The week started with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., promising a vote on a bipartisan infrastructure package. However, she also said she would not bring a bill to the floor for a vote if it wasn’t guaranteed to pass. And that’s what happened Thursday night when she pulled the floor vote on H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, from the House schedule.

Many agricultural groups support the infrastructure bill and its provisions to improve the nation’s ports, inland waterways, roads, bridges and rail and rural broadband. A strong transportation and infrastructure system is crucial to allowing farmers to transport their crop and remain competitive in the global market.

But a successful bipartisan vote in the Senate on the infrastructure package continues to be held hostage in the House as the Sept. 27 promise for a vote is come and gone.

For weeks, I’ve been writing about the push and pull between the over $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill brokered between the White House and senators on both sides of the aisle and the House Democrats for a $3.5 trillion reconciliation package they now have coined the “Build Back Better” Act. And this tug-of-way does not appear to be over yet.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has promised that more than half the 95 members of the group will vote against the infrastructure bill if it comes up before the Build Back Better bill. On the other side, House Republicans have been reluctant to reveal their support if indeed the passage of one is tied to the other.

As House Democrats say one can’t be advanced without the other, it appears the compromise needed to obtain the crucial Senate Democrat votes of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., may never come.

All eyes are on “President” Manchin as he wields the power to prevent passage in the Senate of whatever the House may send over if the price tag is too high. This week he again confirmed his dollar number he’d be willing to support is $1.5 trillion; anything higher and he couldn’t offer his support.

"I've never been a liberal in any way, shape or form," Manchin told a group of reporters Thursday. "I'm willing to come from zero to 1.5 (trillion)."

Interestingly, this number from Manchin is not new. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., dated July 28 the day after the bipartisan infrastructure agreement was announced, Manchin made clear his topline dollar was $1.5 trillion.

In Manchin’s letter to Schumer obtained by Politico, the two signed an agreement that agreed for a topline of $1.5 trillion, with debate on the reconciliation bill not occurring earlier than Oct. 1. It also required funds in the legislation not to be disbursed until all funding from previous COVID legislation and the American Rescue Plan had been spent.

Pelosi in her weekly press conference said that as of a week and a half ago, it was “all systems go” to formulate the legislative proposal around a topline number of $3.5 trillion with discussions with the president and Schumer. But then Pelosi says based on how she implied a “new” topline from Manchin, “we're having to compress a lot of our discussion here.”

President Biden has spent considerable time this week with Manchin and Sinema, as well as other Congressional leaders to try to find a compromise to get the Democrat Party’s priorities across the finish line.

In a statement from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki Thursday night, she notes, “A great deal of progress has been made this week, and we are closer to an agreement than ever. But we are not there yet, and so, we will need some additional time to finish the work.”

Psaki adds, while Democrats do have some differences, they share “common goals of creating good union jobs, building a clean energy future, cutting taxes for working families and small businesses, helping to give those families breathing room on basic expenses—and doing it without adding to the deficit, by making those at the top pay their fair share.”

Pelosi is not raising the white flag yet. She told reporters: “Remove all doubt in anyone's mind that we will not have a reconciliation. We will have a reconciliation bill. That is for sure.”

“It's impossible, though, to persuade people to vote for the BIF [bipartisan infrastructure] without the reassurances that the reconciliation bill will occur, and it will,” she claims.