Resolved means to express by formal vote—this is the only definition that’s in the context of the resolution
Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1998 (dictionary.com)
Resolved: 5. To express, as an opinion or determination, by resolution and vote; to declare or decide by a formal vote; -- followed by a clause; as, the house resolved (or, it was resolved by the house) that no money should be apropriated (or, to appropriate no money).
The U.S. government is 3 branches
Black’s Law Dictionary 90 (6th Edition, p. 695)
In the United States, government consists of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in addition to administrative agencies. In a broader sense, includes the federal government and all its agencies and bureaus, state and county governments, and city and township governments.
Federal government is the national government that expresses power
Black’s Law Dictionary, 8th Edition, June 1, 2004, pg.716.
Federal government. 1. A national government that exercises some degree of control over smaller political units that have surrendered some degree of power in exchange for the right to participate in national politics matters – Also termed (in federal states) central government. 2. the U.S. government – Also termed national government. [Cases: United States -1 C.J.S. United States - - 2-3]
Should requires immediate, certain legal effect
Summers 94 (Justice – Oklahoma Supreme Court, “Kelsey v. Dollarsaver Food Warehouse of Durant”, 1994 OK 123, 11-8, http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=20287#marker3fn13)
4 The legal question to be resolved by the court is whether the word "should"13 in the May 18 order connotes futurity or may be deemed a ruling in praesenti.14 The answer to this query is not to be divined from rules of grammar;15 it must be governed by the age-old practice culture of legal professionals and its immemorial language usage. To determine if the omission (from the critical May 18 entry) of the turgid phrase, "and the same hereby is", (1) makes it an in futuro ruling - i.e., an expression of what the judge will or would do at a later stage - or (2) constitutes an in in praesenti resolution of a disputed law issue, the trial judge's intent must be garnered from the four corners of the entire record.16
[CONTINUES – TO FOOTNOTE]
13 "Should" not only is used as a "present indicative" synonymous with ought but also is the past tense of "shall" with various shades of meaning not always easy to analyze. See 57 C.J. Shall § 9, Judgments § 121 (1932). O. JESPERSEN, GROWTH AND STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1984); St. Louis & S.F.R. Co. v. Brown, 45 Okl. 143, 144 P. 1075, 1080-81 (1914). For a more detailed explanation, see the Partridge quotation infra note 15. Certain contexts mandate a construction of the term "should" as more than merely indicating preference or desirability. Brown, supra at 1080-81 (jury instructions stating that jurors "should" reduce the amount of damages in proportion to the amount of contributory negligence of the plaintiff was held to imply an obligation and to be more than advisory); Carrigan v. California Horse Racing Board, 60 Wash. App. 79, 802 P.2d 813 (1990) (one of the Rules of Appellate Procedure requiring that a party "should devote a section of the brief to the request for the fee or expenses" was interpreted to mean that a party is under an obligation to include the requested segment); State v. Rack, 318 S.W.2d 211, 215 (Mo. 1958) ("should" would mean the same as "shall" or "must" when used in an instruction to the jury which tells the triers they "should disregard false testimony"). 14 In praesenti means literally "at the present time." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 792 (6th Ed. 1990). In legal parlance the phrase denotes that which in law is presently or immediately effective, as opposed to something that will or would become effective in the future [in futurol]. See Van Wyck v. Knevals, 106 U.S. 360, 365, 1 S.Ct. 336, 337, 27 L.Ed. 201 (1882).
Dialogic focus best for exposing gaps in state power—it destabilizes monolithic narratives of the government—contingent practices are never stable institutions
Joe PainterCorresponding author contact information, E-mail the corresponding author
Centre for the Study of Cities & Regions and Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom
Available online 30 October 2006.
Volume 25, Issue 7, September 2006, Pages 752–774
Narrative and discourse, in both their everyday and more authoritative forms are integral to the notion that the state is best understood as an imagined collective actor. The state emerges as an imagined collective actor partly through the telling of stories of statehood and the production of narrative accounts of state power ( [Hansen and Stepputat, 2001], [Meadowcroft, 1995] and [Neocleous, 2003]). Another key mechanism is the symbolic relationship between state and nation that underpins state actors' claims to be acting on behalf of ‘the people’. Considering these narratives through the lens of dialogism and prosaics highlights their potential instability, historicity and artefactual character.
The arguments of Bakhtin and Tolstoy about the effectivity of the mundane and the ordinary encourage us to rethink both the functioning of state institutions and the mechanisms that give rise to state effects. For example, passing legislation has few immediate effects in itself. Rather, its effects are produced in practice through the myriad mundane actions of officials, clerks, police officers, inspectors, teachers, social workers, doctors and so on. In addition, the act of passing legislation in the first place also depends on the prosaic practices and small decisions of parliamentary drafters, elected politicians, civil servants and all those who influence them, including journalists, electors, letter writers, campaigning organizations, lobbyists, academics and others. Furthermore, all of these interactions are characterized by heteroglossia and—another Bakhtinian keyword—unfinalizability. Thus, the outcome of state actions is always uncertain and fallible.
Decisionmaking outweighs—values aren’t enough—comparing courses of action develops exportable problem-solving skills.
Jiménez-Aleixandre, professor of education – University of Santiago de Compostela, and Pereiro-Muñoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain), ‘2
(Maria-Pilar and Cristina, “Knowledge producers or knowledge consumers? Argumentation and decision making about environmental management,” International Journal of Science Education Vol. 24, No. 11, p. 1171–1190)
One of the objectives of environmental education is to prepare students for future participation in society. To be an informed citizen, one needs to be able to make decisions. Implicit in the concept of decision making in everyday situations is the skill of being able to present an argued point of view (Kortland 1997). Kortland (1996) points out that decisions are reasoned choices, built on criteria that are not formulated from the beginning, but developed in interaction with the evaluation of the choices available. Reasoned choices and evaluation are often based on values but, although values are an important basis for making a judgement, the use of relevant conceptual knowledge is needed in order to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the available options. If solving environmental problems through decision making promotes behaviour for the environment, conceptual knowledge must play an important role in environmental education. Changes in attitudes and behaviours, we argue, should be supported by relevant knowledge, by the understanding of the consequences of careless behaviour or, as in the case studied here, by the careful assessment of the different options for environmental management. The relationship between conceptual understanding and environmental attitudes has been explored, in the context of landscape interpretation, by Benayas (1992). Benayas found that university students possessing cognitive schemes of greater complexity and variety tended to choose a higher proportion of rural or local landscapes and reject scenarios including human intervention or those presenting exotic plants and animals than did other students. Moore (1981) found that university students assigning more importance to the need for taking steps to save energy were the ones who knew most about energy and the consequences of its mismanagement. The focus of this paper is decision making and argumentation. We take argumentation as meaning the evaluation of theoretical claims in the light of empirical evidence or data from other sources (Kuhn 1992, 1993). Put another way, we see it as the capacity to choose between different explanations and to reason which criteria lead to the choice. For Kuhn (1992), the ability to make reasoned judgements should be part of the ability to ‘think well’, but she suggests that the promotion of argumentative reasoning skills does not occur equally across all school environments. This study focuses on natural science classroom discourse partly, as Kuhn says, because argumentative dialogue externalizes argumentative reasoning and partly as a way to study attitudes and values beyond the scope of paper and pencil instruments. The focus of the study are not any arguments, but the substantive arguments (Toulmin 1958) in which the knowledge of content is a requisite. If science is viewed as a complex practice involving not only planning and performing experiments but also proposing and discussing ideas and choosing from among different explanations, then, discursive processes and practices constitute an essential part of the building of scientific knowledge (Latour and Woolgar 1986). Decision making and argumentation require an adequate context, for instance classrooms organized as knowledge-producing communities, rather than knowledgeconsuming communities, where, as McGinn and Roth (1999) argue, scientific literacy is understood as preparation for participation in scientific practice. Environmental conflicts offer good opportunities to evaluate options due to the complexity of the problems under study (Jime´nez et al. 2000a). The students were asked to assess the impact of a projected network of drainpipes in the marshes of river Louro, a wetland near their school. This real-life issue involves conflicts between contradictory interests and cannot be resolved with straightforward affirmative or negative answers, a teaching strategy that has been advocated elsewhere (e.g. Ratcliffe 1996). In terms of authenticity, the classroom tasks were designed according to the culture of the science practitioners and not according to a stereotyped school culture (Brown et al. 1989). For Roth and Roychoudhury (1993) authentic contexts mean laboratory experiences providing students with open-ended problems of personal relevance; for Duschl and Gitomer (1996) authentic problems, besides having relevance for students, should demand the use of criteria for evidence and justification similar to those the scientists would use. So, the criteria for choosing the wetland problem were that it was: open-ended, relevant to the life of the students and that it allowed reasoned debate about the solutions using available data and evidence. Authentic problems do not need to be ‘true’, but the issue chosen is a real problem and it adds motivation and interest for the students, offering them the possibility of discussing it in the classroom and trying to influence, to some extent, the real world outside the classroom.
Decisionmaking skills gained from debate are key to problem solving in all facets of life—outweighs the case
Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp. 9-10
If we assume it to be possible without recourse to violence to reach agreement on all the problems implied in the employment of the idea of justice we are granting the possibility of formulating an ideal of man and society, valid for all beings endowed with reason and accepted by what we have called elsewhere the universal audience.14
I think that the only discursive methods available to us stem from techniques that are not demonstrative—that is, conclusive and rational in the narrow sense of the term—but from argumentative techniques which are not conclusive but which may tend to demonstrate the reasonable character of the conceptions put forward. It is this recourse to the rational and reasonable for the realization of the ideal of universal communion that characterizes the age-long endeavor of all philosophies in their aspiration for a city of man in which violence may progressively give way to wisdom.13
Whenever an individual controls the dimensions of" a problem, he or she can solve the problem through a personal decision. For example, if the problem is whether to go to the basketball game tonight, if tickets are not too expensive and if transportation is available, the decision can be made individually. But if a friend's car is needed to get to the game, then that person's decision to furnish the transportation must be obtained.
Complex problems, too, are subject to individual decision making. American business offers many examples of small companies that grew into major corporations while still under the individual control of the founder. Some computer companies that began in the 1970s as one-person operations burgeoned into multimillion-dollar corporations with the original inventor still making all the major decisions. And some of the multibillion-dollar leveraged buyouts of the 1980s were put together by daring—some would say greedy—financiers who made the day-to-day and even hour-to-hour decisions individually.
When President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm, when President Bill Clinton sent troops into Somalia and Haiti and authorized Operation Desert Fox, and when President George W. Bush authorized Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq, they each used different methods of decision making, but in each case the ultimate decision was an individual one. In fact, many government decisions can be made only by the president. As Walter Lippmann pointed out, debate is the only satisfactory way the exact issues can be decided:
A president, whoever he is, has to find a way of understanding the novel and changing issues which he must, under the Constitution, decide. Broadly speaking ... the president has two ways of making up his mind. The one is to turn to his subordinates—to his chiefs of staff and his cabinet officers and undersecretaries and the like—and to direct them to argue out the issues and to bring him an agreed decision…
The other way is to sit like a judge at a hearing where the issues to be decided are debated. After he has heard the debate, after he has examined the evidence, after he has heard the debaters cross-examine one another, after he has questioned them himself he makes his decision…
It is a much harder method in that it subjects the president to the stress of feeling the full impact of conflicting views, and then to the strain of making his decision, fully aware of how momentous it Is. But there is no other satisfactory way by which momentous and complex issues can be decided.16
John F. Kennedy used Cabinet sessions and National Security Council meetings to provide debate to illuminate diverse points of view, expose errors, and challenge assumptions before he reached decisions.17 As he gained experience in office, he placed greater emphasis on debate. One historian points out: "One reason for the difference between the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis was that [the Bay of Pig*] fiasco instructed Kennedy in the importance of uninhibited debate in advance of major decision."18 All presidents, to varying degrees, encourage debate among their advisors.
We may never be called on to render the final decision on great issues of national policy, but we are constantly concerned with decisions important to ourselves for which debate can be applied in similar ways. That is, this debate may take place in our minds as we weigh the pros and cons of the problem, or we may arrange for others to debate the problem for us. Because we all are increasingly involved in the decisions of the campus, community, and society in general, it is in our intelligent self-interest to reach these decisions through reasoned debate.
Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialogue—monopolizing strategy and prep makes the discussion one-sided and subverts any meaningful neg role
Galloway 7 – professor of communications at Samford University (Ryan, “Dinner And Conversation At The Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative Dialogue”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007), ebsco)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning:¶ Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).¶ Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).¶ For example, an affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.