This is our overview of the 2026 NSDA Congress docket.
You can find our essays on individual bills here. Evidence files on the bills are here.
Bills appear in docket order within each round. All 41 docket bills are now published in the Substack series. Where an essay’s published title differs from the docket title, the docket title is listed first with the published title noted.
NSDA 2026: The Congressional Debate Docket — series overview + 200 pages of analysis (start here)
Preliminary Round Legislation (For All Debate)
A Bill to Prohibit the Development and Deployment of Lethal Autonomous Weapons
A Bill to Regulate the Commercial Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
A Bill to Ban Political Action Committees (PACs) (published as “Citizens United and PACs”)
A Bill to Provide Aid to Syria to Reform and Rebuild Syria (published as “Increasing U.S. Humanitarian Aid to Syria”)
A Bill to Incentivize Onshoring of Semiconductor Manufacturing to Strengthen Domestic Supply Chains
The Child Education Standardization Act (published as “A Bill to Standardize Children”)
A Bill to Terminate the Willow Oil Development and Promote Environmental Restoration (published as “A Billow to Terminate Willow Oil Development”)
House Quarterfinal / Senate Semifinal Round Legislation
A Bill to Amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to Reduce the Work Week to Thirty-Two Hours
A Bill to Mandate Later School Start Times to Promote Student Mental Health
A Bill to Establish Federal Standards Regulating Medical False Advertising to Protect Public Health
A Bill to Establish a National Carbon Capture Research and Deployment Program (published as “Carbon Capture”)
A Resolution to Go South (published as “A Resolution to Go South (USMCA Expansion and Tariff Limits)”)
House Semifinal Round Legislation
A Bill to Reinstate and Fund Psychiatric Facilities Nationwide
A Bill to Ban Corporate Acquisition of Single-Family Residences
A Bill to Condition United States Foreign Aid on Democratic Governance and Human Rights Compliance
Supplement: Why Aid Conditionality Fails
The AI Accountability Act (published as “Data Center Water & Electricity Use” — the bill regulates AI data center water/electricity use)
Senate Final Round Legislation
A Bill to Promote Ethical Mineral Trade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
A Resolution to Amend the Constitution to Abolish the Electoral College
House Final Round Legislation
A Bill to Reclassify Predictive Betting Markets as Online Gambling
A Bill to Ban the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Learning Settings Through High School (published as “A Bill to Ban Generative AI in Schools”)
A Bill to Prohibit the Manufacture and Possession of Ghost Guns
Overview
Thirty-five bills, five tiers, five days in Richmond for NSDA Nationals. Everyone in your chamber will have read the docket — that’s not the question. The question is whether you’ve read it the way a coach reads a file, hunting for the funding hole, the definitional trap, the dead enforcement agency, and the bill where the chamber will have heard four people advocate for it and nobody competent oppose it.
This is the overview; the bill-by-bill breakdowns come after. Every bill-text fact below — section numbers, thresholds, effective dates, the exact wording — is drawn from NSDA’s official 2026 high school docket, which is worth having open as you read.
A note on the links below: load-bearing facts and every case carry a source link, pointing to a free authoritative copy — Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, where it hosts a case cleanly, and Justia, where Cornell’s coverage is incomplete. One quirk to know: Cornell uses docket-number paths for several modern cases (Citizens United is at /text/08-205, not a volume/page path), so open each case URL to confirm it before relying on it in a round, since a broken link cited in cross-examination undercuts you.
Where to Invest
NSDA stacks the hard, technical, ideologically loud bills deeper in the bracket. Your prep should track the stack.
Prelims get fifteen bills, and everyone speaks on all of them, so an extra paragraph of canned analysis doesn’t help you. What gets you out of prelims is a turn nobody else is running, a statistic nobody else has, or a constitutional angle nobody else flagged. If you don’t have something different to say on a bill, you don’t really have a prelim speech on it yet.
House Quarters and Senate Semis share eight bills, and this is where technical depth starts to matter. The 32-hour workweek bill reads like a one-line amendment until you trace it into the overtime math, the salaried-exempt carve-out, and the ACA’s 30-hour benefit threshold sitting below the bill’s new 32-hour overtime trigger. The auto-CR bill quietly rewrites how every appropriations fight in Washington runs. Carbon Capture puts $40 billion on the table with verification standards stricter than what the technology or the regulator can actually meet. Surface-level preparation won’t get you through this tier.
House Semis is the values tier — psychiatric facilities, legacy admissions, red flag laws, national service, foreign aid conditionality. It’s tempting to argue these on values alone, but that’s a mistake. The bills that look purely ideological are usually hiding a hard constitutional question, and finding it is what separates a memorable speech from a forgettable one. The psychiatric facilities bill runs into Olmstead v. L.C.; national service runs into the Thirteenth Amendment and Welsh v. United States; legacy admissions turns on the post-SFFA enrollment data. Bring the doctrine and you’ll stand out.
Finals — five bills each chamber — are the prestige slots, and the judges have heard every cliché twice. They reward depth and original sourcing. The Electoral College resolution turns on ratification math, not on whether direct election is a good idea. The DRC minerals bill turns on whether you’ve read the academic argument over Dodd-Frank Section 1502. The prediction markets bill turns on whether you know the CFTC has been acting on this almost monthly since January 2026. Without that level of preparation, you’ll be working from outdated information.
The Tilt
This is unpopular to say, but it matters: the 2026 docket leans progressive. Most of the bills sit on one side — demilitarizing the police, banning PACs, abolishing the Electoral College, ending petroleum subsidies, conditioning foreign aid, banning legacy admissions, the HOME Act, master leasing for the homeless, cutting the workweek, later school start times, federal red flag laws, stopping UAE arms sales, and banning generative AI in K-12.
There are bills cutting the other way — homeschooling is libertarian poison, national service has obvious left and right-wing critics, psychiatric reinstatement is a law-and-order pitch, and the ghost gun ban cuts the familiar direction — but the center of gravity is clear.
Here’s what that means for you. Chambers will flood the side advocating for these bills and starve the opposition. The competitor who delivers a substantive, non-ideological case against a bill — one that doesn’t sound like talk radio or like a reflex contrarian — stands out. Prepare your opposition harder than your advocacy, and hardest on the bills whose case for passage looks airtight on a first read, because those are exactly the ones the chamber will hand you to oppose after they’ve already heard four people say yes.
The bills where a prepared opposition overperforms most, and the move that does it:
First, the psychiatric facilities bill. Run Olmstead v. L.C. (1999), Robinson v. California (1962), and the Willowbrook record together — the integration mandate, the status-crime bar, and the history of institutional abuse. Most of the chamber will be speaking in vague law-and-order or civil-liberties terms, so naming three cases and a consent decree marks you as the most prepared person in the room.
Second, the AI Accountability Act. The penalty is 5% of annual revenue per year of non-compliance. Against a company with hundreds of billions in revenue, that’s a multi-billion-dollar penalty for a reporting failure, which is the clearest Excessive Fines case in the docket under Timbs v. Indiana (2019). Walk through the arithmetic in cross-examination and let it stand on its own.
Third, the foreign aid conditionality bill. The strongest version names Egypt and Saudi Arabia and runs the strategic-partner problem: cutting their aid doesn’t improve their human rights, it opens the door to Chinese and Russian influence, which is worse. CRS notes that without U.S. aid Egypt leans on Gulf monarchies, Europe, Turkey, and China, who in return expect Cairo to side with their foreign-policy priorities — the vacuum fills rather than staying empty. Most advocates won’t engage this, because it requires admitting the U.S. partners with authoritarians deliberately.
Fourth, the Federal Red Flag bill. The public database of ERPO recipients is the strongest single point, and it works as a civil-liberties argument rather than a gun-rights one — there’s no removal mechanism after the order expires. Framed that way, closer to the ACLU’s position than the NRA’s, it reaches judges who would tune out a Second Amendment speech.
Fifth, the K-12 generative AI ban. The bill names NIST as the enforcement agency, and NIST is a non-regulatory agency within the Commerce Department — it sets standards and has no inspectors and no penalty authority. Ask in cross-examination how NIST enforces anything. There’s more on this below; it may be the single most exploitable provision in the docket.
Sixth, the UAE arms sales bill. Here the Abraham Accords and the I2U2 framework are the counter. Don’t argue the UAE isn’t arming the RSF — the State Department determined the RSF committed genocide in January 2025, alongside sanctions on seven RSF-owned companies based in the UAE, so the evidence cuts against you. Argue instead that the bill’s structural cost to a strategic partnership exceeds its operational benefit in Sudan.
The Five-Point Read
There are five things to check on every bill. None of this is original — it’s the standard coach’s read — but most of your chamber won’t do all five.
First, the funding. Where does the money come from, is it specified, is it realistic, and is it a poison pill? This docket funds several programs out of the Department of Defense budget for things that have nothing to do with defense, including rural healthcare loan forgiveness and mandatory national service. The chamber will treat “take it from defense” as a serious fiscal answer, and it isn’t, because DoD is made up of separately appropriated accounts and “the defense budget” isn’t a fund you can draw from. There are worse offenders. The HOME Act funds millions of legalizations on “application fees, employer fines, and DHS reallocation,” which doesn’t come close to the tens of billions CBO scored for the comparable 2013 Gang of Eight bill. The HEALTH Act sets a $50 billion annual floor with Treasury cleared to spend more, which makes it an open-ended entitlement.
Second, the effective date. Several bills take effect before the tournament — the DRC minerals bill and the foreign aid conditionality bill both predate Richmond. By the time you speak, the bill is supposed to already be law. That hands you a clean procedural critique: either the timeline is implementation-infeasible, or the bill is effectively retroactive, or both. And watch the bills overtaken by events — the USMCA’s mandatory joint review begins July 1, 2026, about two weeks after the tournament ends, which reframes the Resolution to Go South entirely.
Third, the enforcement agency. Can the named agency actually do what the bill assigns it? The K-12 AI ban assigns enforcement to NIST, a non-regulatory standards body inside the Commerce Department with no inspectors, no civil penalty authority, and no presence in a single school — the most exploitable line in the docket, and one most of the chamber will read right past. The same problem recurs elsewhere: the Genome Testing Act names NIH as primary enforcement, but NIH is a research-funding agency, not an enforcement body; and the corporate single-family home ban would require the FTC to force divestiture of lawfully owned homes, whereas the FTC’s actual housing work has been a 6(b) market study of large investors and a consumer-protection case against a single-family landlord, not seizure of property. The question to ask is whether the agency has both the statutory authority and the operational capacity to do what the words command.
Fourth, the definitions. This is where the drafting weaknesses live, and they’re all checkable against the official docket text. The corporate SFH ban defines “institutional investor” at 50-plus properties, which sweeps in mid-size family landlords who aren’t the BlackRock buyers the bill claims to target. The Homes First Act defines “underutilized” at 20% occupancy for 12 months — an unusually strict line, stricter than the industry’s own functional-vacancy range, that captures less inventory than the program needs. The deep-sea mining ban defines “deep sea” at 10 meters, which on its face captures clam dredging and recreational diving. The psychiatric facilities bill folds substance use disorder into “severe mental illness,” a major expansion past anything involuntary commitment has historically reached. The Genome Testing Act bans germline modification broadly enough to capture mitochondrial replacement therapy — a treatment licensed in the UK that, as of July 2025, had produced eight babies showing no signs of inherited mitochondrial disease. The chamber will tend to trust the definitions; it’s worth reading them closely instead.
Fifth, the constitutional posture. This is the most under-used resource in the docket. Roughly half these bills have a serious constitutional argument running against them, and most competitors won’t make it because they’re locked onto policy. Running down the list:
The PAC ban tries to legislatively overrule Citizens United (2010) — and Congress can’t statutorily reverse a First Amendment holding. The Child Education Standardization Act bans homeschooling and runs straight into Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972). The psychiatric facilities bill ignores Olmstead v. L.C., and its substance-use inclusion runs into Robinson v. California. The corporate SFH ban’s 50%-of-fair-market-value penalty may be excessive under Timbs v. Indiana. The AI Accountability Act‘s 5%-of-revenue penalty is the cleanest Excessive Fines proportionality case here. The medical false advertising bill regulates commercial speech in ways that likely fail Central Hudson‘s “no more extensive than necessary” prong. The auto-CR bill raises an appropriations-clause problem under Article I, Section 9 — which is structured as a limitation requiring affirmative appropriation, not automatic continuation. The school start times bill’s 10% block-grant cut may hit the coercion line from NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) for rural districts where federal funds are a third of revenue. The national service bill runs into the Thirteenth Amendment — no case holds that compulsory civilian service survives — and into Welsh v. United States (1970) on conscientious objection. The Electoral College resolution is a constitutional amendment, and the ratification math works against it. The HOME Act delegates visa-cap authority to DHS with no statutory standard, a major-questions problem after West Virginia v. EPA (2022).
Constitutional arguments work because you don’t have to disagree with the policy goal. You only have to show the bill can’t do what it claims to do.
What the Chamber Will Get Wrong
A few things to flag in advance.
The Resolution to Go South is a resolution — non-binding. Half the chamber will debate it like a bill and argue implementation that isn’t there. Notice that, then turn it: treat it as a vote of conscience if you’re advocating, or argue that Congress should spend its time on real legislation if you’re opposing. The timing is the current hook — the USMCA’s mandatory review opens July 1, 2026, right after the tournament, so the resolution lands just as the real trilateral review begins.
The Electoral College resolution is a constitutional amendment — two-thirds of both chambers, then 38 states. The practical-impossibility critique is itself substantive, and most competitors skip it because they’re arguing the merits of direct election. The smaller states benefiting from current apportionment hold collective veto power, and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact — 18 states plus DC, 222 electoral votes committed as of April 2026, after Virginia joined, and 48 short of the 270 needed to take effect — is the operational alternative the amendment route ignores.
The LAWS prohibition bill references the “Department of War,” the current rebrand of DoD authorized by a September 2025 executive order, and then refers to the “Department of Defense” elsewhere — so it uses both names for the same agency. Whatever your position on lethal autonomous weapons, the drafting is marked, and catching it signals you read closely.
The Willow Project termination bill repeats itself — its substantive license-withdrawal language appears in two sections, near-identically, and it references “both agencies” while naming only BLM. And the currency point most of the chamber won’t have: the Ninth Circuit ruled in June 2025 that BLM’s 2023 Willow approval violated NEPA and remanded it, so the bill acts on a project a court already found unlawfully approved.
The K-12 AI ban carries language no federal statute should: a promise of “no constant surveillance” paired with “random checks at schools”. It names NIST as enforcer, and it treats all generative AI as one thing, so translation tools for English Language Learners would be banned alongside essay generators. Several procedural critiques live here; the NIST enforcement gap is the cleanest.
The Genome Testing Act bans germline modification broadly enough to capture mitochondrial replacement therapy, which most of the chamber has never heard of. Explaining it — approved in the UK, produces healthy children, technically germline because mtDNA is heritable — makes the bill’s overbreadth visible in a single cross-examination answer.
The Bills Where the Substance Is Hard
Four bills reward real research and expose surface preparation.
The Carbon Capture program puts $40 billion behind direct air capture, and its own verification standards are the vulnerability. A long-duration storage requirement can’t be independently verified — EPA’s Class VI well program sets a post-injection monitoring baseline on the order of 50 years, not a millennium, and no audit reaches further. The bill also demands net-negative emissions verified by independent audit, which most current DAC facilities can’t show because they burn substantial energy to run. But the policy underneath is genuinely complex — the DOE’s Regional DAC Hubs, the 45Q credit reaffirmed at $85/ton point-source and $180/ton DAC in the July 2025 OBBBA, and the IPCC’s reliance on carbon removal in every 1.5°C pathway. This is a bill where knowing the literature is what separates the strong speeches.
The prediction markets bill is the most current item in the docket, and the evidence moves monthly — as of April 2026, the Third Circuit had held 2-1 that the Commodity Exchange Act preempts state gambling law for CFTC-regulated sports event contracts, the CFTC and DOJ had sued three states over their enforcement actions, and the CFTC’s own rulemaking on event contracts was still open, with state courts splitting the other way. Canned “gambling is bad” or “free markets” arguments will lose to a competitor who knows where the litigation stands this month. Check the current state of the CFTC rulemaking and the latest court rulings the week before you speak; this is the one bill where even last month’s research may already be out of date.
The DRC mineral trade bill lives or dies on Dodd-Frank Section 1502, the conflict-minerals provision in place since 2010. The empirical record is contested and central — the Parker-Vadheim research found 1502 produced a de facto embargo that increased violence in eastern DRC by cutting legitimate mining income, and Brautigam at SAIS has written hard against the framework. This bill copies the 1502 structure onto cobalt and copper without engaging that record. Walk in not knowing 1502 exists and you’ll struggle; walk in with the empirical critique and you’re the best-prepared person on the bill. (Pull Parker-Vadheim and Brautigam directly — these are academic arguments worth citing to the primary source.)
The UAE arms sales bill is the second-most current item. Sudan-related sanctions and arms-embargo measures have been introduced repeatedly in the 119th Congress, Treasury has sanctioned companies tied to the RSF supply chain — including UAE-based entities — and the State Department determined the RSF committed genocide in January 2025. Advocates of the bill have the evidence; the opponents’ best ground is the Abraham Accords and the I2U2 strategic frame. Verify the most recent sanctions and congressional actions before you speak — this file changes.
The Doctrine That Recurs
Build one doctrinal reference for the tournament. These are the cases that show up again and again across the docket. (Verify each URL by opening it — Cornell’s path convention is inconsistent, and a couple of these point to Justia because Cornell hosts them only as PDFs.)
Timbs v. Indiana (2019) — Excessive Fines applies to the states. Live on the corporate SFH ban (50% of fair market value), the AI Accountability Act (5% of revenue), and the Genome Testing Act ($5 million per violation).
West Virginia v. EPA (2022) — major questions doctrine. Live on the AI Accountability Act (DOE consumption limits) and the HOME Act (DHS visa caps).
NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) — coercion. Live on the school start times bill’s 10% block-grant cut. (Cornell hosts this only as a PDF, so the link points to Justia.)
Olmstead v. L.C. (1999) and Robinson v. California (1962) — the psychiatric facilities bill.
Central Hudson (1980) — commercial speech. The medical false advertising bill.
Welsh v. United States (1970) and the Thirteenth Amendment — the national service bill.
Bondi v. VanDerStok (2025, 7-2) — the ghost gun bill is codifying what the Court already upheld, so it’s better positioned legally than the chamber will assume.
Citizens United (2010) — the PAC ban tries to overrule it by statute and can’t.
Pierce (1925) and Yoder (1972) — the homeschooling ban runs into both.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — the legacy bill operates in the wreckage. Post-2023 enrollment data on how Black enrollment shifted at selective schools after the decision is your strongest advocacy card, and it isn’t in anyone’s surface preparation — pull the current Brookings or institutional numbers before you cut it, since these figures get revised year to year.
It’s half a page, and it earns its keep many times over.
Prepping From Here
Three last things.
Prepare clusters, not individual bills. The AI bills cluster together — commercial regulation, the K-12 ban, the AI Accountability Act. The democracy bills cluster — the PAC ban, dark money disclosure, the Electoral College. The healthcare bills cluster — Veterans Community Care, school start times, medical advertising, the HEALTH Act. The criminal justice bills cluster — red flag, demilitarization, mandatory sentencing. The foreign policy bills cluster — LAWS, war powers, foreign aid conditionality, UAE arms. One strong file per cluster lets you speak on four bills off a single research base.
Write your opposition cases before your advocacy cases. Advocating is easy, because the bill hands you the structure; opposing makes you build the counter-frame yourself. The competitor who has a polished case against the bill ready when the chamber has already heard three speeches for it is the one who breaks out.
And read the bills first — the bills, not the analysis. Every drafting weakness is invisible once someone points it out and obvious if you read the bill cold and ask whether the words actually do what the bill says. The deep dives walk every bill with that lens, but the lens has to be yours first.
Two things to know about how the deep dives are built. Each bill now carries a dedicated Logical flaws section, separate from the drafting weaknesses. Drafting weaknesses are about loose or broken text; logical flaws are about the reasoning — where the bill’s mechanism contradicts its own stated purpose, where the means can’t reach the end, or where the enforcement design works against the goal. These arguments are useful because they don’t require you to dispute the policy; they show the bill can’t deliver it on its own terms. Several of them apply to both sides, so read them with care — Willow’s leakage-versus-vested-rights point, the ghost-guns Bruen/VanDerStok problem, and the petroleum production-versus-emissions claim each cut in two directions, and the sections note where.
The other change is the cross-examination. Each bill’s CX is now built for cross-fire — five to ten questions per side, split into the questions advocates put to the opposing case and the questions opponents put to the advocates’. They’re sequenced so the follow-up lands after the likely answer rather than as a list of openers. Go into the questioning block knowing which few you’d actually ask given how the prior speeches went, rather than reading them in order.
Richmond will be a good tournament. The docket is substantive, the bills are current, and the chambers reward the work. Deep dives for subscribers.