How Compromise Works

Here is a good example of compromise.

Bush wanted to fund the Iraq war in 2007, so the democrats tacked a minimum wage bill onto the Iraq war funding bill.

I’ve heard that this is harder now, that tacking bills onto each other is more difficult, but also that pork is more difficult.

On paper it sounds great, but in practice supposedly it made politics much more difficult.

Go get pizza tonight, go get crap the next time.

So, which of those things have you done to make your displeasure with uncooperative Democrats personally known to them?

He got her name a little wrong–it’s Mitch McCarmen. And it’s totally on-point.

Since you’re having trouble following the analogy, I’ll let this be my last post to you.

Alonso and Bree will never make this relationship work. They should agree to see other people.

Ain’t that the truth. Problem is, their country doesn’t have divorce laws. Also Alonso has the nuclear launch codes.

And as you were told earlier, Mitch McCuckold did the same thing to the Obama administration. Since that party started this stupidity, they have to be the first to cop a plea and end it.

Let’s say I get a new job that is located 30 miles east of where my family currently lives. I want to take my husband and family and move to a new home east of where I now live.
But my husband just got a new job 30 miles west of where we live. He wants to move west.

So we stay where we are and don’t move. When ALL your goals are in diametric opposition to each other’s, the stalemate IS the compromise.

I read the OP. Did you read the history of the United States, January 2017 - January 2019?

That’s exactly what happened in my Texas House district election- our moderate, reasonable, Trump-criticizing Republican incumbent legislator(Jason Villalba) got primaried by a crazy woman who was super-religious, a Trump supporter, Brett Kavanaugh supporter, anti-vaxxer and Tea Partier (Lisa Luby Ryan).

Luckily the district elected a Democrat instead (John Turner) instead of that lunatic by more than 11 percentage points. I think had Villalba not been primaried, it would have been a MUCH closer race.

You can’t negotiate a compromise if one side is determined that the other side doesn’t get any of what is important to him. Trump wants five billion for a wall. The Democrats don’t want a wall.

So they aren’t going to split the difference and give him two and a half billion, or one billion, or anything else. The important thing about the deal is that Trump doesn’t get anything that will go to the wall. They will negotiate on DACA or border security or whatever - but not a wall.

It is reminiscent of the deal with Bush 41 and the Democrats at that time. The important thing, the purpose of the negotiation, was to get Bush to break his promise of “no new taxes”. And Bush was defeated for re-election.

The Dems are trying to do the same here. The important thing is to get Trump to break a campaign promise, and hope they can use it in 2020. Nothing more to it than that.

There is not much room for compromise in that.

Regards,
Shodan

This doesn’t reflect reality as I understand it. In the version of reality that I see, Democrats and Republicans both stated that they wanted to fund the government at roughly the same levels as the previous year. Then, at the last minute, the President decided to stop this (even though he stated he wanted to fund the government) because he wanted wall funding, and the Republicans leading Congress decided to go along with it, and refused to fund the government even though they said they wanted a funded government.

So then the government shut down. There wasn’t much negotiating, because the President and Republicans had already stated they wanted to fund the government. They weren’t offering to give anything in the give and take – since funding the government was a give to both parties. They just wanted to take wall funding, while offering nothing in return, when the other party opposes wall funding.

There have in fact been previous deals offered, agreed to at least partially by “both sides”, which include wall funding in exchange for a Democratic priority like a permanent solution for DACA. But Trump nixed those, and thus there doesn’t seem to be the possibility of any negotiation going forwad.

It seems silly to expect the Democrats to start negotiating when Trump is not offering anything in exchange for wall funding. And even more silly when you look at the polling and see that most Americans are blaming Trump and the Republicans.

That’s the earmarks ban, I believe. Earmarks are where politicians will attach little appropriations to bills in order to pass them. So for example, you may have a relatively large scale Democratic-led anti-poverty bill with a few lines appropriating funds for some sort of Texas panhandle cattle ranching stuff. That’s the earmark- in order to get some votes from the Texas panhandle republicans, they funded a project that positively affects their districts in exchange for votes.

Basically it was one of the primary Congressional political horse-trading mechanisms until the ban.

Now with the ban, there’s no incentive to compromise.

Trump says he wants a wall for the purpose of border security. It just so happens that a wall is a (literally) monumentally stupid and cost-ineffective approach to border security. Trump refuses to recognize that because, as a real-estate grifter and reality-show celebrity with only the most tenuous grasp of the actual facts of governance and public policy, his conception of a worthwhile achievement is a big physical object that he can display his name on.

It is not in any way unreasonable or intransigent for the Democrats to deny funding specifically for this “wall” bullshit, while remaining willing to compromise on more rational and cost-effective border security issues.

Similarly, if two sides were trying to negotiate a plan for addressing childhood autism and one side insisted that some of the money should be spent on measures to reduce or limit routine vaccination programs because “vaccines cause autism” [sic], it would not be unreasonable or intransigent for the other side to reject that nonsense while still being willing to compromise on autism-handling measures that actually make sense.

Democrats undertook to resist the destructive, criminal, destabilizing and/or racist measures that the Trump administration and its Republican lackeys were proposing. The fact that those categories happen to include almost everything in the Trump/Republican agenda is not the fault of the Democrats.

You do know that the Dems already proposed $25 billion for border security, including the wall, in exchange for DACA protections and were told to fuck off by Trump.

So yeah, your post is demonstrably untrue, and if a deal doesn’t get done, he only has himself to blame.

This is what that looks like in reality:

Democrats already know that Trump’s not a reliable negotiator. He wants to act like he’ll agree to a reasonable compromise, but when it comes time to agree, he’s repeatedly backed out. It’s no longer possible to trust him in a compromise.

Post 14 already covered this ground.

Trump’s campaign promise was that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. The Democrats are preventing him from breaking a campaign promise. Nothing more to it than that.

Compromise also looks like this:

Obviously Pelosi thinks the wall is stupid and a waste of money. But she’s willing to compromise on that, willing to do something she thinks is stupid, if it means advancing priorities that she thinks comprise good governance.

We’ll see if McCarmen and Alonso will go along with actual compromise.

There is no incentive for compromise. For the last 20+ years there has been a cycle of power. The governing party is unpopular and loses big allowing the other party to gain the presidency and congress. They then push through whatever piece of their agenda they think is important and popular. This makes them unpopular and they lose the congressional majority at the next election. This leads to six years of gridlock which renders the incumbent’s party unpopular and the cycle repeats itself. Why compromise if you can get what you want just by waiting for your party’s turn to be on top?

This is exacerbated by the partisanship of much of the electorate and the hatred of politics by the rest. Partisans hate the other side more than they want to accomplish legislation so giving the other side something is anathema to them. Independents claim to want compromise but the process of vote trading, insult hurling, and negotiation puts them off and so they vote the incumbent party out.