We are in the midst of a bit of Washington Kabuki theater, which is underway with a very specific audience in mind: Senator Joe Manchin. The entire exercise is designed to prove to him that Republicans are fundamentally incapable of compromise and are not negotiating in good faith with President Joe Biden and the Democrats on anything, including things that used to be fairly universally-supported, such as infrastructure. So I do hope Senator Manchin is paying attention.

Joe Biden probably sincerely does want to work with Republicans, because he knows that picking up a handful of Republican votes in Congress would insulate him from all the cries of "partisan legislation" from the right. He also is old enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans weren't split on purely ideological lines, when conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans still existed in both the Senate and the House. So it's kind of nostalgic for him to even try to get bipartisan support. But Biden also remembers the endless stalling Republicans did under Barack Obama, and how they wound up with precisely zero GOP votes at the end of the process. So he's determined not to fall into that trap again.

He will accomplish this with deadlines. He has set Memorial Day as the deadline for his American Jobs Plan, and if he determines there has been no significant progress on a compromise by then, then Biden will push Chuck Schumer to just lump the whole thing with his American Families Plan and pass it with only Democratic votes (using budget reconciliation). The question of when we get to this point, though, has always been whether Manchin will go along with it or not.

Manchin did, after all, vote for Biden's first big legislative success, the American Rescue Plan, but only after demanding last-minute tweaks (just to remind everyone that he has the final voice on whether Biden can get anything done or not). So he may well fall into line with the next two big bills Biden has proposed. But only -- only -- after he has been satisfied that Biden truly tried to get bipartisan support but failed in the face of Republican bad-faith negotiating and continued universal GOP obstructionism.

Which is why this Kabuki play has even been staged, really. So, like I said, I hope Manchin is playing close attention and gives the production a good review at the end of it.

Yesterday, Biden met with all four congressional leaders: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. This was the first such official meeting between Biden and all four top congressional leaders. McConnell, true to form, drew a line in the sand over Biden's legislative plans: the 2017 Trump tax cut was an inviolable red line and any attempt to raise the corporate tax rates or raise any taxes on wealthy individuals would not get a single Republican vote. McConnell seems to think that raising the gas tax is somehow an easier political sell to the public, which is just downright bizarre (I cannot remember the last time a Republican proposed or even expressed support for hiking the gas tax). If I were Joe Biden, I would have immediately demanded a list of the 10 Republican senators who were on board with hiking gas taxes and would vote to do so, because to me this is an absolutely unbelievable concept. It was only a couple weeks ago that Republicans were loudly promising to "stop the Democrats from raising the gas tax," in fact.

Biden's red line is to not accept any taxes for people making less than $400,000 a year, which definitely includes a gas tax hike (call it a "user fee" all you want, it's still a tax hike on ordinary Americans). The White House has said this is completely off the table, for Biden.

Today, Biden met with key Senate Republicans for another session of wheeling and dealing. But I seriously doubt much is going to happen as a result of this meeting. One of the leading Republicans stated before the meeting took place that she thought that "how to pay for it" wasn't even going to be discussed in the meeting, since the two sides are not just extremely far apart but their solutions are kind of mutually exclusive -- both ideas are behind the red lines the other side has drawn, in other words. That doesn't leave a whole lot of room for movement either way.

Putting off such a key discussion also seems to be another case of Republicans trying their patented "big stall" tactic. "Oh, sure, we can talk about that later -- after we spend lots and lots of time haggling over the final cost of the entire bill," essentially means: "We are never going to talk in any meaningful way about how to pay for it and will keep stringing you along for as many months as we think we can get away with."

Biden has set his deadline, though, at Memorial Day (which falls at the very end of this month). This leaves two-and-a-half weeks more for the Kabuki show to play out. Memorial Day is when Biden will assumably call Manchin down to the White House for a chat. Biden will be able to point to all this time he's taken trying to come to a compromise, with nothing to show for it. The two sides are just never going to agree on a way to raise the revenue, and chalking the whole thing up as deficit spending is not very likely either. Neither side will cross their own red line, leaving them miles apart. Manchin has already come out against a gas tax hike, so (hopefully) he won't defect to the GOP position on this.

"All they're doing is stalling!" Biden will be able to tell Manchin. Then hopefully they'll both adopt a "more in sorrow than in anger" tone and start talking about passing Biden's agenda with just Democratic votes. Manchin will no doubt demand a few pounds of flesh (he's already gotten a rather large one, as when Biden proposed raising the corporate tax from 21 to 28 percent, Manchin shot back that he would only agree to increasing it to 25 percent. Biden hasn't formally agreed to this, but he will. Manchin will no doubt extract other such changes to the bill, just to prove how much weight he now is able to throw around. But at the end of the day (again, hopefully), Manchin will then vote for the package.

Mitch McConnell's Republicans are just never going to help Joe Biden score a huge political victory. Why should they? They'll all be running in next year's midterms on the themes of either: "Biden is ineffective, he can't get anything done," or: "Biden is moving too fast, we have to act as a brake on him." Helping Biden pass a big historic bill isn't going to feed into either one of these campaign themes for Republicans, to state the obvious.

Most Democrats are already painfully aware of this. They know that in order to even have a chance next year of retaining (or even building upon) their razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress is going to depend on whether they can brag to the voters about all the good things a Democratic Congress has accomplished. So most Senate Democrats are champing at the bit to just circumvent the filibuster and pass some big ideas into law as quickly as possible.

But Joe Manchin isn't. Joe Manchin has his own agenda, which mostly consists of raising his own political profile as the "most important senator in Washington" and making sure that everyone knows it. He has already accomplished this, in fact. Joe Biden is staging this entire Kabuki negotiating drama for Manchin's sole enjoyment. So I do hope he's paying close attention, because when it comes to an end, it really will be impossible for him to attempt to claim that bipartisanship is still possible, if elusive. Biden is systematically proving to Manchin that this is nowhere near true, so let's hope the performance is convincing enough to allow Manchin, in the end, to reluctantly allow a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress to actually get some big and important things done. Because the alternative is another congressional session of complete and utter gridlock.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant