I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, October 1st.

So when we last left the high-stakes soap opera of the Democrats in Congress after yesterday's show, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi

was aiming for a grand bargain between centrists and progressives by last night to approve both

the bipartisan infrastructure bill for roads and rails and broadband and the human infrastructure

bill to create new child care and elder care and family leave rights,

plus climate change prevention measures. The agreement didn't come. Here's Central Senator

Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

We need a little bit more time. We're getting that time in order to do it. We're going to come

to an agreement. I'm trying to make sure they understand. I'm at 1.5 trillion. I think 1.5 trillion

does exactly the necessary things we need to do to take care of our children and take care of our

people at end of life, our seniors, and we're working hard on that. Now, you'll notice he said

$1.5 trillion in that clip, way less than the $3.5 trillion for human infrastructure that the president's plan

includes. Manson seemed to say he might be willing to vote for more of the president's plan later,

but not right now.

I'm willing to sit down and work through that $1.5 to get our bar priorities, and they can come

back and do later, and they can run on the rest of it later. I think there's many ways to get to where they want to, just not in

everything at one time. But that position later meant no deal with House Democrats like

Pramila Gaiapal of Washington State, you know, she's chair of the Progressive Caucus, who

reminds us

Manchin is in a very small minority of their party.

Look, we are in the same place we've always been. We put out an offer for $3.5 trillion,

and it has all of our legislative language, and in fact, 96% of Democrats in the House and

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