"If you can defend, counter-attack and take the initiative then you become a more dangerous player.” - Jo Durie, No.5 Tennis Player in the United Kingdom. 

Debaters often assume that the negative side's only option is to argue for the status quo. Although it is true that the negative team's job is to negate the affirmative position or plan, there is nothing in the official rules that specifically forbids counterplans. (Depending on what league you compete in–some leagues do ban counterplans.) 

This series of articles will address the types of counterplans and guidelines for running them. 

This first post won’t present any arguments about whether counterplans are valid or not. Instead, we will focus on the different types of counterplans and how likely they are to succeed with judges. This article is not presenting our views on what types of counterplans are valid–that's for later on in this series.

Let’s begin by going over the types of counterplans.

The amendment to AFF’s plan

This usually occurs when the negative believes that the affirmative has made a mistake in their mandates. Alternatively, the negative may have crafted a different mandate to avoid a specific disadvantage or solvency issue. You have to be careful with what arguments you run against the affirmative in this situation, as many of those arguments may apply to your counterplan as well. This type of repair is so complex that most people just avoid them. It can also appear nitpicky to a judge in some cases.

Normally, amendment counterplans address a solvency issue or disadvantage. For example, suppose there is a plan to allocate $100 million to establish weigh-stations and x-ray scanners along each US-Mexico border checkpoint. The negative presents a study that such a plan would actually cost $200 million. An amendment counterplan would be the negative presenting the plan again but with $200 million allocated instead of $100 million. The rest of the plan remains the same. (This is why these counterplans can be viewed as nitpicky). These can also be called process/enforcement counterplans (changing the process or agency of enforcement of the plan to ensure it upholds proper legislative procedures) or advantage counterplan (reducing the amount of mandates to focus on 1 solvable advantage.) These are all minor repairs to the affirmative’s original mandates, and so these rounds will really just boil down to mandate specifics rather than narratives.

Bigger amendments can produce interesting debates, but small amendments often end up frustrating both teams and the judge. They can be successful, but they are often a hard sell, especially to parent and community judges.

The minor repair

Teams often call an amendment to AFF’s plan a “minor repair” but traditionally a minor repair refers to the negative arguing that rather than a massive policy change, all that is needed is a small change to the status quo. This is a form of a non-topical counterplan, because while it is within the bounds of the resolution, it is not a significant or substantial change. Essentially, it is a counterplan where you run “significant/substantial” topicality against yourself. This type of counterplan is helpful when there is a tiny change that can solve the problem, and AFF overlooked it. It can be a great way to capture the advantages of AFF while avoiding the disadvantages.

I (Josiah) ran a minor repair against a team running “Close Guantanamo Bay.” I had just beat a team running GTMO by arguing that torture doesn’t happen at GTMO, but this team had better evidence of torture at GTMO. I decided to run a minor repair to ban torture at GTMO rather than closing it. This was a much smaller change than AFF asked for, and was outside of the bounds of that particular resolution. We successfully solved the problem of torture and avoided the disadvantages that we proceeded to run.

In the next post, we will look at four more types of counterplans.

Coming soon: More Types of Counterplans, Counterplan Burdens, whether Counterplans should be topical, and more!