COVID Relief DA

1NC—COVID
Republicans will pass COVID relief in July—McConnell’ PC is key!
Carney, 6/10 (Jordain, The Hill, “Republicans prepare to punt on next COVID-19 relief bill,”
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/501962-republicans-prepare-to-punt-on-next-covid-19-relief-bill)

Bolstered by last week’s unexpectedly positive jobs report, Senate Republicans are signaling they will
not pass another bill before late July. They have also flatly rejected the $3 trillion price tag of the bill
passed last month by House Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) indicated to GOP colleagues during a closed-door policy
lunch on Tuesday that he does not anticipate the chamber will take up another coronavirus relief
package before leaving for a two-week July 4 recess, according to senators in the meeting.
Instead, McConnell told Republicans he viewed the next work period — which runs from July 20 to Aug.
7 — as the time to take up and pass a bill, setting up a crucial three-week window.
“That seemed like a pretty wise strategy,” said Sen.  John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 Republican senator,
“and we’ll have a better sense for what we’ll need to do probably a few weeks down the road.”

Justice reform costs McConnell political capital

Sarah Binder 6-5-20 -- a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institution, “Congress can’t easily pass police reforms. Here’s why.” The
Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/05/congress-cant-easily-pass-
police-reforms-heres-why/

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 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.

Follow-up aid is key to stop another recession

Henney 6-9-2020 - reporter for FOX Business
Megan, Odds of another recession this year 'pretty high' if Congress doesn't pass more aid: Zandi, Fox
Business, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/second-recession-odds-congress-aid-mark-zandi

The U.S. could slide into a second coronavirus-induced recession this year if the federal government
does not pass additional economic relief measures , according to Moody's chief economist Mark Zandi.
"Policymakers have done a good job, I think to date, but they've got more work to do," Zandi said Tuesday during an
interview with FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo. "I don't think they can sit back and say, 'Oh, the recovery is now
underway and we don't have to do anything more.' If they don't, the odds of going back into a recession
this year are pretty high." So far, Congress has passed three massive stimulus packages totaling nearly $3 trillion to blunt the economic
pain from the virus outbreak. Both parties have indicated they're open to additional aid -- House Democrats passed a $3
trillion aid bill in May, though Senate Republicans declared it dead on arrival -- but remain divided about specific measures should be included.
Some options currently under consideration at the White House include a payroll tax cut, liability protections for businesses reopening during
the outbreak, tax deductions or write-offs for individuals who take a vacation during a defined period of time, and a back-to-work bonus for
unemployed Americans returning to their jobs. "The aggressiveness here was astounding, unprecedented and I think certainly cushioned the
blow. I will say though, that we need more," Zandi said. He cautioned that the economy won't fully bounce back from the crisis until the
virus fully recedes; so long as there's the threat of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, businesses won't hire or expand and consumers will
remain cautious. Even as businesses reopen, he said, unemployment will likely remain in the double-digits. " That's
a lot of households
that are going to be under a lot of financial pressure ," he said. "If they don't get some additional support,
they're going to pull back and the economy could go back into recession."

Economic decline breaks down deterrence and causes global nuclear war
Tønnesson, 15 - Rearch Professor, Peace Research Institute Oslo; Leader of East Asia Peace program,
Uppsala University (Stein Tønnesson, “Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace,” International
Area Studies Review, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 297-311)
Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what
circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least
four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right.
Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies
and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent
states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one
of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between
China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US
into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South
Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014;
Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions
for war and peace are taken by very few people , who act on the
basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign
policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic
development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to
seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence ,
appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt
protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of
socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or
against a third party.

Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan
(2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves.
The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that
changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more
precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result,
interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist
emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence
remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon , and unreliably so. Deterrence could
lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or
conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing
to intervene.
 2NC—UQ—Will Pass
Phase 4 relief bill will pass by August
Semones, 6/13 (Evan, Politico, “White House adviser: Trump wants ‘at least $2 trillion’ in next
coronavirus relief package”, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/13/coronavirus-relief-bill-peter-
navarro-316501

Since early March, Trump has signed into law three relief bills passed by Congress totaling nearly $3
trillion in federal funds to address the ongoing pandemic. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett
said in a Wall Street Journal interview last week that the odds of a phase four package passing Congress
before August “are very, very high.” Navarro specifically mentioned pharmaceutical companies and
medical supplies as parts of the manufacturing base the White House would like a bill to target. “We
need to make our medicines here, we need to make our masks here, our ventilators and all of that,” he
said. “For me and for this president, one of the key thrusts of any phase four — and any economic plan
— going forward has to be manufacturing jobs, a focus on buy American, hire American, make it in the
U.S.A.,” Navarro said. “What we need to do as a country is to make more stuff here.”
 2NC—UQ—McConnell’s Key
Republicans will pass at least $1 trillon in COVID relief
Tausche, 6/11 (Kayla, CNBC, “White House, GOP push coronavirus relief talks to late July, sources
say,” https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/white-house-gop-push-coronavirus-relief-talks-to-late-july-
sources-say.html)

White House and Republican leaders have yet to craft a united position on what programs should be
included in a future stimulus bill. In meetings, the common thread among participants was a desire to
provide liability protection to businesses that decide to open. When Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, at a later meeting, suggested the next stimulus package should not go above $1 trillion, the
response from the White House was “divided,” according to a second senior administration official.
House Democrats, meanwhile, passed a $3 trillion package in mid May. White House chief of staff Mark
Meadows and top economic advisor Larry Kudlow were among the fiscal conservatives said to be against
additional handouts, but two senior administration officials told CNBC in mid-May that, in the end, if
additional stimulus checks were needed, the president would authorize them.
 2NC—Link—Focus
Any complication reverses it
Curran and Hunter June 10th 2020 [Enda Curran---Bloomberg Staff, Gregor Stuart Hunter---
Bloomberg Staff, June 10th, Bloomberg, “A $22 Trillion Stock Rally Now Hinges on Rapid Economic
Recovery”, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/the-market-s-22-trillion-rebound-
may-not-allow-for-dark-turns, accessed 6/13/20]

The danger, though, for investors and policy makers alike is that any complication in the economic
recovery could see market gains swiftly reverse -- at a time when there’s less room for additional policy
support, given the scope of what’s already been deployed. And while markets will likely look through
horrific second-quarter data, tolerance for depression-like numbers into the second half may be thin.

Focus is key
Curran and Hunter June 10th 2020 [Enda Curran---Bloomberg Staff, Gregor Stuart Hunter---
Bloomberg Staff, June 10th, Bloomberg, “A $22 Trillion Stock Rally Now Hinges on Rapid Economic
Recovery”, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-10/the-market-s-22-trillion-rebound-
may-not-allow-for-dark-turns, accessed 6/13/20]

Betting on V

Optimists point to the shock 2.5 million increase in U.S. payrolls and decline in the unemployment rate
to 13.3% as firmer evidence of a rebound.

Goldman Sachs Inc. economists led by Jan Hatzius argue that if global GDP is now rising, the recession
will be the deepest -- but also the shortest -- since World War II. Morgan Stanley Chief Economist Chetan
Ahya holds a similar view, arguing that upside surprises in economic data points to a “ deep V-shaped
recovery.”

Stocks have moved to price that in. With corporate earnings having collapsed thanks to the lockdowns,
the price-to-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 currently sits at 25.6 times, the highest since the dotcom
bubble, and far above the average of just under 17 since the start of 2000.

Investment-grade corporate bonds have also come back, with yields hitting record lows, pulled down by
the powerful rally in government debt. While 10-year U.S. Treasury yields have climbed from their
March lows, analysts surveyed by Bloomberg see them staying below 2% for years to come, effectively
held down by the Fed and continued disinflation.

“The big hope is that this optimism, which reflects the silver lining of this historic shock, proves right,”
said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. “But
every element requires politicians to remain highly focused, put political polarization aside and
appropriately evolve their policy approaches.”
 2NC—I/L—Solves Recession

Further COVID relief is key to stop spiraling recession.

Obstfeld and Tyson 5-22-2020 - *member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers, and
Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley **co-chair of the
Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the
Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

*Maurice Obstfeld and **Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Congress must fund another major economic relief
package, Cal Matters, https://calmatters.org/commentary/congress-must-fund-another-major-
economic-relief-package/

In just a few weeks, the economic outlooks for the U.S. and California dramatically deteriorated. All
major sectors of the economy plunged into a slowdown. At least one in five are out of work, with job losses falling
disproportionately on lower-income workers. According to the governor’s most recent forecast for California, total personal income
will fall by 8.9% in 2020 and won’t return to 2019 levels until 2023. The unemployment rate will remain
at double-digit levels through 2023, with the highest rates among the most vulnerable lower-income
workers with few financial resources. At the end of 2019, the U.S. and California were wealthier than ever, but there were stark
inequalities in the distribution of opportunities and access to health care. With its disproportionate effect on the health and incomes of
disadvantaged workers, the
pandemic has shed a harsh light on these structural inequities. Without effective
policy remedies they will likely worsen, as they did during the recovery from the Great Recession. Unlike
the federal government, state and local governments are constrained by balanced-budget laws . Without
additional federal funds, states and local governments will have to raise taxes or implement deep
spending cuts. There are no other options, and both will exacerbate the recession. Moreover, spending cuts will
overwhelmingly fall on essential services where states spend most of their revenues, including public education, public safety and public health.
While Newsom’s May Revision is guided by prudent fiscal management to protect these priorities, the size of the budget gap implies painful
spending cuts without federal support. Under current conditions, the
macroeconomic rationale for significant additional
federal funding for state governments is compelling . If plummeting revenues force states to slam on
their fiscal brakes, that will undermine the federal government’s own countercyclical measures,
resulting in a deeper recession, more unemployment and a slower recovery for the entire nation. The
lessons of the Great Recession confirm these alarming predictions . Between 2008 and 2014, state government
revenues fell $600 billion, but states received only $150 billion in federal aid. States had to draw down their accumulated reserves, increase
taxes and cut “discretionary” spending. These austerity
measures were a significant drag on growth, and had an
estimated negative multiplier effect of 1.7 – each $1 reduction in spending led to a $1.70 loss of
economic activity. Worse, austerity had long-lasting effects. Inflation-adjusted state spending and state
and local payrolls did not return to pre-recession highs until 2019, just before COVID-19 arrived. Scarred by
this trauma, most states have built up their reserves, which reached all-time highs in many states at the start of the 2020 fiscal year. On the eve
of the pandemic, California’s budgetary situation was robust, with historic revenues, record reserves including a $16 billion rainy-day fund, and
a projected budget surplus of $5.6 billion. Now, due to plummeting revenues and increased pandemic costs, the state faces an estimated
budget gap of $54.3 billion – nearly 37% of the state’s general fund. Not even massive rainy-day funds are sufficient to fill
the huge budgetary holes created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor is bankruptcy an option for states . The
U.S. Constitution prohibits state governments from “impairing the obligation of contracts,” including their own debts. However ,
municipalities can declare bankruptcy and there is good reason to worry they may need to do so,
further destabilizing U.S. and global financial markets . Investors around the world are willing to make long-term loans to
the federal government at very low interest rates. The Federal Reserve is committed to unlimited purchases of U.S. securities and Fed Chair
Jerome Powell has warned of deep and lasting economic consequences without more fiscal support. Under current and foreseeable
economic conditions, the federal government can and should fund another major economic relief
package and include at least $1 trillion in flexible funding for state and local governments.

More ev
The Day 5-29-2020 - newspaper based in New London, Connecticut, published by The Day Publishing
Company. The newspaper has won Newspaper of the Year and the Best Daily Newspaper Award from
the New England Newspaper & Press Association

The Day Editorial Board, “Without more relief, recession will gravely deepen,”
https://www.theday.com/article/20200529/OP01/200529434

Congress, which has passed four emergency spending measures already this year, in March provided some relief for the states with
$150 billion to address emergency COVID-19 expenditures. The governors complained that is not nearly enough to
counter the devastation to state budgets from dwindling tax revenues related to the economic
shutdown. Democrats responded in the House on May 15 by narrowly passing a fifth federal relief package; a $3 trillion bill aimed at
addressing the devastating economic fallout from the coronavirus outbreak. Yes, the price tag attached to the HEROES Act is strikingly large.
The sudden growth in the nation's already too large national debt does have long-term implications for acting as a drag on economic growth.
There are no good options here, only less bad ones. And not acting to help states is the worst choice . It
would assure a deep recession, more costly to the nation than enlarging the relief package . The 1,815-page
legislation is a bigger spending package than the four previous measures combined. The HEROES Act − Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus
Emergency Solutions − passed 208-199. Although the Act directs massive amounts of money into many areas of the economy, the biggest single
expenditure, almost $1 trillion, is relief to state, municipal, and tribal governments. States are in line for $500 billion. Cities were designated to
receive $400 billion. Another $87.5 billion is earmarked specifically for towns of under 50,000 population. The House bill was panned by the
White House and Senate Republicans as a liberal wish list. Republicans concede more federal relief will be needed at some point. However,
they argue that the $2.2 trillion relief package approved in March has yet to work its way into the economy. Republicans want to hit the pause
button and recalibrate before ballooning the federal deficit by another $3 trillion. Thereis no pause button for the governors
on the front lines of this pandemic. State governments are strained beyond capacity in regions of the
country hardest hit, including Connecticut. Unlike the federal government, states must balance their budgets .
The aid from the HEROES Act is designed to keep those governments functioning at full capacity for two years. Trump indicated a
willingness to discuss state aid, but he wants to withhold federal relief from “blue states that have gotten themselves into financial
trouble,” according to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. This is not a red state versus blue state partisan fight. State relief
aid from the federal government has broad bipartisan support from Democratic and Republican
governors. Delaying financial relief to the states is counterproductive to Trump’s desire for a speedy
economic recovery. State operating budgets are imploding. Hundreds of thousands of state employees
around the country will lose their jobs without a federal bailout. State and local taxes would have to be
sharply increased. Such an outcome would add to the unemployment problem and deepen and prolong
the recession. It is the role of the Republican-controlled Senate and the Trump administration to make a counteroffer, to expose what they
consider pork, but inaction would amount to dereliction of duty .
AFF—AT: COVID Relief DA
 AFF—Won’t Pass
Won’t pass – GOP thinks economy is improving
Everett and Levine, 6/8 (Burgess Everett & Marianne Levine, Politico, “Republicans Big Bet on the
Economy” https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/08/republicans-recession-coronavirus-aid-307764 )

The economy has “bottomed out” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in a floor speech
as he touted improving jobs numbers. He declined to answer a reporter’s question about timing for new
aid. But if the Senate waits until next month to act, the window gets smaller. After July 3, the Senate is
scheduled to go on a two-week recess, return for three weeks and then depart again until September.
Republicans say it’s only responsible to wait and see how nearly $3 trillion in total coronavirus spending
seeps into the economy. But it’s also a gamble: if the economic recovery isn’t as strong as they predict,
they risk being blamed by voters in November that they and President Donald Trump didn’t do enough
amid a global pandemic and historic recession. “End of July … is frankly my sense of when I think we’ll
have all the information we need to put the next bill together. And it might be about the time when all
of the money from the [previous] bills has been spent,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the No. 4 GOP
leader. The Democratic House majority passed a $3 trillion coronavirus aid bill in May, but Senate
Republicans dismiss it as a “wish list” of liberal priorities. Still, they have declined to offer an alternative
vision so far and are spending this week on a public lands bill championed by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-
Colo.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who both face tough races this fall. McConnell has publicly predicted
talks on the next bill won’t pick up for about a month and has told Senate Republicans that he prefers to
wait until after the July 4 recess to work on a package, according to a GOP source. Additional economic
upticks could change that calculus further. “I think conditions are definitely going to improve. We’ve
seen the virus take down the best economy in the world, but it looks like it’s pretty resilient and starting
to come back,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of McConnell’s deputies. Last week’s jobs report
“surprised everybody. I’m beginning not to trust the ‘experts,’ the people who make all these
predictions.” The economic surprise was also viewed as a sign of hope for the GOP’s Senate prospects.
The Republican battle to defend its majority was looking increasingly perilous amid more than 100,000
coronavirus deaths and Trump’s hard-line response to the nationwide protests after George Floyd’s
death by police in Minneapolis. “Most people are economic voters,” said Senate Majority Whip John
Thune (R-S.D.). “If people are thinking about their pocketbooks and voting on the economy, it bodes
well for Republicans.”
 AFF—Won’t Pass—Defecit
No more COVID bills – concerns about defecit
Samuels, 6/16 (Brett, the Hill: “Conservatives urge Trump, McConnell to halt spending on coronavirus
relief,” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/502925-conservatives-urge-trump-mcconnell-to-
halt-spending-on-coronavirus)

A group of conservative leaders and White House allies wrote to President Trump and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday urging them to halt talks on further coronavirus relief
bills, arguing that "runaway government spending is the new virus afflicting" the economy.
Twenty fiscal hawks wrote to the two leaders as Congress mulls  the scope and necessity of another
round of legislation to boost the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic. The signatories argued that
additional government spending will hinder the country's economic recovery, contending that the
payroll tax holiday Trump has advocated would be more effective. 
"To ensure the economic health of our citizens and the financial well-being of our nation now and for
years and decades to come, we urge that the multi-trillions of dollars of federal government debt
spending in the wake of the Coronavirus come to a stop," the letter states. "There is no limit to worthy
causes, but there is a limit to other people’s money."
No more COVID bills – republicans worries about spending
The Fiscal Times, 6/16 (“Conservatives Say It’s Time to Stop Spending on Coronavirus Relief,”
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/newsletter/20200616-Conservatives-Say-It-s-Time-Stop-Spending-
Coronavirus-Relief)

Conservatives say it’s time to stop spending on coronavirus relief: The economists’ statement comes on
the same day that a group of 20 conservative leaders, some with close ties to the White House, urged
President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stop deficit spending on coronavirus
relief. "Government spending – and policies such as paying millions of workers more money to stay
unemployed than to go back to work, and paying states more money to enable them to stay shut down
– is inhibiting the fast recovery we want in jobs and incomes, not stimulating it," the conservatives wrote
in a letter. "In short, runaway government spending is the new virus afflicting out [sic] economy." The
conservatives, including economists Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist
and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, write that a repeal of the payroll tax would be "the
best way to supercharge the economy." President Trump has pushed for a payroll tax holiday, though
the idea has met with resistance from lawmakers in both parties.
 AFF—Won’t Pass—No Free Money
No direct payments – GOP opposes
Loudenback, 6/17 (Tanza, BusinessInsider, “Congress has yet to agree on the latest coronavirus
relief package, so don't expect another stimulus check in June,”
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/will-there-be-another-stimulus-check-in-june-2020-
5)

House Democrats passed a bill in May proposing "additional recovery rebates" of up to $1,200 to

individuals and $2,400 to joint filers, plus an additional $1,200 for each dependent, regardless of age. It
also would allow people without Social Security numbers to qualify for a payment.
But the bill is fiercely opposed by Republicans who say they are more focused on funding that will help
get people back to work, reported Business Insider's Joseph Zeballos-Roig. The federal government has
been paying out a $600 weekly bonus, which is set to end on July 31, on top of state benefits to eligible
unemployed people during the pandemic.
 AFF—AT: Econ !
Economic decline increases cooperation.
Christina L. Davis & Krzysztof J. Pelc 17, Christina L. Davis is a Professor of Politics and International
Affairs at Princeton; Krzysztof J. Pelc is an Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University,
“Cooperation in Hard Times: Self-restraint of Trade Protection,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61(2):
398-429

Conclusion Political economy theory would lead us to expect rising trade protection during hard times .
Yet empirical evidence on this count has been mixed. Some studies find a correlation between poor macroeconomic conditions
and protection, but the worst recession since the Great Depression has generated surprisingly moderate levels of protection. We explain this
apparent contradiction. Our statistical findings show that under conditions of pervasive economic crisis at the
international level, states exercise more restraint than they would when facing crisis alone. These results throw light on
behavior not only during the crisis, but throughout the WTO period , from 1995 to the present. One concern may be
that the restraint we observe during widespread crises is actually the result of a decrease in aggregate demand and that domestic pressure for
import relief is lessened by the decline of world trade. By
controlling for product-level imports, we show that the
restraint on remedy use is not a byproduct of declining imports . We also take into account the ability of
some countries to manipulate their currency and demonstrate that the relationship between crisis and
trade protection holds independent of exchange rate policies . Government decisions to impose costs on
their trade partners by taking advantage of their legal right to use flexibility measures are driven not only by the
domestic situation but also by circumstances abroad. This can give rise to an individual incentive for strategic self-
restraint toward trade partners in similar economic trouble. Under conditions of widespread crisis, government
leaders fear the repercussions that their own use of trade protection may have on the behavior of trade
partners at a time when they cannot afford the economic cost of a trade war. Institutions provide
monitoring and a venue for leader interaction that facilitates coordination among states. Here the key
function is to reinforce expectations that any move to protect industries will trigger similar moves in other
countries. Such coordination often draws on shared historical analogies, such as the Smoot–Hawley lesson, which form a focal point to
shape beliefs about appropriate state behavior. Much of the literature has focused on the more visible action of legal enforcement through
dispute settlement, but this only captures part of the story. Our research suggests that tools
of informal governance such as
leader pledges, guidance from the Director General, trade policy reviews, and plenary meetings play a
real role within the trade regime. In the absence of sufficiently stringent rules over flexibility measures, compliance alone is
insufficient during a global economic crisis. These circumstances trigger informal mechanisms that complement
legal rules to support cooperation. During widespread crisis, legal enforcement would be inadequate,
and informal governance helps to bolster the system . Informal coordination is by nature difficult to observe, and we are
unable to directly measure this process. Instead, we examine the variation in responses across crises of varying severity, within the context of
the same formal setting of the WTO. Yet by focusing on discretionary tools of protection—trade remedies and tariff hikes within the bound rate
—we can offer conclusions about how systemic crises shape country restraint independent of formal institutional constraints. Insofar as
institutions are generating such restraint, we offer that it is by facilitating informal coordination, since all these
instruments of trade protection fall within the letter of the law. Future research should explore trade policy at the micro level to identify which
pathway is the most important for coordination. Research at a more macro-historical scope could compare how countries respond to crises
under fundamentally different institutional contexts. In sum, the determinants of protection include economic downturns not only at home but
also abroad. Rather
than reinforcing pressure for protection, pervasive crisis in the global economy is shown
to generate countervailing pressure for restraint in response to domestic crisis. In some cases, hard times
bring more, not less, international cooperation.
Justice Reform DA
 1NC—Justice Reform
Policing reform passes with Trump’s push—PC key
BBC 6-13-2020, "Trump 'generally' supports ban on police chokeholds," BBC News,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53026389

Mr Trump said it would be a "very good thing" to ban chokeholds but they may still be needed in some situations. The
president's comments come with Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress trying to hammer out the
details of a police reform bill - the proposed Justice in Policing Act of 2020 . Mr Trump told Fox News that
chokeholds sounded "so innocent, so perfect" but that if you get two-on-one, "it's a different story". But he continued: "If a police officer is in a
bad scuffle and he's got somebody... you have to be careful. "With that being said ,
it would be, I think, a very good thing that
generally speaking it should be ended," he said, adding that he might make "very strong
recommendations" to local authorities. The police officer who knelt on Mr Floyd's neck has been sacked and charged with second-degree
murder. Pressure for US police reform Mr Trump - who has faced criticism for his responses to the outbreak of the protests
against racism and police brutality - said he wanted to "see really compassionate but strong law enforcement", adding "toughness
is sometimes the most compassionate". Challenged by interviewer Harris Faulkner to explain his tweet last month that "when the looting starts,
the shooting starts", which was censored by Twitter for glorifying violence, the president said: "When the looting starts, it oftentimes means
there's going to be... sure, there's going to be death, there's going to be killing. And, it's a bad thing." The
Justice in Policing Act was
proposed by the opposition Democrats who control the House of Representatives but in order to pass it must win the
support of Mr Trump's Republicans who control the Senate. There is potential for the two parties to reach
agreement on banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants , like the one in the Breonna Taylor shooting.

PC is key to GOP buy-in --- loyalty to Trump is not absolute, it’s transactional
Nicholas 1-4-2020 - staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers the White House (Peter, “The Other
Reason Republicans Won’t Cross Trump,” The Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/how-trump-beat-impeachment/604357)

How has the president avoided a rebellion within his own party? No doubt congressional Republicans fear Trump
because of his unshakable grip on the party’s base. That’s long been the case. But there’s another reason they’ve shielded him from impeachment: He’s

wooed Republicans who can protect his interests, cultivating relationships with them in ways that are not always
visible or understood. So much of Trump’s presidency seems like a jagged break from history. Yet when it
comes to reaching out to his own party , his method isn’t all that different from that of his predecessors—and it’s
helping him survive the biggest domestic crisis of his presidency. An impeachment wildcard is the military strike Trump ordered against the Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani. Americans tend
to rally behind a president facing looming national-security crises, and lawmakers take cues from voters. That could help strengthen Trump’s impeachment advantage within his party, and

even Democrats from conservative states might be more sympathetic to the president in a Senate trial if Trump is overseeing an armed conflict with Iran. An overture from
Trump is something Republican lawmakers can’t easily spurn . They need him. An Economist/YouGov survey from November showed more
Republicans believe that Trump is a better president than was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, who won the Civil War and emancipated the enslaved. Lincoln, the first Republican president.
Lincoln, who delivered the Gettysburg Address before Twitter came along and perfected the art of presidential communication. “This shold tell you everything you need to know,” Michael
Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a prominent Trump critic, told me. “When national polling shows that these folks think that Donald Trump was a better

Trump has built personal ties with key

president than Abraham Lincoln, you know this is fucked up.” Risky as it is for Republicans to buck Trump politically,

members of Congress that have cemented their loyalty. Read Trump’s Twitter feed or listen to his rallies, and he comes off as an unhappy man,
filled with grievances and self-obsessed. But that scabrous persona isn’t what he necessarily shows Republican lawmakers, nor is it what they care to see. “ Trump has been

extremely good at taking care of the parochial interests of members of Congress, and they appreciate that,” former Republican Representative
David Jolly of Florida told me, adding that he’s discussed the president with his former colleagues. “I talked to one member who said, I wish he wouldn’t do these things, but privately, he’s a
really nice guy and he’s really good to me.” Representative Peter King of New York is an illustrative case of a lawmaker Trump has reached out to. An independent-minded Republican who
announced in November that he was retiring from Congress, King broke with his party 20 years ago and voted against impeaching President Bill Clinton. His district on Long Island isn’t
necessarily Trump country: It went for Barack Obama twice before flipping for Trump in 2016. King is the sort of lawmaker whose vote Trump can’t take for granted. And the president hasn’t,
wooing him from the start: King told me that in the summer of 2017, Trump invited him aboard Air Force One as the president traveled to Long Island to give a speech about the gang MS-13.
That proved to be a fateful trip. On the flight back to Washington, Trump ousted Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and replaced him with then–Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. Aboard the
plane, the president confided in King about the move, asking for his thoughts on Kelly. Last July, King took his 11-year-old granddaughter to the White House to watch Trump sign a health-care
bill for the first responders to the September 11 terrorist attacks. After the ceremony, Trump scribbled his spiky signature on the speech he had just delivered; gave it to the girl; “put on this
angry, stern look; and said, If I find this on eBay tonight, I’m coming after you,” King recalled. “He’s down-to-earth, easygoing, friendly,” King told me of his interactions with the president. “He
can be pretty profane about this guy or that. I have to remind myself that I’m with the president of the United States, but I feel like I’m back on the street corner in Queens.” When he’s in
Trump’s company, he added, it’s like being with “a stand-up comic and raconteur.” I asked King whether his affection for Trump played a role in his no vote on impeachment. “I voted against
Bill Clinton’s impeachment and it’s not hard [for me] to vote against Trump’s. To me, impeachment is the last possible weapon that should be used.” Still, he said of Trump’s overtures: “It does
have an impact.” Courting Congress is a part of the job that some presidents relish—others, not so much. Clinton was a natural schmoozer. King recalled watching the Super Bowl in the White
House one year at the former president’s invitation. President George W. Bush tried a similar approach, with uneven success. In his few first weeks in office, Bush invited Democratic Senator
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts to the White House for a screening of the movie Thirteen Days, which depicts how former President John F. Kennedy, the senator’s older brother, defused the
Cuban missile crisis. At the time, Bush needed Kennedy’s cooperation in passing his signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind. It’s unclear whether the bonding session made a
difference, but he got it: Kennedy helped engineer the bill’s passage. Obama had little appetite for glad-handing. As he seemed to see it, especially at the start of his presidency, mere reason—
the facts and merits of an issue—was the path toward bipartisan compromise. In 2013, when Obama spoke at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, he told the crowd
that people often asked him why he didn’t spend more time doting on Congress. Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell, they’d ask. “Really?” Obama said, as the audience laughed.

“Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?” Fundamentally, Trump’s relationships with Congress are transactional . He
works at them continually: One Republican lawmaker, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, told me they turned down requests from Trump to join him at events
simply because they had already spent so much time with him and had other things to do. Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched the impeachment proceedings in late September, Trump
has dialed up the charm. Two potential jurors were part of his all-Republican entourage when he attended Game 5 of the World Series on October 27: Senators David Perdue of Georgia and
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. (Over repeated rounds of golf and meetings since taking office, Trump has defanged Graham, who once called him a “nut job.” Now Graham is one of the
president’s closest allies. He got a private briefing on the Iran strike while golfing with Trump in Florida earlier this week—a courtesy that doesn’t seem to have been extended to other
congressional leaders.) When Trump showed up for an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at Madison Square Garden on November 2, he was accompanied by Representative Kevin
McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, who along with Scalise was pivotal in locking down the unanimous GOP vote opposing impeachment. The next week, when Trump went to
watch the football game between the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University, his guests in the luxury box included another potential juror in the impeachment trial, Republican
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. Perhaps Trump’s most important relationship on Capitol Hill is with McConnell. There isn’t much warmth between them—Trump scorned McConnell’s
judgment in 2017—but the collaboration has proved mutually valuable. He’s focused on one of the senator’s pet projects: stocking the federal courts with conservative judges. And Trump
appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his transportation secretary, and in an administration marked by endless churn, she’s held the job from the beginning. McConnell is now helping
shepherd Trump through impeachment. It’s largely up to McConnell how Trump’s Senate trial could unfold, and the two have talked often about impeachment. Though at times the president
has suggested he wants full vindication in a trial, complete with witnesses and tough cross-examination of his accusers, McConnell favors a streamlined trial that dispenses with the
impeachment articles quickly. Trump seems ready to go along. One bit of advice he’s given Trump, Senate aides told me, is to stave off defections by not antagonizing potential jurors. So far,
Trump has listened. In October, he called Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—his most vocal GOP critic in the chamber—a “pompous ass,” but he has kept quiet in recent weeks. He even invited
Romney to the White House in late November for a lunch discussion that touched on impeachment. Another person in attendance was Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican

who faces a difficult reelection battle and could potentially peel off and vote for impeachment. Executing a strategy—any strategy—is something Trump’s chaotic White House
has had trouble pulling off. Maybe the difference here is that his presidency itself is at stake. In any case, it seems to have worked : he’s hewed to a

conventional playbook, corralling lawmakers and building the durable alliances necessary to beat back impeachment.

Congressional reform is key to racial justice---it’s a moral obligation

Jayapal 2020 – Staff [Pramila, June 15, Big Country News Connection, “Keep up the fight: Help pass the
Justice In Policing Act”, https://www.bigcountrynewsconnection.com/news/state/washington/keep-up-
the-fight-help-pass-the-justice-in-policing-act/article_72bebb2f-5f83-5f16-9974-3de87703edf2.html,
accessed 6/15/20]

In the weeks following the killing of George Floyd, communities across Washington and throughout the
country have stood up and powerfully spoken out — protesting, demanding accountability and fighting
for justice. Thousands upon thousands have marched day after day not only to honor the lives of
Rayshard Brooks, Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Manuel Ellis, Tony McDade, Charleena Lyles and so many
others, but also to fight against police brutality, racism, anti-Blackness and white supremacy.

From the health-care workers making their voices heard outside Seattle City Hall to those who had tear
gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and flash bangs unacceptably unleashed on them at Cal Anderson Park
and outside the East Police Precinct, Seattleites have not just forced a necessary conversation but
prompted necessary action.

Early on, I joined many fellow Washingtonians in calling for the end to the use of curfews, National
Guard troops and militarized law enforcement. Rather than this unnecessary show of force, I have
insisted that we respond differently, focusing instead on concrete policies that take on institutionalized
racism and anti-Blackness.
Last week, I led 10 elected officials of color who represent Seattle at the federal, state, county and city
levels in urging Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best to immediately enact
transformative changes. That includes ending law enforcement’s violent response to ongoing
demonstrations, completely overhauling policing to create an entirely different model of public safety
that protects all in our community, and implementing serious accountability and transparency measures
into police contracts.

But while transforming policing in Seattle is critical, it is not only our community or our police
department that requires urgent reform. We need to re-imagine and rebuild law enforcement across
the country in order to finally put an end to police brutality, militarization and anti-Blackness. We need
accountability, we need oversight, we need transparency — and we need to ensure real justice.

As a member of the House Judiciary Committee — and with the leadership of the Congressional Black
Caucus and civil rights coalitions like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — I was
proud to help introduce the Justice in Policing Act last week. This legislation puts forth the most
aggressive intervention into policing by Congress in recent memory, and reflects long overdue changes
to the way law enforcement is done across the United States. Many of the reforms we have proposed
are widely supported across the ideological spectrum.

The Justice in Policing Act not only bans chokeholds like the one used to kill George Floyd and Manuel
Ellis, but establishes them as a civil rights violation. It also classifies lynching as a federal hate crime; we
know that lynching is tragically not just a relic of our dark past.

The legislation establishes an innovative federal police misconduct registry that is public and tracks
complaints at the local, state and federal level. This increases accountability and transparency while
preventing officers accused of misconduct from skipping around to different agencies without any
accountability. Speaking of accountability, the bill finally ends qualified immunity, which ensures we are
able to hold accountable members of law enforcement who perpetrate violence, murders and injustices.
Additionally, the bill lowers the legal standard for prosecuting law enforcement officers for deprivation
of civil rights and civil liberties.

Importantly, the legislation requires the reporting of all incidents of use of force against a civilian to the
Department of Justice (DOJ). It also collects data on law enforcement practices such as stops and
searches, and tracks the demographic data as a means of halting racial profiling. It does this while also
giving the DOJ the power to subpoena law enforcement departments for pattern and practice
investigations, which allows them to hold accountable agencies who violate the constitution or other
federal laws.
Finally, the new legislation establishes a national task force on law enforcement oversight and works to
end the militarization of law enforcement by restricting the program that allows military equipment to
transfer to local departments.

These changes represent only a first step in what is an urgently needed path to justice for Black
communities, to finally valuing Black lives in America. Even as we work to swiftly pass the Justice in
Policing Act through the House of Representatives, we need to heed the righteous voices of the
powerful movement on the ground so local communities, led by Black voices, can move forward on
transformational changes. Seattle can be a leader on this as it has been on so many other fronts.
Because it is not enough to say Black Lives Matter, we must fight for Black lives and finally secure real,
meaningful, transformative justice.
 2NC—UQ
Comprehensive justice reform has unique momentum to pass now—a focused fight is
key
Claudia Grisales, 6-8-2020, congressional reporter, "Democrats Unveil Police Reform Legislation Amid
Protests Nationwide," NPR, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/871625856/in-wake-of-protests-
democrats-to-unveil-police-reform-legislation
Last week, Pelosi said she asked the Congressional Black Caucus to lead the process of drafting a legislative response. Democrats hope to calm a
national outcry sparked by the May 25 death of Floyd, who was killed in Minneapolis police custody. Democrats sorted through
dozens of proposals to address policing issues, including excessive use of force and racial profiling. And while there is some
degree of bipartisan support for reviewing the tactics that led to Floyd's death, cooperation is less certain on a legislative solution.
Republicans were absent from Democratic talks to develop the legislation and for now are unlikely to support it. "I think we can easily
find common ground on both sides and we can do it swiftly, but it's more difficult if you're away," House
Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters Thursday, referencing an extended House recess as a result of the pandemic.
"Members of Congress should not be called back for one week and say, 'Here are all the bills.' " The Democratic led-House is expected to take
up the measure later this month, but its fate is much less clear in the Republican-controlled Senate . For now, Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and many Republicans have acknowledged "egregious wrongs" in
police brutality cases. "It's certainly something that we need to take a look at," McConnell told reporters last
week. "We'll be talking to our colleagues about what , if anything, is appropriate for us to do in the wake of what's going
on." Congress has often struggled to address policing issues on a bipartisan basis as some say decisions
about policing tactics, training and strategies should be solved at the state and local level . South Carolina Republican Sen.
Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced a June 16 hearing on police use of force to "shine a bright light on the
problems associated with Mr. Floyd's death, with the goal of finding a better way forward for our nation." Many Democrats say it is
critical that this legislation be comprehensive and ambitious , even if Senate Republicans refuse to consider the bill. Rep.
Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said Democrats need to make sure the package reflects the demands of
the people protesting and calling for change. "The
American public is going to get behind it," Cleaver said in an interview with
NPR. "They are saying they want substantive change. They want reform. Reforms that perhaps in the past people have
been afraid to embrace." Cleaver said serving in Congress requires a certain level of courage to vote for legislation that
may be controversial. He said in the past, lawmakers from both parties have shied away from addressing systemic
issues with policing but he believes this moment is different.

Dems will fight to pass justice reform—massive pressure

Caldwell and Shabad 6/8 (Leigh Ann Caldwell and Rebecca Shabad—NBC Corrospondents 6-8-2020,
"Pelosi, top Democrats unveil police reform bill," NBC News,
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/pelosi-top-democrats-unveil-police-reform-bill-n1227376)

Pelosi said that inthe coming weeks, the House will hold hearings , a markup and a vote on the legislation.
Democratic leaders expressed confidence that it would pass the House , and Pelosi said she hopes Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would "swiftly" take it up. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said at the
news conference that Senate Democrats "are going to fight like hell" to make the legislation "a reality ," adding the
"poison of racism" has permeated American society, beyond just the criminal justice system. The measure comes in the wake of
massive protests that have swept the nation over the last two weeks since Floyd’s death while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
While some activists have been calling for the defunding of police departments, the bill doesn’t shrink police budgets. The legislation also would
not provide new funding to police departments to implement the proposed reforms, according to a Senate Democratic aide. Congressional
Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass, D-Calif., who played a lead role in crafting the legislation, said at a press conference Monday that the
power of the protest movement across the U.S. will help Congress pass this measure , which, in addition to
holding police accountable and increasing transparency, would change police culture.

Republicans will negotiate—pressure is forcing cooperation

Lisa Hagen, 6-12-2020, "Republicans Consider Police Reform Bills," US News & World Report,
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-06-12/republicans-in-congress-consider-
police-reform-bills

Republicans, who have long touted themselves the party of law and order, appeared initially resistant to pursuing policing
reforms in the immediate wake of George Floyd's death and the protests that followed. But amid the growing chorus for
police accountability, GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill are readying their own reforms. Republicans in both the Senate and
the House are starting to lay down some initial markers of reforms days after Democrats introduced broad legislation focused
on police accountability. But it remains to be seen how much common ground will exist in the proposals and
whether Democrats negotiate with the GOP on what many expect would be more incremental changes to policing. Sen. Tim Scott of South
Carolina, the lone black Republican senator, is preparing to introduce his police reforms bill by next week after Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky tapped him to lead efforts in the upper chamber. While the text of his bill hasn't been released, the
legislation is
expected to address de-escalation tactics and use of force as well as improvements to federal data collection. The
latter mirrors part of Democrats' bill , which seeks to create a federal registry to log police misconduct complaints. A week ago,
McConnell questioned the role of Congress in enacting police reforms, saying "there may be a role for Congress to play" and would discuss
with his party "about what, if anything, is appropriate for us to do." But on Tuesday, he said it's "important to have a response ,"
adding that Scott would bring valuable perspective due to his own personal experiences. "I think the best way for the Senate Republicans to go
forward on this is to listen to one of our own, who's had these experiences. He's had them since he's been in the United States Senate,"
McConnell said about Scott. Other GOP
senators are proposing reforms including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky's standalone bill
that bans "no-knock" warrants, which allow police officers to enter a person's home without identifying themselves. His bill is
named after Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black woman who was fatally shot in her home when police entered through a "no-knock" warrant.
Paul's bill would require federal law enforcement officers to give notice "of his or her authority and purpose" before entering someone's home
– and apply the same standard to local departments who receive federal funds from the Justice Department. The legislation mirrors one
provision in Democrats' legislation that would end "no-knock" warrants in federal drug cases. The
potential for compromise on
policing reforms appeared out of reach just two weeks earlier. Congress has previously tried – and failed –
to pursue policing reforms particularly in 2014 after Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was fatally shot by a white police officer
in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, an unarmed black man in New York, died in police custody after an officer used a banned chokehold
technique. And the odds for making meaningful reforms seemed to be even more of a longshot in the lead-up to a presidential election this fall.
And though there is some optimism, skepticism lingers over whether Congress can reconcile their differences and pass any
reforms at all.
 2NC—UQ—Bipart
Bipartisanship push to solve police militarization is coming
Edmonson June 1st - reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. [Catie, June 1 st 2020,
NYT, “Lawmakers Begin Bipartisan Push to Cut Off Police Access to Military-Style Gear”,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/police-military-gear.html?
action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article, accessed 6/16/20]

WASHINGTON — Republicans and Democrats in Congress have begun a new push to shut down a
Pentagon program that transfers military weaponry to local law enforcement departments, as
bipartisan urgency builds to address the excessive use of force and the killings of unarmed black
Americans by the police.

With protests turning violent across the country, lawmakers are scrutinizing the Defense Department
initiative — curtailed by former President Barack Obama but revived by President Trump — that
furnishes police departments with equipment such as bayonets and grenade launchers. The move
comes after several nights when officers wearing riot gear have been documented using pepper spray
and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly
unprovoked.

The push stands in stark contrast to the reaction of Mr. Trump, who has often encouraged rough tactics
by law enforcement and spent Monday complaining privately to governors that they were not handling
protesters aggressively enough.

“Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming presence until the violence is quelled,” Mr.
Trump said in remarks from the Rose Garden on Monday evening. “If a city or state refuses to take the
actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States
military and quickly solve the problem for them.”

On Capitol Hill, however, where Republicans often take their cues from the president, most lawmakers
had a different message as they focused on the immediate catalyst for the protests: George Floyd, a
black man in Minneapolis who was killed after a police officer knelt on his neck for a prolonged period.

“In no world whatsoever should arresting a man for an alleged minor infraction involve a police officer
putting his knee on the man’s neck for nine minutes while he cries out ‘I can’t breathe’ and then goes
silent,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said on Monday.
“Our nation cannot deafen itself to the anger, the pain and the frustration of black Americans. Our
nation needs to hear this.”
Top lawmakers in both parties and on both sides of the Capitol moved quickly last week to announce
their intention to hold hearings on the use of excessive force by law enforcement and racial violence.

Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who has long pressed to limit the transfer of military-grade
equipment to police departments, announced that he would move to include an amendment in the
must-pass annual defense policy bill to shut down the program entirely.

“It is clear that many police departments are being outfitted as if they are going to war, and it is not
working in terms of maintaining the peace,” Mr. Schatz said in an interview. “This is not the only thing
we need to do, but as our country sees these images on television that remind us of some countries far,
far away, it’s time to recalibrate this program. Just because the Department of Defense has excess
weaponry doesn’t mean it will be put to good use.”

Doug Stafford, Senator Rand Paul’s chief strategist, responded on Sunday night to Mr. Schatz’s idea:
“We’ve being doing this one for years. Happy to help,” he wrote on Twitter. Mr. Paul has also been a
longtime proponent of the demilitarization of local police and has previously teamed with Mr. Schatz to
reform the Pentagon program, known as 1033.

It is unclear how much support Mr. Schatz’s measure could receive in the Republican-controlled Senate.
But in the House, Representative Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona and a former Marine, said on
Monday that he would introduce similar legislation, opening up the possibility that the measure could
find additional traction in making its way into the final defense bill.
 2NC—PC True—Trump
Political capital theory is true for Trump --- learning curve proves
Graham 18 – David, “Trump's Quietly Growing List of Victories,” The Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/what-trump-has-accomplished/550760/

Nothing comes easy in the Trump presidency, but over the last few months the White House has shown fitful but real
progress toward more effective policymaking. From domestic policy to foreign affairs, President Trump has notched more real victories
over the fall and winter months than during the rest of his administration combined. This includes the passage of a large tax-cut package, the long delayed first major legislative achievement of
his presidency. Trump has appointed conservative judges and further cut regulations. He has fulfilled campaign promises by announcing the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, recognizing Jerusalem as the

These and other victories seem to

capital of Israel, and announcing a plan to move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. He has also presided over the end of ISIS’s territorial control in Syria and Iraq.

reflect a learning curve. Most new presidents manage to ram through top priorities in their first days or
months in office, when their political capital is high, but Trump entered office with little goodwill and
little or no understanding of either policy or the policymaking process , as well as a staff largely
inexperienced in either—though proficient at intramural feuding. There’s little indication that Trump himself has learned much more about policy or legislation, but he has
professionalized his White House staff, creating a more effective team. The rub is that insofar as the Trump administration is hitting its stride, it is
doing so just as the prospects for further success dry up. Every few months, I try to look back on what Trump has accomplished in the intervening period. This is an important exercise because

coverage of the president is overwhelmingly negative , largely for reasons of his own making, and the Russia probe and other scandals tend to obscure more mundane
political action. In that context, it’s easy for the public to miss or forget about changes that will affect the nation and American

policy for years and decades to come. This is not intended as an assessment of the wisdom of the decisions—of the items included here, some are overwhelmingly unpopular, and some may end up producing
largely negative effects, even from the perspective of those who advocated them. The point is simply to measure what the White House is doing. The biggest single accomplishment for Trump in the time since I last conducted this
exercise is the passage of a suite of tax cuts. In some ways, that bill was a disappointment. Early on, Trump and GOP leaders were promising an overhaul of the tax code on a par with the 1986 tax-reform law: A full rewrite of the
tax code, permanent changes, returns that could be filed on a postcard. The final bill is none of that. Because leaders were rushing frantically to get a bill passed before Christmas and made little attempt to attract Democratic votes,
they ended up with a conventional, if large, package of tax cuts. Those cuts overwhelmingly favor high earners, and changes to individual tax rates will expire in 10 years. But after multiple failed attempts at repealing Obamacare,
and with no other major legislation through Congress, the bar was lowered. Trump and Republicans showed up a chorus of naysayers who insisted there was no way a bill could be written and passed by the end of the year. The
resulting bill allowed Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker Paul Ryan to all claim victory, and the cuts for high earners and corporations fulfill longstanding wishes from GOP donors and machers. Since
Trump signed the law, multiple large companies have announced raises for employees, many of them citing the new tax plan as an incentive. Some executives are likely catering to a president who responds well to flattery and has
no hesitations about bullying companies, while other messages have been tempered (Walmart announced raises noisily, while quietly laying off thousands of Sam’s Club employees), but Trump has sought to harvest a political
dividend. Elsewhere on the domestic front, Trump has continued to make progress on his immigration agenda. After multiple attempts and multiple defeats in court, the Supreme Court in December allowed Trump’s travel ban, née
Muslim ban, to take effect while legal challenges continue, a partial victory nearly a year in the making. The efficacy of the ban has never been well-demonstrated, but Trump has argued for months it is essential and now has a
version in place. In September, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, marking the culmination of a promise that Trump made during the campaign (but had on
occasion contradicted since then). Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico, generally a rough proxy for the number of people attempting to enter the United States, reached their lowest level since 1971, although that is a
continuation of a pre-existing trend, and Trump persists in exaggerating the size of the drop. The raw number of deportations has actually dropped from the end of Barack Obama’s term to the start of Trump’s, but that is in part
because of fewer crossings. The Trump administration has ramped up deportations of people already living in the United States, including with some high-profile moves like a nationwide raid on 7-Elevens. The San Francisco
Chronicle reported this week that federal officials are planning a sweeping raid in Northern California intended as a brushback on sanctuary cities. Trump has not succeeded in repealing Obamacare, a longstanding priority, and
after multiple attempts, congressional GOP leaders have demonstrated that they have little stomach for another try any time soon. But the president has managed to gradually erode the law, including a repeal of the individual
mandate. Around 3.2 million fewer people have insurance than did at the start of 2017, and a plurality of Republicans in an Economist/YouGov poll said the law had been repealed. The president has also continued to nominate
federal judges at a record clip, and to see them confirmed to the federal bench. He successfully installed Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, as interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, from which perch Mulvaney has moved quickly to dismantle regulations on the financial industry. Abroad, even as Trump struggles with North Korea policy, strained ties with allies, and a broken relationship with his
secretary of state, the president saw ISIS driven from its territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria, in large part due to American fighters and strategy. Trump inherited a fight going well for the U.S. and a strategy on the way to achieving
that, as Obama administration alums like to point out, but he saw that strategy through. This doesn’t mean ISIS is no longer a threat, but the end of its territorial claims is a major milestone. In announcing U.S. recognition of
Jerusalem and future plans to move the American embassy there, Trump followed through on a promise made not just by him but by several predecessors, who backtracked once in office. Like most choices in the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the move won him both praise and fury. In August, I argued that while Trump was quietly accomplishing more than was immediately clear, nearly all of his accomplishments dovetailed with traditional priorities of the
Republican Party—deregulation, judgeships, and the like—while his own distinctive priorities were stuck in neutral. That remains largely the case, as exemplified by the tax bill, which eschewed any of the populist flourishes for
which Trump was labeled distinctive in the past. In his immigration enforcement push, he is matching the rhetoric of many establishment Republicans while going beyond what Republican presidents have been willing to do. In

Trump’s presidency. Even if the president has not become an especially effective advocate for policies, his staff has become
sum, the past few months have been the most productive period of the

more effective at avoiding the problems that sank earlier policy attempts . At times, the White House
relationship with congressional leaders has even looked strong, though it’s an up-and-down affair.

Trump can use PC effectively if he avoids partisan fights and sticks to major priorities
Nelson 18 – PhD, Fulmer Professor of Political Science at Rhodes College and a senior fellow at the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center. A former editor of the Washington Monthly, his most recent books
include Trump’s First Year (2018); The Elections of 2016 (2018); The Evolving Presidency: Landmark
Documents (2019); The American Presidency: Origins and Development (with Sidney M. Milkis, 2011);
and Governing at Home: The White House and Domestic Policymaking (with Russell B. Riley, 2011)
(Michael, “The Presidency and the Political System,” Kindle)
As a n additional reminder of the ephemeral nature of political capital, Trump would do well to remember his Obama's
response early in his presidency to Republicans' request for him to consider their draft of an economic stimulus bill. When presented the draft by Republican representative Eric Cantor, Obama rejected it, reportedly saying, "Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.
So I think on that one I trump you."99 Because Obama's statement seemed to ignore the fact that the Republicans with whom he was negotiating had also won their elections to Congress, it likely did little to further his goal of creating a bipartisan atmosphere. Two years later Obama's

Bush When Bush

party had lost their House majority, in part due to public opposition to Obama's stimulus bill. Similarly, in the aftermath of his reelection in 2004, proclaimed, "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."

tried to expend that capital by reforming Social Security, the effort failed soundly. In his memoirs Bush conceded that if he had to "do it all over again, I would

the effort to push social security "widened the

have pushed immigration reform ... as the first major initiative" of his second term because it "had bipartisan support." Instead, as he acknowledged,

partisan divide ."100 It also contributed to Republicans losing their congressional majority in 2006. A decade later Donald Trump won the presidential election by promising to use his outsider status and deal- making prowess to end legislative gridlock and restore

after
American greatness. When it came to repealing Obamacare, however, Trump's first foray into the legislative realm followed the familiar path trod by his immediate predecessors—one that relied solely on the president's party to achieve a legislative objective. But

failing to repeal Obamacare Trump showed signs of recalibrating his

, and to enact any other major legislation in his first seven months in office,

bargaining strategy to dealing with Congress to know

by adopting a more bipartisan approach . It is too early whether this represents a fundamental shift and, if so, whether it will

produce legislative breakthroughs

the he promised on the campaign trail—and at what cost to his core support. However, he may judge that it is a risk worth taking. The alternative is to govern in a purely partisan manner—a
strategy that recent history indicates may gain Trump a few legislative victories, but which may also risk his Republican majority in Congress, and his dream to be a transformational president.

Political capital theory is true, especially under Trump

Delamaide 1-3-2017 – former Bruecke fellow, writes "Political Capital," a weekly column from
Washington, D.C. on politics that affect financial markets. A former foreign correspondent and recipient
of an Overseas Press Club award, he has written for Barron's, Dow Jones, Institutional Investor,
Bloomberg and other (Darrell, “Opinion: Trump will play Congress like a fiddle,”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-will-play-congress-like-a-fiddle-2017-01-03/print

But there are also some significant differences — in the approach to trade issues and deficit spending, to
name just two. Trump’s pledge to maintain and defend Medicare and Social Security is another
important difference. Congressional Republicans may think they are about to reach the Promised Land,
and Washington Post reporter David Weigel this week neatly summed up the various bills they have
vetted on issues from deregulation to repealing Obamacare that are just waiting for a president to sign
into law. But if Trump has proven anything in his idiosyncratic campaign, it is that he is hardly just “a
Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen” — the ideal president once dreamed of by tax
reform activist Grover Norquist. In other words, it’s not likely Trump will simply rubber-stamp
legislation that a Republican Congress churns out. Why would someone who trumpets his expertise in
negotiation simply give Congress what it wants? He will hold back on those signatures as leverage to
get what he wants, especially when it runs counter to or simply beyond the lawmakers’ agenda. Salena
Zito, a pro-Trump commentator who catapulted to prominence for her insights into the Trump
campaign, reminds us that the key to understanding the incoming president is his 1987 book, “The Art of
the Deal.” Trump voters understood what mainstream media commentators still haven’t grasped —
many of his statements are not ex cathedra pronouncements on policies but negotiating ploys. And,
yes, many of them are not completely true. “Throughout the book, he is always negotiating, no matter if
he was coming from a full truth or not, didn’t matter,” Zito writes of the 1987 book in the Washington
Examiner. “It is always about the value of what is at stake. In that type of barter, truthfulness becomes
irrelevant, it only has actuality if the deal is struck and the facts come out.” Which brings us back to
Congress and how Trump will deal with it. Even though Republicans retained control of both houses,
Democrats trimmed those majorities even as Clinton won a commanding plurality in the popular vote
for president. The Republican majority in the Senate went to 52 from 54, out of 100, and to 241 from
247, out of 435 in the House. The electoral upsets that enabled Republicans to maintain the Senate
majority were the victories of Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, two
Republican incumbents most pollsters predicted would lose to Democratic challengers, Russ Feingold
and Kathleen McGinty. But Trump’s surprising win in those swing states also lifted the two incumbents
to an unexpected victory. Had Clinton’s campaign in those states been slightly more effective she might
be the president-elect with Democratic control of the Senate. Democrats were bound to recapture the
Senate seat in Illinois, but they also won a closely fought battle in New Hampshire, where the popular
governor, Maggie Hassan, defeated Republican incumbent Kelly Ayotte. It may well have been Ayotte’s
disavowal of Trump that cost her the margin of victory. The lesson here, as with unsuccessful Nevada
Senate candidate Joe Heck, who lost ground after distancing himself from Trump, is that Republican
lawmakers need Trump’s support to gain voter favor more than he needs them. The picture from the
House results is a little less clear-cut. Although every member is up for re-election every two years, the
rate of incumbency victories is very high. In 2016, 380 of the 393 incumbents seeking re-election won,
for an incumbency rate of 96.7%. According to Ballotpedia, Democrats tend to gain seats in presidential
election years with their higher voter turnout, while Republicans tend to gain in the midterm elections.
For instance, Democrats gained eight sets in 2012 and 24 in 2008, which make the net gain of six in 2016
seem relatively small. So Republicans are likely to make gains in the House in 2018. In the Senate,
Republicans will be defending only eight seats, while Democrats will be defending 25 — 10 of which are
in states that Trump won. Those 10 Democratic senators will be very careful about thwarting Trump,
which makes his leverage in the Senate considerably larger than the 52 Republicans. Trump may be a
political novice, but if he’s half as skillful at negotiation as he claims to be, he will quickly grasp how to
play the legislature like a fiddle.
 2NC—PC Real
Consensus of poli sci research confirms
---True for several months after an election, especially post-surprises – proves PC finite and it’s now or
never

Azari, 16 – citing political science professors Lawrence Grossback (WVU), David Peterson (Texas A&M),
James Stimson (UNC Chapel Hill), and David Peterson (Iowa State) – Julia Azari, associate professor of
political science at Marquette, 11-2-2016, “Presidential Mandates Aren’t Real, But Congress Sometimes
Acts As If They Are”, FiveThirtyEight, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/presidential-mandates-arent-
real-but-congress-sometimes-acts-as-if-they-are/

Despite all this subjectivity, Congress’s behavior does seem to shift when there’s lots of mandate talk in
the air. Political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson found that members
of Congress responded to media cues that a mandate election had occurred, deviating from their usual
voting habits for a few months at most. Surprise, these scholars argue, is the key element in the
development of mandate narratives in the media. The elections of 1964 (for the effect of the
presidential race on Congress), 1980 and 1994, for example, took observers by surprise and required
explanation. The explanation offered by media observers was that voters had been clear in their desire
for party’s agenda to be enacted. The media interpretations of the election after the fact created a
convincing story about the policy meaning of the election. Can presidents themselves convince Congress
that an election carried with it a mandate? I’ve looked into this issue with David Peterson, an Iowa State
University professor and co-author of the research mentioned above, and we found that when
presidents identify the election as a mandate, members of Congress respond. Our study covered
presidents from John F. Kennedy through Barack Obama, and drew on the research that I did on how
presidents interpret election results in their rhetoric. Looking at a wide range of presidential remarks,1 I
assessed whether each communication event used the election results to justify what the president was
doing. I found that presidents interpret elections in a variety of ways: sometimes as mandates for their
own leadership and judgment, but more often for the issues and governing philosophies they talked
about during the campaign. Contrary to what we might expect, the final vote shares don’t seem to
matter.

It tips the scales, through agenda-setting, signaling, and political cover

Gelman, 15 – Jeremy Gelman, University of Michigan; Gilad Wilkenfeld and E. Scott Adler, University
of Colorado; “The Opportunistic President: How US Presidents Determine Their Legislative Programs”,
August 2015, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 40:3

The president’s legislative program,1which is the set of proposals sent from the president to the
legislative branch, is viewed as pivotal in presidential-congressional relations. We see evidence of the
privileged place these requests have in three ways. First, they shape Congress’s lawmaking agenda. Over
70% of the president’s issue priorities get congressional consideration, and significant legislation sent by
the administration is almost always debated (Edwards and Barrett 2000;Peterson 1990). Second, these
policy proposals are traditionally viewed as a tool the president can use to open policy windows and
create more accommodating lawmaking environments. Kingdon reports that “no other single actor in
the political system has quite the capability of the president to set agendas in given policy areas.. .”
(1984, 23). Third, these proposals provide cues to legislators about which issues they can successfully
politi-cize by opposing or supporting the president’s policy ideas (Lee 2009).As the president’s program
heavily influences legislative attention and the level of partisanship within Congress, it is also crucial to
under-standing the broader policymaking process. To that end, we examine why presidents select some
issues to promote in their legislative agenda and not others.
 AT winners win—Trump
Plan is not a win – Link ev proves it doesn’t have the broad bipartisan support
necessary to capitalize

Plan is a loss—no risk of PC replenishment

Bennett 2017 2-1-17 - White House Correspondent for CQ Roll Call. App State & Johns Hopkins grad.
John T., Bannon’s Power Spawns Fears of Frozen-Out Congress, Roll Call,
https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/bannons-power-spawns-fears-of-frozen-out-congress

“Granted, we’ve seen decades of centralization of resources and expertise within the White House. But
allowing presidential staff to make decisions without consultation or buy-in from the agencies and
departments that execute policy leads to the sorts of chaos, confusion and pushback from important
party allies on the Hill,” Binder said. “It’s hard to replenish political capital over the course of a
presidency. Engaging in firefights — and drawing in the federal courts — is hardly a recipe for preserving
capital with Congress.”

Trump PC is finite — he’ll take the heat for the plan — every ounce is key to
legislation.
Buchanan 17 — Neil H. Buchanan, Economist and Legal Scholar, Professor of Law at George
Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute at Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia, 2017 (“Neil Buchanan: Trump is Fast Blowing His Political Capital,”
News Week, March 18th, Available Online at http://www.newsweek.com/neil-buchanan-trump-fast-
blowing-his-political-capital-569695, Accessed 07/21/2017)

In short, Trump is making himself look like a fool. More importantly, he is doing this when it is absolutely
unnecessary to do so. Trump might believe that he has unlimited political capital—and with most of his
supporters, he might well be right—but he does not, and it makes no sense for him to make this
unforced political error. It makes no sense, that is, unless he has drawn one of two conclusions: (1)
Going through with building the wall will actually become popular with people who currently do not
support it, or (2) He is willing to lose political popularity over this issue, because the substantive
advantages of building a wall are worth it. If he believes explanation No. 1, he is fooling himself. If it is
No. 2, he simply does not understand how border protection works. (See also his travel bans.) It could
be both, and I am betting that it is. The reason that this is all so odd is that Trump seemed to have
figured out a way to glide through his presidency without actually doing anything important. He has
created such a distorted political atmosphere that he can, for example, both confirm and deny that a
2005 tax form was accurate, leaving everyone to wonder whether the "leak" of that shred of
information was planted by the White House. Watching the press chase every crazy thing coming from
his Administration was turning out to be a seriously plausible survival strategy. All Trump had to do was
say something bizarre every time anything serious came up, and he could skate along to the next news
cycle. Would it matter that nothing ever happened under Trump's presidency? Not really. Trump could
blame the Democrats, the Republicans (especially his chew toy, Paul Ryan), and pretty much anyone else
for not getting it right. More importantly, he would not have to put his name on anything that would be
open to attack. This is especially important because a White House does have to do some things that are
going to be politically contentious. The federal budget is a minefield, for example, and any president is
going to be take heat for the choices of winners and losers that his budget implies. Trump's first budget
proposal makes it obvious that he is not going to do anything to help his non-rich supporters, and he is
actually proposing to make their lives worse. (This is also true of the new health care bill.) All of which
means that a president who came into office with historically low approval ratings, and who still cannot
accept his drubbing in the popular vote, needs to do everything he can to avoid self-inflicted wounds.
 AT Winners Win—Classics
Wins don’t spillover---capital is finite---prioritizing issues is key
Schultz 13 David Schultz is a professor at Hamline University School of Business, where he teaches
classes on privatization and public, private and nonprofit partnerships. He is the editor of the Journal of
Public Affairs Education (JPAE). “Obama's dwindling prospects in a second term,” MinnPost, 1/22,
http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2013/01/obamas-dwindling-prospects-second-term

Four more years for Obama. Now what? What does Barack Obama do in his second term and what can he
accomplish? Simply put, his options are limited and the prospects for major success quite limited. Presidential power is the
power to persuade, as Richard Neustadt famously stated. Many factors determine presidential power and the ability
to influence including personality (as James David Barber argued), attitude toward power, margin of victory, public support, support in Congress, and one’s
sense of narrative or purpose. Additionally, presidential power is temporal , often greatest when one is first elected , and it is

contextual, affected by competing items on an agenda. All of these factors affect the political power or
capital of a president. Presidential power also is a finite and generally decreasing product. The first hundred
days in office – so marked forever by FDR’s first 100 in 1933 – are usually a honeymoon period, during which presidents
often get what they want. FDR gets the first New Deal, Ronald Reagan gets Kemp-Roth, George Bush in 2001 gets his tax cuts. Presidents lose political
capital, support But, over time, presidents lose political capital. Presidents get distracted by world and domestic events,

they lose support in Congress or among the American public, or they turn into lame ducks. This is the problem Obama now faces .

Obama had a lot of political capital when sworn in as president in 2009. He won a decisive victory for change with strong
approval ratings and had majorities in Congress — with eventually a filibuster margin in the Senate, when Al Franken finally took office in July. Obama used his
political capital to secure a stimulus bill and then pass the Affordable Care Act. He eventually got rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and secured many other victories. But

Obama was a lousy salesman, and he lost what little control of Congress that he had in the 2010 elections.

No wins – negative messaging outweighs

Weaver 13 (Kent, Professor at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at
the Brookings Institution, “Policy Leadership and the Blame Trap: Seven Strategies for Avoiding Policy
Stalemate”, March 2013 http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/03/29-policy-leadership-
blame-weaver)

Negative messages about political opponents increasingly dominate not just election campaigns in the
United States, but the policymaking process as well. And politics dominated by negative messaging (also
known as blame-generating) tends to result in policy stalemate. Negative messaging is attractive to
politicians because people tend to pay more attention to negative information than positive
information, and they are more sensitive to losses than equivalent gains. Political polarization,
competitive, nationalized elections, increased fiscal stress and changes in campaign law and practice
have all exacerbated pressures to engage in negative messaging in recent years. There are a number of
strategies that allow politicians to maneuver around the “blame trap” and avoid policy deadlock in some
circumstances, including passing the buck to non-elected bodies and putting in place triggering
mechanisms that generate politically unpopular policy changes in the future. All of these strategies have
limitations and disadvantages, however, so both blame-generating politics and policy stalemate are
likely to be the “new normal” in American politics in the near future.
PC is finite---fights on one issue make pushing others harder
Hayward 12 John is a writer at Human Events. “DON’T BE GLAD THE BUFFETT RULE IS DEAD, BE
ANGRY IT EVER EXISTED,” 4/17, http://www.humanevents.com/2012/04/17/dont-be-glad-the-buffett-
rule-is-dead-be-angry-it-ever-existed/
Toomey makes the excellent point that Obama’s class-warfare sideshow act is worse than useless, because it’s wasting America’s valuable time, even as the last fiscal sand runs through our

America has only a finite

hourglass. Politicians speak of “political capital” in selfish terms, as a pile of chips each party hoards on its side of the poker table, but in truth

amount of political capital in total. When time and energy is wasted on pointless distractions, the capital
expended---in the form of the public’s attention, and the debates they hold among themselves--- cannot easily
be regained . ¶ There is an “opportunity cost” associated with the debates we aren’t having, and the valid ideas
we’re not considering, when our time is wasted upon nonsense that is useful only to political re-election campaigns. Health care reform is the paramount example of our
time, as countless real, workable market-based reforms were obscured by the flaccid bulk of ObamaCare. The Buffett Rule, like all talk of tax increases in the shadow of outrageous government
spending, likewise distracts us from the real issues.

Winners lose
Walsh 12 Ken covers the White House and politics for U.S. News. “Setting Clear Priorities Will Be Key
for Obama,” 12/20, http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/Ken-Walshs-Washington/2012/12/20/setting-
clear-priorities-will-be-key-for-obama

And there is an axiom in Washington: Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and other power centers can do justice to only one or two
issues at a time. Phil Schiliro, Obama's former liaison to Congress, said Obama has "always had a personal commitment" to gun control, for example. ¶ But
Schiliro told the New York Times, "Given the crisis he faced when he first took office, there's only so much capacity

in the system to move his agenda." So Obama might be wise to limit his goals now and avoid
overburdening the system, or he could face major setbacks that would limit his power and credibility for the
remainder of his presidency.
 AT Theory
Our interpretation is that fiat means debate over the plan starts immediately—
Politics DAs are key to mitigate a limitless topic — also key to education about the
agenda, political process, and political climate around the plan.
Police Reform
AFF—AT: Justice Reform DA
 UX—Justice Reform
Trump won’t push
Nilsen and Zhou 6/8 (Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou – vox reporters, 6-8-2020, "Democrats’ sweeping new
police reform bill, explained," Vox, https://www.vox.com/2020/6/8/21283841/democrats-police-
reform-bill-explained-george-floyd)

With over 200 co-sponsors in the House and Senate, the bill is likely to pass the House . House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he
will call the full House back to vote “as soon as this legislation is ready to hit the floor,” and Democrats are eyeing passage by the end of the
month. But it probably
won’t get much further, especially after Trump tweeted his opposition to Democrats’
proposed reforms. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown very little appetite for taking up bills that
don’t have Trump’s support, and he’s called for Republicans to develop their own response, led by Sen. Tim
Scott (R-SC), the only African American in the GOP conference. (Already, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has been working with Scott and a small
group of Republican lawmakers to draft his own bill to create police “supervisory boards” and increase racial bias trainings.) The Senate
Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), will also hold a hearing on police violence next week that is likely to provide more
insight into what lawmakers are interested in doing. Democrats
on Monday condemned the inertia they’ve seen thus
far in the Senate. “Just last week, we couldn’t even pass an anti-lynching bill in the US Senate ,” Harris noted,
mentioning a bill that was held up due to the objections of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
 PC false – Trump
PC is meaningless under Trump --- he’s distracted and not concerned with policy
Crowley 9-4-2019 (Michael, “Trump Heads Into 2020 With No Clear Policy Agenda. But It May Not
Matter.,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/us/politics/trump-2020-policy-
agenda.html)

President Trumpheads into the closing months of the year before he faces re-election without a clear
policy agenda and with an uphill path to achieving any major new accomplishments before he faces voters.
Over a summer dominated by his personal attacks on Democratic lawmakers, the news media and his trade
showdown with China, Mr. Trump spent little time clarifying his positions on several important agenda items that
could bolster his record. And as official Washington returns to work, it is unclear whether Mr. Trump intends to focus
his time and attention on his policy goals , or whether he will step into a full-bore campaign mode, escalating attacks on his
political rivals and spurning traditional governance. “Does he want a few more wins? Of course. Everything is a competition with him, he’s
extraordinarily impatient, and he would spend every week signing bills — any bills — if he could,” said Brendan Buck, who served as a
spokesman for the former Republican speaker, Paul D. Ryan. “At the same time, he’s far removed from the normal convention of how we look
at presidents. His supporters care far more about the persona than the policy,” Mr. Buck added. Mr. Trump signaled some of that impatience
on Tuesday when, writing on Twitter, he gave marching orders to the Democrat-controlled House, which returns from its summer recess next
week. The House should move on from “witch hunt” investigations, he wrote, and “get back to work on drug prices, health care, infrastructure
and all else.” But on two of those three issues, Mr. Trump has sent mixed signals about his willingness to actually negotiate. Mr. Trump called
action on infrastructure “a necessity” during his State of the Union address in February, yet he angrily canceled a meeting on the subject with
Democratic leaders in May after learning that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had suggested he was engaged in a “cover-up,” and talks ground to a halt.
Nor has Mr. Trump backed up his talk of action on health care. The president has said he will submit to Congress a health care plan to
completely replace President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and told ABC News in mid-June that he would do so “in about two months,
maybe less.” More than two months later, he has not done so, and many Republicans are skeptical that he ever will. Although Mr. Trump
omitted the subject from his tweet, Congress is also eagerly waiting to see whether he will take the lead on strengthening gun control laws after
a summer of mass shootings. Mr. Trump has sent conflicting signals about whether he will push for expanded background checks for gun
buyers, and this week, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, told the talk radio host Hugh Hewitt that “the administration is in the
process of studying what they’re prepared to support, if anything.” Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump did
little to clarify his intentions, saying that he was considering “many different concepts and many different things” on the subject. And in a
statement, a White House spokesman said that Mr. Trump, who has boasted of being the most successful president in history, has already kept
his promise to deliver “greatness” to the country. "Along with record job growth, rising wages, fair and reciprocal trade deals, energy
independence, lower prescription drug prices, criminal justice reform, securing our border and judicial appointments who uphold the
Constitution, this president is helping America win again, but his work is far from over,” said the spokesman, Judd Deere. To be sure, Mr.
Trump faces obstacles to scoring policy victories that would be worthy of applause lines at his campaign rallies. Many
House Democrats would rather impeach him than hand him legislative victories that could bolster his re-
election chances. And his efforts to defang American enemies have run up against intransigent foreign leaders as well as resistance from
both allies and his own advisers. But a crucial factor is a president whose fleeting attention span, impatience with
policy details and appetite for personal feuds and news media controversies make for a limited interest
in traditional legislating and regulating. Mr. Trump’s primary focus for winning re-election, said the Republican pollster David Winston,
is to connect his actions as president to positive economic news “in such a way that people understand and see how it’s personally translating
in their lives.” “He’s got one responsibility, and that’s to effectively drive his narrative,” Mr. Winston said. “Everything he does has to be put in
the context of, ‘Will this help the narrative?’” Many of the president’s recent tweets and remarks to the news media would seem to fail that
test. They include his latest criticism of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, whom Mr. Trump in a Tuesday tweet called "incompetent” after the
British politician, with whom the president has sparred before, mocked him for playing golf after canceling a trip to Poland to oversee the
response to Hurricane Dorian. That inevitably drew attention to the persistent question of how hard the president is willing to work on his
priorities, as opposed to talking about them in public. Multiple Democratic presidential candidates
have criticized Mr. Trump,
who for years ridiculed Mr. Obama’s golf outings, for the amount of time he devotes to golf . Republicans said they do see
theoretical opportunities for Mr. Trump to score notable victories , if House Democrats are willing to help deliver them.
Perhaps the most significant would be congressional ratification of Mr. Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, a renegotiated
version of the NAFTA trade pact that is commonly known as the U.S.M.C.A. Trump administration officials have been working in earnest on
Capitol Hill for months to approve the trade deal, but it is unclear whether Ms. Pelosi will support a vote. Another, as mentioned in Trump’s
Tuesday tweet, is legislation to lower prescription drug prices. But it is unclear whether Democrats and Republicans can reach consensus on
that issue. Mr. Trump has more freedom of action on foreign policy and trade, which offer him some prospects for breakthroughs, if few easy
deliverables. The most likely is a potential agreement with the Taliban that would begin the phased withdrawal of American troops from
Afghanistan and allow Mr. Trump to boast that he is winding down an 18-year military conflict with wan public support. But top military officials
are worried about a potentially premature exit, and on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that an agreement “may or may not happen.” Despite his
three friendly meetings with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, his diplomacy with the country is stalled and Mr. Kim continues to expand his
nuclear arsenal. Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran has so far only led Iran to accelerate its nuclear program, and Tehran
continues to resist talks that he hopes could lead to a tougher version of the 2015 nuclear agreement brokered by the Obama administration
from which the president withdrew last year. Mr. Trump has also said conflicting things about whether he might release some or all of a long-
in-the-works peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians before Israel’s elections on Sept. 17, which will decide the fate of one of his close allies,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nor has Mr. Trump indicated that he will revisit the idea of the “very major” middle-class tax cut that he
trumpeted in the weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, a subject he quickly dropped. A White House official did say that the president’s
agenda includes “tax cuts 2.0,” but did not specify what that meant. Perhaps no
substantive issue has drawn more sustained
focus from Mr. Trump of late than his steadily escalating trade fight with China , about which the
president talks or tweets on a near-daily basis . But economics, strategists and Trump administration officials alike say there is
no clear endgame to the confrontation. Mr. Buck said that the president might be content to focus on campaigning
rather than on policy. “He was not particularly upset when we lost the House , and that’s because he sees the
benefit of having a foil to run against,” he said. “Ultimately he controls what we talk about, and he’s made clear he
doesn’t need a policy win to control the conversation, for better or worse .”

PC false—Trump can’t negotiate

Phillips 2019 (Amber Phillips, Washington Post, 4-27-2019, "Trump’s attempt to strong-arm Congress
is actually a sign of his weakness," https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/27/could-
trumps-attempt-strong-arm-congress-actually-be-sign-his-weakness/)
Suing a committee chairman and his own accounting firm. Telling people who don’t work for him anymore that they can’t testify to Congress.
Having his personal lawyer tell the Treasury Department not to release Trump’s tax returns to Congress. These are all actions President Trump
has taken against Congress in the past few days, evidence that he’s going full-court to stop lawmakers from investigating him. It’s an
unprecedentedly brazen move for a president. But Joshua Huder, a fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, says
it’s actually a sign of Trump’s weakness. Past presidents have negotiated behind the scenes with Congress when they
don’t want to turn over information. They’ve relied on influential allies on Capitol Hill to help make their case. Trump is
forced to take the most extreme measures because he doesn’t have enough soft power to do that, Huder argues.
As a result, Trump is forcing himself into high-profile legal and political battles he has a real risk of losing. " The president lacks a lot of
informal modes of influence,” Huder said, “and he can't convince the allies he does have." Trump’s weakness has
manifested itself in other ways that have cost him politically. Trump spent nearly all of his political capital at the beginning of
this year trying to get Congress to fund a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He failed when enough Republicans joined with
Democrats to pass a spending bill that didn’t include the amount of money he wanted. The longest shutdown in federal
government history failed to win over lawmakers to Trump’s side — or any new money for his wall. (And
let’s not forget that presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigned on Mexico paying for the wall, another place where his negotiations
seem to have fallen through.) To make good on his central campaign promise, Trump declared a national emergency and took money from
elsewhere to do it. The consequence? A lengthy, time-consuming legal battle that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. “Look, I expect to
be sued,” he said in February when he announced the emergency declaration. “We’ll win in the Supreme Court.” Trump is likely to lose the
many legal fights he has picked with Congress over that branch of government’s right to see his tax returns and financial statements and to
issue subpoenas to his former top aides. (Though to the extent this is all a delay tactic to the 2020 presidential election, Trump may succeed.)
Still, the
president is engaging in extremely risky legal battles just as his support in Congress appears to be
eroding, if ever so slightly. Trump recently wanted to try again to repeal Obamacare; Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.) refused. Trump suddenly got rid of most of his top immigration officials — top Senate Republicans went on Fox News
and publicly warned him to stop. He wanted to nominate Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve — pushback from Republicans had him drop the
idea. To some degree, Trump’s strong-arming tactics with Congress reflect his personality. Trump’s M.O., long before
getting into politics, has been to threaten and intimidate to get his way. “It’s a Trumpian way of negotiating,” Larry Kudlow, a Trump friend and
current White House economic adviser, once said. “You knock them in the teeth and get their attention. And then you kind of work out a deal.”
 Theory
1. Fiat solves the link—it’s immediate so the plan passes without a fight
2. OR the plan starts at the bottom of the docket— solves the link because it
doesn’t interrupt fights now
NEG—Links
 L – CJR DA Specific
Trump will do everything he can to limit reform – the aff creates immediate backlash
that derails current reform efforts
Bonnie Kristian 6-16-20 -- a writer living in the Twin Cities. She is The Week's contributing editor, a
columnist at Christianity Today, and a fellow at Defense Priorities. Her writing has also appeared at Time
Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative,
“Trump's executive order on policing looks like a setup.” The Week.
https://theweek.com/articles/920272/trumps-executive-order-policing-looks-like-setup

The executive order on policing President Trump signed Tuesday afternoon is not entirely symbolic. Nor,
however, is it anything remotely close to being a "pretty comprehensive" reform, as Trump claimed. Perhaps that
phrase is simply typical Trumpian hyperbole. But the choice to label the order "comprehensive" strikes me as suspect,
particularly when more thorough reform packages are being developed in Congress. "Certainly we can add on to
what we do [in the executive order] by the work that's being done in the House and in the Senate," Trump said Monday — but by falsely
declaring his own order "comprehensive," he has already suggested no addition is needed. Thus the
Trump order could serve as a foundation for further reform, but it could also serve as a setup: a ready-made excuse for Trump
to veto any significant congressional changes to American policing . The more hopeful interpretation of what Trump is
doing with this order is that advanced by civil rights attorney S. Lee Merritt, who is representing the families of George Floyd and Ahmaud
Arbery. Merritt told PBS the order is "not a cure" and is "too incremental" to effect "sweeping" change, but he nevertheless characterized it as a
"step in the right direction." Trump's order has five sections, two of which have no direct policy outcome . One of
those two is a request that Congress pass policing-related legislation, and the other is a tepid acknowledgement that police brutality has
occurred. Of the remaining three items, the most likely to do any real good is the creation of a national database to track police misconduct.
Many police officers who are fired for abuse of their power are simply rehired by other police departments. In Florida, a recent study published
in the Yale Law Journal showed, a shocking 3 percent of working cops were previously fired by a Florida law enforcement agency other than
their current employer. These fired cops "tend to move to smaller agencies with fewer resources and slightly larger communities of color," one
of the study's authors, Ben Grunwald, told The Washington Post. After they're rehired, he added, "they tend to get fired about twice as often as
other officers and are more likely to receive 'moral character violations,' both in general and for physical and sexual misconduct." Florida is not
unique in this regard, and a lack of transparency in police disciplinary procedure means the rehiring department may not know about a fired
cop's history of misconduct. If done right — and that's a big "if" — the national database Trump's order creates could help get abusive cops out
of policing altogether. The final two items of the order are of even more dubious value. One directs the secretary of Health and Human Services
(HHS) to push police departments to improve officers' handling of mental health crises. Using police officers with little or no training in mental
health care as our mental health first responders is absolutely dangerous, but it's not clear how this directive will work in practice. (The HHS
secretary is supposed to produce recommendations within 90 days.) Lastly, the order will give the Department of Justice grant funding to pay
police departments to enroll officers in federally-approved training programs. The money has strings attached, most notably that it will go only
to departments which prohibit the use of chokeholds, like the neck restraints police used to kill Floyd in Minneapolis and Eric Garner in New
York, "except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law." That is a loophole so large as to make the chokehold ban
meaningless, as officers are generally allowed to use deadly force any time they believe — or are willing to say they believe — their lives are in
danger. Like the mental health element, improved training is not a bad idea. But getting police out of bad trainings is at least as important as
getting them into good ones, and use-of-force "best practices" from the president who says "please don't be too nice [to suspects]" don't
exactly inspire confidence. What
these measures do accomplish, however, is provide that same president with
an excuse to veto any more substantive federal policing reforms — and anything likely to come out of
Congress will be more substantive than this executive order . That is certainly true of the House Democrats' proposal,
which is extensive and won't pass the Republican-controlled Senate. Yet even the as-yet unreleased Senate GOP plan seems poised to go
further than Trump's order, if only in its willingness to incentivize reform by withdrawing federal funds instead of padding police budgets with
new federal grants. Trump has already indicated he will not sign any bill eliminating qualified immunity, and despite his occasional lip service to
criminal justice reform, he has repeatedly revealed he does not object to — indeed, perhaps even enjoys — police brutality. Maybe he will, as
he suggested, "add on to" Tuesday's order by approving a reform package from Congress. I hope that incrementalist reading is correct. But it
seems more likely to me that Trump will play this like he did the immigration debate of late 2017 and early
2018, loudly touting his commitment to reform before rejecting everything Congress offers. It's a handy little
arrangement, if indeed it is the setup it seems. With this order on the books, Trump can claim he wanted something
from Congress, but those Do-Nothing Democrats just couldn't get it together . Ah well, he'll tweet, good thing that
executive order was so comprehensive. Good thing we've made American policing great again.
 L – Generic
Reforms are unpopular – election incentives and unions
John Pfaff 18 -- American law professor at Fordham University, “Why today’s criminal justice reform
efforts won’t end mass incarceration.” America Magazine. Dec 21, 2018.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/12/21/why-todays-criminal-justice-reform-
efforts-wont-end-mass-incarceration
Ever since its founding, American attitudes toward crime and criminals have been harsher than those in Europe, even if our prison populations
did not differ much throughout most of the 20th century. This harshness, however, is compounded by the fact that our criminal justice system
is haphazardly organized in ways that consistently incentivize severity and punish lenience. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the heart of the
problem is an excess of democratic accountability. In no other country are criminal justice actors so immediately accountable to the public. We
are the only nation in the world that elects its prosecutors, and, for all intents and purposes, the only one that elects its judges as well.
Moreover, our single-member district, first-past-the-post process for electing legislators means that even senior legislative leaders are at risk of
losing their seats in any election—and bad crime stories are a powerful political tool for opponents to use. And while
Americans voters
care a lot about crime, they respond far less to broad overarching trends and far more to highly salient,
shocking, “newsworthy” cases—which are often newsworthy because they are unusual. As a result, they are far more attuned
to errors in leniency—when a preventable, headline-grabbing crime occurs—than to the far-more-often invisible excess
severity. This effect is so common that it has a name: the Willie Horton Effect, named after William Horton, a man who was serving
time for homicide in Massachusetts and who in 1986 absconded from a furlough program that allowed inmates to visit with family. A year later
he committed a violent rape and assault in Maryland, and his story was used in a virulently racist ad run against Massachusetts governor
Michael Dukakis when he ran for president in 1988. That the furlough program had a success rate of over 99 percent never came up; one
shocking crime stripped public awareness of the program of all context and support. Excessive
severity, however, imposes little to
no downside for elected officials . How do you prove the counterfactual that someone would not have reoffended had he been
locked up for less time? Perhaps we can show it with data, but a regression will never have the political power of a flesh-and-blood victim. And
it is clear that the Willie Horton Effect persists to this day. Arkansas saw its prison population drop by over 9 percent in 2012, only to rise by
over 17 percent in 2013, as a single murder that year by a single parolee led to immediate policy changes. Even New York City’s progressive
mayor, Bill de Blasio, proposed changing diversion programs in the state in the wake of a single murder of a New York City police officer. This
politically driven harshness is then magnified by other ill-conceived distortions in the system. Prosecutors, for example, are county officials,
elected by and generally paid for by the county they serve, while prisons are paid for by the state. So not only is being harsh politically safe, but
a different government picks up the tab. In fact, less-harsh options, like county jail or probation, are also paid for by the county, so it is actually
cheaper to be harsher and shift the costs away from the county to the state prison system. Our continuing legacy of racial segregation further
amplifies this punitiveness. Wealthier, whiter suburban voters often wield disproportionate electoral influence when it comes to electing the
prosecutor. These voters like the feeling of crime going down—but they face none of the costs of aggressive policies. After all, it is not their
brothers or fathers or uncles or sons who face the unnecessary police stops or arrests or indictments or convictions or prison terms. Those costs
are disproportionately borne by poorer people of color in the city, whom those voters do not know or even interact with. These problems have
always been with us. But they are more problematic now because as our prisons have grown, so, too, have the groups that
benefit from them—and who thus have an incentive to manipulate people’s punitiveness and fear of
crime for their own ends. Though many would at this juncture quickly point to private prison firms, they are not the main ones
“profiting” off prisons. They hold about 9 percent of the nation’s prisoners and generally have little impact on policy. It is various public
sector actors who truly benefit. About two-thirds of $50 billion we spend on prisons —$33 billion or so—goes to
the wages and benefits of prison staff. It is not surprising, then, that (public sector) correctional officer unions
fight reforms, given how much is at stake . That many if not most prisons are located in economically distressed areas and
provide some of the few well-paying jobs in the region only magnifies this effect. Or consider the impact of “prison
gerrymandering.” When drawing legislative districts, 44 states count prisoners as residing in their prison,
not their prior home—but do not let them vote . All across the country, state and local legislators know that a decline in
prison population means a decline in their district’s population for election purposes, putting their seats
at risk of redistricting. Moreover, there is a particularly stark partisan bent to this distortion. Prisoners are disproportionately people of
color from cities, which suggests they are disproportionately Democrats. Prisons are increasingly located in more
conservative rural areas. This “prison gerrymandering ” thus inflates Republican statehouse representation
while simultaneously suppressing Democratic turnout, creating a powerful partisan resistance to deep
changes. All of these responses are perfectly rational. Yet so far, no effort has been made to address these and other defects that politicians
and various interest groups exploit. Reform efforts have opted to capitalize on favorable conditions (low crime, high
prison populations, soaring costs) to push reform bills through the same broken system that gave us mass incarceration and mass
punishment in the first place. As long as these political incentives remain in place, it will not take much of a rise in
crime, whatever its causes, to see reforms start to crumble . It was never going to be possible to significantly scale back our outsized
reliance on prisons easily. Mass incarceration did not arise by accident or due to one or two small mistakes. It is the product of a deep, racially
driven punitiveness, combined with a vast array of incentives that consistently make harshness politically safe and leniency dangerous. Our
seven-year reduction in prison populations is certainly something to celebrate, but those reductions are modest and always vulnerable. And
they will remain modest and vulnerable unless we tackle some very difficult issues, such as how we treat violence and the even the basic design
of our criminal justice systems. Yet these issues are not intractable. One reason why California has seen such a large decline in its prison
population is that it is one the state to actually confront the fiscal moral hazards of county prosecutors having unlimited access to state-funded
prisons. There have even been a few small, halting steps toward treating violence less harshly. Neither major structural political change nor
comprehensive shifts in the response to violence is dominating discussions about criminal justice reform, but each is increasingly making itself
heard. There are still many ways for broad, comprehensive reform to fail but many—if challenging—ways for it to succeed as well.

Intra-party tensions make reforms highly controversial

Amanda Marcotte 2018 -- politics writer for Salon who covers American politics, feminism and culture,
“Biggest obstacles to prison reform? Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.” Salon. Feb 21, 2018.
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/21/biggest-obstacles-to-prison-reform-donald-trump-and-mitch-
mcconnell/
Last week, in a move that is surprisingly bipartisan for modern times, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the Sentencing Reform and
Corrections Act. This bill meant to reduce the length of sentences and the use of mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenses,
applying many reforms retroactively so people in jail right now for these offenses can go free. Criminal
justice reform has long
been seen as a liberal cause, but recent years have seen a surge of Republican interest in some steps toward
reducing mass incarceration, and this bill advanced out of committee by 16-5 vote last Thursday. That level of support suggests there's a real
chance this bill could pass Congress with a strong bipartisan majority, but
advocates for criminal justice reform fear that
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will never let it get that far. The issue causes real conflict
within the Republican Party, especially in the age of Donald Trump. With the 2018 midterms just ahead,
McConnell may not want to exacerbate intra-party tensions by allowing debate, still less a vote, on a bill
that Attorney General Jeff Sessions has portrayed as soft on crime. "We have a lot of Republican allies who believe in an urgent need
for sentencing reform, for broad criminal justice reform," said Ames Grawert of the Brennan Center, pointing out that Judiciary Committee
chair Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, introduced this bill. "A lot of them are scared to go up against the president on something that he doesn’t
appear to have a strong belief on -- but the attorney general has a strong belief on.” Sessions tried to kill a 2015 version of the bill when he was
a senator from Alabama and, in an unusual move, sent a letter to Grassley last Wednesday in which he wrote, "Passing this legislation to further
reduce sentences for drug traffickers in the midst of the worst drug crisis in our nation’s history would make it more difficult to achieve our
goals and have potentially dire consequences.” Grassley responded with outrage. To add another wrinkle, Trump seemed to promise criminal
justice reform during his State of the Union address last month, saying, "We will embark on reforming our prisons to help former inmates who
have served their time get a second chance." Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project is skeptical "His opinion tends to fluctuate," she said, "but
where the attorney general is is very clear -- which is not a good place in terms of criminal justice reform." It's worth noting that Trump only
made a vague promise to help former inmates, which suggests programs to help people getting out of prison rather than reforms to the
sentences themselves. But, as Gotsch noted, Trump backed away even further from criminal justice reform a few days after that speech,
claiming that "the economy is just booming" and the problem "is going to solve itself." "We’ve gone through decades of fluctuations of our
economy, up and down, and still we have a huge mass incarceration crisis,” Gotsch said in rebuttal. The problem is, bluntly put, that
the issue is still racialized, especially on the right . While 71 percent of Americans, including 57 percent of Republicans, believe
that it's important to reduce the prison population, Trump knows full well that many of his supporters would revolt if
he took steps to reduce the inhumanity of a criminal justice system that targets people of color
disproportionately. While he may say nice words once in awhile, ultimately Trump is predictable, and will always
choose the policy that is most congruent with a white supremacist point of view . The public has seen this
dance before with Trump and immigration . He makes smiley faces at the cameras and claims to want some kind of pathway to
citizenship for undocumented young people brought here as children. But he has repeatedly tanked any legislation that might make that
happen. Trump will never betray his racist base, even to embrace broadly popular legislation . To make the
situation worse, Grawert said, this bill is a "much more tepid attempt at sentencing reform than what was originally presented in 2015." He
noted that it has been watered down to get votes from right-wing Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., but even with all those
compromises, Grassley was unable to get their votes or support from Sessions. Grawert is worried that further efforts to water the legislation
down will end in the same result, because
opponents of this bill ultimately don't want any kind of reform at all.
Because of all this, Gotsch worries that McConnell will avoid even bringing the bill up for a vote, which is how
he avoided intra-party conflict with a previous version. The majority leader's "calculation last Congress was purely political,
not based on substance," she said, "so my assumption is it will be political again." Even in those terms, Gotsch argues that McConnell will be
making a mistake if he kills this bill quietly rather than put it up for a vote. The legislation would likely pass with a large bipartisan majority,
because most Democrats and a sizable chunk of Republicans are prepared to support it. "It would be an easy win," she said. "We know that
there is broad bipartisan support ... not just with lawmakers, but with the public. They certainly could benefit from more wins in the Senate."
Under normal political circumstances, this would be an easy decision, even for someone as calculating as Mitch McConnell. But even
though "the public really believes in reform," Grawert said, the issue is "getting hung up on the politics
of the Trump administration.” As with immigration reform, those with hardline, racism-inflected views have
been able, under Trump, to put themselves in position to veto any positive change. As long as
Republicans control Congress, congressional leadership will likely be too afraid of offending Trump and
Sessions to take any major steps forward on this critical social justice issue.

The plan forces Trump to fight his own administration – magnifies the link
Wesley Lowery et. al 19 -- National correspondent covering law enforcement, justice, politics and
policy, Neena Satija, investigative reporter, Josh Dawsey, reporter covering the White House, “Trump
boasts that his landmark law is freeing these inmates. His Justice Department wants them to stay in
prison.” The Washington Post.https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-brags-that-his-
landmark-law-freed-these-inmates-his-justice-department-wants-them-to-stay-in-
prison/2019/11/07/5f075456-f5db-11e9-a285-882a8e386a96_story.html

The gathering in April was a triumphant celebration of the First Step Act , the most sweeping overhaul of the federal
criminal justice system in a generation. Since its passage nearly a year ago, the law has led to the release of more than 3,000
inmates — including Allen, who was convicted of cocaine trafficking in 2001. The Justice Department, though, had never
wanted to let Allen out of prison. In fact, even as he and Trump shared a joyous embrace on television, federal prosecutors were
trying to persuade a judge to put Allen back behind bars. The president has repeatedly pointed to the First Step Act as one of his
administration’s chief bipartisan achievements and one for which he is personally responsible. But cases
like Allen’s expose a
striking rift between the White House allies who supported the law and the Justice Department officials
now working to limit the number of inmates who might benefit from it. “DOJ is pushing against the will of the
people, the will of Congress, the will of the president,” said Holly Harris, a conservative activist and leader of the Justice Action Network who
worked with Congress and the White House to pass the law. Harris noted that, before the law’s passage, then-Attorney General Jeff
Sessions was a vocal critic of reducing prison sentences. His successor, William P. Barr, expressed similar
reservations before his appointment. The First Step Act aims to lessen long-standing disparities in punishment for nonviolent drug offenses
involving crack cocaine. Having five grams of crack, a form of cocaine that is more common among black drug users, used to carry the same
mandatory minimum sentence as having 500 grams of powder cocaine, which is more common among white drug users. But federal
prosecutors are arguing in hundreds of cases that inmates who have applied for this type of relief are
ineligible, according to a review of court records and interviews with defense attorneys. In at least half a dozen cases,
prosecutors are seeking to reincarcerate offenders who have been released under the First Step Act. The department has told federal
prosecutors that when determining whether to challenge an application for early release, they should consider not the amount of crack an
inmate was convicted of having or trafficking — but rather the amount that court records suggest they may have actually had, which is often
much larger. A Justice spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle, defended that interpretation, though he declined to discuss the department’s guidance to
prosecutors or to say when it was disseminated. He did not respond to questions about the split between the department and the White House
allies who pushed for the law. Hornbuckle said that in years past, prosecutors could secure lengthy prison sentences without having to prove an
offender had large amounts of drugs. Under today’s laws, he said, those same offenders would probably be charged with crimes involving larger
quantities. “The government’s position is that the text of the statute requires courts to look at the quantity of crack that was part of the actual
crime,” Hornbuckle said. “This is a fairness issue.” In
the vast majority of cases reviewed by The Washington Post,
judges have disagreed with the Justice Department’s interpretation. Some of the people involved in writing the
legislation also disagree, including Brett Tolman, a former U.S. attorney in Utah. He and other supporters of the law note that the text of the
legislation does not explicitly instruct courts to consider the actual amount of crack an offender allegedly had. “ This is not a faithful
implementation of this part of the First Step Act ,” said Tolman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. “At some
point, they figured out a way to come back and argue that it wouldn’t apply to as many people.” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the
House Judiciary Committee, accused the Justice Department at a congressional hearing last month of “trying to sabotage” the law by
interpreting it in this way. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a key Republican sponsor of the law, declined to comment on the department’s stance on
inmate eligibility but told The Post he had concerns about how other aspects of the law are being implemented. “ It would be a shame if
the people working under the President failed to implement the bill as written ,” Lee said in a recent statement to
The Post. In January, Barr told Congress he would enact the law in ways that “are consistent with congressional intent,” and Hornbuckle said in
a statement that the “timely and effective implementation of the First Step Act is a priority.” But current
and former White House
officials said Barr, who was sworn in Feb. 14, has expressed concerns that it would drive up crime
numbers and that the administration would be blamed. He also told White House officials he’d heard from many critics of
the law, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations. Hornbuckle declined to comment on
those accounts. “The people that did the deal, including President Trump, wanted to help guys like me,” said Allen, 49, whose case was
mentioned in a Reuters story in July about efforts by some prosecutors to clamp down on First Step Act relief. “But on the flip side, you have
federal prosecutors who wake up every day trying to keep guys like me locked up.” In February, two months before the White House ceremony,
U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara in Tampa rejected the Justice Department’s argument that Allen should remain in prison, concluding that it
was contrary to the spirit of the law. “Congress says what it means and means what it says, and I don’t have any authority to fiddle with what
they’ve said,” Lazzara said before ordering Allen’s release, according to a court transcript. Prosecutors told Lazzara they would appeal. When
they noted that some judges had interpreted the law differently, Lazzara said, “I’ll bet you Congress didn’t really think through what was going
to happen.” Indeed,at least five federal judges across the country have sided with the Justice Department
in rejecting applications for early release. Others have said they will not rule on the applications until appellate courts decide
how they should be handled. The effect has been to paralyze the flow of First Step Act releases in some areas, leaving hundreds of petitioners
— the vast majority of whom are black — in federal prison, defense attorneys say. Among the stalled cases is that of Deonte Sweeney, a former
construction worker serving a 22-year sentence for trafficking more than 5 grams of crack cocaine. Prosecutors have opposed Sweeney’s
application for early release, alleging that he had 84 grams of crack. The judge said he would not rule until he had guidance from appellate
courts. “I put my life in the jury’s hands,” Sweeney, 41, said in a telephone interview from a federal prison in Pennsylvania. “So whatever
amount the jury chose, that’s what I should be held accountable for.” White House officials declined to comment — even as Trump continues
to claim credit for the bill. Just last month, the president appeared onstage in South Carolina with Tanesha Bannister, a 45-year-old woman
freed under the First Step Act. “I want to thank the president for giving me another lease on life,” Bannister told the crowd. “When is she
running for office, please? I want to back her,” Trump said after Bannister was finished speaking. “We have to back her, right?” Unmentioned
was that Justice Department prosecutors had opposed Bannister’s release. A call from the president The First Step Act was championed by a
bipartisan coalition that spanned the political spectrum, from the conservative Koch network toracial-justice activist Van Jones. The legislation
forbids federal jailers from shackling pregnant inmates and grants judges new powers to free sick and elderly prisoners. One of the most
consequential parts of the law was the provision allowing federal inmates such as Allen to apply for early release. The mandatory sentencing
policies those offenders faced are among the factors that have led the United States to incarcerate more people than any other nation, experts
say. Efforts
to pass similar legislation during the Obama administration failed to gain traction with
congressional Republicans and were not taken up by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). But
after Trump’s election in 2016, advocates believed they had another shot. Their hope was rooted in the president’s son-in-law and senior
adviser, Jared Kushner, who had expressed support for criminal justice reform and whose father spent 14 months in federal prison for crimes
including tax evasion and witness tampering. A
version of the legislation made it through the House in May 2018, but
the chances of a bill gaining enough Republican support in the Senate seemed a long shot — especially
because Sessions opposed it. “There are still those who would have you believe we should release the criminals early, shorten
sentences for serious federal traffickers, and go soft on crime,” Sessions said in a speech last year. “That would be bad for the rule of law, it
would be bad for public safety, and it would be bad for the communities across America.” Advocates
who lobbied on behalf of
the bill said they believed that Sessions’s opposition trickled down to other members of the Justice
Department, some of whom encouraged Republican senators to oppose the legislation. “I have no question
about it that, behind the scenes, there
were certain people at DOJ who seemed like they were trying to actively
hurt the legislation,” said Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs for the conservative group FreedomWorks. “ The tough-on-
crime mentality that existed in the 1980s and ’90s is still present with some members of Congress and is
still very much present inside the DOJ.” But Kushner raised the issue with his father-in-law so often that the president grew
annoyed with him, according to current and former administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private
conversations. Trump was more interested in talking about tariffs and immigration, one official said. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West
introduced the president to the case of Alice Johnson, a grandmother who had received a life sentence for trafficking crack cocaine. Trump has
said he was deeply affected by her story. The celebrity couple convinced him to grant her clemency in June. White House aides say Trump was
also swayed by lobbying from several Republican governors who had enacted similar sentencing changes in their states. McConnell was
unwilling to act without hearing from Trump directly. He did not trust others to speak for the president,
aides said. Early in December 2018, Trump called McConnell directly and asked him to give the legislation a vote in the Senate, the aides
said. Trump told him that, with White House backing, McConnell’s fellow Republicans would fall in line. “Once his heart was in it, he was all in,”
said Ja’Ron Smith, a special assistant to Trump who helped shepherd the legislation. “It
wasn’t easy to get consensus, but the
president was really pushing for this.” McConnell called a vote on Dec. 18. The legislation passed overwhelmingly, with 87
senators in favor and just 12 against. Three days later, Trump signed it. As President Donald Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner explained at a
White House summit on prison reform: "The single biggest thing we want to do is really define what the purpose of a prison is. Is the purpose to
punish, is the purpose to warehouse, or is the purpose to rehabilitate?" By promoting the First Step Act, Kushner appears to be pushing the U.S.
prison system to facilitate more rehabilitation.

CJR is a political nightmare

Randy Petersen 19 -- the Senior Researcher for the policing initiative at Texas Public Policy
Foundation, “Why is it so Hard to Reform Criminal Justice?” Right on Crime.
http://rightoncrime.com/2019/05/why-is-it-so-hard-to-reform-criminal-justice/
Policing is a core function of government, one of its few necessary functions, but is also the most intrusive institution in all of government. A
deliberate restraint on government’s power and a constant review of governmental influence in our lives is a fundamental principle of
conservatism and therefore applies to law enforcement at least as much as any other area of government. Or does it? Conservative doctrine
respects the rule of law and demands that laws (and government) be limited and equally applied, punishments just, communities safe, and
personal accountability enforced. In contrast, progressive doctrine looks to government to solve societal problems, the byproduct being ever
more laws and larger government. The enforcement of the copious laws a government generates is tempered by very little appetite for
personal accountability, and identity politics is often the basis for the calculus for how accountable an individual should be to these numerous
laws. This is admittedly a simplification of the two worldviews, and there are many points in between, but it gives some background for why
the policing issue is such a political nightmare. None of the normal rules apply. Limited government
conservatives routinely and reflexively defer to law enforcement —part of the very government they declare needs
restraining and limiting—whenever policing legislation is considered . Progressives, normally content with passing all sorts
of regulations and crimes, reflexively oppose those we empower to enforce the laws they pass, often with abolitionist
talking points and accusations of racism. The two ends of this political spectrum often pass each other without
hitting any point of agreement. Further complicating the issue are the police unions. Police unions claim to
speak for the police, but do they really? Police officers tend to be a right-of-center group. Unions (even police unions) are almost always left-of-
center in their politics. Police officers and police unions have overlapping interests in some cases, but where they speak to genuine law
enforcement officer concerns and where they speak to union concerns is lost in the dressing. Unions
are the darlings of the far
left, the far right reflexively supports law enforcement, and the police union is therefore a political
paradox unseen anywhere else. Police unions either represent collectivist union interests or they
represent government agents dictating the terms of their power in relation to your liberty-pick your poison. What other entity
is given the courtesy by legislative members to change bills and then still come up to testify against the
amended bill. Why would a member modify a bill to appease the unions when they will not support the
bill even as amended? The next time you hear a police officer claim he is only enforcing the laws that the legislature makes (as it should
be), consider the fact that those supposedly speaking on his behalf probably had more than a little hand in crafting that law. How perverse is
that?
Policing unions actively work against reforms
Katherine Beckett 18 -- Department of Law, Societies & Justice and Department of Sociology,
University of Washington, “The Politics, Promise, and Peril of Criminal Justice Reform in the Context of
Mass Incarceration.” Annual Review of Criminology. Vol. 1, pp. 235-259,
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092458#_i4

Researchers emphasizing the challenge of path dependence often identify a range of interest groups
that benefit from penal expansion and now endeavor to block penal reform . For example, private
corporations that own and operate prisons (or profit from contracts with them), prison officers’ unions, the bail
industry, and even county clerks who depend on the collection of fees and fines benefit from the penal status quo and often seek
to undermine progressive criminal justice reforms (Gottschalk 2015; Justice Policy Inst. 2012; Page 2011a,b; Petersilia &
Cullen 2015). Similarly, legislators from rural communities that house prisons constitute an important voting
block that seeks to obstruct the adoption of legislative reform measures (Thorpe 2015). In addition, a variety of
state agencies and organizations, including state departments of correction, prosecutorial associations, and law enforcement
groups have expanded in recent decades, and these organizations sometimes pose a powerful obstacle to
reform (Campbell 2012, Gottschalk 2015). Yet it is also true that these groups do not always achieve their anti-reform goals. Certainly,
some reform initiatives falter in the face of opposition from organized groups that benefit from mass
incarceration. For example, as Page (2011a,b) shows, the uniquely powerful California prison guards’ union [California
Corrections Peace Officers Association (CCPOA)] served for many years as an effective obstacle to legislative reform.
More generally, prison officers’ unions represent a powerful vested interest group that actively works to
resist what Page (2011b) calls prison downsizing: the closure of prisons and the laying off of correctional staff. And yet some prison
downsizing has occurred, even in California.2 In New York State, for example, the recent closure of nine prisons was staunchly opposed by the
prison officers’ union (Porter 2016). Nationally, “… at least 22 states have closed or announced closures for 94 state prisons and juvenile
facilities, resulting in the elimination of over 48,000 state prison beds and an estimated cost savings of over $345 million” since 2011 (Porter
2016, p. 1). Although some of these facilities have been reopened or repurposed to serve alternative carceral purposes, many have not. Vested
opponents of penal reform have lost other battles as well. Recently, for example, California voters adopted Propositions 47, which reduced
many felony offenses to misdemeanors, and 57, which renders people serving time for nonviolent offenses eligible for parole, despite the
opposition of most law enforcement groups, district attorneys, and the CCPOA. In Maryland and New Jersey, bail reform advocates have made
significant progress toward eliminating cash bail for most defendants, the opposition of the bail bond industry and other law enforcement
groups notwithstanding (Hernandez 2017, Wiggins 2016). And although legislators from rural communities that house prisons often seek to
obstruct proposed criminal justice reforms (Thorpe 2015), many such reforms have been enacted. In fact, since 2008, at least 48 states and the
District of Columbia have undertaken some type of progressive criminal justice reform aimed at reducing reliance on incarceration; more than
half the 50 US states adopted significant drug law reforms (Beckett et al. 2016, Subramanian & Moreno 2014). Until about 2011, such measures
were also opposed by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which represents about one-third of all state legislators (Green 2015).
In short, although vested penal interests clearly exist and often attempt to block reform, they sometimes lose. Evidence that powerful private
interests with a stake in mass incarceration exist and attempt to influence policy debates is not, therefore, evidence that change is impossible
or even unlikely. Penal pessimists might counter that recently enacted reforms tend to be limited to nonserious and nonviolent offenses, and
that their potential impact on the scale of incarceration is therefore limited (Beckett et al. 2016, Gottschalk 2015, Tonry 2016). Although
accurate, this observation does not negate the fact that many recent reforms were enacted over and against the opposition of vested and
powerful interest groups. In the future, comparative case studies would help researchers develop and evaluate hypotheses regarding the
circumstances and tactics that favor or disfavor reform under such circumstances. In the meantime, evidence of the existence of vested
interests should not be construed as evidence that change is impossible.

No matter the reform, Dems will always fight for more – still costs PC
Ashley Hackett 18 – investigative reporter for CNN, Pacific Standard, Chicago Tribune, “DOES
CONGRESS' PRISON REFORM BILL GO TOO FAR OR NOT FAR ENOUGH?” Pacific Standard. May 23, 2018.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/does-congress-prison-reform-bill-go-too-far-or-not-far-enough
The First Step Act also requires inmates to be housed within 500 miles of their families and prohibits the shackling of female inmates while they
are pregnant, giving birth, or in postpartum recovery. Despite the bill's progressive, reform-based nature, it faces
opposition from both sides of the aisle. In fact, some prominent Democrats argued in a letter to their colleagues that
the bill doesn't go far enough. Conversely, Republican Senator Tom Cotton appears to be working discreetly
to tank the bill because he believes it goes too far. Critics also cite the bill's heavy prioritization of "back-end" reform as a
downside. "Back-end" reforms focus on improving conditions once people are already imprisoned, while "front-end" reforms focus on reducing
the time that someone is imprisoned during their sentencing. Some
members of Congress, including many Democrats,
are disappointed in the bill's failure to address mandatory minimums , one of the prime targets for overhauling the
prison system. Beyond that, although this bill is a positive move for prison reform, it will not result in sweeping criminal justice reform: The
federal prison system makes up a relatively small proportion of the U.S. prison population. There are about 18,000 law enforcement agencies in
America, of which only about a dozen are federal. In a letter, theLeadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights , an
advocacy group that usually supports criminal justice reform, urged lawmakers to vote "no" for a myriad
of reasons including the bill's lack of sentencing reform and its credit system, which could potentially magnify the racial discrimination that's
already pervasive in the prison system. Essentially, the group views the "take what we can get" mentality as a risky maneuver that may not
bring about as much positive reform as anticipated. Amid the controversy surrounding this bill is one seemingly surprising revelation: Trump,
who describes himself as "tough on crime," endorsed the bill and said that he would sign if and when it arrives on his desk. Upon further
inspection, however, it's logical that Trump would support a mild bill that likely won't do much to reduce America's prison population as a
whole. Even in spite of all the opposition the bill faces, the First Step Act would be the nation's first federal criminal justice reform in years. It
would indeed be a small but important "first step" toward addressing America's mass incarceration problem.
 L – Decriminalization
GOP opposes decriminalization – 2020 magnifies the link
Brendan Bures 20 – freelance writer published in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, VICE, the New York
Observer, The Daily Beast, and more, “Trump administration doubles down on anti-marijuana position.”
Chicago Tribune. Feb 21, 2020. https://www.chicagotribune.com/marijuana/sns-tft-trump-anti-
marijuana-stance-20200221-jfdx4urbb5bhrf6ldtfpxleopi-story.html

Analysts previously predicted Donald Trump might support marijuana legalization to boost his chances
of re-election this year. Instead, the opposite has happened. The Trump Administration has proposed removing medical
marijuana protections in the 2021 fiscal budget and leaked audio revealed the President’s belief that smoking weed makes you dumb. Trump
has done little to reverse this appearance of an anti-marijuana sentiment building in the White House .
Rather, a top Trump campaign spokesman doubled down and said marijuana should remain illegal at the
federal level. During an interview with Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS-TV, Marc Lotter, who serves as director of strategic communications for
Trump's 2020 campaign, was asked about the President's stance on changing federal cannabis laws. “I think the president is looking at this from
a standpoint of a parent—a parent of a young person—to make sure we keep our kids away from drugs,” Lotter said. “They need to be
kept illegal. That is the federal policy.” This complicates what Trump stated during his 2016 campaign and time in the White
House. Previously, Trump supported leaving marijuana legalization to the states and voiced support for the STATES Act, bipartisan legislation
that would prohibit federal prosecution for those living in states with legal cannabis. “I think the
president has been pretty clear on
his views on marijuana at the federal level . I know many states have taken a different path,” Lotter said. It could also
signal a change in political strategy from the president in the upcoming election . Outside candidates Joe Biden
and Mike Bloomberg, the Democratic presidential nominee will support legalizing cannabis at the federal level.
Trump could see it as an advantage to position himself opposite of his eventual opponent . For now, Trump
appears comfortable allowing himself being seen as someone who will uphold federal cannabis prohibition. Said Lotter, “If he changes that,
obviously that would be something I wouldn’t want to get out in front of him on that.”

Partisan divide makes decriminalization an intense political battle

Sushree Mohanty 19 -- a financial analyst with eight years of experience in finance, retail, and
operations management, writer at MarketRealist, “Where Trump Stands on Marijuana Legalization.”
Market Realist. Dec 27, 2019. https://marketrealist.com/2019/12/where-trump-stands-on-marijuana-
legalization/

Trump challenges Congress on medical marijuana On December 21, Forbes discussed Trump’s resistance to marijuana
legalization. He stated that if required, he would ignore Congress’s protection laws for marijuana in each state. In the
US, marijuana is federally illegal. However, the Trump administration has allowed legalization on a state level. Congress has passed a bill that
would prohibit federal interference in certain states. Under this reform, federal authorities cannot interfere, arrest, or prosecute people for
marijuana possession in states where marijuana is legal. It’s this reform that Trump said he could ignore. In November, CNBC reported that the
House had approved a bill making marijuana legal at the federal level, removing cannabis from Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act. In
the US, a bill can become a law only after both the House and Senate have passed it. As the House has a Democrat majority, it
has more support for legalization. On the other hand, the Senate has a Republican majority. Therefore, it
rejects most legalization bills. Other cannabis reforms this year In October, Newsweek discussed the House’s
many other attempted cannabis reforms. It passed a reform to protect legal cannabis companies from federal interference,
especially while obtaining US banking services. Another reform was the SAFE (Secure and Fair Enforcement) Act, designed to protect US banks
providing financial help to cannabis companies. And this month, Newsweek stated that the
House and Senate had introduced a
reform that would “protect veterans who are legally employed by the cannabis industry from
discrimination at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs when applying for home loans.” However, the Senate declined it,
and instead introduced an anti-cannabis rule . This new rule would not let Washington, DC, legalize cannabis or even reduce
the criminal penalties for marijuana possession. The Democrats’ many bills and reforms in support of marijuana
legalization have been opposed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. No cannabis reforms have
been passed in the Senate this year. Trump and his views on cannabis legalization This isn’t the first time Trump has
challenged cannabis laws. As Forbes reports, he ignored a Congress medical cannabis rider in 2017 . While signing
a funding bill, Trump added a statement specifying he could ignore the marijuana rider. And in February 2019, Trump highlighted that he could
still allow federal interference in states. In
contrast to Democrats, Trump and other Republicans have never clearly
shown support for cannabis legalization. As I’ve discussed previously, Trump’s stance on legalization could depend on which
Democratic candidates he is up against in the 2020 election. Furthermore, Trump could strengthen his reelection campaign by supporting
medical marijuana legalization.

Decriminalization still contentious issue

Alex Johnson 19 -- a projects and breaking news reporter for NBC News, “House panel approves
marijuana decriminalization, but it faces a long, hard road.” NBC News. Nov 21, 2019.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/house-panel-approves-marijuana-decriminalization-it-faces-
long-hard-road-n1087781

The campaign to decriminalize marijuana overcame a historic congressional hurdle this week, but opponents
and some supporters acknowledge the legislation faces serious obstacles . The House Judiciary Committee on
Wednesday voted 24-10 to approve the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, or MORE, which would remove marijuana
from the federal list of controlled substances, where it's now banned alongside powerful drugs like heroin and LSD. The bill would require
federal courts to expunge convictions for marijuana offenses and authorize a 5 percent tax on marijuana sales to encourage minority
communities to enter the cannabis business. It's believed to be the first time a congressional committee has backed legislation to decriminalize
marijuana at the federal level. Eleven states and Washington, D.C., have already done so. But major roadblocks must be cleared before the
measure can ever become law. For one, the Judiciary Committee is only the first committee to have taken up the bill; it also has been
introduced in seven other House committees, any or all of which could alter the debate. And it isn't a lock to pass the Democratic-led
House, because members are sharply divided over whether to try to push through sweeping legislation like the MORE Act or to
go more slowly, emphasizing regulatory issues like the financial ramifications of decriminalization. Meanwhile, the measure
is likely to be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, opponents and even its primary sponsor suggested.
"This bill is nearly devoid of bipartisan support," Doug Collins of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said
Wednesday. Another Republican on the committee, Ken Buck of Colorado, said: "I don't think a majority of the Republicans will
support this bill. It is even less likely that the Senate would take it up. Therefore, I would just suggest that we deal with
other bills that we can get a much larger bipartisan support from." The legislation's primary sponsor, Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the committee's
chairman, said he, too, assumed that the Senate wouldn't accept the bill "as is." But he said he didn't agree with the argument that "the Senate
won't take this bill." "When the House passes a bill, it's part of a continuing process. It's not the end of a process," he said. Should the bill
ever make it through Congress, it must be signed by the president to become law. President Donald Trump hasn't
explicitly said whether he thinks the federal government should get out of the business of regulating marijuana. The closest he's come was in
April, when he said he supported legislation that would protect legal marijuana activities in states that have approved them. In a position paper,
the White House says marijuana "has a high abuse potential and no approved therapeutic use ," listing child
developmental impacts, mental health problems and marijuana's potential as a gateway to addiction to harder drugs as reasons to
pursue "substance use prevention" over legalization.
 L – Death Penalty
Partisanship makes repeal unpopular
Zachary Wolf 19 -- senior writer for CNN Politics, “Trump returns to the death penalty as Democrats
turn against it.” CNN. July 27, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/27/politics/death-penalty-trump-
democrats/index.html

The administration's move to start executing prisoners on federal death row after a 16-year hiatus reverses a
trend away from capital punishment in the US and tees up yet another divide between President Donald Trump
and Democrats, who are nearly united in opposition. Trump has been a public advocate of the death penalty for
decades. And his embrace of the rhetoric of criminal justice reformers hasn't softened his view on putting prisoners to death. He took out a
full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the state to reinstate its death penalty when five black and Latino teenagers were charged with
raping a woman in Central Park in the 1990s. The teens were later exonerated in that crime and received settlements from the city. A recent
Netflix documentary has brought the case back into the spotlight and drawn criticism of the prosecutor who oversaw the case. But Trump has
expressed no remorse for taking out the ads, which didn't specifically mention the so-called Central Park 5. "You have people on both sides of
that," he said in June. He's endorsed imposing the death penalty for some drug dealers, although the Supreme Court
has ruled against capital punishment for federal offenders who did not commit murder. He's pushed China to impose the death penalty for
crimes involving fentanyl and praised the Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte for his drug war, which has included extrajudicial killings and
vigilante justice. A number of other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, use capital punishment for drug offenses, according to
Harm Reduction International, a nongovernmental organization specializing in drug policy. Trump publicly called for the death penalty against
Sayfullo Saipov, the suspect in a deadly 2017 attack on a New York bike path that killed eight people. The day after the crime, Trump said Saipov
should be executed, long before a trial. Federal prosecutors rejected Saipov's offer to plead guilty in exchange for not being put to death. The
US federal government has not executed a prisoner since 2003, and most prosecutions and convictions for murder occur in state courts. There
are currently 62 prisoners on federal death row, compared with more than 2,600 on death row in states, according to the nonprofit Death
Penalty Information Center. More than half of the federal death row inmates are black or Latino. President Barack Obama did not move to end
the federal death penalty, but he signed no death warrants and he commuted the federal death sentences of two individuals to life without
parole. California recently joined multiple states in placing a moratorium on the death penalty and new Gov. Gavin Newsom had the death
chamber at San Quentin dismantled. Half the states have some kind of death penalty, 21 do not and four have governor-induced moratoriums,
according to the Death Penalty Information Center. TheTrump administration's move could put the death penalty
back into the political conversation. Multiple candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts,
condemned the administration's move Thursday. In fact, when The New York Times asked every Democratic candidate if they
supported or opposed the death penalty, every one except Steve Bullock, the Montana governor, said they opposed it. Bullock supports it in
limited circumstances. One glaring omission in that project is former Vice President Joe Biden, who declined to be interviewed. Biden, who has
a long record of supporting capital punishment as a senator, seemed recently to suggest he no longer holds that view. Politico noted that Biden
recently congratulated New Hampshire for repealing its death penalty this year. His criminal justice plan calls for ending the federal death
penalty and encouraging states to follow suit. It's a far cry from 2000, when The New York Times noted that every candidate for president
supported capital punishment. Or 1992, when then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton approved the death warrant of Ricky Ray Rector, who had brain
damage. That type of execution would not be possible today, after subsequent Supreme Court decisions. John Paul Stevens, the Republican-
appointed former Supreme Court justice who died earlier this month, had helped bring the death penalty back to the country by joining a
decision in 1976 after a four-year court-imposed hiatus. But he veered left during his career on the bench and wrote the opinion curbing capital
punishment for people with mental impairments. By 2008 he was opposed to all forms of capital punishment. The country has been moving in
the same direction, but not quite as fast. Support for capital punishment was over 60% in the early 2000s in Gallup polling. More recently it has
fallen to around 50%. After Trump's comments in March 2018 endorsing the death penalty for drug pushers, Quinnipiac asked about the death
penalty in a poll and found 58% of Americans support the death penalty for people convicted of murder but another majority, 51%, said they
would prefer a sentence of life without parole. In that same poll, just 21% said they supported the death penalty for people who sold drugs that
contributed to a fatal overdose. A similar 20% said they thought capital punishment for such people would help stop the opioid crisis. There
is a large partisan divide on the death penalty, with strong support among Republicans and Democrats
preferring the penalty of life without parole in that poll. It's not clear if the Trump administration's plan
to execute five federal death row inmates will suddenly make the death penalty a key election issue, but
it hasn't really been part of the national political conversation since 2004 , when John Kerry, then on his way to
becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, opposed it for everyone but terrorists.
The death penalty is still supported – repeal is unpopular
Laura Santhanam 19 -- Data Producer for the PBS NewsHour, “Americans are divided on federal
executions. Why is the Trump administration bringing them back?” PBS. Jul 26, 2019.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/americans-are-divided-on-federal-executions-why-is-trump-
administration-bringing-them-back

The Trump administration’s decision to reinstate the federal death penalty , beginning with the executions of five
men later this year, highlights a growing partisan divide over capital punishment at a time when its use has
been decreasing. Polls show a strong majority of Republicans support the death penalty, while a majority
of Democrats do not. The expected executions, scheduled for this winter, would be the first time the federal government has executed
anyone in 16 years — a time period that encompasses both Democratic and Republican administrations. The expected executions, scheduled
for this winter, would be the first time the federal government has executed anyone in 16 years. “The Justice Department upholds the rule of
law — and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Attorney General William
Barr said about the move in a press release on Thursday. But many see the use of the death penalty, at the federal level in particular, as
arbitrary in terms of who ultimately faces that punishment — a sentiment that has affected its public support, said Robert Dunham, director for
the Death Penalty Information Center. The change also comes as the Justice Department shifts policy on what chemical it will use to kill the
men, a topic of public and legal debate around the use of lethal injection drugs. Over the last two decades, capital punishment has fallen
overall, and at the state level especially, Dunham said. Nearly two dozen states have abolished the death penalty, and public opinion supporting
executions has followed that slump. “The national trend is [moving] away from capital punishment,” Dunham said. Could public opinion
and partisanship have played a role in Trump administration’s decision? The PBS NewsHour asked experts for their
insights. Who is being executed? The five men who will stand execution have all been convicted of killing children, among other victims. All
were found to be guilty of federal crimes due to different specific details of their cases, such as where the murder took place, or if they had
transported a minor over state lines. “Under Administrations of both parties, the Department of Justice has sought the death penalty against
the worst criminals, including these five murderers, each of whom was convicted by a jury of his peers after a full and fair proceeding,” Barr said
in his statement. The inmates include: Daniel Lewis Lee, who will be killed on Dec. 9, Lezmond Mitchell on Dec. 11, Wesley Ira Purkey on Dec.
13, Alfred Bourgeois on Jan. 13, 2020, and Dustin Lee Honken on Jan. 15, 2020. These men have run out of appeals to their death sentences,
according to the Justice Department, and all five will be put to death at the same prison, the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, a press
release noted. To execute them, the Justice Department have proposed using a single, acutely toxic barbiturate used to euthanize animals —
pentobarbital. That marks a departure from the three-chemical protocol used in previous executions but an option increasingly adopted amid
continued debate around the drugs used in lethal injections. Since 2010, the Justice Department said 14 states have used pentobarbital in more
than 200 executions. In 2018, drug companies distanced themselves from executions and refused to sell their product to be used for lethal
injections. But it’s unclear why the federal government is assuming responsibility for the execution of these men, Dunham said. In all of these
cases, they could be executed by the state. This “is a classic state interest,” Dunham said, adding that there is a false myth that the federal
death penalty is somehow better applied than at the state level. How this punishment is given out remains arbitrary and there are resource
constraints when it comes to such cases, he said. African Americans are disproportionately sentenced to death compared to whites, according
to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, and federal prosecutors are just as prone to making mistakes or pursuing erroneous
convictions as their peers at the state level. “The fact of the matter is the federal death penalty has all the same kinds of problems that state
death penalties do,” he said. The death penalty, public opinion and politics Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have abolished the
death penalty, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. In 2018, states executed 25 people — a record low. A year earlier,
the state of Arkansas stirred national outrage when the state announced plans to put eight men to death in less than two weeks around the
Easter holidays. That’s down from 98 executions that took place in 1999, a time when 78 percent of Americans said they supported the death
penalty. Since then, support has waned. According to Pew Research Center, 54 percent of U.S. adults said they
backed the death penalty in 2018,and partisanship quickly emerges when you look at numbers , said Jocelyn
Kiley, Pew’s associate director for U.S. politics. “Parties are much more divided over this question than they
historically were,” she said. In 2018, a clear majority of Republicans — 77 percent — said they favored the
death penalty, while 35 percent of Democrats said they supported capital punishment, Kiley said. And white
Americans were more likely to say they support the death penalty than African American or Latino respondents, Pew’s polling data suggested. A
few years earlier, in 2015, 49 percent of Americans said they supported the death penalty, according to Pew polling data. With a nearly
even split in opinion, Americans overall aren’t ready to abolish the death penalty , as some Democratic
presidential candidates such as Julian Castro have proposed. In a recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, 58 percent of U.S. adults
said it was a bad idea to get rid of the death penalty altogether, including 79 percent of Republicans,
who are Trump’s core of voters. Thirty-six percent said it was a good idea to abolish capital punishment. “What we’re left with is a
punishment that is fading away in most of the country but is still practiced in a few outlier jurisdictions,” Dunham said. “It looks as though the
federal death penalty may be becoming an outlier where it’s going forward against the flow of American public opinion.”
AFF—Links
 LT – Generic
Bipartisan support for CJR makes the aff a win
Van Jones 19 -- CEO of REFORM Alliance and co-founder of #cut50, a bipartisan criminal justice
initiative of the Dream Corps, “Fractured America got together on this issue. And it could point the way
for more.” CNN. Dec 5, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/05/opinions/criminal-justice-reform-
bipartisanship-jones/index.html

In this era of extreme political division, one issue is bringing people together : the need to invest in public
safety solutions that reduce crime and make the criminal justice system fairer. For the first time in my life, it appears every
presidential candidate is running as a champion of criminal justice reform -- including (to the shock of many)
Donald J. Trump. It is an astonishing reversal in both political parties . For decades, ambitious politicians tried to outdo each
other with "lock 'em up" policies and "tough-on-crime" rhetoric. This dynamic accelerated after George H.W. Bush crushed Massachusetts
Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race. Popular wisdom attributed the win to television ads spotlighting a prisoner named
Willie Horton, who committed heinous crimes while part of Dukakis' prison furlough program. Afterward, generations of politicians were afraid
to champion prison reform. So, how did justice reform emerge as the one cause that brings people together? The answers are complicated --
and surprising. I have a special perspective on the topic. In California, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which I co-founded in 1996,
helped to close five abusive youth prisons; we also blocked construction of a draconian "super jail for youth" near Oakland. Five years ago, I co-
founded the Dream Corps' #cut50 campaign with Jessica Jackson and Matt Haney, through which we passed more than a dozen bipartisan
criminal justice bills at the state level, plus last year's federal First Step Act. This year, I helped launch the REFORM Alliance, which aims to shrink
and transform the probation and parole systems. I have dedicated my life to this cause. But I have never seen anything like 2019 -- a year in
which all presidential candidates and both parties are fighting over who can be trusted to put fewer people behind bars while reducing crime.
The magic moment Any shift of this magnitude has many causes. Let's explore the top five: 1. The trifecta We are benefiting from an
extraordinary trifecta: low crime rates, a strong economy and both parties being fed up with our bloated, ineffective prison system. Politicians
can more easily embrace reform when job numbers are up. President Barack Obama helped put the US economy into recovery and, under
Trump, unemployment has continued to decline. Now, there are more open jobs in some cities than there are qualified workers. And yet, too
many job categories still exclude people with criminal records. But, in this economy, more employers are willing to hire formerly incarcerated
people, and more lawmakers are willing to invest in job training, "second chance" and "clean slate" bills to help the formerly incarcerated start
new lives. Finally, lawmakers eventually got frustrated investing billions into a system that was failing to rehabilitate a majority of people who
came into contact with it. Incarceration
fatigue opened the door to new ways of thinking about crime
prevention that address underlying causes -- like mental health, drugs, trauma, etc. And so leaders began shifting resources to
create specialty courts -- veterans courts, drug courts, mental health courts -- across the country. 2. Culture shift The television series, "Orange
is the New Black," brought binge-watching Americans inside the lives of women living behind bars. Ava DuVernay's explosive documentary,
"The 13th," and Netflix series, "When They See Us," broke hearts. Other documentaries and podcasts, from "Time: The Kalief Browder Story" to
"Serial," opened the public's eyes. Authors like Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson shook the consciences of those who read their works.
Shaka Senghor's bestselling book, "Writing My Wrongs," won the admiration of Oprah Winfrey and helped to open the floodgates for formerly
incarcerated authors. And in recent years, household names like Common, John Legend, Alicia Keys and Kim Kardashian have become
outspoken advocates. This wave of popular
media pushed into mainstream living rooms and reached beyond the
pool of those who once paid attention to the incarceration system. It is now common knowledge that the
United States, shamefully, has the highest incarceration rate in the world . 3. Democratic value: Justice Many people
assume that Democrats always opposed mass incarceration. That is a myth. Democrats overwhelmingly backed President Bill Clinton's
disastrous 1994 crime bill. The deep blue state of California just recently began to dig itself out of an incarceration crisis that resulted in the
construction of more than 20 prisons but only one university in the past generation. And the national Democratic Party's platform carefully
excluded any reference to criminal justice reform until 2016. So, what changed? Many things -- from #BlackLivesMatter to the opioid crisis.
Seeing African American communities devastated by decades of overpolicing and excessive
incarceration, a new generation of black activists rebelled . Starting in 2013, they demanded that Democrats
address head-on the issues of racist police abuse and racial bias in the justice system . Their passion gave
more political room for traditional civil rights and civil liberties organizations to accelerate their own longstanding reform
efforts. Their grass-roots protests also gave Obama a greater impetus and opportunity to champion criminal justice reform. He took full
advantage -- granting clemency to close to 2,000 inmates, pushing hard for bipartisan legislation and even becoming the first-ever sitting US
president to visit a prison. His attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, reshaped the Department of Justice -- with a focus on
incarcerating fewer people. And, in 2016, Hillary Clinton's platform included a plank calling for criminal justice reform -- an issue no nominee
had touched for decades. Pushed past the breaking point, the incarceration generation rose up and insisted that Democrats speak out boldly
against the racial injustice in the system. Today, all Democrats echo their call. The protests
that started in 2013 have yielded a
Democratic Party today that is more firmly grounded in its core ideals of racial, gender and social justice.
But Democrats also know the Republicans aren't going to "Willie Horton" them, since so many conservatives are also embracing the cause. 4.
Republican value: Liberty Many on the left doubt the sincerity of criminal justice reformers on the right. They can't believe that Republicans
would truly care about a "racial justice" issue. But the truth is that Republicans
have their own reasons to oppose the
incarceration industry. Republicans care a lot about public safety. But the "tough on crime" system made many communities less safe.
Today, many conservatives want an evidence-based system that focuses on reducing crime. They've returned to principles that resonate deeply
on the right as they joined the fight for reform. One such principle is the need for fiscal prudence with taxpayer dollars and less government
waste. Fiscal conservatives balk at the $80 billion annual price tag of mass incarceration . That's one reason
Republican governors, like Rick Perry in Texas and Nathan Deal in Georgia, passed reform bills that saved millions of dollars and (in Texas) even
closed several prisons, all while bringing the crime rate down. Another
conservative principle is the desire for
transparency, accountability and limits on government overreach . Libertarians especially don't want the government to
have too much power over individual lives. The Koch brothers fall into this category. So do US Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul and advocacy
groups like FreedomWorks. Yet another conservative value is the faith-based belief in human dignity. Religious conservatives, including
Newt Gingrich, worry the present system leaves no real opportunity for second chances or personal
redemption. When he was the Republican governor of Mississippi, Phil Bryant explicitly cited his Christian faith as the source of his passion
for prison reform. Black pro-Trump conservatives like Candace Owens and Katrina Pierson are working to return a pro-Lincoln, pro-freedom
ethic inside the GOP on this issue. In
theory, of course, all conservatives should oppose a big, failed government
bureaucracy that produces bad outcomes while eating up taxpayer dollars. America's massive prison
industry today represents a classic case of this phenomenon. And more and more Republicans -- from Right
on Crime to Faith & Freedom Coalition to The American Conservative Union Foundation -- are willing to say so. 5. The Trump factor
Then there is the most surprising plot twist of all: Trump's decision to release Alice Johnson. The world watched as Johnson, a 63-year-old
grandmother who had been sentenced to die in prison, ran across the road into her family's arms. Webegan to hear the President
shift from describing himself as "tough on crime" to expressing that he's tough but fair and recognizing the
disproportionate sentencing in the justice system . Surrounded by law enforcement, faith leaders, Republican members and
even several Democrats, Trump then endorsed adding sentencing reform to the First Step Act, which he signed into law
later that year. Because many red state governors took the lead, this Republican President could engage on
criminal justice reform without risking his base. More importantly, key people in Trump's inner circle -- including
his son-in-law, Jared Kushner -- were strong allies. This opened the door for formerly incarcerated people (on the left and right) to make
repeated visits to the White House, sharing their experiences with senior officials of how the existing system failed them. People on both sides
of the aisle should be glad that Trump decided to adopt the cause -- and not crush it. Criminal
justice reform could have fallen
into a divisive stalemate like guns, climate or immigration. Instead, Trump's decision to embrace
criminal justice reform has set Republicans free to work with Democrats. That's a good thing for both
parties -- and a very good thing for the people suffering behind bars.

Tides have turned – Republicans support CJR

NBC 15 -- news division of the American broadcast television network NBC, “How The Political Ground
Shifted on Criminal Justice Reform.” Feb 24, 2015. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-
news/how-politicians-came-support-criminal-justice-reform-n309966
Twenty years later, the U.S. houses more than 1.5 million prisoners in federal and state prisons, more than any other country on a per capita
basis and that doesn’t include people local jails and military prisons. But a
major shift is happening in the political sphere.
Many Democrats have dropped the tough-on-crime persona and some Republicans have as well. States
have begun to reverse many of the tough-on-crime laws that passed , including California which has a major prison
overcrowding problem. At the national level, the shift started to take shape in Congress in 2010 when lawmakers
dramatically reduced the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Four years later, some of the most
conservative senators, like Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, are teaming up with some of the most liberal
senators, such as Cory Booker of New Jersey and Patrick Leahy of Vermont to address the issue. In October of 2014, a meeting was
convened by philanthropists Laura and John Arnold. Invited were some of the most ideological groups spanning the political spectrum:
FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform from the right and the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress on
the left. Out of that meeting the Coalition for Public Safety was formed with participants vowing to present ways to reform various tenets of the
criminal justice system. Charles Koch asked: “If this happens to a big corporation that can afford the best lawyers, what is happening to those
who can’t?” While several foundations are backing the project, including the Arnold Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford
Foundation, a critical component of this coalition is Koch Industries, a multinational corporation owned by conservative billionaire activists
Charles and David Koch that spent nearly a billion dollars to defeat Democrats in recent elections. The Kochs have not placed any limit on how
much they will spend on the issue but have already committed a portion of the $5 million donated by the foundations to the coalition. Like
Nolan, the Kochs had their own experience that caused them to question the impact of the criminal justice system. In the 90s, an oil refinery
that belonged to a Koch Industries subsidiary was involved in a court case in Texas over environmental violations. The case turned into a
criminal one involving four Koch employees that was eventually settled but after a long, tumultuous process that caused Charles Koch to ask “if
this happens to a big corporation that can afford the best lawyers, what is happening to those who can’t?” After the trial wrapped, the Koch
organization started looking into the criminal justice system and determined that the system isn’t working for many. Now
enough
conservatives are on board with reforming the criminal justice system that activists are optimistic that
things might change. What changed? A lot of things. The cost to taxpayers has become extremely large . Prisons cost
$80 billion per year, that’s up to $50,000 per inmate each year in some states. For fiscal conservatives, that’s too a lot of
wasted money. Matt Kibbe, head of FreedomWorks, a conservative group that is committed to small government that is part of the
Coalition for Public Safety, said “mass incarceration has ominous fiscal implications, and that matters to a lot of us,” he said. Kibbe said he
briefly touched on the issue in his last book and the FreedomWorks membership, which is active online, responded with veracity, signifying
their concern on the issue. Clinton’s crime bill pumped billions of dollars into states to build new prisons, but Nolan said it didn’t provide any
money for operating the prisons. “Then the bill came due for the guards and the food and the program officers and the equipment and these
prisons, which had been a gift from the federal government, began to be a very costly part of the state budget,” Nolan said. Secondly, the
rise of libertarian thought within the Republican Party has spurred harsh critique on the criminal justice
system. Mark Holden, general counsel for Koch Industries said the system is an assault on personal freedom. “One of the largest intrusive
actions by the government is the criminal justice system,” Holden said. “They can take away your life, liberty and property.” In addition,
conservatives began feeling the impact of an overreaching criminal justice system. That’s why Kibbe’s group,
FreedomWorks, is intent on reforming civil asset forfeiture, which is when police can take personal property if they believe, without having to
prove, it’s connected to illegal activity. Holden points to the over criminalization of human behavior. He said there are 4500 federal criminal
laws that are on the books. “I know I couldn’t list 4500 things that are criminal,” he said. And Nolan said it’s hard to meet a family who hasn’t
been impacted by harsh drug sentencing. “In many of these cases, stupid decisions by young people ended up with dozens of years behind
bars,” Nolan said. “That’s not justice.” Finally,
crime rates are at the lowest level that they’ve been in two decades.
While numerous studies have shown that an increase in incarceration is not the reason for a reduction
in crime, a low crime rate means that it’s not an issue of concern to people.

Trump doesn’t derail reforms – the plan is popular

George Mitchell 17 -- Professor in Law and Public Policy, Georgetown University, and National Legal
Director for the American Civil Liberties Union, “The Changing Politics of Crime and the Future of Mass
Incarceration.” Keynote at the Academy for Justice conference on criminal justice reform. Feb 11, 2017.
https://law.asu.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/academy_for_justice/2_Reforming-Criminal-Justice_Vol_1_-
The-Changing-Politics-of-Crime-and-the-Future-of-Mass-Incarceration.pdf

Skeptics may ask whether these reforms stand a chance in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, who ran at
least in part as a throwback to the “tough on-crime” approaches of the 20th century . As a candidate, Trump defended
the aggressive “stop-and-frisk” policing that generated racial profiling in New York City and other cities.2 As president, he appointed as attorney
general Jeff Sessions, who, while a senator from Alabama, consistently opposed bipartisan efforts at criminal justice reform.3 Sessions has
already reversed criminal justice reforms introduced by the Obama administration, and has directed federal prosecutors in drug cases to charge
the most harsh penalty possible in all cases, regardless of the circumstances.4 The shift from the prior administration is dramatic on all fronts,
but nowhere more so than on criminal justice. So does it make sense to think about criminal justice reform in this
political environment? The answer is yes, for three fundamental reasons . First, it’s the right thing to do.
The status quo—in which more than 2 million people are behind bars, many needlessly, and nearly all for much longer than warranted by
concerns about recidivism, retribution, or deterrence—is morally problematic and fiscally irresponsible. That the incarcerated population is
disproportionately poor and people of color compounds the injustice.5 Bringing
a measure of justice to our criminal law
enforcement system is the most urgent civil-rights issue of our time . Second, criminal justice reform
enjoys substantial bipartisan support, despite our highly polarized world, making it possible to forge
progress here that is not possible on many other subjects . This project has been financially supported by the Charles Koch
Foundation. Meanwhile, also with Koch’s support, the ACLU, the Center for American Progress, Right on Crime, Prison
Fellowship, and the Tea Party’s Freedom Agenda have all joined forces to press for criminal justice
reform.6 The time for reform is now. Third, while the president and attorney general are unlikely to be allies on
criminal justice reform, the federal government has less to say on this subject than on many others. About
99% of criminal law cases are brought by state and local officials, in state courts.7 And about 90% of the nation’s incarcerated population is
housed in state prisons and jails.8 It certainly helps to have a president and attorney general committed to reform, as President Barack Obama
and Attorney General Eric Holder were. But reform can and must continue without federal assistance . The locus of the
debate on criminal justice must be at the state level. And red, blue, and purple states have all shown an interest in getting smarter, more
efficient, and more humane in their criminal law policies.
 LT – Decriminalization
Decriminalization is popular – GOP has turned
Kris Krane 18 – senior contributor at Forbes, “Why President Trump Is Positioned To Be Marijuana's
Great Savior & How The Democrats Blew It.” Forbes. Jun 11, 2018.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kriskrane/2018/07/11/why-president-trump-could-be-marijuanas-
savior/#527723a20a0d
President Trump: America’s Great Marijuana Savior. It’s an idea that may sound counterintuitive to many Americans who falsely believe that
Democrats and their allies on the left have been the sole champions of legalizing cannabis. While
the left side of the aisle may
traditionally have been more likely to support legalization, no party has ever had a monopoly on the issue.
And now we have a president—one known for his unpredictability—who recently signaled a willingness to support
reform. President Trump, whether premeditated or not, is putting himself in a position to make history by becoming the U.S. president who
reversed a nearly century-long policy of marijuana prohibition and, in so doing, reap the political spoils of taking on the mantle of “the
legalization president.” This idea is not so far-fetched. Trump
has every reason politically to become an unlikely
champion of marijuana legalization . Given the overwhelming public support of the issue, legalizing marijuana
will certainly improve his chances of reelection in 2020. If he does, the Democrats will have nobody to blame but themselves.
Talk of President Trump’s potential support picked up steam in early June when he stated that he would “probably"
support the STATES Act, a new bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that would
exempt legal state-licensed cannabis businesses from the Controlled Substances Act, eliminating the fear of federal prosecution, as well as
banking and tax issues that currently plague the industry. But this isn’t new ground for the current president. During the 2016
campaign, in an interview with KUSA-TV in Colorado, Donald Trump was asked if his administration would crack down on cannabis businesses
operating in compliance with state laws. His response: "I wouldn’t do that, no … I think it should be up to the states, absolutely." Earlier in the
campaign, back in October 2015, Trump discussed the issue at a campaign rally, announcing: "The marijuana thing is such a big thing. I think
medical should happen—right? Don’t we agree? I think so. ... I think that should be a state issue, state-by-state." Granted, the president’s
position on this issue has not been consistent, and nobody should mistake him for a champion of legalization. His embrace of legalization would
be a reversal spurred by purely political motives. At the same time he was touting respect for states’ rights and support for medical cannabis,
he expressed disdain for full legalization. In June 2016, when asked about legalization at a CPAC conference, he responded: "I say it's bad.
Medical marijuana is another thing, but I think [recreational marijuana] it's bad. And I feel strongly about that." But what about states' rights?
"If they vote for it, they vote for it. But they've got a lot of problems going on right now, in Colorado. Some big problems. But I think medical
marijuana, 100 percent." Republican Support Not New; Democratic Support Not Universal Many may believe that Trump is an outlier when it
comes to Republican support for marijuana reform, but historically this has never been a traditional left-wing issue. Until recently, the only
elected officials willing to champion cannabis-reform legislation came from the fringes of both parties. The States’ Rights to Medical Marijuana
Act, the only federal legislation introduced throughout the 2000s that would have protected state medical marijuana laws, was co-sponsored
every year by far-left Democrat Barney Frank and far-right Republican Ron Paul. Neither could muster more than token support from other
members of their parties in Congress. While support for legalization has historically been somewhat stronger among Democratic Party
politicians than their GOP counterparts, Democrats have been slow to embrace reform even while their constituents have been much further
ahead. For example, while the STATES Act has the support of President Trump, it lacks support from Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate's top
Democrat. Some of the past's most ardent drug warriors in Congress came from the Democratic delegation. The harsh mandatory minimum
sentences enacted in the 1980s that largely led to today’s mass-incarceration problem were championed by then Democratic House Speaker
Tip O'Neill, someone generally revered as a progressive hero. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, has long been one of the strongest
supporters of the War on Drugs, having campaigned vigorously against every proposed marijuana-reform proposal on the California ballot,
including Prop 215 in 1996 that legalized medical marijuana and Prop 64 in 2016 that ended prohibition altogether in the state. Only this year—
once it had become politically untenable for a California Democrat to support prohibition, and she faced a progressive challenger in a
contentious primary race—did Sen. Feinstein come around on cannabis reform. Even President Obama, largely celebrated by the cannabis
industry for having not cracked down on Colorado and Washington after they became the first states to end marijuana prohibition, never had
the political courage to call for real reform at the federal level, despite majority support for legalization among the general public and
overwhelming support amongst registered Democrats. While the Democrats controlled Congress and the White House from 2008 to 2010, not
a single major marijuana-reform legislation was approved. Not until 2014, under a GOP-controlled House during Obama's second term, was a
budget rider passed that prevents the justice department from cracking down on state-legal medical marijuana businesses, an amendment
largely championed by Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. In 2010, two years before Colorado and Washington voted to legalize, 54% of
Democrats already supported full legalization, according to Gallup, but you couldn’t find a single national Democratic party leader willing to
champion legislative efforts to end prohibition. Despite the writing being on the wall for nearly a decade, Democrats have missed out on
chances to own this issue and the political benefits that come along with it—in particular, the 70% of millennials who support legalization,
according to the Pew Research Center. It Didn’t Have To Be This Way Democrats blew it. In the 2016 election, Democrats had an
opportunity to own this issue, especially in a campaign in which millennial voters showed record levels of dissatisfaction with the
major-party candidates. Hillary Clinton could have chosen to go further than President Obama and support an end to federal cannabis
prohibition, as some Democratic party political strategists were urging at the time. Yet, just as Democratic leaders had for years, she chose
the “politically safe” route and only endorsed medical marijuana, while calling on the federal government to study the legalization
programs in Colorado and Washington. This essentially put no daylight between her position and that of then-candidate Trump, losing what
was perhaps the Democrats’ last opportunity to reap the political spoils of being the party to embrace
legalization. This has opened up a huge opportunity for President Trump to own this issue in a way that no
president ever has, eliminating any chance Democrats may have had to earn the political gains of embracing legalization. The Democrats
have potentially ceded these benefits to the president, who could potentially use them with staggering effectiveness during his reelection
campaign. From President Trump’spoint of view, there is virtually no political downside to championing
legalization. His base has already shown a willingness to stick with him through any number of political
scandals and controversial policies. If his evangelical supporters have stayed loyal despite allegations of extramarital affairs, paying
hush money to porn stars, accusations of sexual assault and harassment, calling white supremacists “very fine people,” and separating children
from their parents at the border, it is hard to imagine them abandoning him for supporting the legalization of a
healing plant. In fact, he could realize some very real political gains by supporting legalization. A record high 64% of Americans now support
legalizing marijuana at the federal level, including 51% of Republicans, according to a recent Gallup poll. Even in deep-red Oklahoma, voters
recently overwhelmingly approved a medical marijuana law through a ballot initiative that was opposed by the entire state GOP establishment.

Election incentives make decriminalization a no-brainer

Kris Krane 18 – senior contributor at Forbes, “Why President Trump Is Positioned To Be Marijuana's
Great Savior & How The Democrats Blew It.” Forbes. Jun 11, 2018.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kriskrane/2018/07/11/why-president-trump-could-be-marijuanas-
savior/#527723a20a0d

Given that President Trump’s approval ratings have consistently teetered around 40% throughout his term, he will
need to look for new issues heading into the 2020 election that can earn him votes from constituencies that may
not otherwise be inclined to support the reelection of a controversial president. There’s arguably no issue more ripe
for this kind of political swing than marijuana legalization. In particular, the aforementioned millennial voters support
legalization in record numbers, and while they tend to lean progressive, they don’t have a strong loyalty to either
party. The president and his political advisors may well understand these ramifications. And looking at the political map, coming out in
support of legalization may become a political no-brainer . The most important swing states in the 2020
presidential election all have some form of legalization in place : Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida have all legalized medical
marijuana and are in the process of implementing their legal markets. Purple states like Colorado and Nevada have thriving adult-use markets,
while Michigan is expected to legalize for all adults this November. The
president will need to win many of these states if
he wants to keep his job, and legalization will only help his prospects of doing so.

Recent history proves – this Congress supports decriminalization

Angela LaVito 19 -- a reporter covering health care, tobacco and the cannabis industry for CNBC.com,
“US lawmakers look to legalize pot in ‘historic’ marijuana reform hearing.” CNBC. Jul 10, 2019.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/us-lawmakers-look-to-legalize-pot-in-historic-marijuana-reform-
hearing.html

U.S. lawmakers weighed reforming pot laws in what advocates called a “historic” hearing Wednesday, with numerous
members of Congress saying they wanted to loosen federal laws, even legalize marijuana. “ Marijuana decriminalization may be
one of the very few issues upon which bipartisan agreement can still be reached in this session,” said Rep. Tom
McClintock, R-Calif., adding “it ought to be crystal clear to everyone that our laws have not accomplished their goals.” Eleven states have
legalized adult recreational use and a majority of Americans support legalization. A number of bills are on the table that would
reform federal marijuana laws. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security sought input on how
to reform federal laws in a hearing Wednesday titled “Marijuana Laws in America: Racial Justice and the Need for Reform.” “ There is a
growing consensus in this country that current marijuana laws are not appropriate and we must consider
reform,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif. “Today’s hearing is a first step in that process.” Despite the optimism, lawmakers did not appear to
have a clear consensus on the best approach, such as whether to give states the right to legalize on their own, remove marijuana from schedule
1 of the Controlled Substances Act, legalize it or include promote social and racial equity in marijuana laws. The
STATES Act is among the
most popular cannabis bills. It would amend the Controlled Substances Act and exempts state-approved
marijuana activity from federal enforcement . Proponents say the legislation would eliminate federal concerns in states where
marijuana is legal. Yet some say the bill does not go far enough because it does not address any racial or social concerns. “We need to reinvest
in those individuals and those communities that have been disproportionately impacted [by marijuana prohibition],” Baltimore State’s Attorney
Marilyn Mosby told the committee. “The STATES Act does not do that, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m opposed to it.” Malik Burnett,
Chief Operating Officer of multi-state cannabis operator Tribe Companies and former cannabis policy advisor, warned lawmakers that while
white people are making money in the growing industry, minorities in other parts of the country are impoverished because of drug policy.
Representatives asked for suggestions on policies to combat this. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a co-sponsor of the STATES Act in the House, urged
lawmakers to support the bill even though it does not go as far as some would like, saying it could be a first step toward legalization. “My deep
concern is that concerns over how far to go on some of the restorative elements in our policy could divide our movement,” he said. Justin
Strekal, political director of the marijuana advocacy group NORML, applauded the subcommittee for holding the hearing. “Today was a historic
day in the fight to end federal marijuana criminalization,” he said in a statement. “ Members
of both political parties
demonstrated a desire to reform our nations failed policy of prohibition and the only disagreement was
how, not if.” But even if reform gains momentum in the Democratically controlled House, it’s likely to face a tougher battle in the
Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposes marijuana legalization.
 LT – Death Penalty
Support for the death penalty is at an all-time low – the plan is popular
Kim Bellware 19 -- Reporter covering national breaking news and features, “Despite Trump’s vow to
revive the death penalty, support for capital punishment shrank in 2019.” Washington Post. Dec 16,
2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/17/despite-trumps-vow-revive-it-support-
death-penalty-continued-shrink/
In May, New Hampshire became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty, when lawmakers overrode a veto by Republican Gov. Chris
Sununu. After that, Robert Dunham started to see the map in a whole new way. Dunham, who leads the nonprofit Death Penalty Information
Center (DPIC), saw that the death penalty had disappeared not only from New England but largely from the Mid-Atlantic to Appalachia. “I
MapQuested this,” Dunham told The Washington Post ahead of the release of a new DPIC report Tuesday. “If you started your car in
Madawaska, Maine, and you drove it to Fort Gay, West Virginia, you would go 1,289 miles without setting a tire in a death penalty state.” The
disappearance of the death penalty in the Northeast marks its steady decline across the United States ,
which continued in 2019, according to the report. Despite President Trump’s desire to resume federal executions, use of and support
for the death penalty trended downward by almost every metric: Nationwide, there were fewer than 30 executions
and 50 death sentences for the fifth year in a row. Public support for the death penalty remains near a 47-year low .
Throughout the year, the death penalty was a recurring news story because of a flurry of high-profile exonerations, temporary reprieves and
commutations. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court did relatively little with the death penalty but had an “inordinate amount of controversy,”
according to Dunham. Twenty-two people were executed this year in a handful of states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, South Dakota,
Tennessee and Texas. The 33 death sentences (issued as of mid-December) came from 28 counties, or fewer than 1 percent of all counties in
the country, effectively making those that produced the majority of the nation’s death sentences outliers in their own states, according to the
report. “That’s a 75 percent drop in executions from their peak at the end of the 1990s and an 85 percent drop in death sentences since their
peak in the mid-'90s,” Dunham said. As
downward trends held steady, there were also exceptional developments
in how states administered capital punishment and how the wider public reacted . In addition to New
Hampshire’s abolition, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) issued a moratorium on executions in May. The state holds a quarter of all death row
prisoners in the United States. The number of prisoners with death sentences continues to decline. “California has by far the largest death row
in the country, so the moratorium means a huge effective decline in America’s death row,” Brandon Garrett, a Duke law professor who has
written several books on the death penalty and prosecution, said in an email. “Over
time, more states that are not executing
anyone may reconsider the considerable expense of the death penalty as not a worthwhile use of
resources.” Earlier this year, Oregon vastly curtailed instances when the death penalty could be imposed. As of mid-December, Indiana
marked a full decade with no executions. “Any one of these, or even a combination of a few, would be a lot for a year,” Garrett said. “But all of
them together is remarkable.” The Trump administration’s effort to revive federal executions places it increasingly out of touch with the
majority of Americans: A
record 60 percent of Americans favor life without parole over execution, according to
the latest Gallup poll. In two of the most high-profile Supreme Court cases of the year, criticism of state misconduct was dragged into
full view. The cases of Rodney Reed in Texas and Curtis Flowers in Mississippi were extraordinary and sensational, Dunham said. “Both Curtis
Flowers and Rodney Reed embodied the legacy of lynching,” he said. Flowers has been tried six times in the same killings, a case that was thrust
into the national spotlight by the popular American Public Media podcast “In the Dark.” His latest conviction in a 1996 quadruple killing in a
Mississippi furniture store came under review by the Supreme Court, which overturned the guilty finding in the summer as it ruled that a white
prosecutor worked to keep African Americans off the jury. After 6 trials over the same killings, Curtis Flowers can await a possible 7th from
home Reed’s case, meanwhile, attracted the attention of a wide range of high-profile figures, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Kim Kardashian
West and Oprah Winfrey. Reed received a rare last-minute stay of execution as supporters called for DNA evidence that could exonerate him to
be tested. Reed, who is black, is accused of raping and murdering 19-year-old Stacey Stites, a white woman who was engaged to a police
officer. Reed maintained the two were having a consensual affair and that Stites’s fiance murdered her out of anger over her affair.
“Americans now know that innocent people are at risk of being executed . For years, death penalty proponents
denied that. But with 166 exonerations, only the most ardent innocence denier claims there is no risk of executing the innocent,” Dunham said.
“I think cases like this just add to the perception that the government cannot be trusted to be fair in these cases.” “African Americans have
known this all along,” he added. “The question is whether events like this will make a dent in the psyche of white Americans.” Dale Baich, an
assistant federal public defender in Arizona, said exonerations
can go a long way in turning people against the death
penalty. “What the exonerations do is it makes the public and the legislature more aware that there are
problems with the death penalty. Even if a person committed the crime, is this the kind of case where we want to impose the death
sentence?” Baich said. Shrinking support Even as death penalty supporters increasingly become outliers, there is still some support for the
death penalty beyond the White House and conservative Supreme Court justices. “There are some prosecutors in some jurisdictions that are
still aggressively seeking death,” Baich said, pointing to district attorneys in Maricopa County, Ariz., and Riverside County, Calif., which together
have generated more than third of all death sentences since 2014. “We had a client in Utah, Ron Lafferty, who had cancer and was confined to
a bed, and the state was moving forward to carry out his execution. But rather than say, ‘Look, he’s going to die of cancer, let’s just end this
[effort],’ the state was aggressively appealing the case in the courts,” Baich said. Lafferty, who spent 34 years on death row for the murder of
his sister-in-law and her daughter, died of natural causes in November. The argument Baich hears most often from those who defend pursuing
executions for years-old or problematic death sentences is that “it’s the sentence that was imposed by the jury or the court, and [their] job is to
carry out the judgment of the court,” he said. From his view as a federal public defender, Baich said, 2019 was steady, continuing trends of the
previous five years. But he agreed that if
the death penalty wasn’t a mainstream issue already, it became one this
year. “I think it’s there. It’s no longer a third rail in politics,” he said. “You have bipartisan efforts in a number of
states around the country. I think it’s trending in that direction so that, in the end, we’ll have few outliers.”

Times have changed – bipartisan support for repeal

Nathalie Baptiste 19 – reporter for Mother Jones in D.C, “Trump Loves the Death Penalty. These
Conservatives Don’t.” Mother Jones. Oct 31, 2019. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-
justice/2019/10/trump-loves-the-death-penalty-these-conservatives-dont/
“Criminals who murder our police should get the death penalty,” Donald Trump said to loud cheers at the International Association of Chiefs of
Police conference on Monday. The president loves the death penalty. He’s called for it for those convicted of terrorism, mass
shooters, and even drug dealers. So, it came as no surprise when Attorney General William Barr announced in July that the federal government
would resume executions after a 16-year hiatus. But
not all conservatives are cheering. “The death penalty is a failed
big-government program,” Hannah Cox, the national director of the Conservatives Concerned About the Death
Penalty said at a press conference on Monday, which happened to coincide with the President’s speech. “The administration is
out of step with where the country is going on criminal justice reform.” Support for the death penalty
across the political spectrum has declined since its peak popularity in the 1990s, but support among Republicans
remains high. A 2018 Pew Research survey found that 77 percent of Republicans support capital punishment. By contrast, 52 percent of
Independents support the practice while 35 percent of Democrats do. But at their press conference, the
Conservatives Concerned
About the Death Penalty announced that they had received more than 250 signatures from Republicans,
conservatives, and Libertarians who are opposed to capital punishment in hopes that they could
convince more conservatives to abandon the death penalty . Republicans remain criminal justice hardliners even after the
Democratic party slowly began embracing progressive reforms, but conservatives opposed to the death penalty justify
their approach with classically conservative arguments: They see it as an expensive government
program rooted in arbitrariness and prone to big-government mistakes . All of which doesn’t align with what their
ideology claims to value. When the Department of Justice announced the resumption of executions, Barr said in the press release, “We owe it
to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” But Earlene Peterson, a Trump voter from
Arkansas, doesn’t want what the government thinks it owes her. She created a six-minute video asking Trump to spare the life of Daniel Lee,
who is scheduled to be put to death on December 9 for the murder of Peterson’s daughter Nancy Mueller, her son-in-law William, and their
eight-year-old daughter. She voted for Trump in 2016 and will do so again in 2020. “I can’t see how executing Daniel Lee will honor my
daughter in any way,” she said. “I hope and pray President Trump will give him clemency. That would help me and my family more than
anything.” In 1996, Daniel Lee broke into the Russellville, Arkansas, home of the Muellers. William Mueller was a gun dealer, and Lee and his
accomplice Chevie Kehoe, were looking for firearms and money. In the course of the robbery, they murdered the family and deposited their
remains in a bayou. They were charged with murder in the aid of racketeering, which made it a federal offense. Though both defendants were
charged with three counts of murder, Kehoe was the one who murdered the child after Lee said he did not kill children. Kehoe, who was clean-
cut and well-dressed during the trial in 1999, was sentenced to life in prison. The prosecution team initially decided not to pursue the death
penalty against Lee, but Department of Justice officials overruled the lawyers. They argued that Lee would be dangerous unless he was put to
death. His will be the first of five federal death sentences that will be carried out in December and January. Despite the argument that one
important justification for the death penalty is, as Barr noted, someone compensating victims for their losses, Peterson has been public in her
opposition. “The government ain’t doing this for me,” she said in the video. After showing pictures of Nancy and her granddaughter to the
camera, Peterson sits outside of her home and recounts the story of the crime that robbed her of a daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. “I
believe you have to pay for what you do,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean death.” Some of Peterson’s family members, like her daughter
Kimma Gurel and her granddaughter Monica Veillette agree. Scott Mueller, William Mueller’s son, says it doesn’t matter to him. Liberals and
progressives often argue conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves pro-life if they are anti-
abortion but support the death penalty . Recently some conservatives have begun to acknowledge what they
see as that fundamental contradiction. “I am pro-life from conception until natural death,” Ohio state Rep. Niraj Antani, said on
the CCADP press call. Darcy Van Orden, founder and executive director of the Utah Justice Coalition, a criminal justice reform organization,
echoed Antani’s sentiments. “I’m a pro-life person,” she explained. “I don’t want government to play God.” Some
other conservatives
point to the fact that the death penalty is costly—even in states where it’s rarely used . “Utah spent $40 million
dollars in the last 20 years, just to add two people to death row,” Van Orden explained during the press conference. The last person executed in
Utah was Ronnie Gardner in 2010. There are currently 8 people awaiting death in the state. In Wyoming, the financial picture is even starker.
Although no one has been executed in the state since 1992, and no one has been on death row since 2014, it still costs the state $1 million each
year to fund death penalty trials. For
supporters of limited government, it seems obvious that conservatives
wouldn’t want the government meddling in such existential questions . “The small government aspect is a driving
force for me,” Wyoming state Rep. Jared Olsen said on the press call. “It blows my mind that anyone would want to trust
the Justice Department with matters of life and death .” Distrust of the government’s ability to kill inmates is well-deserved.
According to a 2014 report by the National Academy of Sciences, one in 25 people currently on death row are innocent. For many
conservatives, there is no better example of why the government should no longer be involved than botched execution than the case of Clayton
Lockett, the Oklahoma inmate who in 2014 writhed and moaned in pain while prison staffers spent close to an hour trying to inject him with a
lethal dosage of drugs. “We don’t trust government to run our healthcare,” Rep. Antani said, “why would we trust government to put us to
death?”

Repeal is popular on both sides of the aisle

Washington Post 20 – Editorial board at the Washington Post, “The death penalty is unworthy of
America.” Washington Post. Jan 1, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-death-
penalty-is-unworthy-of-america/2020/01/01/1b0be1c6-2c05-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html

The death penalty in the United States is in decline. It is less used, less popular and just as unnecessary
as ever, according to a year-end report from the Death Penalty Information Center , which tracks death penalty
numbers. This should represent a way station toward the punishment’s eventual elimination — not a temporary low in its application. For
the fifth year in a row, fewer than 30 people were executed and fewer than 50 people were sentenced
to death. Half of states representing half the population no longer execute people. With the New Hampshire legislature’s abolition of capital
punishment last year, the punishment has been banned across New England and in all Northeastern states save Pennsylvania, where the
governor has imposed a moratorium. Seven states executed 22 inmates last year, and Texas was responsible for nearly half. The state is also
responsible for a large share of new death sentences. No one was executed west of Texas. Juries in California, the state with the largest death-
row population, handed down three new death sentences in 2019. But California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) declared a moratorium and ordered
San Quentin State Prison’s execution chamber dismantled. Otherwise, new death sentences mostly came in the South, particularly in Florida.
Death sentences are down some 90 percent from their mid-1990s peak. Executions are down some 77 
percent from the late 1990s. Even so, the death penalty survives, as does the horrifying possibility that the government might kill an
innocent person. Two more death-row inmates were exonerated in 2019. That makes 166 exonerees since 1973. As always, those executed are
not necessarily the worst of the worst but the least capable of defending themselves. The center found that “at least 19 of the 22 prisoners who
were executed this year had one or more of the following impairments: significant evidence of mental illness; evidence of brain injury,
developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually disabled range; or chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse.” It is
little wonder — and heartening — that public opinion is evolving. Sixty percent of Americans said in a
2019 Gallup poll that life without the possibility of parole is a better penalty for murder than death. That
was the first time Gallup reported a majority holding that position . The Trump Justice Department, however, failed to
get the memo, pushing suddenly and unexpectedly last year to execute federal inmates for the first time in 16 years. The death penalty
is expensive, unfairly implemented and unworthy of a justice system that strives for equal application of
the law. Yet even if it could be applied fairly, state-sponsored killing would be unworthy of a nation founded on the principle of individual
dignity.