Frustrated front-line House Democrats desperately need to pass some part of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) plan to have something to run on in 2022. They’re pushing for BBB to be split up and hold votes on the most popular things as stand-alone provisions—like extending the child tax credit and lowering prescription drug costs. This, they think, will give Democrats the ability to run on the economic help they’ve provided their constituents. They also seem to think Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who has pretty much single-handedly stymied the whole thing, is movable.

Their reasoning is faulty. “What I don’t want to do is have the Democratic caucus just beat their heads against the wall for months. We need a timeline here,” Rep. Susan Wild from Pennsylvania told The Washington Post. “If there is still hope for Manchin to agree, we need to figure out when that’s going to be and what we are doing if he doesn’t meet that deadline because, in the past, he hasn’t. What’s our next plan?” They’ve suggested going to the narrow proposal Manchin offered the White House last month, if he actually did that.

The problem with that is of course Manchin has no problem at all going back on his word. None. For example, this fall Democrats had reached an agreement with him on the child tax credit (CTC). If he would agree to drop his demand for a work requirement, they would shorten the planned extension from three years to just one. That’s according to Senate Democratic aides who were involved in the process, who spoke anonymously with Business Insider.

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That agreement the White House thought it had secured was in the framework it released in late October. As far as anyone knew at that point, both Manchin and Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema were on board. “I still do not understand what happened with this framework,” one of the sources said.

“And it being communicated to pretty much everyone that the reason we were only doing [one-year] CTC was because that was the only way he would agree to do the CTC without work requirements.”

Manchin never publicly said he would go along with this framework, but let the White House and congressional leadership progress as if he was on board, and then blew it all up, very publicly and on Fox News no less, just before Christmas.

Some of these vulnerable House members were among that Sabotage Squad group that was being egged on by Manchin and Sinema last summer to make sure that the hard infrastructure bill was decoupled from the BBB, so that they could pass that “bipartisan” bill full of stuff that would also help Republicans in their own districts while delaying—and whittling away at and ultimately destroying—BBB.

Right now, leadership isn’t convinced breaking it up is the way to go, arguing that there’s no way to achieve the transformative goals of the package piece by piece. That could change, but there are over a hundred progressives in the House—the largest voting bloc in the party—who will need to be convinced. And at this point it looks like anything they want, Manchin will fight just because.

So maybe what should happen now is that leadership sics the panicking group of House moderates on Manchin. Maybe they would have some ability to get through to him, since they helped him out before. But probably not, because if Manchin has proven one thing, it’s that he’s not to be trusted.