This is where all download will be listed, utilizing the Page Add plugin.
File Name | S21-LD-NCFCA-9-AFF-Accountability.docx |
File Size | 71.96 KB |
Date added | September 28, 2020 |
Category | Archived |
Tags | Lincoln-Douglas, NCFCA, Season 21 |
This case centers around the need for democratically elected officials to be accountable to the people who elected them. The value of accountability should be easy to defend, because the train of logic is pretty ironclad: democratic elections exist so that people can govern themselves through elected representatives, and that process both requires and fosters accountability.
The secondary argument here is that valuing the public’s right to know increases accountability. This is also a pretty simple link to prove. It’s difficult to hold someone – especially a politician – accountable if you don’t have enough information about them. With regards to democratic elections, the way that citizens learn about their representatives, and thus hold them accountable, is through the public’s right to know.
The applications for this case are centered around the medical records of elected officials, and they range from the general (nine U.S. Presidents may have suffered from mental illness that affected their job performance) to the specific (Grover Cleveland’s oral cancer) and from the clearly established (Edith Wilson running the country after President Woodrow Wilson’s stroke) to the somewhat speculative (that John F. Kennedy’s undisclosed back problems indirectly caused his assassination). The common theme of these applications, however, is that citizens need to know things about their leaders in order to hold them accountable, and that shocking information has been hidden from the voting public before. Effectively combining the principle of electoral accountability with vivid examples of what happens when a candidate’s privacy gets in the way of that principle is the best path to victory with this case.