This is the fifth article in a series about the history of plans in policy debate. The first article explained the early history of plans, covering the 1910s to the 1960s. The second article discussed the era beginning in the late 1960s and ending in the mid-1980s. The third article covered one of the significant developments in the late-1970s and 1980s: extra-topicality. The fourth article documented the other major development of the 1980s and early 1990s: the topical, plan-inclusive counterplan, which shaped debate through the 2000s. This article discusses the rise of “normal means” PICs and process counterplans during the 2000s and 2010s and documents the plan writing adjustments made in response to them.
By the mid- to late-2000s, “PICs” had evolved into something quite different from those pioneered in the 1990s. Because affirmative teams downsized their plans to only include a direct (and often vague) mandate, the negative had fewer opportunities to design counterplans that competed with the text of the plan. As details about the plan’s mandate(s), implementation, and enforcement shifted from the plan text to “normal means,” negatives responded by designing counterplans that “PICed out of normal means.” These counterplans defined the plan writing era of the late aughts and early-2010s.
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