The Senate finally got around to consideration of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, on Monday afternoon and approved a couple of uncontroversial amendments in Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s effort to move things along. “Let’s start voting on amendments,” Schumer said in opening Monday’s session. “The longer it takes to finish the bill, the longer we will be here.” That’s an implied threat to August recess, now officially scheduled to start on Aug. 9—a goal that is clearly not going to be reached.

Potentially the most complicating issue is Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s COVID-19 infection, diagnosed Monday. Graham, who is one of the 22 original group of bipartisan senators endorsing the bill, is now in a 10-day quarantine. The big question is whether he infected any of the other senators he was in contact with over the weekend at a gathering on Sen. Joe Manchin’s houseboat. That would be “Democrats Mark Kelly of Arizona, Chris Coons of Delaware, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maria Cantwell of Washington, and Republican John Thune of South Dakota.” The party, according to Manchin, was “all outdoors,” but since everyone was vaccinated, it was also presumably a maskless party. There most certainly could be further infections either within that group, or in other senators Graham came into contact with after being infected.

Manchin might have been having the party to celebrate the $1 billion grant he slipped into the bill for the Appalachian Regional Commission, a 13-state and federal economic development partnership that coincidentally is run by Manchin’s wife, Gayle Conelly Manchin, so she’ll be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. Manchin might be feeling the need to ensure he can continue to live in the manner to which he’s become accustomed. The returns on his investment in Enersystems, “one of the most polluting coal power plants in West Virginia” according to Vice, might start to dip below the nearly $500,000 he made last year, drawing his $174,000 salary as a senator. He’s pretty much in the catbird seat here, being chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee as well as one of two deciding votes for the Democratic majority. Nothing happens without his and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s consent.

That’s why there’s a bipartisan bill being considered on the floor at this moment, a bill that prioritizes the status quo of road-building and fossil fuel dependency over the essential investment in always cash-starved transit agencies. Roads are getting $110 billion and public transit $39 billion. That’s more than has ever been dedicated to transit, but that’s essentially maintenance levels of funding, not growth.

That’s got House Democrats—who have already completed a transportation and water funding bill—frustrated and disappointed, since their work has been shunted aside, but mostly because it doesn’t answer the demand of climate change. “From what I can tell, this is a largely status quo and highway-centric bill,” Oregon Democrat and House Transportation Chair Peter DeFazio told Politico. “Ultimately, we need a bill that goes bigger, bolder, and takes advantage of this once-in-a-generation opportunity to catapult our infrastructure into the modern era and beyond.” This bill does not do that.

It’s unclear whether the companion budget resolution and reconciliation bill Schumer and Budget Chair Bernie Sanders are constructing will be able to correct any of the failures of this bill. Unfortunately, it likely won’t include any of the hard infrastructure funding that should be enhanced. The likeliest way for adequate funding to meet those needs would come from the failure of the bipartisan bill—and that could still happen—and the inclusion of the House bill into the reconciliation package. It could happen because there’s still no guarantee that there will be 10 Republican votes for the bipartisan bill.

McConnell and team are trying their best to slow-walk the process. On Monday, McConnell said the bills is a “good and important jumping off point” for infrastructure, but just that: a beginning. He wants a “robust” amendment process, which means endless Republican amendments not constrained by “any artificial timetable.” He weaponized the process itself—President Biden’s desire for this bipartisan effort to succeed—by saying, “Infrastructure is exactly the kind of subject that Congress should be able to address across the aisle.” When McConnell is talking about the bipartisanship ship, he means Democratic capitulation.

He’s got back up among his Republicans. “We shouldn’t sacrifice adequate time on this bill merely because the Democratic leader would like to spend next week jamming a 100% partisan piece of legislation through the United States Senate,” Thune said on Monday. (That’s the other Republican besides Graham who was hanging out with Manchin and team on the boat this weekend.) Schumer wants the bipartisan bill dealt with this week so that the Senate can move quickly to the larger, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. He does have tepid support in that from Manchin, who said, “It would be nice to do that.”

Manchin also indicated that he would vote to move the budget resolution forward as soon as next week. “I told them I would do that and we would go from there,” he said Tuesday. That would mean voting to move forward on the budget resolution, the mechanism to allow for the reconciliation bill, and then recessing and resuming that work in September when Congress also has to pass a government funding bill to avert a shutdown at the beginning of October—the new fiscal year—and also has to either suspend or increase the debt ceiling.

In the meantime, Senate Democrats are trying to figure out where the $3.5 trillion for the reconciliation bill—all that critical economic recovery stuff to actually help people—will come from. “We’re gonna pay for $3.5 trillion,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee, told Politico. “We expect to be working all through the summer.”

The Iraq War, by the way, has cost the nation nearly $2 trillion. Congress didn’t insist that the war had be paid for to be waged. If the tax cuts in the GOP Tax Scam of 2017 are not repealed or allowed to expire, it could cost the nation $2.3 trillion over the next 10 years. That passed in a reconciliation bill with only Republican votes.