Biden’s halting, frail, sometimes slurring speech was all in the service of a “historic economic framework.” Which is like bragging about an epochal memo, or a watershed PowerPoint slide. What was the framework? It was just a grab bag of items in the ever-shrinking Build Back Better legislation, with enormous round dollar figures attached to them.

What this wasn’t, was an agreement between moderate Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, or progressive House members Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, and Pramila Jayapal. Those three House members alone can sink any legislation, and none of them were persuaded to give up their leverage by passing the infrastructure bill by this announced framework, or by the pressing need to puff up Biden ahead of an international flight.

Setting arbitrary deadlines has failed to generate pressure on either the Senate moderates or the House progressives. If you assume that the House progressives will not want to throw away the Democratic majority next year without passing some of the largest U.S. government spending commitments short of a world war, then you will conclude that at some point — maybe before the Christmas recess, or by next spring, they’ll pass something. But are we so sure that they want to pass something? Would the three to six most radical progressive members be punished for torpedoing a bill that they claimed was too watered-down to support? I’m less and less sure.