We’ve all heard the phrase “What goes around comes around.” If you treat someone badly, the thought is, they will turn and – eventually – treat you badly too. Crucially, this presumes that you will have some contact and relationship with them in the future.
This notion lies at the heart of the current negotiation impasse between President Trump and the Senate Republicans over the possible elimination in the U.S. Senate of the filibuster – a long-standing powerful precedent that requires 60 Senate votes to pass almost all legislation.
President Trump wants it eliminated, which the Senate Republicans could do without any Democratic support. This would enable Trump and the Republicans alone to end the shutdown. But a critical number of Senate Republicans plus all the Democrats want it kept.
What is going on negotiation-wise?
The heart of this conflict involves two competing negotiation concepts: the power of precedent and the power of future relationships.
The power of precedent refers to the notion that you should accept and do X now – it is “fair” for you to do this – because you have accepted X and done it in the past. And the more you have accepted and done X in the past, the more powerful it is from a negotiation perspective. (This is just one application of my Third Golden Rule of Negotiation: Employ “Fair” Objective Criteria).
Since the filibuster goes back to the country’s founding (although the formal rule wasn’t enacted until 1837), this particular precedent is quite powerful.
But the filibuster, negotiation-wise, is also just a norm or benchmark. And President Trump has not been shy, to say the least, about busting norms.
So why won’t the Senate Republicans acquiesce and nuke the filibuster norm too? They have the raw power to do so (it only requires 51 Senate Republicans). And it would not only end the shutdown, but it would also empower them to pass a ton of other Republican-supported legislation without any Democratic votes.
Because of the power of future relationships. They are concerned that – if they eliminate the filibuster – the inevitable Democratic majority in the future (with whom many of them will likely be serving) will reverse everything they did now and more. That ongoing cycle, they believe, would be disastrous for the country.
But doesn’t President Trump care about that, too? No, according to his social media posts and multiple reports. In fact, he is now even threatening to create, according to one of his advisors, a “living hell” for Republican Senators who support the filibuster. And therein lies the impasse.
Bottom line: Senate Republicans worry more than President Trump about future relationships and “what goes around comes around” – at least for now.
Latz’s Lesson: Evaluate the power of precedent AND the power of relationships in your negotiations. Both are impacting millions of lives in today’s shutdown.
* Marty Latz is the founder of Latz Negotiation, a national negotiation training and consulting company that helps individuals and organizations achieve better results with best practices based on the experts’ research. He can be reached at 480.951.3222 or Marty@LatzNegotiation.com.