2019: Congress as Usual, Somehow

Someone somewhere will eventually write her dissertation on what Congressional Debate was like during the Trump Administration.  One reason:  we are America's biggest political game, attracting some of our most gifted young people to talk about the issues of the day.  Another:  Everything will have a dissertation written about it sometime.  Still flush from having contributed Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day for May 23rd (a definition which had previously been cited in the Washington Post), I'm going to do that grad student a solid (assuming she has the research skills to find this tiniest of blogs). 

What I think our historian will discover is that the Trump administration's bonfire of norms didn't really register with Congress.  Looking through the NSDA 2019 docket, only one bill directly addresses itself to this:  the Kansas Hills District's "Bill to Limit Presidential Authority Authorized by the National Emergency Act."  (And here only the last of three parts of the bill would restore the previously unwritten norm through legislation.)

Two other pieces of legislation would overturn Trump administration foreign policy moves ("A Bill to Cease Sale of Weaponry to Saudi Arabia" and "A Resolution to Rejoin Iran Nuclear Deal").  But those are the kinds of bills you'd see during any presidency. 

These bills were written by national qualifiers and then emerged from their districts via discussions among coaches and finally were overseen and then selected by the national tournament committee itself. The nationals docket reflects the event-as-event more than dockets at regular tournaments which tend to pass through fewer adult hands and more closely reflect the debaters' understandings (and sometimes misunderstandings) of how things work.  I'll leave this to the historian to confirm, but I believe that the NSDA 2019 docket is pretty representative of Student Congress since 11/9/16 in that it doesn't reflect a sense of crisis.

The event is supposed to reflect on the important issues of the day.  It isn't. 

Some possibilities:

• He's the only president most of our debaters have paid any attention to so there's no "normal" frame of reference to see what an outlier this presidency has been.
• Our debaters, especially on the national circuits, are largely whiter and wealthier. They're insulated from or are even short-term beneficiaries of administration policies.  
• Most of the topics are lopsided AFF.  For instance, fully funding and implementing plans to prevent hacking of federal elections.   How do you go NEG on that?  
• Debaters believe that adult judges can't be trusted to set aside their partisan identities while judging.
• Debaters believe it would be seen as uncool by other debaters (or maybe just all-downside) to take a straightforwardly political stance. 
• Maybe all of high school speech and debate is really about kids pleasing adults by playing together in a way that adults approve of.  Maybe the kids who really care about politics just go do politics.   

I'm not saying we really ought to be debating impeachment but . . . we really ought to be debating impeachment. 

P.S.  And climate change?  We can't get a bill on that either?  (Kansas Hills' bill has something that would make it harder for states to skirt pollution rules.  That's as close as we get.)