Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer informed Senate Democrats Monday that it’s full steam ahead on passing Build Back Better in the next two weeks. ”[O]ur goal in the Senate is to pass the legislation before Christmas and get it to the president’s desk,” he wrote, then added the list of “other priorities we plan to address before the end of the year as well, including voting rights, debt limit” and the defense spending bill. Oh, and nominations.

To get that done, he told his colleagues, committees are now in the process of making the technical changes needed in the House-passed version of the bill to make sure it conforms with the Senate’s special budget reconciliation rules. Eight out of 12 committees have finalized their work on the bill and submitted it to the parliamentarian, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and the Senate Republicans, Schumer said, and the “committees with the two largest pieces of the bill—Finance and [Health, Education, Labor and Pensions]—are set to have their final Democratic-only briefings on Monday and Tuesday with the formal bipartisan Byrd Bath meetings to follow.” Schumer told senators that they will finalize all committee work this week and next and that there will be “ample time to review the text and CBO scores.” What he’s not saying out loud is that Christmas recess won’t be starting next Monday, as previously scheduled.

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“I will continue to remind you,” he wrote, “that there are more long days and nights, and potentially weekends, that the Senate will be in session this month.” That’s a given even if the only things Schumer was intent on completing were the debt ceiling and the defense spending bill—both must-pass bills. As determined as Schumer is to get this all that stuff done, Republicans are determined to thwart him. They ate up all of last week with Florida Republican Marco Rubio’s defense bill fight. They are going to eat up this week with the debt ceiling fight, or as much of it as they can.

Because they don’t want the Build Back Better bill, with all of the very popular things it contains, to pass. They will eat up as much time as they possibly can to push it into next year or beyond if possible. They’ll potentially have help from Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who have both said that they don’t think it can pass this year and that they are guaranteed votes on it (some self-fulfilling prophesy there).

There are ongoing issues with Manchin on the whole bill, but particularly climate provisions. The bill as passed by the House includes a watered down compromise on regulating methane with fines. Manchin is still not on board, apparently, although not entirely coherently. “We have methane, and we have regulations. And I’ve been talking to [EPA Administrator] Michael Regan on the regulations that they’re trying to come to fruition and, you know, are you looking for money? Or are you looking at fixing things? So I think that’s what it’s about.”

Manchin is also fighting his colleagues who want to include a new tax credit of up to $4,500 for the purchase of union-made U.S. electric vehicles. Manchin wants to drop the “union-made” provision. Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow said the point of the provision, besides encouraging electric vehicle purchases and strengthening domestic manufacturing of them, is to avoid rewarding foreign companies who “fight collective bargaining” in the U.S. but have union labor in their home country plants. “I want to make sure that we are leveling the playing field and that the companies that pay high wages for Americans get supported, and so we’ll see what that looks like,” Stabenow said last week.

There’s also some danger that if the climate provisions get too compromised in the Senate, the House could balk. They’ll have to pass the Senate’s version of the bill once it’s done, after already having to swallow a lot of compromises to get it out of the House. “All of this stuff is basically the crumbs that we are left with because [the American Petroleum Institute] has already won a lot of these battles,” Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and senior member of the Natural Resources Committee, complained last week. “The idea of making a whole bunch of more additional concessions to the fossil fuel industry, when the entire package, frankly, already has their fingerprints all over it in some huge ways, would be totally unacceptable to me.”

Those fights are taking place behind the scenes while President Joe Biden is stumping for the bill, focusing Monday on the prescription drug provisions and in the White House’s words, the “historic action to lower the prices of drugs and hold drug companies accountable while deterring future price increases,” adding Americans pay “often two to three times as much” for prescription drugs “as citizens in other developed countries.” Biden is touting the $35 a month cap the bill would place on insulin costs for people with Medicare and private insurance, as well as the drug price negotiation it would allow Medicare on certain high-cost medications.

There’s another Medicare change included: adding hearing benefits. Manchin is reportedly also opposed to that. And to the four weeks of paid family and medical leave in the bill, negotiated down from the original 12 weeks by the House in hopes of appeasing him and getting him on board. He also seems to have problems with the tax provisions in the bill. Once again, it’s a game whack-a-mole with him. That in turn feeds the Republican effort to drag everything out as long as possible, knowing that he’ll just keep coming up with things to oppose given enough time.

There’s such critical stuff in this bill: another year’s worth of expanded monthly Child Tax Credit payments of as much as $300 per child; pre-K for 3- and 4-year-old children, though Republican states are already plotting how to sabotage that; a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for Medicare enrollees at $2,000 a year, with a smoothing proposal that will allow seniors to pay a monthly installment to cover those costs; a means for the 2 million people left in the Medicaid gap in states that refused expansion under the Affordable Care Act to get free or extremely low-cost Obamacare coverage; a permanently funded Children’s Health Insurance Program, requiring states to keep children in the program for a full 12 months regardless of fluctuations in household income; expanding home- and community-based care for disabled and elderly people; tax credits for clean energy production and the manufacture of clean energy technology components; and increased tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and clean technology like solar panels, as well as their manufacture.

There’s also immigration, and another watered down provision that isn’t a path to citizenship for Dreamers and migrant workers but would give them a temporary reprieve in a decade of protection under a sort of parole. That’s being negotiated with the Senate parliamentarian along with everything else. Democrats have been chipping away at these protections to answer the parliamentarian’s concerns, even though her advice on what’s allowable in the bill is just that: advice. It’s not law. Democrats could decide to disregard her ruling. That’s what McConnell and team would do.

Even as compromised as the bill was getting out of the House, it still represents the largest investment in American families and climate in decades. The only path Schumer has now is to keep trying to steamroll his Democrats—as a budget reconciliation, the bill can pass with just Democratic votes—and use the momentum to force Manchin and Sinema to get on board. The longer they’re allowed to dither, the weaker the bill becomes.