Not one, but two bubble rounds…

With our mascot in tow, Carleton headed out for the second day of debating. Nothing interesting happened on the way. So, uh, moving on.

 

Round six topic: The United States should intervene militarily in Iran. David/Grahm gov, Cal/Justin opp. David and Graham prepped a case with Azuza Pacific, which bore a remarkable similarity to a counterplan heard earlier. Their idea was to send Seal Team Six to secretly apprehend one of Iran’s top nuclear scientists. This, apparently, would shut down their nuclear program, which is good.

 

The opposition ran T: You should have been air strikes (?), then read two disads on why air strikes were bad. They also read a ‘consult Russia for 12 hours’ CP, which proved to be a fatal error. Graham’s MGC included Consult Bad theory, while no-linking out of the DAs and giving fairly solid responses to T. In an unsurprising move, the opp collapsed down to Topicality in the block. They undercovered the Consult Bad stuff, though, only saying that kicking the CP mutes the abuse.

 

So, the PMR was four minutes of T and one minute of consult bad. The judge said that the opp was probably winning T, and the gov was probably winning Consult Bad, and so he ultimately decided that Consult Bad outweighed. David and Graham thus picked up on theory.

 

Cal and Justin hit a team which read a somewhat unconventional plan, and by ‘unconventional’, we mean that they didn’t really do anything. They took the US Navy’s fifth Carrier Group, which is currently stationed in the UAE, and moved it to off the coast of Iran. That’s it. This prevents closing of the strait of Hormuz, and somehow dissuades Iran from pursuing nukes. Opp strat was T, an Israel-attacks-Iran-if-the-US-makes-the-first-move DA, a “Hezbollah proxy wars” DA (Hezbollah is in the US now, if we piss off Iran they’ll give them a chemical weapon or a dirty bomb to detonate on US soil, this is bad”, and a lot of case defense. The advantages were pretty dumb, so it didn’t take a ton of effort to discredit them.

 

The MGC had some pretty poor coverage, so Carleton kicked T and the Israel DA, and went for case plus Hezbollah. Justin, despite making a fool of himself by very confidently asserting something that was not at all true, and despite using the word ‘fuck’ in the round for some unfathomable reason, did enough in the MOC to extend these scenarios, and Cal shut the door. Most of the PMR was new, which was bad for them, and Carleton won.

 

Round seven: The United States Senate should confirm or deny all presidential appointees within 90 days of nomination. Both teams were opp. Gameplan was a Supreme Court PIC (confirm or deny all appointees within 90 days except supreme court nominees), plus some kinda bullshit rule-of-law DA to create a net benefit. Oh, and T: All, just in case.

 

David and Graham dropped, because evidently the way they wrote the CP text was unclear. A PICs bad/good debate was had, though that may not have been what decided the round. I dunno, ask them.

 

Cal and Justin hit a team that had congress pass the resolution, then had two advantages based off of why federal judges are blocked endlessly now, and won’t be post-plan. The first advantage was called ‘court clog’, and impacted in business confidence—because tech-sector companies evidently are involved in a ton of court cases, and without judges they have to keep paying lawyers endlessly and they get nervous about how those cases turn out. That collapses the economy, because mumble mumble. The other advantage was Congressional Credibility—nobody likes congress now, and I guess forcing them to quickly decide on the appointments of federal judges fixes that. That solves for Hege (?) and the economy.

 

This, of course, messed up our strategy—their advantages were all about judges, so our PIC’s net benefit couldn’t work. Cal, however, realized that they hadn’t really impacted Hege at all, and that it was probably an afterthought since it was read in the last 15 seconds of their PMC. He still read T:All (even though they met), read an ad-hoc ‘ambassadors’ DA (forcing appointments to be decided in 90 days means we get shitty ambassadors, which…causes war?), then some pretty solid case defense, followed by about 1:30 of Hege bad arguments.

 

The MGC for some reason spent two minutes responding to T, which meant their coverage of other stuff was a bit lacking. In the block, Carleton kicked out of both their off-case positions, and went for case defense and hege bad. We won.

 

Thus, we find ourselves both 4-3. If either team wins, Carleton will have broken a team at nationals. We’ll see how this goes.