Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has decided to brush aside the effort by Sen. Joe Manchin to derail the reconciliation package Congress has been focused on for months and keep moving. She told reporters Tuesday that they will try to get the bill to the Rules Committee on Wednesday, to prepare it to go to the floor for a final vote on Thursday. That would put the House on track to potentially pass both the bipartisan hard infrastructure bill that the Senate has already passed (let’s keep calling it BIF), and the large domestic spending bill that comprises President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB). The BBB would still need to pass in the Senate, where it needs every Democratic vote, but is not subject to the filibuster, so Democrats can do it on their own.

The issues that are still outstanding, Pelosi told members in a closed meeting Tuesday, are climate, prescription drugs, and immigration. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus is fine with votes this week on both of the bills. Whether that can actually happen is questionable, because the remaining issues are thorny politically, with Manchin still bigfooting his way around, stomping good ideas down.

Those antics are one of the reasons the House Democrats want to get this done. “I think we need to move. I think every day we delay plays into Joe Manchin’s theatrics,” House Budget Chair John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, told Politico. He said that he told his colleagues the same thing in a Monday night meeting. Manchin will keep up this game of whack-a-mole indefinitely—once Biden and Democratic leadership answer one of his demands, he’ll just come up with another.

Manchin’s been doing this for months, with some help from colleague Kyrsten Sinema. The Arizona Democrat has been less obstructive in recent days, so for now she seems to be less of a thorn for Democrats, except for the pesky issue of reversing the Trump tax giveaway to the rich in order to fund good stuff for everyone else. “There is no one except Kyrsten Sinema who thinks substantively we shouldn’t reverse the Trump tax cuts and who doesn’t think politically it wouldn’t be a much better thing for us to do than what we are doing,” a Democratic senator told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “And that to me is the biggest disappointment of this whole thing.”

That aside, the three big issues yet to be resolved each present different complications, some that could be resolved straightforwardly, like immigration. What everyone is waiting on is the results of the third attempt by Senate Democrats to get immigration reform cleared for the package, which could happen Tuesday. Given the big news on that Tuesday, that Elizabeth MacDonough was at Immigration and Naturalization Service prosecutor working to deport people before she joined the parliamentarian’s office, Democrats have every reason to challenge an adverse ruling from her. By all rights, she should recuse herself from this one, given her professional background. Her not doing so gives Democrats all the justification they need to ignore her advice.

On the prescription drug piece, there’s a glimmer of an agreement giving Medicare the ability to negotiate on a narrow set of drugs, including insulin. It would cap drug price hikes to the rate of inflation, and include a $2,000 annual cap on what Medicare enrollees have to spend out of pocket. That’s according to Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden. Capping out-of-pocket prescription drug spending for people with the highest expenses and enacting it immediately is a good idea. It wouldn’t save the government nearly as much money as full drug price negotiation, but it would save a lot of seniors a lot of money. There is no limit now to what Medicare Part D enrollees pay out on drugs.

Importantly, Sen. Bob Menendez, a big PhRMA booster in the Senate and a stalwart obstacle to drug price reforms, is “on board” with this proposal. The New Jersey Democrat told Politico “I’ve been talking to Chairman Wyden quite a bit and I think we’re on a pathway to have negotiations and a series of other things.” Menendez justifies his resistance to reforms by saying  “In a state that has 300,000 jobs in the pharmaceutical industry … they’re not supportive of price negotiations but it will have price negotiation and we will get a big chunk of money out of them.” There are probably more seniors trying to decide between buying their prescription or paying their heating bill in New Jersey than there are pharmaceutical jobs, but at least there could be partial drug price negotiations going out of this.

On the last big issue, climate, negotiators are working on how to cut methane emissions to help meet Biden’s goal, reiterated at the Glasgow climate summit, of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 50% of 2005 levels by the year 2030. Lawmakers are replacing the word “fee” with the word “penalty” for oil and gas companies that have to pay up for the methane that escapes from their operations. The penalty in the new version of the provision would start a $900 per ton starting in 2023, down from $1,500. The penalty would increase to $1,200 per ton in 2024 and $1,500 in 2025 and beyond. Delaware Sen. Tom Carper has been working on Manchin with this one. Because, of course, it’s Manchin who’s the problem. Manchin hasn’t commented on the proposal.

At the same time, the Biden administration has released a broad new set of regulations Tuesday to cut those methane emissions. The proposed rules “could establish standards for old wells, impose more frequent and stringent leak monitoring, and require the capture of natural gas found alongside oil that is often released into the atmosphere.” The industry is opposed to the proposed legislation and thus far non-committal on Biden’s proposed rules.

Manchin could tank the whole thing either on the basis of the climate provisions, or immigration, or, well, anything. He could justify rejecting the whole thing if the majority decides to include immigration, even though he’s offered no objections to adding it to the package. He’d hinge his objection on the procedure rather than the substance. Some of his colleagues believe he’s absolutely fine with nothing passing at all. An anonymous senator unloaded about that to Brownstein.

But Manchin, the senator added, feels that he’s compromised plenty already because “he’d say ‘I’m at zero’“—meaning he would be content passing no reconciliation bill at all. “I believe him if he says, … ‘I’d rather go home to West Virginia and say I’m not passing anything,’“ the senator added. In private or public, when it comes to the reconciliation bill, Manchin “never says anything positive about it. He doesn’t like it … but apparently he’s decided he doesn’t want to destroy the Biden presidency, which I’m grateful for.”

That’s the big question. Will he be comfortable tanking Biden’s agenda and potentially his presidency. Some senators don’t think so. “Manchin is not going to be the guy who pulls the foundation out of the Biden first-year track record,” Virginia’s Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine told Politico. “I don’t think he’ll surprise me on this.”

That could be what Democrats are betting on now in deciding to just push the bill through and put Manchin and Biden both to the test. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Senate Budget Chair—is on board—with just getting it done. “[T]his process cannot go on week after week, month after month,” he told reporters Tuesday. “It’s finally got to come to an end. And I will do everything I can to see that we get a vote on the floor of the Senate as soon as possible. Hopefully next week.” He added “This thing has dragged on for long enough. It’s got to get to the floor and if people want to vote against it, they have the right.”

Meanwhile, Manchin is insisting he needs more time, while also insisting that he’s working in good faith - on all sorts of good things. “My goodness, we’re agreeing on childcare, we’re agreeing on pre-K, we’re agreeing on homecare,” he told reporters. “And we’re working on climate very progressive, I think in a good way and we’ll get something done I believe.”

Just . . . someday. Maybe.