Student Congress

Student Congress (also Congressional Debate) is a form of high school debate and a National Forensic League event. In Student Congress, high school students imitate the United States Congress by debating billss.

Table of contents

1 Rules

1.1 Bills
1.2 Chambers
1.3 Debate
1.4 Awards

2 Student Congress tournaments

Rules

There are several different systems of rules used to govern Student Congress. Presented here are the rules for the Illinois Congressional Debate Association. These differ slightly from the National Forensic League rules on topic such as Presiding Officer election and amending bills.

Bills

Before each tournament, students write bills on a variety of issues pertaining to issues that face the United States Congress. At each tournament, there is often a team captain's meeting to decide which of the bills submitted will be debated at the next tournament.

Chambers

Students are divided into chambers of around 20 students. Each chamber represents a United States House of Representatives. Before the debating portion of the tournament begins, chambers must first vote on Presiding Officers (POs). One PO is elected for each of the three sessions of debate. The contestant who recieves the most votes chooses which session he wishes to preside over (a matter of strategy). After POs are chosen, the chamber breaks up into three committees - "Public welfare," "Foreign affairs," and "Economics." Each of these committees is assigned to look through all the bills of their category and determine the order in which they will be debated. The merits of debating each bill is discussed (although each member of a committee often has a bill from his or her school that they want to be on the docket, and voting is conducted by the committee chair (assigned beforehand) to determine the final results. The bills selected form the docket. For instance, if the Public Welfare committee decided on bills 103, 101, and 107 as their best; Foreign Affairs 201, 205, and 202, and Economics 309, 308, and 304, the docket would look like this:

103   201   309

101   205   308

107 202 304

The bills are debated left to right, so the order of debate would start with 103 and eventually end at 304 (although chambers almost never debate all of their bills).

Debate

After POs are elected and the docket is set up, debate begins. The PO for first session opens debate on the first bill. He or she first calls for an authorship speech. This speech is given by a member of the school which wrote the bill only. It is allowed to be pre-written, so as to introduce the chamber to the intent of the bill and the basic arguments for it. The authorship speech is 4 minutes long and is followed by 3 minutes of questioning. If no one from the school is present to give the authorship, a 4 minute sponsorship speech is given, which is not pre-written. After the authorship, the PO calls for a 4 minute con speech to be given against the bill with 3 minutes of questioning. After this cycle, cycles of pro and con speeches with 3 minutes of speaking and 2 minutes of questioning are given until either (1) 60 minutes have been spent debating the bill, (2) the chamber votes of previous question the bill, or (3) the chamber votes to table the bill.