1NC

1
Enact means a law or statute created through legislature
John C. Philo in 2019

Anthony D. Paris (P71525) SUGAR LAW CENTER FOR ECONOMIC & SOCIAL JUSTICE; AMICI CURIAE BRIEF
OF THE SUGAR LAW CENTER FOR ECONOMIC & SOCIAL JUSTICE, THE MICHIGAN CHAPTER OF THE
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD, THE MICHIGAN IMMIGRANT RIGHTS CENTER, FARMWORK LEGAL SERVICES
OF MICHIGAN AND THE CENTER FOR COMMUNITY BASED ENTERPRISE IN OPPOSITION TO THE
CONSTITUTIONALITY OF 2018 PA 368 and 2018 PA 369;
https://courts.michigan.gov/Courts/MichiganSupremeCourt/oral-arguments/2018-
2019/Documents/159160_33_02_AC_SLC.pdf

Article 2, § 9 gives the Legislature the power to “ enact” a citizen’s initiative before the measure is placed
on the ballot. The provision reads: “[a]ny law proposed by initiative petition shall be either enacted or rejected
by the legislature without change or amendment.” Const 1963, art 2, § 9 (emphasis added). The framers and the electorate
in 1963 would have shared an understanding that the term “enacted” encompasses and requires that an initiative, in fact, takes effect as a law
of this state. As stated by the Michigan Supreme Court, “the primary objective of constitutional interpretation is to determine the original
meaning of the provision … at the time of ratification.” Nat'l Pride at Work, Inc, 481 Mich at 67. The original meaning is determined based on
the rule of “common understanding.” People v Nutt, 469 Mich at 573. The rule of common understanding holds that “the people are
understood to have accepted the words employed in a constitutional provision in the sense most obvious to the common understanding.” Id.
(emphasis added). The court determines common understanding by the term's plain meaning at the time of ratification. Nat’l Pride at Work,
Inc., 481 Mich at 67-68. Common words are given their plain meaning, obvious on their face. Phillips v Mirac, Inc., 470 Mich 415, 422; 685
NW2d 174, 179 (2004). Only when words have no plain meaning, may the Court then ascribe a legal or technical meaning. Id. (citing Silver
Creek Drain Dist v RECEIVED by MSC 6/19/2019 5:06:00 PM 11 Extrusions Div, Inc, 468 Mich 367, 375; 663 NW2d 436 (2003); Michigan
Coalition of State Employee Unions v Civil Service Comm, 465 Mich 212, 222-223; 634 NW2d 692 (2001), quoting 1 Cooley, Constitutional
Limitations (8th ed), p 132). “Courts … may “discern the ‘plain meaning’ by reference to a dictionary.” Citizens Protecting Michigan's
Constitution v Sec'y of State, 280 Mich App 273, 295; 761 NW2d 210 (2008) (citing Nat'l Pride at Work, Inc 481 Mich at 67-69). See also People v
Duncan, 494 Mich 713, 723; 835 NW2d 399 (2013). The
common understanding of the term ‘enact’ incorporates an
understanding that a measure in fact becomes effective and binding on citizens as a law of this state. It is inconceivable
that the majority of persons who ratified art 2, § 9 understood the term “enact” to simply mean a formal vote of the state Legislature without
the law ever becoming effective. Common
definitions of the word support this understanding. Dictionary.com defines
the verb ‘enact’
to mean “to make into an act or statute” where an act and statute are defined as a law
and law is defined as “principles and regulations established in a community by some authority and
applicable to its people [and] … recognized and enforced by judicial decision.” Dictionary.com,
<http://www.dictionary.com > (accessed June 17, 2019) (emphasis added). An act or statute that never comes into effect and that is not
intended to come into effect is not a law under lay understandings and such measures have not been ‘enacted’ as those terms are commonly
understood now or in 1963. The New Oxford American Dictionary shares this understanding, defining ‘enact’ as to “make law” and “put into
practice.” New Oxford American Dictionary, p. 570 (3rd ed). Law is again defined as “the system of rules that a particular … community
recognizes as regulating actions of its members and may enforce” and “a thing regarded as having the binding force or effect of a formal system
of rules.” Id. at 989. Again, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, defines ‘enact’ as “to make into an act or statute.” Random House
Unabridged Dictionary, p. 639 (2nd ed). Both an act and a statute are defined as a law. Id. at pp. 29 & 1862. ‘Law’ is defined as “the principles
and regulations established in a community by some authority and applicable to its people … recognized and enforced by judicial decision.” Id.
at 1089 (emphasis added). Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary defines ‘enact’ as “to establish by legal or authoritative act” and “to
make (as a bill) into law.” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, p. 272 (1963). ‘Establish’ is defined as “to institute (as a law)
permanently by enactment or agreement.” Id. at 284. And again, ‘law’ is defined as “a binding custom or practice of a community : a rule of
conduct or action prescribed or formally recognized as binding or enforced by a controlling authority.” Id. at 478. Webster’s New World
Dictionary, College Edition also defines ‘enact’ as “to establish by legal or authoritative act” and “to make (a bill, etc.)
into law” with substantially similar definitions to the words ‘establish’ and ‘law’ noted above. Webster’s New World Dictionary, College
Edition, p. 477 (1960). In all instances, the definition of ‘enact’ encompasses a requirement that the measure
at issue be made binding and enforceable and that it become a rule that is, in fact, in effect . This is
particularly true in the context of laws, which in all cases are commonly understood to be binding rules that is enforceable by an
authority. An initiative is therefore only fully ‘enacted’ when there is an intent that a measure become
binding and enforceable. Enactment is not complete until that occurs. Thus, an initiative could not be amended or repealed by the
Legislature until that process is complete. Common understandings of the term ‘enacted’ as found in art 2, § 9 requires that the initiative
cannot be amended or repealed until the law becomes effective and, as explained in the following section, not until the next legislative session
following the session in which the measure becomes effective (when enactment is completed).5

Violation – the plan’s mechanism is not Congressional action

Vote negative for predictable limits – a stable agent is the backbone of negative prep
because it clarifies the link to DAs and competition for counterplans. Otherwise, there
are tons of tiny rulings on obscure issues that make being neg impossible and remove
the only redress they have through generics that compete off enact.
 2
Dems are winning key swing states now.
Kapur 9/10/2020. Sahil Kapur is a national politics reporter for NBC News. “Harry Reid predicts
Democrats will flip the Senate” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-press-
blog-latest-news-analysis-data-driving-political-discussion-n988541/ncrd1239815#blogHeader

WASHINGTON — Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made a bullish prediction Thursday that
his party will flip six or seven Republican-held seats in the 2020 election and seize the majority. “I think we’re
going to retake the Senate,” the Nevada Democrat told NBC News. “I think we're going to win in Colorado, Montana, Maine,
North Carolina, (Sen. David) Perdue’s seat in Georgia — we're going to win in Arizona. And we’re in good
shape in Iowa.”He added, “If I’m only right on three of those we’ll still take the Senate.” Reid served as minority
leader and majority leader during the last decade of his 30-year tenure in the chamber.It's a challenging cycle for Senate
Republicans, who hold a 52-48 majority and are defending 23 seats, compared to just 12 Democrats
are defending. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates Republican Arizona Sen. Martha McSally's
seat as "lean Democrat", and rates the other six mentioned by Reid as toss-ups.  And while Republicans are
defending seats in vulnerable areas, Democrats are mostly defending seats on favorable terrain with the exception of
Sen. Doug Jones, Ala., who is in a race that Cook rates as “lean Republican”.

The plan gives the GOP credibility going into November

Taylor 6/27/2020 (Andrew Taylor, writer, "Once again, Congree unable to act during national
trauma", StarTribune, June 27, 2020, https://www.startribune.com/congress-stalls-out-again-dealing-
with-national-trauma/571517452/, BTD)

WASHINGTON — For a moment, Congress had a chance to act on a policing overhaul, mobilized by a
national trauma and overwhelming public support . Those efforts have stalled now and seem unlikely to
be revived in an election year.

It's latest example of how partisanship and polarization on Capitol Hill have hamstrung Congress' ability
to meet the moment and respond meaningfully to public opinion.

Major changes in policing policy appear likely to join gun control and immigration as social issues where
even with Americans' overwhelming support, their elected representatives are unable or unwilling to go
along, especially when President Donald Trump is indifferent or opposed.

"In this moment, as it was with gun violence and immigration reform, we don't know where the
president really is," said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who weeks ago was expressing skepticism weeks ago
about a breakthrough. "If this were the first time we were in this situation, I'd be more hopeful," he said
then.

The bipartisan outcry over the deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans appeared to be a
chance for Congress to reshape its reputation. Polls showed nearly all Americans in a favor of some
measure of change to the criminal justice system, and both chambers moved quickly to draft legislation.

There were common elements in the House Democratic proposal and the Senate Republican bill,
including a national database of use-of-force incidents by law enforcement and restrictions on police
chokeholds. But efforts to bridge the divides bogged down in a predictable fight over process and
exposed again how little trust there is between the Senate's leaders, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Chuck
Schumer, D-N.Y.

McConnell said Democrats refused to take him at his word that he was willing to negotiate over the final
bill, and he pitched a supposedly fair and freewheeling floor debate. Schumer and other Democrats saw
little that was genuine in McConnell's overtures, noting that during his tenure as GOP leader, the sharp-
elbowed Kentucky Republican has permitted almost no open floor debate on legislation.

The swift rise and fall of prospects for the police bill showed how lawmakers are often driven more by
the views of their parties' hard-liners than overall public opinion.

"The incentive structure is misaligned for compromise. That's the reality of it. Members are more likely
to be rewarded electorally for representing their base primary voters than for reaching out to voters in
the middle," said Michael Steel, who was a top aide to former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
"The giants of yesteryear are remembered as such because voters rewarded them for successfully
legislating. And that just seems to be less and less the case."

Public support for some kind of policing overhaul after Floyd's death is overwhelming . An Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll shows 29% of Americans say the criminal justice
system needs a complete overhaul, 40% say it needs major changes and 25% say it needs minor
changes.

Democratic Senate is key to Biden’s agenda, and the Supreme Court – also even a low
risk of the link alone turns the case
Nichols 7/13/2020 (John Nichols, The Nation's national-affairs correspondent and author,
"Democrats Will Be Lost Without the Senate", The Nation, July 13 2020,
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/senate-democrats-biden/, mmv)

If Biden is elected but Republicans maintain control of the Senate, he will enter office as a lame-duck
president. After the inaugural celebrations are done, Biden will settle into a dysfunctional relationship in
which Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will determine precisely how ambitious his agenda can
be. “If we remove Trump but we don’t remove McConnell, people need to understand how frustrating
that will be,” says People for the American Way president Ben Jealous. “What good will a new president
be if we can’t get new laws passed?”

This prospect is so depressing that Democrats do not rush to discuss it. They focus on the feel-good
politics of a presidential race that seems to be going well rather than the stark reality that ending mass
unemployment, expanding health care, addressing the climate crisis, and implementing genuine criminal
justice reform will be all but impossible with a Republican-led Senate.

Democrats need to confront this reality. In a moment of tremendous instability and potential for
progress, old expectations about what is possible have to be discarded in favor of a sense of mission that
seeks to mobilize new voters and increase turnout everywhere. A winning strategy for November has to
be grounded in a deep recognition of the fact that the combination of a Democratic president and a
Republican Senate is fraught with peril. “A capable Senate minority leader who is opposed to the
president can cause a lot of problems for that president,” says Rebecca Katz, who served as a top aide to
former Senate majority leader Harry Reid. “A capable Senate majority leader can stop almost anything.”
Like it or not, McConnell is capable. The most honest political history of the 2010s would be a biography
of the Kentucky Republican, whose mastery of the Senate’s rules and politics has enabled him to
disempower an honorable Democratic president and to empower a dishonorable Republican one.
McConnell is the reason Judge Merrick Garland is not on the Supreme Court, while Brett Kavanaugh is
busy tipping the balance to the right on 5-4 decisions. And the high court is just the tip of the iceberg.
When McConnell appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last year, the two men talked about the
federal courts. “I was shocked that former President Obama left so many vacancies and didn’t try to fill
those positions,” Hannity said. McConnell chortled in response. “I’ll tell you why,” he said. “I was in
charge of what we did the last two years of the Obama administration.” The Senate majority leader
maintained his grip on power after Trump’s inauguration, steering the new president’s rogues’ gallery of
judicial picks through the confirmation process and then ensuring that Trump had nothing to fear even
after Democrats took control of the House and made a credible case for impeachment. “Let’s be very
clear,” says Robert Reich, a labor secretary under Bill Clinton, “Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans
are sacrificing the world’s greatest deliberative body to serve their Dear Leader.”

If Trump is defeated while McConnell retains his seat and remains majority leader, the Kentuckian will
no longer have to provide cover for an erratic president, but that doesn’t mean proper order—as least
as it is understood in civics books—will be restored. Even before Trump began remaking the Republican
Party in his image, McConnell had remade the Senate GOP as a fully owned subsidiary of the corporate
interests and billionaire donors that fund campaigns . That’s not going to change if Biden is elected,
despite the dim-witted fantasy the former vice president entertains about sitting down with a former
Senate colleague to work things out.

A conservative supreme court strikes down legislation to limit climate change – locks
in the worst impacts
Kilgore, ‘19
(Ed, staff writer for NY Mag, “Another Obstacle for Climate Action: A Conservative Supreme Court,” NY
Mag, 16 September 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/a-conservative-supreme-court-
could-prevent-action-on-climate.html, accessed on 7/17/2020, ZW)
It’s not a novel idea that control of the U.S. Supreme Court is one of the great prizes in contemporary presidential elections. Indeed, in 2016
Donald Trump shrewdly made uniquely specific SCOTUS promises to white conservative evangelicals that bonded them to his candidacy (and,
when he kept those if not other promises, his presidency) in record numbers. Without question, progressives
are waking up to the
strong possibility that a second Trump term with an aging Court will likely produce a reversal of many
key constitutional precedents, particularly those involving reproductive rights, voting rights, and corporate regulation. The
composition of SCOTUS could be (and most definitely ought to be) a serious voting issue for Democrats as well as
Republicans next year.
But until now nobody’s talked a lot about the Court as a potential stumbling block to increasingly urgent efforts to stop — and, if possible,
reverse — climate change. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent explains, that could change thanks to an academic study of conservative
legal thinking and how it might collide in the Supreme Court with legislation like the proposed Green New
Deal:

What makes the study interesting is that it uses the justices’

past rulings, as well as other conservative legal
scholarship, to elaborate a picture of the specific legal doctrines they might employ to strike down efforts
to legislate against global warming. The study concludes that their records clearly demonstrate they will have many such doctrines
to weaponize in this fashion.

Here are some specifics from the study itself:

The Court’s conservative justices have an array of dubious legal interpretations at their disposal for
dismantling climate change legislation, including an exceedingly narrow interpretation of statutes that
empower federal agencies, an expansive reading of the Takings Clause and the Tenth Amendment , and a
preferential application of the Commerce Clause. Given the Roberts Court’s track record of applying
doctrine arbitrarily to suit preferred policy outcomes, it seems unlikely that climate change legislation
would survive judicial review.

The study (conducted by Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School and Aaron Belkin of San Francisco State University) focuses on the views
of Trump appointees Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has been carefully but
steadily leading the Court into a position to protect conservative interests on a broad range of issues —
most particularly those involving economic privilege . Some of the issues they raise — particularly the hostility of
conservative jurists to delegation of congressional authority to agencies or state governments —
illustrate opportunities the Roberts Court could have to slow down or hamstring climate-change action
even if it declines to make a frontal assault.

Climate change causes extinction --- latest studies.

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

2050: By 2050, there is broad scientific acceptance that system tipping-points for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a sea-ice-
free Arctic summer were passed well before 1.5°C of warming, for the Greenland Ice Sheet well before
2°C, and for widespread permafrost loss and large-scale Amazon drought and dieback by 2.5°C. The
“hothouse Earth” scenario has been realised, and Earth is headed for another degree or more of
warming, especially since human greenhouse emissions are still significant. While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by 2050, the
increase may be 2–3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by more than 25

metres. Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject
to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability. The
destabilisation of the Jet Stream has very significantly affected the intensity and geographical distribution
of the Asian and West African monsoons and, together with the further slowing of the Gulf Stream, is
impinging on life support systems in Europe. North America suffers from devastating weather extremes
including wildfires, heatwaves, drought and inundation. The summer monsoons in China have failed,
and water flows into the great rivers of Asia are severely reduced by the loss of more than one-third of the
Himalayan ice sheet. Glacial loss reaches 70 percent in the Andes , and rainfall in Mexico and central
America falls by half. Semi-permanent El Nino conditions prevail. Aridification emerges over more than 30
percent of the world’s land surface. Desertification is severe in southern Africa, the southern
Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States. Impacts: A
number of ecosystems collapse, including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic . Some

poorer nations and regions, which lack capacity to provide artificially-cooled environments for their populations, become unviable. Deadly

heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the
Middle East and South-East Asia, which together with land degradation and rising sea levels contributes to 21
perhaps a billion people being displaced. Water availability decreases sharply in the most affected regions at lower latitudes

(dry tropics and subtropics), affecting about two billion people worldwide. Agriculture becomes nonviable in the dry

subtropics. Most regions in the world see a significant drop in food production and increasing numbers of extreme
weather events, including heat waves, floods and storms. Food production is inadequate to feed the
global population and food prices skyrocket, as a consequence of a one-fifth decline in crop yields, a
decline in the nutrition content of food crops, a catastrophic decline in insect populations, desertification,
monsoon failure and chronic water shortages, and conditions too hot for human habitation in significant food-
growing regions. The lower reaches of the agriculturally-important river deltas such as the Mekong, Ganges and Nile are inundated, and

significant sectors of some of the world’s most populous cities — including Chennai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi

Minh City, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok and Manila — are abandoned . Some small islands become uninhabitable. Ten percent

of Bangladesh is inundated, displacing 15 million people. According to the Global Challenges Foundation’s Global Catastrophic Risks
2018 report, even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated due to sea-level

rise, and In high-end scenarios “the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood
of human civilisation coming to an end”. 22
 3
The 50 states and relevant territories should introduce majority-vote ballot initiatives
advocating for the relevant parts of the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Acts.
Should they fail, state governments should codify the initiative as statutory law.
The counterplan is a salient ballot measure that drives voter turnout in swing states---
it’s an insurance policy for Biden
Smith 16 – *director of the fair punishment project, **political advisor and formerly a staff attorney at
the National District Attorneys Association. (Robert and Whitney Tymas, “Election Night Saw Victories in
Local Criminal-Justice Reform—This Should Be the Beginning,” The Nation,
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/election-night-saw-victories-in-local-criminal-justice-
reform-this-should-be-the-beginning/)//BB

Criminal-justice reform is not among many progressives’ priorities, but this local analysis shows why it should be. First, in
places like
Durham, North Carolina, traditional Democratic strongholds with large black populations situated in
swing states, investing in local criminal-justice reform could help with voter turnout in 2018 and 2020.
Given the narrow margins that tend to accompany wins in states like North Carolina, voter mobilization
in these locations is incredibly important for progressives. Investment in criminal-justice reform at the local
level creates a strong infrastructure that includes organizers, church leaders and civil-rights
organizations. Unlike “out-of-town swoop down” get out the vote efforts, local power in the criminal-justice space draws
on strong preexisting relationships, communications channels, and mobilization infrastructure . Most
importantly, though, creating the energy to mobilize around local races serves as an insurance policy against
national candidates who are less than inspiring.

One reason Clinton lost Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin —all by relatively small margins—is a
persistent inability to connect with working-class white voters . Criminal-justice reform is an issue that
can bridge this divide. Most people—black, white, brown, and Asian—have a family member, a neighbor, or a friend who struggles with
mental illness and addiction. For many of us, and especially for those who struggle financially, those addictions inevitably intersect with the
criminal justice system. White people, too, and especially marginalized white people who feel that government has abandoned them, struggle
to pay overly punitive fines and fees, languish in jail because they cannot afford unnecessarily high bail, and struggle to find employment after
convictions for marijuana possession and other low-level offenses. White people, too, are treated as disposable by the criminal-justice system.

There is also an opportunity to connect the massive taxpayer investment in stop-and-frisk and other
programs that do not reduce violent crime with overly intrusive government , overzealous and unaccountable
public servants, and colossal misuses of resources. Indeed, these are exactly the rationales that have propelled conservatives and libertarians,
such as Right on Crime and the Koch brothers, into criminal-justice reform.

Finally, focusing
on criminal-justice reform, especially at the local level, helps to create a pipeline of future
progressive leaders. First, as an issue, criminal-justice reform is particularly compelling and often very
personal, especially among those who have watched our broken system destroy the lives of family
members and neighbors. A strong, progressive local criminal-justice reform community is able to attract
and recruit the next generation of prosecutors, sheriffs, and other local officials . These local officials become
powerful in statewide prosecutor and police associations, groups with enormous influence at the statehouse, and often become state
legislators, judges, attorney generals, and governors. Kamala Harris, who was elected to the United States Senate this week, is a striking
example. She started as the district attorney of San Francisco County, became California’s attorney general, and now she’s headed to Congress.
Who knows, perhaps the pathway from criminal-justice reformer to progressive visionary will take her all the way to the White House.
 4
The internal war on terrorism otherwise known as the “criminal justice system”
sanctions state-organized human capture, physical/social/psychic alienation and social
apartheid. The assumption that working towards “winnable” reforms can challenge
the conditions of domestic warfare solidifies the permanence of racialized violence
and forfeits the radical potentialities of abolitionist thought in favor of casualty
management. And yes—their failure to envision and prioritize abolition is in and of
itself a link to the criticism.
Rodriguez 08 - Dylan, Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies @ Univ. California-
Riverside (“Warfare and the terms of Engagement,” Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle
Against the Prison Industrial Complex, p.91-5)

This introductory litany of dread reminds us that domestic warfare is both the common language and intensely materialized
modality of the US state. While this form of legitimated state violence certainly predates Reagan's "war on drugs" and his/its inheritors, the scope and depth of domestic
warmaking seems to be mount ing with a peculiar urgency in our historical moment. To take former NYPD and current LAPD Chief William Bratton on the strength of his own words, the

primary work of the police is to engage aggressively in "the internal war on terrorism," which in these
times entails everything from record-breaking expansions of urban police forces, to cross-party
consensus in legislating state offensives against criminalized populations of choice, and the reshuffling
of administrative relationships between the militarized and juridical arms of local and federal
government to facilitate the state's various localized "wars on gangs." It is in this context that we can urgently assume the political
burden of critically assessing the work of progressive US based community and non-profit organizations, grassroots movements, and issue-based campaigns: that is, if we are to

take the state's own language of domestic warfare seriously, what do we make of the political,
ideological, institutional, and financial relationships that progressive movements, campaigns, and
organizations are creating in (uneasy) alliance with the state's vast architectures of war? Under what
conditions and sets of assumptions are progressive activists, organizers, and scholars able to so
militantly oppose the proliferation of American state violence in other parts of the world, while
tolerating the everyday state violence of US policing, criminal law, and low-intensity genocide? We are
collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of unprecedented state-organized human
capture and state-produced physical/social/ psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the
domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of informal apartheid and
proto-apartheid that are being instantiated in cities, suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This
condition presents a profound crisis-and political possibility-for people struggling against the white
supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social liquidation and physical evisceration of
Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples nearby and far away . If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism, militarism/militarization, and US state
hegemony and domination in a legitimately "global" way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan,
etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most intimate and nearby geographies of " home." this time of
crisis and emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and particularly the "establishment" left that is
tethered (for better and worse) to the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies
of state and owning class social control with surveillance over public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements. This definition is most
focused on the industrialized incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-pro t

It is in the context of the formation of the NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to
organizations.

address, with a less-than-subtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that
often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most progressive movements and
organizations within the US establishment left (of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is,
the left 's willingness to fundamentally tolerate- and accompanying unwillingness to abolish- the
institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and imprisonment apparatus in its most
localized, unremarkable, and hence "normal" manifestations within the domestic "homeland" ofthe
Homeland Security state. Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public
policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against
the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist criminalization, there is an unspoken
politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic warfare as a
constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by the logic of Black, brown, and
indigenous subjection to the expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-
building project. To put it differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and
political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the
establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US) does not care to envision, much less politically
prioritize, the abolition of us domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its
most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular, seems content to engage
in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare,
foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the
moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not long from now, generations will emerge
from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically principled
rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical
accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the
strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized
and frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same
populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such "classical" structures of
dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more
intimate sense, how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we
seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging , dislodging, and
transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this condition of domestic warfare in favor
of short-term, "winnable" policy reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate
a "progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of "criminality" in the
process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three Strikes" laws ?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive
organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state's terms of
engagement (that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anti colonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and
nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious
agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers
or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, ought to clarify
the premises of the social "mission" that our generation of US based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US
state, much of the most urgent and immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision. Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive
ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the "good citizen." Following Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be

. I believe that to respond to this political problem requires a n analysis and conceptualization
fulfilled or betrayed

of "the state" that is far more complex and laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of
obligations to build campaigns , organize communities, and write grant proposals. In fact, I think one
pragmatic step toward an abolitionist politics involves the development of grassroots pedagogies
(such as reading groups, in-home workshops, inter-organization and inter-movement critical
dialogues) that will compel us to teach ourselves about the different ways that the state works in the
context of domestic warfare, so that we no longer treat it simplistically. We require, in other words, a
scholarly activist framework to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on
multiple fronts by an abolitionist politics.
The affirmative upholds paradigmatic liberal faith in the virtues of national reform
which upholds white supremacist humanism—the rhetoric of “mass incarceration,
“police brutality” and “__insert something the aff has said that fits into this
critique__” operates within a shared vernacular of white nationhood that works to
minimize the “excesses” of violence. Such politics voice a reform parable where the
evocations of suffering of “good people” cement the permanent conditions of anti-
Black criminal jurisprudence.
Rodríguez, 18 – Dylan Rodríguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside. He
received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2001)
Prof. Rodríguez is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the
U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy,
Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Prof. Rodríguez is a founding
member of Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies
Association, and has worked in or alongside various social movements and activist collectives (““Mass
Incarceration” Reform as Police Endorsement,” Black Agenda Report, Feb 28, 2018,
https://www.blackagendareport.com/mass-incarceration-reform-police-endorsement)//BL

“The reform of mass incarceration, as it has been absorbed by the cultural ensemble of the state and its
distensions, endorses an expansion of policing logics.” “Mass incarceration,” “police brutality,” “school-
to-prison pipeline,” and other terms of crisis have permeated the political theater of post-racialism and
its apparent white nationalist aftermath. Such keywords of the early-21st century liberal-to-progressive
critique of racist state violence form an increasingly shared vernacular for academic scholarship, policy
reform, nonprofit campaigns, foundation grants, and ongoing dialogue and debate across various
communities and publics. But there is something troublesome in the ongoing, industrialized circulation of these keywords, a territorialization and
corruption—at times, a statecraft—of crisis-terms that undermines the collective genius of periodic radical rearticulation (e.g. Black radical and anti-colonialist
practitioners seizing control of these terms and transforming them into active literatures of liberation combat, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon). As
the
particular phrase “mass incarceration” spreads across venues and publics, a relatively coherent reform
parable attains increasing political-ideological traction. We can concisely outline the progression of this
increasingly hegemonic, liberal-progressive mass incarceration reform narrative as such: First, there is
an uneven though growing national acknowledgement that over the course of the last few decades,
there has been a systemic expansion of the institutional and cultural capacity and will to profile,
criminalize, incarcerate, and denigrate targeted bodies, places, and populations . We might consider this
as a spreading, though sometimes hesitant and certainly overdue acknowledgement of the raw, long-
irrefutable facts of gendered racist state terro r. “The parable holds that targeted Black and Brown
incarceration is not the problem in-and-of-itself.” Next in this parable, quickly and slowly, alarmed
responses spill across journalistic, testimonial, activist, and social scientific revelations of the damage
done to communities, families, and otherwise good people . This is confirmation of the suspicion that the
contemporary carceral domestic war may have misidentified or exceeded its operational objectives. (We
should be clear that this part of the reform narrative is the counter-abolitionist, counter-Black radical
rejoinder: [targeted Black, Brown] “incarceration” is not the problem in-and-of-itself; rather, it is the
excess of “mass” incarceration—the white supremacist embarrassment it creates for respectable
liberal/post-racial white nationhood—that requires reform.) The mass incarceration parable then opens
into spreading, dense accounts of the degradation and suffering that traverse stories of individualized
tragedy to collectively-communally voiced, insurgent outrage . These accounts are mobilized and
repurposed by various narrators (journalists, reform advocates, progressive pundits, elected officials,
academics) as the ethnographic, deeply personalized, and urgent reasons for reforming “mass
incarceration”—here, they proclaim, is the accumulated primary evidence of the state’s alleged
criminological dysfunction. (Of course, what complicates this part of the narrative is that many of these accounts not only preceded the recent,
increasingly generalized acknowledgement of the so-called mass incarceration crisis, but also seem to suggest that what has happened during the time in question is
not the result of a dysfunctional state, but rather of an entirely functional one.) “Well-placed intellectuals collectively strive to restore
a paradigmatic liberal faith in the virtues and possibilities of righteous national reform against the
state sanctioned climate of atrocity.” And now, a protracted skirmish ensues, as organized political blocs, cultural institutions, and emergent
grassroots-to-social media collectives struggle to make sense—that is, to definitively narrate—this turmoil. Entering the skirmish (at the same

time they are formed by it) are multiple coalescences of organic and professional intellectuals —of the
racial state, nonprofit/foundation regimes, and liberal cultural industry, including thinktank and
foundation commissioned academics, writers, and artists. These are the well-placed ones who
collectively strive to restore a paradigmatic liberal faith in the virtues and possibilities of righteous
national reform against the state sanctioned climate of atrocity. From here grows a definitive, outraged
rhetoric of liberal humanist alarm that strives for a sense of shared moral grievance: in 2012, a writer for
The New Yorker asserts that “The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of
American life,”[i] while in 2014, the Soros Foundation announces a $50 million grant to the ACLU, to which is
appended the proclamation that “America’s bloated prisons are an appalling and expensive failure…
overwhelming common sense and human decency.” [ii] Morality, Common Sense, Decency: these are
rhetorical signals of a violently hopeful thinking, one that requires a full, radical, abolitionist rebuttal all
the time, and everywhere. The thinking that must be so resolutely refuted goes something like this : that
if there is such a massive problem as mass incarceration, it can be fixed, if “we” bring rational heart to
mind in another adventure of humanist reform , if we follow the stories into the tragedy and insist over-
and-over-again that such harrowing details are not the primary or intended outcome of this state , its
policy, its martialing of cultural and domestic force, then solutions can be found in vigorous reform, the
threads of post-American apartheid racial modernity can again be pulled taut around the jagged,
always-disarticulating edges of the civil underside , where statecraft unfolds on the intimate geography
of the flesh. (etc etc, to be continued.) “The reformist ‘mass incarceration’ narrative is in most ways entirely
symbiotic with an expansion of police force and of its various capacities to occupy the lifeworlds and
ecologies of criminalized people and communities. ” In fact, the reform of mass incarceration, as it has been
absorbed by the cultural ensemble of the state and its distensions, endorses an expansion of policing
logics (including carceral policing logics) beyond the discrete institutional sites of prisons, jails, detention
centers, and juvenile facilities . In a longer version of this piece, I consider how the Holder-Obama-Clinton ensemble’s
reformist auto-critique of mass incarceration proliferates an invigorated and refurbished technology of
policing, which is to say that the “mass incarceration” narrative is in most ways entirely symbiotic with
an expansion of police force and of its various capacities to occupy the lifeworlds and ecologies of
criminalized people and communities. In this sense, any shared radical abolitionist praxis in this moment must
pay close analytical and practical attention to the moments in which those who allegedly embrace the
objective of “ending” or “reducing” mass incarceration may also advocate the absolute necessity of
police, criminal jurisprudence, and incarceration as permanent conditions of sociality, collective safety,
and even “democracy.” Let us end with a question about the implications of “mass incarceration” as a vernacular of militant state reform: it seems to
be an almost canonized liberal common sense assumption within this narrative that the well-noted asymmetries of misery, suffering, displacement and terror
catalyzed by mass incarceration are an “unintended consequence” of state policy and the contemporary racial-cultural formation of the United States. We must ask:
what if this assumption is false?
Thus, vote negative for praxes of abolition. Abolition abrogates the political-discursive
limits of “an alternative demand” in favor of insurgent revolt and a radical
reconfiguration of life itself. Through structural analysis and counterwar, voting
negative dis/configures of the coherence of “criminal justice reform” and offers an
alternative story against anti-Black, settler Civilization.
Rodriguez 19 - Dylan, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Chair of the Academic Senate, University of
California, Riverside, a founding member of Critical Resistance ("Abolition as Praxis of Human Being: A
Foreword." Harvard Law Review, vol. 132, no. 6, April 2019, pp. 1575)
What are the historical conditions and political imperatives of "abolition" as a contemporary praxis? How does abolition generate a radical critique of carceral power - of "incarceration" as a logic of state and social formation? What are the limitations of liberal-to-progressive demands to
reform (allegedly) dysfunctional and/or scandalous systems of legitimated state violence (for example, "mass incarceration" or "police brutality")? How does abolitionist praxis facilitate notions of freedom, justice, security, and community that do not rely on systems of carceral state

Abolition is a dream toward futurity vested in insurgent,

power, including but not limited to criminal justice, policing, and (domestic) militarization/war?

counterCivilizational histories - genealogies of collective genius' that perform liberation under

conditions of duress. "[b]y
The late Black-liberation warrior, organizer, and Vice President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika 2 Safiya Bukhari once wrote, in characteristically crystallized terms,

definition, security means the freedom from danger, fear, and anxiety." Security and freedom, for 3

peoples subjected to the normalized state- and culturally condoned violence of (global) U.S. nation-
building, require a decisive departure from typical demands for policy reform, formal equality, and
amped-up electoral participation; rather, what is needed is a mustering of collective voice that
abrogates the political-discursive limits of "demand" itself. The long historical praxis of abolition is 4

grounded in a Black radical genealogy of revolt and transformative insurgency against racial chattel
enslavement and the transatlantic trafficking of captive Africans .5 Understood as part of the historical present tense, abolitionist critique, organizing, and collective
movement (across scales of geography and collectivity) honor and extend this tradition. The contributors to this issue of the Harvard Law Review signify the breadth, rigor, and strategic brilliance of contemporary abolitionist praxis, as their work represents a broader field of creative and

In this sense, abolition is not merely a practice

rigorously theorized struggle against the continuities of carceral state violence, including but not limited to imprisonment, jailing, detention, and policing.

of negation - a collective attempt to eliminate institutionalized dominance over targeted peoples and
populations but also a radically imaginative, generative, and socially productive communal (and
community-building) practice. Abolition seeks (as it performs) a radical reconfiguration of justice,
subjectivity, and social formation that does not depend on the existence of either the carceral state (a
statecraft that institutionalizes various forms of targeted human capture) or carceral power as such (a
totality of state-sanctioned and extrastate relations of gendered racial-colonial dominance).
Contemporary reformist approaches to addressing the apparent overreach and scandalous excesses of
the carceral state - characterized by calls to end "police brutality" and "mass incarceration" - fail to
recognize that the very logics of the overlapping criminal justice and policing regimes systemically
perpetuate racial, sexual, gender, colonial, and class violence through carceral power. Thus, in addition to being ineffective at
achieving their generally stated goals of alleviating vulnerable peoples' subjection to legitimated state violence, reformist approaches ultimately reinforce a violent system that is fundamentally asymmetrical in its production and organization of normalized misery, social surveillance,

an abolitionist historical mandate provides a useful and

vulnerability to state terror, and incarceration.6 It is within this irreconcilable reformist contradiction that

necessary departure from the liberal assumption that either the carceral state or carceral power is an
inevitable and permanent feature of the social formation. This historical mandate animates abolition as a creative, imaginative, and speculative collective labor: while liberal-to-

abolitionism addresses the historical roots of

progressive reformism attempts to protect and sustain the institutional and cultural-political coherence of an existing system by adjusting and/or refurbishing it,

that system in relations of oppressive, continuous, and asymmetrical violence and raises the radical
question of whether those relations must be uprooted and transformed (rather than reformed or
"fixed") for the sake of particular peoples' existence and survival as such. 7 Consider abolition as both a long accumulation and future planning of acts,
performed by and in the name of peoples and communities relentlessly laboring for their own physiological and cultural integrity as such. Embrace the obligation that accompanies the term abolition - a complex, dynamic, and deeply historical shorthand, if you will - in the work of

Abolition, then, is constituted

constantly remaking sociality, politics, ecology, place, and (human) being against the duress that some call dehumanization, others name colonialism, and still others identify as slavery and incarceration.

by so many acts long overlapping, dispersed across geographies and historical moments, that reveal
the underside of the New World and its descendant forms - the police, jail, prison, criminal court,
detention center, reservation, plantation, and "border." No longer limited by canonized narratives of late nineteenth-century (and disproportionately white) abolitionists seeking
redemption of the American project against its own constitutional racial-colonial-chattel carcerality, or even by recent articulations of early twenty-first-century abolition across a spectrum of progressive-to-radical rejoinders to gendered racist state violence, another conceptualization of

the term becomes possible. Now and long before, abolition is and was a practice, an analytical method, a present-tense visioning, an
infrastructure in the making, a creative project, a performance, a counterwar, an ideological struggle,
a pedagogy and curriculum, an alleged impossibility that is furtively present, pulsing, produced in the
persistent insurgencies of human being that undermine the totalizing logics of empire, chattel,
occupation, heteropatriarchy, racial-colonial genocide, and Civilization as a juridical-narrative epoch. I
join my fellow contributors to this issue of the Harvard Law Review in defying a liberal-to-reactionary (white/multiculturalist) common sense8 that rejects abolitionist creativity by languishing in simplistic notions of "what is practical," "what is realistic," "what the people will

Critical Resistance,9 Black Youth Project loo,10 We

understand/accept/do," or even "what must be reformed first/now/soon." Alongside current and recent communities of organizers such as

Charge Genocide," Idle No More, 1 2 and #NoDAPL and the Standing Rock Sioux,13 I embrace a
conception of abolition that is inseparable from its roots in (feminist, queer) Black liberation and
(feminist, queer) Indigenous anticolonialism/decolonization. 14 To contextualize abolition within and across these complex, vibrant traditions is to significantly complicate (and
productively disarticulate) teleological or formulaic notions of classical Marxist social transformation, while intervening in patriarchal and masculinist constructions of freedom/self-determination and obliterating liberal-optimistic paradigms of incrementalist, reformist social justice.

Abolition, in its radical totality, consists of constant, critical assessment of the economic, ecological,
political, cultural, and spiritual conditions for the security and liberation of subjected peoples' fullest
collective being and posits that revolutions of material, economic, and political systems compose the
necessary but not definitive or completed conditions for abolitionist praxis. Consider abolition, then,
as a counter-Civilizational distension of "freedom" that defies the modern disciplinary (and generally
militarized) orders of the citizen, the nation-state, jurisprudence, politicality, and most importantly -
the gendered racial ascendancy of the white human and its deadly regimes of normalized
physiological and culturalepistemic integrity. (The latter, in short, is: the rigorously reproduced worldliness of white life in a relation of power/violence over and against other life, including nonhuman life;
this includes the toxic political, affective, and discursive differentiation of premature, tragic, unjust, brutal, and/or massive white death - the interruption of white ascendancy - from the long and deep asymmetries of Indigenous death, queer death, Black death, Third World death, and so
forth. This is the formation of historical dominance that Professors Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick elsewhere term "white radiance."15) A long abolitionist project is already present in the terms, reflections, and scholarly-activist theorizations offered in the following pages by
Patrisse Cullors, Angel Sanchez, and Professor Allegra McLeod. This project suggests a speculative practice of immanent futurity for people who cannot presume an individual (or even collective) tomorrow in the long historical presence of gendered racist state violence structured in
militarism, policing, occupation, and incarceration.1 6 Such a fragile futurity convenes a creative force that is, at once, interruptive and destructive in form and method. For example, to demystify and fracture the prototheological (and always white-supremacist) sanctification of police as

When
suprahuman and supralegal (though somehow simultaneously vulnerable) embodiments of universal (that is, undifferentiated and nonhierarchical) justice, safety, and communal (bodily) integrity is but one urgent signaling of abolitionist method in the here and now.

some on the far right (including the emergent alt-right) stake out the terms of moral panic by
marshaling fearful, defensive reactions to a "war on cops," screaming and whispering that "blue lives
matter" in rebuttal to the intense and visible activation of so many around the fact of Black life's
institutionalized subjection to state terror, there is a grain of truth buried in their cynical,
reprehensible posturing. Here, then, is a central pedagogical and conceptual task for abolitionist
praxis, requisite to the task of disarticulating the assumptions of the mass incarceration-reform
narrative and offering a different, insurgent story against Civilization : to define and historicize
"incarceration" against its modern juridical-cultural coherence as such.