[Scarblac]

But the flip side is surely that the chance that the whole deal is overthrown by the time legislators finally get to see it becomes a lot bigger.

I think they will not be done this way going forward, because these deals took ten years of negotations, and now they fail. It doesn't work anymore.

[evgen]

There is always the possibility of a deal not getting approved, but no trade deal would ever be negotiated in public. The problem with such public negotiation is that instead of a single deal where a country can decide to sacrifice industry X in favor of industry Y you get astroturfing and publicity campaigns from both industry X and industry Y seeking to gain favor in the negotiations. A pre-negotiated package may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but the alternatives are non-starters; no one is going to bother to negotiate a deal with another country that tries this sort of public horse-trading so asking for the deal to be done in public is no different than simply asking for no deal in the first place.