The proposals are more a trial balloon than anything else.
We send up trial balloons all the time, feeling each other out on a justice's position.
Seems to me you've been floating trial balloons for quite a while.
A trial balloon is information sent out to the media in order to observe the reaction of an audience.
"Your father has floated a trial balloon," he said at last.
Then he called the current British compromise efforts a "trial balloon."
There is no way to distinguish a regular test question from a trial balloon.
But this was one trial balloon that, by all appearances, never quite left the ground.
To many, this game is a trial balloon to that end.
It was a trial balloon the two of them had worked out, to see how they'd get along.
