Remember the halcyon days when countries spent time negotiating trade agreements, to their mutual benefit? Remember when disagreements in Congress between the majority and minority were negotiated either in back rooms or conference committees (when the two branches arrived at different bills)? Remember when our country didn’t shut down the federal government when there was a fiscal disagreement? Or when tantrums weren’t displayed across social media against other countries? Oh, if only we could return to those days of glory (and sanity).

Negotiation is a dirty word in this country now. It’s corollary is compromise. Yet compromise is OK if it is between members of your own political party (i.e. the raising of the SALT deduction cap) but not with members of the opposition party. Even if it means your party gets to show it can govern and lead. Even if the thing you are negotiating over is helpful to your core constituency. Not a day goes by that we don’t see an example in Washington, DC of adults looking like immature children stomping their feet in distress.

It starts at the top – President Trump’s behavior provides poor guidance for the rest of his party. As soon as he entered office, he set high tariff rates with 90 countries – friends, allies, enemies, competitors, partners – really didn’t matter. He gave them 90 days to negotiate deals with him. What he really meant was to agree to his terms. The ultimate trade deals were one page memos that the US unilaterally imposed on imports – which, legal or not, were tax duties on American importers (and ultimately the American people). No negotiation. No compromises. Only the imposition of what the Administration thinks of as ‘leverage’.

What has that ‘leverage’ gotten us? China has not purchased any of the current US soybean crop – that’s 51% of the our market destroyed (in addition to hundreds of family farms). Travel to the US from Canadians (our neighbors who took the statements and actions of the President as a personal affront) is down 34% by car and 25% by air. Higher prices on coffee (up 33%), lumber (+16%) – it’s going to cost more to buy that new home, audio equipment (+12.2%), beef (+16%) – there are few bright spots. The Administration’s continued arrogance around China recently brought new rare-earth mineral export restrictions. Instead of the President diving in and communicating with his Chinese counterpart (and showing that self-expressed deal-making expertise), he had a public tizzy fit on social media, cancelling his upcoming conversation with Premier Xi and adding more tariffs (yes, punishing American businesses and consumers with higher taxes) – that’ll show ’em!

The Congress has largely followed the President’s example, as poor as it is. They passed their budget bill (One Big Beautiful Budget Act) on their own, without any consultation with Democrats. They threw in some meat for a couple of their caucus members (SALT caps, a fund to help save rural hospitals that the bill will likely cause to close), but ignored the most immediate threat to working families – the elimination of expanded ACA subsidies. These cuts are expected to increase health insurance premiums by an average of 114% for the 22 million people purchasing through the exchanges. Even people who don’t purchase through the exchanges will see their premiums increase more than they would have otherwise, as insurers baked in higher risk into their rates (averaging 18% rate increases for next year. Who are these folks? Well 5 million of them are small business owners and the self-employed – you know, the little guys the GOP always claims to have their backs.

But instead of negotiating away this self-inflicted wound, the GOP leaders have chosen to fail to negotiate with Senate Democrats and get this changed. This despite polls indicating that they will be blamed for the higher premiums if nothing is changed. People in Texas, a state without expanded Medicaid, will see some of the largest impacts – 1.7 million people could lose their health care coverage, largely in the most rural (and politically red) counties in the state. One GOP Senator’s most recent solution – eliminate the 60 vote rule required to advance a bill to a vote. Not negotiating is non-negotiable.

And the national disgrace continues…