Final Updates - Michigan 2024 BEJJKP

DA Ups
Aff Agenda
Farm Bill---2AC
Farm Bill will be delayed to 2025. Republicans have an electoral incentive not to compromise.
Alan Guebert 7/11, served as a writer and editor at Professional Farmers of America, Successful Farming magazine and Farm Journal magazine, “Farm Bill politics 2024 are leaning toward Project 2025,” Farm and Dairy, 7/11/2024, https://www.farmanddairy.com/columns/farm-bill-politics-2024-are-leaning-toward-project-2025/831412.html, JL
This year, like last year, is a Farm Bill year and this year, like last year, probably won’t deliver any Farm Bill.
The reason is the oldest one in Washington, D.C.: politics. Most Congressional Republicans aren’t interested in passing any bipartisan farm and food assistance bill when they believe a delay might deliver a GOP-controlled House, Senate and White House which then would write and pass a Farm Bill that might well resemble something out of the 1980s.
If you think that’s hyperbole, then read the 30-page blueprint for U.S. agriculture included in Project 2025, a mostly unexamined, deeply conservative initiative that “if enacted,” explained Newsweek in late June, “would bring significant changes across various aspects of American life…”
In fact, the 920-page, highly detailed, deeply partisan plan — written and issued by the Heritage Foundation, not the Trump campaign — outlines “a radical transformation of the executive branch… replacing many federal civil servant jobs with political appointees who would be loyal to the president.”
According to Project 2025, a second Trump White House — and by extension, an already Trump-loving Congress — should enact a wholesale overhaul of the 2018 Farm Bill and its implementing agency, the 163-year-old U.S. Department of Agriculture.
For example, according to the plan, a new Republican majority must kill the sugar program and with it, presumably, the high fructose corn syrup industry which uses, on average, 6% of the U.S. corn crop.
“The federal government should not be in the central planning business, and the sugar program is a prime example of harmful central planning,” explains Project 2025.
Next, “ideally” Congress should repeal the two principal crop insurance programs used by most farmers, the Agricultural Risk Coverage and the Price Loss Coverage Program, the twin pillars of U.S. farm policy that farmers use to insure an estimated 81% of all eligible food-producing acres.
But, if both somehow survive the planned gutting, “Congress should prohibit… farmers [from] receiving an ARC or PLC payment the same year they receive a crop insurance indemnity…”
On top of that, the Heritage plan continues, Congress should “Reduce the premium subsidy rate for crop insurance” from “about 60% to no more than 50% because, “(a)fter all taxpayers should not have to pay more than the farmers who benefit from the crop insurance policies.”
Moreover, “The White House and the USDA should make it very clear that the farm bill process, including reform of farm subsidies, must be conducted through an open process with time for mark-up and the opportunity for changes to be made outside the Agriculture Committee process.”
Translation: Big Ag can save the $165 million — or thereabouts — it spends lobbying Congress during Farm Bill years because the $1.5 trillion legislation should be written in the clear sunlight of high noon on Capitol Hill.
And, of course, Project 2025 includes that oldie, but-goodie, “Separate the agricultural provision of the farm bill from the nutrition provisions… (A)gricultural programs should be considered separate legislation distinct from food stamps and the nutrition part of the farm bill… [because] when it comes to American agriculture and welfare programs, they deserve sound policy debates, not political tactics…”
But wait, there are even more changes an incoming Republican White House and Congress should implement.
“Champion the elimination of the Conservation Reserve Program,” eliminate commodity checkoff programs “when possible,” “eliminate or reform dietary guidelines,” allow state-inspected meat to be sold across state lines, repeal export promotion programs and “repeal the federal labeling mandate” — whatever that means.
Could Project 2025 become the guiding hand for Farm Bill 2025?
Of course it can. Continued foot dragging by today’s House leadership to even schedule a Farm Bill vote and a long-stalled Senate already has Washington discussing another extension of the 2018 law until after — you guessed it — January 2025.
Thumper---2AC
Thumper---Supreme Court reform.
Ankush Khardori 7/29, “Democrats May Have a Real Chance to Reform the Supreme Court,” POLITICO, 7-29-2024, pg. XX-XX, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/29/biden-supreme-court-reform-00171667, JL
The summer of reversals for President Joe Biden continued in dramatic form on Monday as he announced that he now supports sweeping Supreme Court reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Biden pushed 18-year term limits and a binding ethics code on Supreme Court justices — after a long career spent opposing such measures — as well as a constitutional amendment overturning the court’s recent decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution.
Is it too little too late?
After all, Biden is now a lame-duck president, and he faces a Republican-held House that won’t go anywhere near these proposals. Even when Democrats had full control of Washington in Biden’s first two years as president, the party shied away from Supreme Court reform — thanks in significant part to the ambivalence and intransigence of Biden himself.
It’s politicized.
Austin Sarat 7/31, associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, “Joe Biden is politicizing US supreme court reform – and that’s a good thing,” Guardian, 7/31/2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/31/joe-biden-supreme-court-reform, JL
“Better late than never” is a useful maxim in all of life and in politics as well. On Monday, Joe Biden caught the “better late than never” bug when he unveiled a series of proposals to reform the US supreme court.
Those proposals come more than two and a half years after the US president’s presidential commission on the supreme court issued its recommendations, and more than 40 years after Biden called former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to impose term limits on the court “boneheaded”.
In 2020, during his quest for the White House, Biden again distanced himself from people who were pushing for significant institutional reform at the court.
How times have changed. That was before the court overruled Roe v Wade, the ethics scandals of justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas came to light, and before the court gave the president almost blanket immunity from criminal prosecution.
Biden announced his new thinking in a Washington Post op-ed, in which he detailed what he called “three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy”. They begin with a constitutional amendment designed to reverse the supreme court’s Trump v United States decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.
Biden calls it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment”. It would “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office”.
The second of Biden’s reform proposals would impose term limits on the justices who sit on the supreme court. It would institute “a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court”.
Third, Biden called for enacting “a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court”. Justices, Biden wrote, “should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest”.
While each of these proposals is a wise response to the current crisis of the supreme court, none of them has any chance of being enacted in the near future. Still, Biden has done a service by going public with these ideas and politicizing the court reform question.
His op-ed and speech on court reform at an event commemorating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act will help ensure that supreme court reform is a live issue during the remainder of the 2024 presidential campaign.
The first of Biden’s proposals, the call for a constitutional amendment, is the most important but also the most difficult to achieve among his three ideas. Like earlier versions of the same idea, it offers an important vehicle for engaging the public in resisting yet another exercise of judicial supremacy by our increasingly rogue supreme court.
America has a long history of using the amendment process to reverse repugnant supreme court decisions, like Trump v United States. But as Harvard Law’s Jill Lepore notes, over the long arc of American history, amending the constitution has “become a lost art”.
In fact, Lepore noted elsewhere: “The US Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971.”
However, by supporting an amendment to reverse Trump v United States, Biden has teed up a winning issue for Kamala Harris. Polls show that 65% of Americans do not think presidents should have immunity for actions taken in office.
Among independent voters, that number is 68%.
Even larger majorities support 18-year term limits for supreme court justices. As the Biden commission noted: “Up until the late 1960s, the average term of service was 15 years. It has now risen to roughly 26 years, and a number of Justices have served three or more decades, spanning numerous election cycles and presidential administrations.”
This may be why a Fox News Poll conducted earlier this month found that 78% of the respondents favor that idea. That is up from 66% in 2022.
While term limits are popular, it is unclear whether Congress could impose them by ordinary legislation or whether this proposal would also require a constitutional amendment. Even Biden’s supreme court commission was divided on that question.
As an article in Forbes explains: “Article III of the Constitution states judges ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ which has been interpreted to mean justices have to hold lifetime appointments. The commission said Congress could get around the issue by having only the most recent justices hear most cases, which originate in lower courts, while still keeping the older ones on to hear cases that originate in the Supreme Court.”
“That strategy … would create the ‘effective equivalent’ of term limits without actually violating Article III by kicking justices off the court.”
What is clear is that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the supreme court term limits idea. Earlier this month, the former president branded court reform proposals such as term limits “illegal” and “unconstitutional”.
“The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court,” he posted on Truth Social. “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country.”
Trump is even out of step with his supporters on the idea of term limits for justices. Newsweek says: “Among those who voted for Trump in 2020, 54% supported term limits, while 20% opposed them.”
Finally, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last September showed that “three-in-four voters want the justices bound to an ethics code, the most popular reform proposal in the survey”. This figure reflects what Politico calls “a bipartisan consensus of 81% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 69% of independents”.
Here, too, Maga world is on the wrong side politically, as well as on the wrong side of history. Just last month, as NBC News reported, Senate Republicans “blocked a Democratic-sponsored bill that would have required Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct”.
In the end, no matter how Biden’s proposals play out in the presidential contest, by politicizing the issue, by going public with them in a high-profile manner, the president has offered the people of the United States a chance to make their voices heard about the kind of supreme court they want. It is now up to all of us to take him up on that offer and use our votes to weigh in on this most important question.
Farm Bill---1AR
It won’t be pushed until after the election.
Meghan Grebner 7/8, Broadcast Supervisor, Brownfield Ag News, major in communications and animal science at Western Illinois University, citing Ethan Lane, the head lobbyist for NCBA, “Likelihood of getting a farm bill passed this year continues to dwindle,” Brownfield Ag News, 7/8/2024, https://www.brownfieldagnews.com/news/likelihood-of-getting-a-farm-bill-passed-this-year-continues-to-dwindle/, JL
He tells Brownfield the current tone in Washington, D.C makes any progress a challenge. “With the Freedom Caucus antics and all of the other problems we’re all highly aware of, with those tight majorities there just isn’t going to be, I don’t believe, the time on the schedule or the right political environment for that bill to move in a responsible way across the House floor,” he says. “Never mind whatever is going on in the Senate.”
He says the November election could change that. “One thing we know about budget-hawks that won’t vote for anything with any kind of a dollar amount attached to it when a Democrat is President, is when a Republican becomes President, all of that goes out the window,” he says. “And they pass whatever they need to pass if their party leadership is moving that direction.”
Lane says the farm bill and its negotiations are just one of the issues up for discussion at NCBA’s Summer Business Meeting this week.
Biden PC---1AR
Biden is a half president.
John F. Harris 7/25, founding editor and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO, “Biden Lost His Voice, Then His Power,” POLITICO, 7/25/2024, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/25/biden-lost-his-voice-then-his-power-00171081, JL
In most respects, President Joseph R. Biden is a thoroughly conventional president — a leader deeply respectful of precedent, a man whose style and values are shaped by living through more than half of the 20th century even as he ends his career navigating the disruptive politics of the 21st.
By contrast, the great foil of his presidency — predecessor Donald Trump — is in style and contempt for precedent the most radical person ever to hold the office.
Biden’s Oval Office address Wednesday night, however, underlined a paradox. There is one way that Trump represents continuity and Biden is the anomaly. This paradox is also the reason Biden won’t be his party’s nominee for a second term.
For most of American history — certainly since the start of the 20th century — the presidency has taken much of its power from the ability of its occupants to communicate. In other words, to use the singular power of the Oval Office to command the attention of the nation — more or less at will, on any topic or occasion — and shape the thoughts and mood of the country through the power of words and image. There is no better place to wage a national argument.
By this narrow but critical standard, it is Trump who used the presidential pulpit — and the mania and obsessive interest that followed him even after he lost it — in ways consistent with the grain of American history. He preoccupies the psyche of the nation, no less among those who loathe him as among the half or nearly half who are open to returning him to power.
It was Biden who is the tragic exception. He has been essentially a half president.
Neg Econ
U---Inflation---2NC
POWELL TESTIMONY and DATA.
Victoria Guida 7/31, economics correspondent at POLITICO, “Fed's Powell signals inflation fight is nearly over, in boon to Harris,” POLITICO, 7/31/2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/31/fed-powell-rate-cut-inflation-00172128, JL
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said the central bank might cut interest rates as soon as September, signaling the fight against elevated inflation is close to over.
That timing would be especially fortunate for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Biden administration has struggled to convince voters that the economy is doing well, despite low unemployment and rising pay. That’s largely because Republicans have hammered the Democrats over consumer prices, which are up roughly 20 percent since President Joe Biden took office, outpacing wages.
Now, with the prospect of a rate cut in the coming months, Harris and Democrats can at least argue that the economy is finally turning the corner on inflation.
“Lower interest rates will be doubly positive news to consumers,” said Ernie Tedeschi, a former Biden White House official. “They’re welcome news in their own right, but lower rates will also punctuate the better inflation data throughout the economy.”
“That’s the same victory over inflation that Democrats will also be touting,” added Tedeschi, now director of economics at Yale Budget Lab.
The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has fallen within striking distance of the central bank’s 2 percent target, while the job market has stayed relatively strong. That’s giving Powell more confidence that he can ease off the economy after holding borrowing costs at high levels for the past year.
Powell said at a press conference on Wednesday that policymakers have made no firm decision on what they will do when they meet next on Sept. 17-18. But he said if economic indicators stay on a similar path, a rate cut is “on the table.”
The statement merely ratified widespread expectations among investors heading into the Fed announcement, but his words will buoy markets and businesses that have been hoping for a reprieve from higher borrowing costs in the coming months. Stocks jumped after Powell’s press conference.
PRICES and LABOR MARKETS.
Jeff Cox 7/31, economics editor for CNBC.com where he covers the latest data, the Federal Reserve and how the developments impact financial markets, “Fed holds rates steady and notes progress on inflation,” CNBC, 7/31/2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/31/fed-rate-decision-july-2024.html, JL
Price pressures off 2022 peak
Economic data of late has indicated that price pressures are well off the boil from their peak in mid-2022, when inflation hit its highest level since the early 1980s.
The Fed’s preferred measure, the personal consumption expenditures price index, shows inflation around 2.5% annually, though other gauges indicate slightly higher readings. The central bank targets inflation at 2% and has been insistent that it will stick with that goal despite pressure from some quarters to tolerate higher levels.
Though the Fed has held to its tightest monetary policy in decades, the economy has continued to expand.
Gross domestic product registered a 2.8% annualized growth rate in the second quarter, well above expectations amid a boost from consumer and government spending and restocking of inventories.
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Labor market data has been a little less robust, though the 4.1% unemployment rate is not far from what economists consider full employment. The Fed statement noted that unemployment “has moved up but remains low.” A reading Wednesday from payrolls processing firm ADP showed July private sector job growth of just 122,000, indicating that the labor market could be weakening.
However, there was some positive inflation data in the ADP report, with wages increasing at their slowest pace in three years. Also Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that costs of wages, benefits and salaries increased just 0.9% in the second quarter, below expectations and the 1.2% level in the first quarter.
Fed officials have vowed to proceed carefully, despite signs that inflation is weakening and worries that t

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