It's infrastructure week again, down at the Republicans' Last Chance Saloon. One week from today is Memorial Day, which is the deadline President Joe Biden set to see some sort of substantial progress on a bipartisan infrastructure bill in Congress. If such progress is not achieved by the time of the summer-opening picnics, then Democrats will begin moving on their own to use the Senate's budget reconciliation provision to pass both of the big Biden proposals (the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan). The clock is ticking, in other words, with one week to go.

Of course, Biden's deadline was self-imposed and rather vague. He didn't say a drafted bill or even a good-faith agreement was actually necessary, just that substantial progress be made towards those goals. So he can define defeat or victory pretty much how he chooses. Compared to the COVID relief package, there has already been a lot more substantial progress in bipartisan talks. But no agreement is in sight, and the two sides are pretty far apart with only one week remaining.

Republicans made one offer and haven't really budged from it. The White House started with an initial offer of $2.3 trillion and then proposed only $1.7 trillion, but the Republicans' offer is far below it. Most report that the GOP offer is $568 billion, but that is not exactly true. Biden is proposing increased spending, while much of the GOP offer is spending that would almost certainly happen anyway. The new spending the GOP is proposing is more on the order of $200 billion. That's an entire order of magnitude lower than what Biden wants.

The two sides aren't even close on how they'll pay for their respective plans, either, and neither side seems likely to budge at all. Republicans have drawn a line in the sand over the Trump tax cuts they passed a few years ago, and have sworn not to accept a single change in them. Instead, they are incredibly vague about how they'll pay for their rather small plan -- through mostly-unspecified "user fees." Which could mean raising the gas tax, even if they are frightened to admit that part of it. One wonders how many Republicans in Congress would ever actually vote for a gas tax hike, meaning they likely don't even have the support they'd need to pass such a bill. If not a gas tax, this would at the very least mean a whole lot of tolls on the new roads and bridges, one would have to assume. Republicans are telling the public: "We'll build you better roads and bridges, but you're going to have to pay to use them."

Biden, on the other hand, has sworn not to increase taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year. Gas taxes would definitely count, as far as he's concerned, so that's a non-starter for him. Instead, he'd raise corporate taxes to cover the costs. Which is a non-starter for the Republicans.

It is hard to see how any sort of middle ground can ever be achieved between these two positions. And the actual cost of the plans is still so widely different it seems unlikely that that gap will ever be successfully bridged, either. Biden might go as low as perhaps $1.2 trillion or so, but that's twice what Republicans have proposed and would likely be too much to get the necessary 10 votes in the Senate.

All of this is painfully obvious, one week out. But the Kabuki theater must play out until the end, in order to convince Senator Joe Manchin that bipartisanship just is not possible with the current Republican Party.

The real question is going to be whether Biden sticks to his timeline or not. Will he shrug his shoulders next Monday and say, "Oh, well, I tried... but failure is not an option, let's move forward with just Democrats," or will the Republican negotiators somehow convince him that a deal could be achieved if they just had a little more time? This "big stall" tactic has worked wonders for the GOP in the past, but Biden remembers a few key instances of this happening when he was vice president, so he should know the signs.

Biden shocked many by how fast he moved on the COVID plan. He did move quickly to reconciliation and he got the bill on his desk in record time. So he knows full well it can work, and work wonders. If he publicly throws in the towel on bipartisanship next Monday, look for this effort to get underway immediately, in other words, as some congressional Democrats are already champing at the bit to get some more stuff accomplished as soon as possible.

If reconciliation becomes the only route, Biden's two plans will likely be merged together. Right now they would cost roughly $4 trillion, but Biden has already shown flexibility so it wouldn't surprise me if that number came down a bit ($3.5 trillion, maybe?). But everything will be wrapped up into one bill so there would only be one vote on it (and it would fit in better with the arcane Senate budget rules).

How fast it would come together is anyone's guess, but it'll likely be at least mid-June or July before any votes actually happen. And Congress has a whole lot else on its plate to deal with, so if the bill passed by July 4th, that would actually be pretty fast work.

The question everyone has at this point is whether Biden will fire the starting gun for this effort next Monday. The bipartisan negotiations have already gotten mired down in ideology, over how to raise the revenue. It's not a matter of just adjusting the numbers, in other words, where one side goes up and the other comes down and they meet somewhere in the middle. There really isn't such an easy "middle" between hiking the gas tax and hiking corporate tax rates. And both sides are pretty absolutist on the question -- neither one seems inclined to allow what the other wants at all.

So my educated guess is that next week Biden will (more in sorrow than in anger, of course) announce that the talks have deadlocked and, as he has always said, failure is not an option. Democrats will pass a bill on their own if Republicans aren't serious about doing so. Hopefully Joe Manchin will agree, and get on board. At this point, that really seems like the only way anything is going to get done. And, as usual, virtually the entire public is just not going to care how it all happens -- just whether it does or not.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant