On Congressional bills and negotiations

“Asked on Tuesday evening why negotiators appeared to be having such a hard time closing out the deal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has served as a point person for the administration in the talks, responded, ‘Who says we are having a hard time? It’s just a complicated deal. We go through a lot of language.'”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/25/politics/stimulus-senate-action-coronavirus/index.html

Look closely at the quote above. There is an object lesson there for many Facebook posters.

Beginning a couple of days ago, I began to see multiple posts by people on both sides of the political divide bemoaning the supposed fact that the other side was about to ruin the country by trying to pass an evil stimulus package. These posts were apocalyptic posts that foresaw the doom of the USA due to the evil [fill in the name of your most hated party]. Supposedly each post had details of these evil proposals, with each post appearing to dwell more and more on these details.

But, 48 hours later, all is sweetness and light. And, as quoted above, the Treasury Secretary says that they did not have a hard time in the negotiations. So, what happened?

Well, actually, nothing happened. The Senate and the White House, with input from the House, went through a normal negotiation process. As with all negotiations, each side put on the table proposals that were nothing more than gambits that they expected to have to withdraw. It is like the seller who first puts out an overly high price and expects the buyer to respond with a ridiculously low price. That is where the bargaining starts. In the same way, two branches of government and two parties were engaged in some high-level bargaining.

Much of what you saw on the Facebook posts from both sides were the gambits that the other side was willing to discard, and would have been surprised had they been accepted. As with flea-market bargaining, they were only purposeful distractions from the main goal, which was to pass a bill that favored your economic ideology more than it favored the other side’s economic ideology.

I fully expect to hear of one or two more minor scandals before the bill is safely passed. There will be one or two Congresspeople in each party in each House to stand up and offer some vehement objection or other, claiming that the bill will destroy something or other. There may be some very minor final adjustments, then the bill will be passed.

So, what about all those Facebook posts? Well, sigh, you got taken. Sufficient information was released about the gambits of both parties to trigger the partisans from the other party. The strategy was to get partisans from one party to hopefully put sufficient pressure on the Congresspeople from the other party to get them to drop their gambit. The Facebook posts were also a way to measure support for any given gambit, to see how people were responding. In most cases, there was no final commitment to the gambit. It was just a gambit.

There are some exceptions. Democrats were fully serious when they said they would not allow money to be given to companies without oversight. Notice that Republicans ultimately did not object to that. One of their gambits probably was to put out an initial bill in which money was given to companies without oversight. It would force Democrats to waste energy forcing an oversight to which Republicans were most probably not opposed. Do you see how the game works?

So, please do not react to a lot of news stories about this bill or that bill. If it is early in the negotiation process, these stories are probably gambits released through friendly news media as part of the negotiation process. And, yes, there are both Republican and Democratic-leaning mainstream media whose reporters are quite willing to publish a story that they know is probably a gambit. Worse, there are non-mainstream media who are even willing to make up a story for the sake of readership. They not only receive the gambits, but they also elaborate on them. However, that is another subject.

So, be careful when you post about a supposed bill that will destroy the Union or that contains news too dire to be believed. It is probably a gambit, and truly too dire to be believable. Wait to comment until you see both sides saying that they have a bill that upon which they agree. That is when you need to read the bill and see whether you need to comment.