While some schools of debate theory require the negative position in a debate to defend the status quo against an affirmative position or plan, a counterplan allows the negative to advance a separate plan or an advocacy.
Advocates of this view, which has become increasingly popular in national circuit high school debate, believe that once the affirmative selects its specific plan so long as it is topical, it abandons any further tie to the resolution and cedes the remaining ground of advocacy to the negative.
This theory is often called Plan-Optimization and argues that the affirmative should have the burden to prove that its policy is the best example of the resolution.
For example, School Triple Crown students on the Aff argue modus tollens (the conclusion justifies the proposition) performative embodiment earns fiat.
The counterplan is to confiscate students' electronic devices, turn off all flat screens, and reduce their electric appliance usage down to the Xerox machine, while banning the use of the plugin coffeemaker, the plugin juice grinder, and the battery-operated flyswatter, but they may have traditional office supplies and 3M Scotch tape, and a red Swingline stapler.
For example if the plan text was "Pass the farm bill" and the counterplan text was "Don't pass the farm bill" the affirmative would be mistaken were they to say: "permutation: do the counterplan" on the grounds that it was textually plan plus.
In that example, the Aff is not only extra-Topical with the perm, but a huge illogical contradiction Turns plan Justification of the resolution, which is not desirable.
Rather than "testing", argumentation should avoid illogical leaps and leakage, aka unfair wild permutations analogous to nefarious viruses.
As the negative gains a substantial power by having the ability to run counterplans, the affirmative naturally insists on some limitations to their use.
Many debates are won and lost on "theory" arguments, about the legitimacy of conditional counterplans or kritiks.
Although considered legitimate, for the Negative to drop one's team counterplan concedes that hypothesis testing is not particularly bona fide, wasting time and argumentation.
It is unwise to have to condition, for example, that the Affirmative has to pass a multilateral, unilateral, bilateral rigorous test in-round on a foreign affairs topic of about five different foreign countries, although relaxed "testing" can occur throughout the tournament season if one were looking for the ideal "best plan" that implements the resolution.
Affirmatives will claim conditionality is noneducational because it allows negative teams to make bad or inconsistent arguments and then ignore them later.
Most successful Typicality arguments get rid of counterplans, but they can also be difficult for the Affirmative to defend Uniqueness of Solvency.
To answer education arguments, negative teams will claim that conditionality is real world, because policy makers often decide between more than two options.
One of the only conditionality is the acceded Socratic Flow on "morally reasoned" that does not introduce new plan components nor a counterplan.
There is some dispute about whether the negative can ultimately advocate the alternative vision of a kritik if it has already run an unconditional counterplan.
[citation needed] Also if negative chooses to argue that the affirmative is not topical in the final speech, it is rarely considered a violation of its commitment to defend the counterplan.
More recently, "dispositionality" has become an umbrella term for an express contract between the teams, generally clarified in 1NC cross-examination.
An advantage counterplan seeks to resolve the offense of the affirmative's plan through a variety of mechanisms that will not link to the net benefit.
For example, if the affirmative reads an advantage that claims to solve climate change, and the negative forwards a disadvantage predicated on the possibility of the plan being patrician and costing political capital necessary for another bill in congress, they could read an advantage counterplan that targets investments in carbon capture and storage, international agreements, etc., both politically appealing processes.
If the affirmative plan uses the United States as an agency, an example of a PEC would be to disband the U.S. Government.
This type of counterplan provides very clear competition with the affirmative plan simply because the two are mutually exclusive.
The whole matter initiated by non-U.S. personnel (nongovernmental groups) would be sedition, destroying debate resolution actually, due to diminution of Grounds "glad tidings", if not for Grounds "safe harbor" for high school and college students and their coaching staff.
The theory on Grounds was recodified into doctrine for exactly that real world scenario, which occurred intermittently in the status quo, a warped form of Washington gridlock that abused military servicemembers.
Deterrence against sedition was reinforced, emphasizing "the benevolent debate" for educational value, although United States Army War College did not openly concede -- as a matter of resolution.
Counterplans that are 100% plan-inclusive have only shaky competition claims, typically resting on dense theory.
For example, if the Affirmative runs a squirrelly case of shifting the national deficit (domestic budget) into I.O.U.s onto the U.S. debt that the U.S. owes other countries, which are two different accounting columns altogether, the Negative can ban all such plans and then cite nefarious woes of war brink and economic collapse from U.S. lying to China.