,
2018; Osmond and Klausmeier, 2017; Rothman, 2017; Schuur et al., 2015; Sims and Finnoff, 2016; Van Aalst, 2006).7

A possibly imminent tipping point could be in the form of ‘an abrupt ice sheet collapse [that] could
cause a rapid sea level rise’ (Baum et al., 2011, p. 399). There are many avenues for positive feedback in global
warming, including:

• the replacement of an ice sea by a liquid ocean surface from melting reduces the reflection
and increases the absorption of sunlight, leading to faster warming;

• the drying of forests from warming increases forest fires and the release of more carbon; and
 • higher ocean temperatures may lead to the release of methane trapped under the ocean floor,
producing runaway global warming.

Though there are also avenues for negative feedback, the scientific consensus is for an overall net
positive feedback (Roe and Baker, 2007). Thus, the Global Challenges Foundation (2017, p. 25) concludes, ‘The world is
currently completely unprepared to envisage, and even less deal with, the consequences of CCC’.

The threat of sea-level rising from global warming is well known, but there are also other likely and
more imminent threats to the survivability of mankind and other living things. For example , Sherwood and
Huber (2010) emphasize the adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress from high environmental
wet-bulb temperature. They show that ‘even modest global warming could ... expose large fractions of the
[world] population to unprecedented heat stress’ p. 9552 and that with substantial global warming, ‘the area
of land rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level’ p. 9555, making
extinction much more likely and the relatively moderate damages estimated by most integrated assessment models unreliably low.

While imminent extinction is very unlikely and may not come for a long time even under business as usual, the main point is that
we cannot rule it out. Annan and Hargreaves (2011, pp. 434–435) may be right that there is ‘an upper 95 per cent
probability limit for S [temperature increase] ... to lie close to 4°C, and certainly well below 6°C’.
However, probabilities of 5 per cent, 0.5 per cent, 0.05 per cent or even 0.005 per cent of excessive
warming and the resulting extinction probabilities cannot be ruled out and are unacceptable. Even if
there is only a 1 per cent probability that there is a time bomb in the airplane, you probably want to
change your flight. Extinction of the whole world is more important to avoid by
literally a trillion times.
 1NC – DA: Elections
Biden wins, BUT it’s close AND tightening.
Levy 8/25 – Ariel Edwards-Levy, senior reporter and polling editor, citing Christopher Wlezien, Hogg
Professor of Government at the University of Texas, PhD from the University of Iowa. [How Well Can
Polls Predict Who’ll Win the Election? 8-25-20, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/2020-polls-predict-
election_n_5f453ff1c5b60c7ec416c6e8]//BPS

Polling on the 2020 presidential race has been pretty unambiguous: Joe Biden is ahead.
Throughout the year, the former vice president has consistently maintained a lead over President Donald Trump ― one that has appeared
more robust than Hillary Clinton’s polling lead in 2016. Since June, Biden’s average share of the polls nationally has hovered close to the 50%
mark, with Trump trailing in the low 40s.

Being ahead in the polls ― as gun-shy Democrats, indignant Republicans and hedging-prone pollsters all know ― isn’t
synonymous with “going on to win.” Surveys serve as snapshots of the state of a race, not predictions of the
final results.

Election polling, while not unerring, does generally correspond to the eventual outcome by this point of the
race. Most candidates leading at this stage of the campaign go on to win, especially when they’re facing off against an incumbent president.
The only incumbent since 1940 to pull out a win after lagging in early summer polls was Harry Truman, according to CNN.

“Historically, we know a lot of what’s going on by this point in time, but we don’t know everything,” said Christopher Wlezien, a University of
Texas at Austin political scientist.

Wlezien, along with co-author Robert Erikson, wrote “The Timeline of Presidential Elections,” a book that tracks the
increasing
predictive power of polling over the course of a campaign. In January of an election year, they found, polls are
almost meaningless as predictive tools. By mid-August, polls tell “about two-thirds or three-quarters of
the story of Election Day,” depending on the timing of the conventions.

The next few weeks will be a crucial test for the durability of Biden’s lead. Convention season is a volatile time in
the campaign cycle, carrying with it the potential for unusually bouncy poll numbers, either from temporary changes in sentiment or deeper,
more fundamental shifts in opinion. Polls rapidly start to become more predictive after those convention effects
settle, Wlezien said.
Democrats are understandably wary about getting their hopes up about November after what happened in 2016, when polls showed that
Clinton led over Trump. In that campaign cycle, surveys were reasonably accurate nationally, but struggled badly in battleground states. Many
pollsters have since implemented a number of reforms, including changes to how they weight polls for educational composition.

What pollsters can’t fix, of course, is the potential for public opinion to change over the course of a campaign, or for late-
deciding voters to break hard in the direction of one candidate, as happened four years ago. That leaves a different question: How likely is it
that we’ll see a shift in the remaining time before Election Day?

Fundamentally, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the precise level of volatility we should expect over the remainder of this year’s
campaign. There are good reasons to believe the polling now is more predictive than it has been in the past, but the
pandemic also throws in an unexpected level of uncertainty. Read on for a look at some of the factors at play.

Why This Year Could Be Less Volatile

Voters are deciding earlier. Traditionally, many Americans haven’t really started tuning into campaigns until autumn rolls around.
But, as the Voter Study Group’s Robert Griffin explained last year, polling in recent election cycles suggests that voters are making
up their minds earlier, and growing more likely to stick to the decisions they made. Those trends , should they
hold in this election, would mean that earlier surveys hold more predictive power than they did in past
election cycles.

The electorate may be more stable than it was even four years ago. Comparing recent national polls with those from
the summer of 2016, political analyst Kyle Kondik finds, there are now fewer voters who say they’re undecided or that they intend to support a
third-party candidate. That suggests there’s somewhat less room for the polls to shift in the same way.

The candidates are known quantities. Both Trump and Biden have experience on the national stage and near-universal name
recognition. And a majority of the electorate has strongly held opinions about each man. In one recent poll, 60% of voters said they felt strongly
one way or another about Biden, and 77% said the same of Trump. By comparison, at a similar point in 1988 ― an oft-cited example of a
candidate’s summertime lead evaporating ― only a third had strong feelings about Michael Dukakis, and just 28% reported feeling strongly
about George H.W. Bush.

Trump was, of course, well-known in 2016, too. But now he’s an incumbent president, in a race largely seen by voters as a referendum on his
performance. How likely is it that voters’ assessments of him will substantially change?

Throughout his presidency, Trump’s ratings have remained both unusually stable and, continuing a trend set by his predecessors, polarized to
an historic degree. Even in the midst of an economic collapse and a pandemic, and despite his poor marks for handling the latter, Trump’s
approval rating has remained within a roughly 7-point band. That suggests there’s limited potential for a complete overhaul in voters’ opinions,
although whether Trump’s at the bottom or top of that range probably makes some difference.

Early voting is increasingly common. A record share of American voters ― roughly three-quarters ― will
be eligible to vote by mail this year. With the pandemic looking unlikely to disappear anytime soon, this year could see an
unusually high proportion of voters casting ballots long before Election Day. Voting is set to start as early as
September.

A prolonged period of voting also may dampen the impact of a potential “October surprise” in the race.
Political campaigns’ effects on voters tend to be relatively short-lived. If voters are casting their ballot over a period
of weeks or months, any single event is primed to influence only the smaller group of people who happen to be voting immediately afterward.

Why This Year Could Be More Volatile

Close elections are more common than they used to be. As FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley notes, the 2016 election
marked the eighth consecutive presidential election to end with the popular vote winner ahead by only a single-digit margin, the longest stretch
since the Civil War. This is the flip side to the idea of entrenched, highly partisan voter preferences ― big, game-changing swings in the
campaign may now be less common, but even smaller shifts could be more likely to affect who actually wins.

Trump is desperately trying to portray himself as a CJR reformer – but that rings
hollow now because of no accomplishments beyond the FIRST STEP Act
Sullum 20 – Cornell graduate, senior editor at Reason and a nationally syndicated columnist. Sullum is
the author of two critically acclaimed books: Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004)
and For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health (Free Press, 1998).
(Jacob, “Trump Attacks Biden on Drug Policy From the Left,” Reason,
https://reason.com/2020/03/09/trump-attacks-biden-on-drug-policy-from-the-left/)//BB

As part of President Donald Trump's attempt to portray himself as a criminal justice reformer , his reelection
campaign last week attacked former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading contender for the Democratic nomination, for
supporting harsh drug policies that have "wreck[ed] countless lives" and endangered overdose victims by discouraging bystanders
from seeking help. It's an interesting gambit from a man who ran for president in 2016 on a "law and order"
platform borrowed from Richard Nixon. Whether it will amount to more than that seems doubtful at this point,
given Trump's silence on how he would reform drug policy or make the criminal justice system less
mindlessly punitive. "In addition to wrecking countless lives with the 1994 crime bill, during his time in the Senate, Biden's 'priority' was
legislation that policy experts agree made the opioid epidemic far more deadly," says a March 4 press release from the Trump campaign. "Biden
pioneered legislation that decreases the likelihood of people to call 911 if they witness a drug overdose and has even led to prosecutors filing
homicide charges against drug overdose victims' loved ones." The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which Biden was
still bragging about as recently as 2015, created 60 new capital offenses, increased drug penalties, provided $10 billion for prison construction,
and encouraged states to pass "truth in sentencing" laws that curtailed or eliminated parole. As Udi Ofer of the American Civil Liberties Union
puts it, "the 1994 Biden Crime Bill" (as Biden has proudly called it) marked "the moment when both parties, at a national level, fully embraced
the policies and political posturing that exacerbated the mass incarceration crisis we are trying to fix today." While the bill was not "the key
driver of mass incarceration," the Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer observes, "it certainly escalated the scale of its impact." And Biden also
played a leading role in earlier legislation that ramped up penalties for drug offenses, including the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984,
the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. Today, Biden has repudiated his longtime support for mandatory
minimum sentences, which he says should be abolished. He also wants to eliminate the irrational sentencing disparity between the smoked and
snorted forms of cocaine, which was created by the 1986 law and reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. And while continuing to resist the
repeal of federal marijuana prohibition, Biden does now call for decriminalizing cannabis consumption and automatically expunging "all prior
cannabis use convictions" (neither of which would have much of an impact at the federal level, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes
low-level marijuana cases). Although Trump touts his support for the FIRST STEP Act—a 2018 law that, among other
things, retroactively applied the shorter crack cocaine sentences approved in 2010—he has said nothing
about further steps beyond the relatively modest reforms included in that law . The Trump campaign's
charge that "Joe Biden made the opioid crisis worse" refers to a provision of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that prescribed a sentence of 20
years to life for drug distribution when it results in death. Like many anti-drug policies enacted in the 1980s and '90s, that provision ostensibly
was aimed at "kingpins" who make a fortune by selling drugs that kill people. But prosecutions for "drug-induced homicide" (mostly at the state
level) usually involve low-level dealers and acquaintances close to overdose victims, since those are the cases in which the causal link is easiest
to prove. And Trump is right that such cases can involve "homicide charges against drug overdose victims' loved ones." These prosecutions are
not only cruel and unjust; they are potentially deadly, since fear of homicide charges is a powerful deterrent to calling 911 when someone
overdoses. The Trump campaign backed up its charge against Biden by linking to a 2019 Politico story by Zachary Siegel, which also discusses
another harm-promoting policy backed by Biden. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act included a provision known as the "crack house statute," which
made it a felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, large fines, and property forfeiture, to "knowingly open or maintain any place for the
purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance," or to "manage or control any building, room, or enclosure" and
knowingly make it available for illegal drug use. Biden's Reducing Americans' Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, the essence of which was
included in the PROTECT Act of 2003, expanded that provision to cover temporary venues used for raves or other events where people
consume drugs. Critics of the RAVE Act pointed out that it discouraged harm-reducing measures such as allowing the distribution of pamphlets
with advice for minimizing MDMA risks or even providing bottled water, since such precautions could be cited as evidence that a rave organizer
knew attendees would be using drugs. Today federal prosecutors argue that the crack house statute makes it illegal to establish supervised
injection facilities where people can use drugs in a safe, medically monitored setting. Prohibiting such facilities, which operate legally in scores
of cities around the world, is arguably another way that "Joe Biden made the opioid crisis worse." But the president's re-election campaign is
silent on that point, presumably because the Trump administration is using the threat of criminal prosecution to block supervised consumption
sites. Trump also has "made the opioid crisis worse" by ham-handedly cracking down on prescription analgesics, a policy that has hurt bona fide
patients while driving nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that are far more dangerous because their potency is highly variable
and unpredictable. For his part, Biden threatens to prosecute employees of companies that make pain medication, although he is vague about
the legal basis for that. He also vows to "eliminate overprescribing of prescription opioids for pain" and "improve the effectiveness of and
access to alternative treatment for pain," which does not sound promising for people with chronic pain who have found that opioids are the
only treatment that makes their lives bearable. Trump has highlighted his use of clemency, and his administration reportedly is considering
reforms that could help reduce the huge backlog of applications for pardons and commutations. Biden promises to "use the president's
clemency power to secure the release of individuals facing unduly long sentences for certain non-violent and drug crimes." Citing the example
of Barack Obama, who issued more commutations than any president in history, Biden's campaign says he "will continue this tradition and
broadly use his clemency power for certain non-violent and drug crimes." Given
Biden's long history as a zealous drug
warrior, his recent conversion should be viewed with skepticism . But at least he has laid out specific
reforms he would pursue as president, while Trump has done nothing beyond bragging about his
accomplishments and sniping at Biden's.
Trump re-election permanently collapses US leadership---leads to global instability
and great power nuclear war
Wright 20 – PhD @ Georgetown, Senior Fellow @ Brookings, previously executive director of studies at the Chicago Council
on Global Affairs and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School for Public Policy (Thomas, “The Folly of
Retrenchment: Why America Can't Withdraw From the World,” Foreign Affairs, 99.2)//BB

For seven decades, U.S. grand strategy was characterized by a bipartisan consensus on the United States'
global role. Although successive administrations had major disagreements over the details, Democrats and Republicans alike backed a
system of alliances, the forward positioning of forces, a relatively open international economy, and, albeit
imperfectly, the principles of freedom, human rights, and democracy. Today, that consensus has broken down .

President Donald Trump has questioned the utility of the United States' alliances and its forward military

presence in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He has displayed little regard for a shared community of
free societies and is drawn to authoritarian leaders . So far, Trump's views are not shared by the vast
majority of leading Republicans. Almost all leading Democrats, for their part, are committed to the United
States' traditional role in Europe and Asia , if not in the Middle East. Trump has struggled to convert his worldview
into policy, and in many respects, his administration has increased U.S. military commitments . But if
Trump wins reelection, that could change quickly, as he would feel more empowered and Washington
would need to adjust to the reality that Americans had reconfirmed their support for a more inward-looking approach to world
affairs. At a private speech in November, according to press reports, John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, even predicted that Trump
could pull out of NATO in a second term. The receptiveness of the American people to Trump's "America first" rhetoric has revealed that
there is a market for a foreign policy in which the United States plays a smaller role in the world. Amid the shifting political winds, a growing chorus of

voices in the policy community, from the left and the right, is calling for a strategy of global retrenchment, whereby the United
States would withdraw its forces from around the world and reduce its security commitments. Leading scholars and policy experts, such as Barry Posen and Ian
Bremmer, have called on the United States to significantly reduce its role in Europe and Asia, including withdrawing from nato. In 2019, a new think tank, the Quincy
Institute for Responsible Statecraft, set up shop, with funding from the conservative Charles Koch Foundation and the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Its
mission, in its own words, is to advocate "a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint." Global
retrenchment is fast
emerging as the most coherent and readymade alternative to the United States' postwar strategy. Yet pursuing it would
be a grave mistake. By
dissolving U.S. alliances and ending the forward presence of U.S. forces, this strategy would destabilize
the regional security orders in Europe and Asia . It would also increase the risk of nuclear proliferation ,
empower right-wing nationalists in Europe, and aggravate the threat of major-power conflict. This is not
to say that U.S. strategy should never change. The United States has regularly increased and decreased
its presence around the world as threats have risen and ebbed. Even though Washington followed a strategy of containment throughout the Cold War, that
took various forms, which meant the difference between war and peace in Vietnam, between an arms race and arms control, and between détente and an all-out
attempt to defeat the Soviets. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States changed course again, expanding its alliances to include many countries that had
previously been part of the Warsaw Pact. Likewise, the United States will now have to do less in some areas and more in others as it shifts its focus from
counterterrorism and reform in the Middle East toward great-power competition with China and Russia. But
advocates of global retrenchment
are not so much proposing changes within a strategy as they are calling for the wholesale replacement of one that has been in place since
World War II. What the United States needs now is a careful pruning of its overseas commitments-not the

indiscriminate abandonment of a strategy that has served it well for decades . RETRENCHMENT REDUX Support for
retrenchment stems from the view that the United States has overextended itself in countries that have little bearing on its national interest. According to this
perspective, which is closely associated with the realist school of international relations, the United States is fundamentally secure thanks to its geography, nuclear
arsenal, and military advantage. Yet the country has nonetheless chosen to pursue a strategy of "liberal hegemony," using force in an unwise attempt to perpetuate
a liberal international order (one that, as evidenced by U.S. support for authoritarian regimes, is not so liberal, after all). Washington, the argument goes, has
distracted itself with costly overseas commitments and interventions that breed resentment and encourage free-riding abroad. Critics of the status quo argue that
the United States must take two steps to change its ways. The first is retrenchment itself: the action of withdrawing from many of the United States' existing
commitments, such as the ongoing military interventions in the Middle East and one-sided alliances in Europe and Asia. The second is restraint: the strategy of
defining U.S. interests narrowly, refusing to launch wars unless vital interests are directly threatened and Congress authorizes such action, compelling other nations
to take care of their own security, and relying more on diplomatic, economic, and political tools. In practice, this approach means ending U.S. military operations in
Afghanistan, withdrawing U.S. forces from the Middle East, relying on an over-the-horizon force that can uphold U.S. national interests, and no longer taking on
responsibility for the security of other states. As for alliances, Posen has argued that the United States should abandon the mutual-defense provision of nato,
replace the organization "with a new, more limited security cooperation agreement," and reduce U.S. commitments to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. On the
question of China, realists have split in recent years. Some, such as the scholar John Mearsheimer, contend that even as the United States retrenches elsewhere, in
Asia, it must contain the threat of China, whereas others, such as Posen, argue that nations in the region are perfectly capable of doing the job themselves. Since
Trump's election, some progressive foreign policy thinkers have joined the retrenchment camp. They diverge from other progressives, who advocate maintaining
the United States' current role. Like the realists, progressive retrenchers hold the view that the United States is safe because of its geography and the size of its
military. Where these progressives break from the realists, however, is on the question of what will happen if the United States pulls back. While the realists
favoring retrenchment have few illusions about the sort of regional competition that will break out in the absence of U.S. dominance, the progressives expect that
the world will become more peaceful and cooperative, because Washington can still manage tensions through diplomatic, economic, and political tools. The
immediate focus of the progressives is the so-called forever wars-U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the broader war on terrorism-as well as
the defense budget and overseas bases. Although the progressives have a less developed vision of how to implement retrenchment than the realists, they do
provide some guideposts. Stephen Wertheim, a co-founder of the Quincy Institute, has called for bringing home many of the U.S. soldiers serving abroad, "leaving
small forces to protect commercial sea lanes," as part of an effort to "deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every problem with a violent solution." He
argues that U.S. allies may believe that the United States has been inflating regional threats and thus conclude that they do not need to increase their conventional
or nuclear forces. Another progressive thinker, Peter Beinart, has argued that the United States should accept Chinese and Russian spheres of influence, a strategy
that would include abandoning Taiwan. IS LESS REALLY MORE? The realists and the progressives arguing for retrenchment differ in
their assumptions, logic, and intentions. The realists tend to be more pessimistic about the prospects for peace and frame their arguments in hardheaded terms,
whereas the progressives downplay the consequences of American withdrawal and make a moral case against the current grand strategy. But they share
a
common claim: that the United States would be better off if it dramatically reduced its global military
footprint and security commitments. This is a false promise, for a number of reasons. First, retrenchment
would worsen regional security competition in Europe and Asia . The realists recognize that the U.S. military presence in Europe
and Asia does dampen security competition, but they claim that it does so at too high a price-and one that, at any rate, should be paid by U.S. allies in the regions
themselves. Although pulling back would invite regional security competition, realist retrenchers admit, the United States could be safer in a more dangerous world
because regional rivals would check one another. This
is a perilous gambit, however, because regional conflicts often end up
implicating U.S. interests. They might thus end up drawing the United States back in after it has left-
resulting in a much more dangerous venture than heading off the conflict in the first place by staying .
Realist retrenchment reveals a hubris that the United States can control consequences and prevent crises from erupting into war. The progressives' view of regional
security is similarly flawed. These retrenchers reject the idea that regional security competition will intensify if the United States leaves. In fact, they

argue, U.S. alliances often promote competition , as in the Middle East, where U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
has emboldened those countries in their cold war with Iran. But this logic does not apply to Europe or Asia, where U.S. allies

have behaved responsibly. A U.S. pullback from those places is more likely to embolden the regional
powers. Since 2008, Russia has invaded two of its neighbors that are not members of nato, and if the Baltic states were no longer
protected by a U.S. security guarantee , it is conceivable that Russia would test the boundaries with gray-zone
warfare. In East Asia, a U.S. withdrawal would force Japan to increase its defense capabilities and change
its constitution to enable it to compete with China on its own, straining relations with South Korea . The
second problem with retrenchment involves nuclear proliferation . If the United States pulled out of NATO or ended its alliance
with Japan, as many realist advocates of retrenchment recommend, some of its allies, no longer protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, would be tempted to
acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Unlike the progressives for retrenchment, the realists are comfortable with that result, since they see deterrence as a
stabilizing force. Most Americans are not so sanguine, and rightly so. There
are good reasons to worry about nuclear
proliferation: nuclear materials could end up in the hands of terrorists, states with less experience might
be more prone to nuclear accidents, and nuclear powers in close proximity have shorter response times
and thus conflicts among them have a greater chance of spiraling into escalation. Third, retrenchment
would heighten nationalism and xenophobia . In Europe, a U.S. withdrawal would send the message that
every country must fend for itself. It would therefore empower the far-right groups already making this claim-such as the
Alternative for Germany, the League in Italy, and the National Front in France-while undermining the centrist democratic leaders there who told their populations
that they could rely on the United States and nato. As a result, Washington
would lose leverage over the domestic politics of
individual allies, particularly younger and more fragile democracies such as Poland . And since these nationalist
populist groups are almost always protectionist, retrenchment would damage U.S. economic interests, as well. Even more alarming, many of the right-wing
nationalists that retrenchment would empower have called for greater accommodation of China and Russia. A
fourth problem concerns
regional stability after global retrenchment. The most likely end state is a spheres-ofinfluence system,
whereby China and Russia dominate their neighbors, but such an order is inherently unstable . The lines of demarcation for such spheres tend
to be unclear, and there is no guarantee that China and Russia will not seek to move them outward over time. Moreover, the United States cannot simply grant
other major powers a sphere of influence-the countries that would fall into those realms have agency, too. If the United States ceded Taiwan to China, for example,
the Taiwanese people could say no. The current U.S. policy toward the country is working and may be sustainable. Withdrawing support from Taiwan against its will
would plunge cross-strait relations into chaos. The entire idea of letting regional powers have their own spheres of influence has an imperial air that is at odds with
modern principles of sovereignty and international law. A fifth problem with retrenchment is that it lacks domestic support. The American people may favor greater
burden sharing, but there is no evidence that they are onboard with a withdrawal from Europe and Asia. As a survey conducted in 2019 by the Chicago Council on
Global Affairs found, seven out of ten Americans believe that maintaining military superiority makes the United States safer, and almost three-quarters think that
alliances contribute to U.S. security. A 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation poll found that over 60 percent of Americans want to maintain or increase defense spending.
As it became apparent that China and Russia would benefit from this shift toward retrenchment, and as the United States' democratic allies objected to its
withdrawal, the domestic political backlash would grow. One result could be a prolonged foreign policy debate that would cause the United States to oscillate
between retrenchment and reengagement, creating uncertainty about its commitments and thus raising the risk of miscalculation by Washington, its allies, or its
rivals. Realist and progressive retrenchers like to argue that the architects of the United States' postwar foreign policy naively sought to remake the world in its
image. But the real revisionists are those who argue for retrenchment, a geopolitical experiment of unprecedented scale in modern history. If this camp were to
have its way, Europe
and Asia-two stable, peaceful, and prosperous regions that form the two main pillars of
the U.S.-led order-would be plunged into an era of uncertainty .
 Case
Circumvention: Trump uses broad pardon powers to pardon tried commanders;
incentive to do so.

Frame all their arguments through several filters:

1. Their evidence doesn’t assume the mechanics of debate, i.e. dropped
arguments are presumed to be true.
2. CP and turns case prove we access their framing and have an intent to solve for
structural violence.

Prefer consequentialist utilitarianism over intent-based ethics

Greene 2010 – Joshua, Associate Professor of Social science in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (The Secret Joke of
Kant’s Soul published in Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings, accessed:
www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/~lchang/material/Evolutionary/Developmental/Greene-KantSoul.pdf)

What turn-of-the-millennium science is telling us is that human moral judgment is not a pristine
rational enterprise, that our moral judgments are driven by a hodgepodge of emotional dispositions, which
themselves were shaped by a hodgepodge of evolutionary forces, both biological and cultural . Because
of this, it is exceedingly unlikely that there is any rationally coherent normative moral theory that can
accommodate our moral intuitions. Moreover, anyone who claims to have such a theory , or even part of one,
almost certainly doesn't. Instead, what that person probably has is a moral rationalization. It seems then, that we have somehow
crossed the infamous "is"-"ought" divide. How did this happen? Didn't Hume (Hume, 1978) and Moore (Moore, 1966) warn us against trying to
derive an "ought" from and "is?" How did we go from descriptive scientific theories concerning moral psychology to skepticism about a whole
class of normative moral theories? The answer is that we did not, as Hume and Moore anticipated, attempt to derive an "ought" from and "is."
That is, our method has been inductive rather than deductive. We have inferred on the basis of the available evidence that the phenomenon of
rationalist deontological philosophy is best explained as a rationalization of evolved emotional intuition (Harman, 1977). Missing the
Deontological Point I suspect that rationalist
deontologists will remain unmoved by the arguments presented
here. Instead, I suspect, they will insist that I have simply misunderstood what Kant and like-minded deontologists
are all about. Deontology, they will say, isn't about this intuition or that intuition . It's not defined by its normative
differences with consequentialism. Rather, deontology is about taking humanity seriously . Above all else, it's about respect
for persons. It's about treating others as fellow rational creatures rather than as mere objects, about acting for reasons rational beings can
share. And so on (Korsgaard, 1996a; Korsgaard, 1996b). This is, no doubt, how many deontologists see deontology. But
this insider's view, as I've suggested, may be misleading. The problem, more specifically, is that it defines
deontology in terms of values that are not distinctively deontological, though they may appear to be from the
inside. Consider the following analogy with religion. When one asks a religious person to explain the
essence of his religion, one often gets an answer like this: "It's about love , really. It's about looking out for other
people, looking beyond oneself. It's about community, being part of something larger than oneself." This sort of answer accurately
captures the phenomenology of many people's religion, but it's nevertheless inadequate for
distinguishing religion from other things. This is because many, if not most, non-religious people aspire to love deeply, look out
for other people, avoid self-absorption, have a sense of a community, and be connected to things larger than themselves. In other words,
secular humanists and atheists can assent to most of what many religious people think religion is all about. From a secular humanist's point of
view, in contrast, what's distinctive about religion is its commitment to the existence of supernatural entities as well as formal religious
institutions and doctrines. And they're right. These things really do distinguish religious from non-religious practices, though they may appear to
be secondary to many people operating from within a religious point of view. In the same way, I believe that most of the standard
deontological/Kantian self-characterizatons fail to distinguish deontology from other approaches to
ethics. (See also Kagan (Kagan, 1997, pp. 70-78.) on the difficulty of defining deontology.) It seems to me that consequentialists, as
much as anyone else, have respect for persons, are against treating people as mere objects, wish to act for
reasons that rational creatures can share, etc. A consequentialist respects other persons, and refrains
from treating them as mere objects, by counting every person's well-being in the decision-making
process. Likewise, a consequentialist attempts to act according to reasons that rational creatures can
share by acting according to principles that give equal weight to everyone's interests, i.e. that are
impartial. This is not to say that consequentialists and deontologists don't differ. They do. It's just that the real differences may not be what
deontologists often take them to be. What, then, distinguishes deontology from other kinds of moral thought? A good strategy for answering
this question is to start with concrete disagreements between deontologists and others (such as consequentialists) and then work backward in
search of deeper principles. This is what I've attempted to do with the trolley and footbridge cases, and other instances in which deontologists
and consequentialists disagree. If
you ask a deontologically-minded person why it's wrong to push someone in
front of speeding trolley in order to save five others, you will get characteristically deontological answers. Some
will be tautological: "Because it's murder!" Others will be more sophisticated: "The ends don't justify
the means." "You have to respect people's rights." But, as we know, these answers don't really explain anything,
because if you give the same people (on different occasions) the trolley case or the loop case (See above), they'll make
the opposite judgment, even though their initial explanation concerning the footbridge case applies equally well to one or both of
these cases. Talk about rights, respect for persons, and reasons we can share are natural attempts to
explain, in "cognitive" terms, what we feel when we find ourselves having emotionally driven intuitions
that are odds with the cold calculus of consequentialism . Although these explanations are inevitably incomplete, there
seems to be "something deeply right" about them because they give voice to powerful moral
emotions. But, as with many religious people's accounts of what's essential to religion, they don't really
explain what's distinctive about the philosophy in question.

Extinction outweighs – any risk is a reason to err neg

Seth D. Baum and Anthony M. Barrett 18. Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. 2018. “Global Catastrophes: The Most Extreme Risks.”
Risk in Extreme Environments: Preparing, Avoiding, Mitigating, and Managing, edited by Vicki Bier, Routledge, pp. 174–184.

2. What Is GCR And Why Is It Important? Taken

literally, a global catastrophe can be any event that is in some way
catastrophic across the globe. This suggests a rather low threshold for what counts as a global catastrophe. An event causing
just one death on each continent (say, from a jet-setting assassin) could rate as a global catastrophe, because surely these deaths would be catastrophic for the
deceased and their loved ones. However, in common usage, a global catastrophe would be catastrophic for a
significant portion of the globe. Minimum thresholds have variously been set around ten thousand to ten million deaths or $10 billion to $10
trillion in damages (Bostrom and Ćirković 2008), or death of one quarter of the human population (Atkinson 1999; Hempsell 2004). Others have

emphasized catastrophes that cause long-term declines in the trajectory of human civilization (Beckstead
2013), that human civilization does not recover from (Maher and Baum 2013), that drastically reduce humanity’s

potential for future achievements (Bostrom 2002, using the term “existential risk”), or that result in human
extinction (Matheny 2007; Posner 2004). A common theme across all these treatments of GCR is that some
catastrophes are vastly more important than others. Carl Sagan was perhaps the first to recognize this, in his commentary on nuclear
winter (Sagan 1983). Without nuclear winter, a global nuclear war might kill several hundred million people.

This is obviously a major catastrophe, but humanity would presumably carry on. However, with nuclear
winter, per Sagan, humanity could go extinct. The loss would be not just an additional four billion or so
deaths, but the loss of all future generations. To paraphrase Sagan, the loss would be billions and billions of
lives, or even more. Sagan estimated 500 trillion lives, assuming humanity would continue for ten
million more years, which he cited as typical for a successful species. Sagan’s 500 trillion number may
even be an underestimate. The analysis here takes an adventurous turn, hinging on the evolution of the human species and the long-term fate of the
universe. On these long time scales, the descendants of contemporary humans may no longer be recognizably “human”. The issue then is whether the descendants
are still worth caring about, whatever they are. If they are, then it begs the question of how many of them there will be. Barring major global catastrophe, Earth will
remain habitable for about one billion more years 2 until the Sun gets too warm and large. The rest of the Solar System, Milky Way galaxy, universe, and (if it exists)
the multiverse will remain habitable for a lot longer than that (Adams and Laughlin 1997), should our descendants gain the capacity to migrate there. An
open
question in astronomy is whether it is possible for the descendants of humanity to continue living for an
infinite length of time or instead merely an astronomically large but finite length of time (see e.g. Ćirković 2002;
Kaku 2005). Either way, the stakes with global catastrophes could be much larger than the loss of 500 trillion

lives. Debates about the infinite vs. the merely astronomical are of theoretical interest (Ng 1991; Bossert et al.
2007), but they have limited practical significance. This can be seen when evaluating GCRs from a

standard risk-equals-probability-times-magnitude framework. Using Sagan’s 500 trillion lives estimate,

it follows that reducing the probability of global catastrophe by a mere one-in-500-trillion chance is of
the same significance as saving one human life. Phrased differently, society should try 500 trillion times
harder to prevent a global catastrophe than it should to save a person’s life. Or, preventing one million
deaths is equivalent to a one-in500-million reduction in the probability of global catastrophe. This
suggests society should make extremely large investment in GCR reduction, at the expense of virtually
all other objectives. Judge and legal scholar Richard Posner made a similar point in monetary terms (Posner 2004). Posner used $50,000 as the value of
a statistical human life (VSL) and 12 billion humans as the total loss of life (double the 2004 world population); he describes both figures as significant
underestimates. Multiplying them gives $600 trillion as an underestimate of the value of preventing global catastrophe. For comparison, the United States
government typically uses a VSL of around one to ten million dollars (Robinson 2007). Multiplying a $10 million VSL with 500 trillion lives gives $5x1021 as the value
of preventing global catastrophe. But even using “just" $600 trillion, society
should be willing to spend at least that much to prevent a global
catastrophe, which converts to being willing to spend at least $1
million for a one-in-500-million reduction in the probability of
global catastrophe. Thus while reasonable disagreement exists on how large of a VSL to use and how much
to count future generations, even low-end positions suggest vast resource allocations should be
redirected to reducing GCR. This conclusion is only strengthened when considering the astronomical
size of the stakes, but the same point holds either way. The bottom line is that, as long as something along the lines of the
standard riskequals-probability-times-magnitude framework is being used, then even tiny GCR
reductions merit significant effort. This point holds especially strongly for risks of catastrophes that
would cause permanent harm to global human civilization. The discussion thus far has assumed that all
human lives are valued equally. This assumption is not universally held. People often value some people
more than others, favoring themselves, their family and friends, their compatriots, their generation, or others whom they identify with. Great
debates rage on across moral philosophy, economics, and other fields about how much people should
value others who are distant in space, time, or social relation, as well as the unborn members of future generations. This debate is crucial for all
valuations of risk, including GCR. Indeed, if each of us only cares about our immediate selves, then global catastrophes may not be especially important, and we
probably have better things to do with our time than worry about them. While everyone has the right to their own views and
feelings, we find that the strongest arguments are for the widely held position that all human lives should
be valued equally. This position is succinctly stated in the United States Declaration of Independence, updated in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and 3 women are created equal”. Philosophers speak of an agent-neutral,

objective “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) or a “veil of ignorance” (Rawls 1971) in which each person considers
what is best for society irrespective of which member of society they happen to be. Such a perspective
suggests valuing everyone equally, regardless of who they are or where or when they live. This in turn
suggests a very high value for reducing GCR, or a high degree of priority for GCR reduction efforts.
Don’t prioritize probability – weigh impacts using expected value – magnitude times
probability is best
Harris & Bender 17 (John, Politico editor-in-chief, & Bryan, Politico national security editor. "Bill
Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?". Interview with Bill Perry, mathematician, engineer, businessman
and former Secretary of Defense. Currently the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) at
Stanford University, with a joint appointment at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
and the School of Engineering. He is also a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He
serves as director of the Preventive Defense Project. He is an expert in U.S. foreign policy, national
security and arms control. In 2013 he founded the William J Perry Project
(http://www.wjperryproject.org/), a non-profit effort to educate the public on the current dangers of
nuclear weapons. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/william-perry-nuclear-weapons-
proliferation-214604)

Perry wishes more people were familiar with the concept of “expected value.” That is a statistical way
of understanding events of very large magnitude that have a low probability. The large magnitude
event could be something good, like winning a lottery ticket. Or it could be something bad, like a nuclear
bomb exploding. Because the odds of winning the lottery are so low, the rational thing is to save your
money and not buy the ticket. As for a nuclear explosion, by Perry’s lights, the consequences are so
grave that the rational thing would be for people in the United States and everywhere to be in a state of
peak alarm about their vulnerability, and for political debate to be dominated by discussion of how to
reduce the risk. And just how high is the risk? The answer of course is ultimately unknowable. Perry’s
point, though, is that it’s a hell of a lot higher than you think. Perry invites his listeners to consider all the
various scenarios that might lead to a nuclear event. “Mathematically speaking, you add those all
together in one year it is still just a possibility, not a probability,” he reckons. “But then you go out ten,
twenty years and each time this possibility repeats itself, and then it starts to become a probability. How
much time we have to get those possibility numbers lower, I don’t know. But sooner or later the odds
are going to get us, I am afraid.” *** Almost uniquely among living Americans, Bill Perry has actually faced down the prospect of
nuclear war before—twice. In the fall of 1962, Bill Perry was 35, father of five young children, living in the Bay Area and serving as director of
Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories—driving his station wagon to recitals in between studying missile trajectories and the radius of
nuclear detonations. Where he resided was not then called Silicon Valley, but the exuberance and spirit of creative possibility we now associate
with the region was already evident. The giants then were Bill Hewlett and David Packard, men Perry deeply admired and wished to emulate in
his own business career. The innovation engine at that time, however, was not consumer technology; it was the government’s appetite for
advantage in a mortal struggle against a powerful Soviet foe. Perry was known as a star in the highly complex field of weapons surveillance and
interpretation. So it was not a surprise, one bright October day, for Perry to get a call from Albert “Bud” Wheelon, a friend at the Central
Intelligence Agency. Wheelon said he wanted Perry in Washington for a consultation. Perry said he’d juggle his schedule and be there the next
week. “No,” Wheelon responded. “I need to see you right away.” Perry caught the red-eye from San Francisco, and went straight to the CIA,
where he was handed photographs whose meaning was instantly clear to him. They were of Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba. For the next
couple weeks, Perry would stay up past midnight each evening poring over the latest reconnaissance photos and help write the analysis that
senior officials would present the next morning to President Kennedy. Perry experienced the crisis partly as ordinary citizen, hearing Kennedy
on television draw an unambiguous line against Soviet missiles in this hemisphere and promising that any attack would be met with “a full
retaliatory response.” But he possessed context, about the capabilities of weapons and the daily state of play in the crisis, that gave him a
vantage point superior to that of all but perhaps a few dozen people. “I was part of a small team—six or eight people,” he recounted of those
days 54 years earlier. “Half of them technical experts, half of them intelligence analysts, or photo interpreters. It was a minor role but I was
seeing all the information coming in. I thought every day when I went back to the hotel it was the last day of my life because I knew exactly
what nuclear weapons could do. I knew it was not just a lot of people getting killed. It was the end of civilization and I thought it was about to
happen.” It was years later that Perry, like other more senior participants in the crisis, learned how right that appraisal was. Nuclear bombs
weren’t only heading toward Cuba on Soviet ships, as Kennedy believed and announced to Americans at the time. Some of them were already
there, and local commanders had been given authority to use them if Americans launched a preemptive raid on Cuba, as Kennedy was being
urged, goaded even, by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay and other military commanders. At the same time, Soviet submarines were armed and one
commander had been on the verge of launching them until other officers on the vessel talked him out of it. Either event would have in turn sent
U.S. missiles flying. The Cuban Missile Crisis recounting is one of the dramatic peaks in “My Journey on the Nuclear Brink,” the memoir Perry
published last fall. It is a book laced with other close calls—like November 9, 1979, when Perry was awakened in the middle of the night by a
watch officer at the North American Aerospace and Defense Command (NORAD) reporting that his computers showed 200 Soviet missiles in
flight toward the United States. For a frozen moment, Perry thought: This is it—This is how it ends. The watch officer soon set him at ease. It
was a computer error, and he was calling to see whether Perry, the technology expert, had any explanation. It took a couple days to discover
the low-tech answer: Someone had carelessly left a crisis-simulation training tape in the computer. All was well. But what if this blunder had
happened in the middle of a real crisis, with leaders in Washington and Moscow already on high alert? The inescapable conclusion was the
same as it was in 1962: The world skirting nuclear Armageddon as much by good luck as by skilled crisis
management. Perry is part of a distinct cohort in American history, one that didn’t come home with the large-living ethos of the World
War II generation, but took responsibility for cleaning up the world that the war bequeathed. He was a 14-year-old in Butler, Pennsylvania
when he heard the news of the Pearl Harbor attack in a friend’s living room, and had the disappointed realization that the war might be over by
the time he was old enough to fight in it. That turned out to be true—he was just shy of 18 at war’s end—a fact that places Perry in what
demographers have called the “Silent Generation,” too young for one war but already middle-aged by the time college campuses erupted over
Vietnam. Like many in his generation, Perry was not so much silent as deeply dutiful, with an understated style that served as a genial, dry-
witted exterior to a life in which success was defined by how faithfully one met his responsibilities. Perry said he became aware, first gradually
and over time profoundly, of the surreal contradictions of his professional life. His work—first at Sylvania and then at ESL, a highly successful
defense contracting firm he co-founded in 1963—was relentlessly logical, analyzing Soviet threats and intentions and coming up with rational
responses to deter them. But each rational move was part of a supremely irrational dynamic—“mutually assured destruction”—that placed the
threat of massive casualties at the heart of America’s basic strategic thinking. It was the kind of framework in which policymakers could accept
that a mere 25 million people dead was good news. Also the kind that in one year alone led the United States to produce 8,000 nuclear bombs.
By the end, the Cold War left the planet with about 70,000 bombs (a total that is now down to about 15,500). “I think probably everybody who
was involved in nuclear weapons in those days would see the two sides of it,” Perry recalls, “the logic of deterrence and the madness of
deterrence, and there was no mistake, I think, that the acronym was MAD.” *** Perry has been at the forefront of a movement that he
considers the sane and only alternative, and he has joined forces with other leading Cold Warriors who in another era would likely have derided
their vision as naïve. In January 2007, he was a co-author of a remarkable commentary that ran on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It
was signed also by two former secretaries of state, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger and by Sam Nunn, a former chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee—all leading military hawks and foreign policy realists who came together to argue for something radical: that the
goal of U.S. policy should be not merely the reduction and control of atomic arms, it should be the ultimate elimination of
all nuclear weapons. This sounded like gauzy utopianism, especially bizarre coming from supremely pragmatic men. But Perry and the
others always made clear they were describing a long-term ideal, one that would only be achieved through a series of more incremental steps.
The vision was stirring enough that it was endorsed by President Obama in his opening weeks in office, in a March 2009 address in Prague. In
retrospect, Obama’s speech may have been the high point for the vision of abolition. “A huge amount of progress was made,” recalled Shultz,
now 93. “Nowit is going in the other direction.” “We have less danger of an all-out war with Russia,” in Nunn’s view. “But we
have more danger of some type of accident, miscalculation, cyber interference, a terrorist group getting
a nuclear weapon. It requires a lot more attention than world leaders are giving it. ” Perry’s goal now is much
more defensive than it was just a few years ago—halting what has become inexorable momentum toward reviving Cold War assumptions about
the central role of nukes in national security. More recently he’s added yet another recruit to his cause: California Governor Jerry Brown.
Brown, now 78, met Perry a year ago, after deciding that he wanted to devote his remaining time in public service mainly to what he sees as
civilization’s two existential issues, climate change and nuclear weapons. Brown said he became fixated on spreading Perry’s message after
reading his memoir: He recently gave a copy to President Obama and is trying to bend the ear of others with influence in Washington. If Bill
Perry has a gift for understatement, Brown has a gift for the theatrical. In an interview at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, he wonders
why everyone is not paying attention to his new friend and his warnings for mankind. “He is at the brink! At the brink! Not WAS at the brink—IS
at the brink,” Brown exclaimed. “But no one else is.” A California governor can have more influence, at least indirectly, than one might think,
due to the state’s outsized role in policy debates and the fact that the University of California’s Board of Regents helps manage some of the
nation’s top weapons laboratories, which study and design nuclear weapons. Brown, who was a vocal critic in the 1980s of what he called
America's "nuclear addiction," reviewed Perry's recent memoir in the New York Review of Books, and said he is determined to help his new
friend spread his message. “Everybody is, 'we are not at the brink,' and we have this guy Perry who says we are. It is the thesis that is being
ignored." Even if more influential people wake up to Perry’s message—a nuclear event is more likely and will be more terrible than you realize
—a hard questions remains: Now what? This is where Perry’s pragmatism comes back into play. The smartest move, he thinks, is to eliminate
the riskiest part of the system. If we can’t eliminate all nukes, Perry argues, we could at least eliminate one leg of the so-called nuclear triad,
intercontinental ballistic missiles. These are especially prone to an accidental nuclear war, if they are launched by accident or due to
miscalculation by a leader operating with only minutes to spare. Nuclear weapons carried by submarines beneath the sea or aboard bomber
planes, he argues, are logically more than enough to deter Russia. The problem, he knows, is that logic is not necessarily the prevailing force in
political debates. Psychology is, and this seems to be dictating not merely that we deter a Russian military force that is modernizing its weapons
but that we have a force that is self-evidently superior to them. It is an argument that strikes Perry as drearily familiar to the old days. Which
leads him the conclusion that the only long-term way out is to persuade a younger generation to make a
different choice. His granddaughter, Lisa Perry, is precisely in the cohort he needs to reach. At first she had some uncomfortable news for
her grandfather: Not many in her generation thought much about the issue . “The more I learned from him about
nuclear weapons the more concerned I was that my generation had this massive and dangerous blind
spot in our understanding of the world,” she said in an interview. “Nuclear weapons are the biggest
public health issue I can think of .” But she has not lost hope that their efforts can make a difference, and today she has put her
graduate studies in public health on hold to work full time for the Perry Project as its social media and web manager. “ It can be easy to
get discouraged about being able to do anything to change our course,” she said. “But the good news is
that nuclear weapons are actually something that we as humans can control...but first we need to start
the conversation.” It was with her help that Perry went on Reddit to field questions ranging from how his PhD in mathematics prepared
him to what young people need to understand. “As a 90s baby I never lived in the Cold War era,” wrote one participant, with the Reddit
username BobinForApples. “What is one thing today's generations will never understand about life during the Cold War?” Perry’s answered, as
SecDef19: “Because you were born
in the 1990s, you did not experience the daily terror of ‘duck and cover’ drills as my children did.
Therefore the
appropriate fear of nuclear weapons is not part of your heritage, but the danger is just as
real now as it was then. It will be up to your generation to develop the policies to deal with the deadly
nuclear legacy that is still very much with us. ” For the former defense secretary, the task now is to finally—belatedly—prove
Einstein wrong. The physicist said in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus
drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” In Perry’s view the only way to avoid it is by directly contemplating catastrophe
—and doing so face to face with the world’s largest nuclear power, Russia, as he recently did in a forum in Luxembourg with several like-minded
Russians he says are brave enough to speak out about nuclear dangers in the era of Putin. “We
could solve it,” he said. “When
you’re a prophet of doom, what keeps you going is not just prophesizing doom but saying there are
things we do to avoid that doom. That’s where the optimism is. ”

We also access their framing through turns case and CPs which proves we also have
intentions of resolving structural violence