Well, it’s still infrastructure week. Again. And Joe Biden’s plans for a “bipartisan” spending bill are still looking as improbable as they have from the beginning. But the game isn’t over yet, because the Senate GOP is rolling out another counteroffer that they claim could bring along enough Republican votes to make it out the door and to Biden’s desk. This is at least the fourth version that’s come out of this horse-trading saga and if you don’t examine it too closely you might be tempted to think that the two sides are drifting closer to the center and some sort of workable compromise. We won’t get to see the full details until tomorrow, but one of the big components of this plan will likely be seen as a poison pill by the Democrats, so nobody should really be getting their hopes up yet. (Associated Press)

Senate Republicans revived negotiations over President Joe Biden’s sweeping investment plan, preparing a $1 trillion infrastructure proposal that would be funded with COVID-19 relief money as a counteroffer to the White House ahead of a Memorial Day deadline toward a bipartisan deal.

The Republicans said Tuesday they would disclose details of the new offer by Thursday, sounding upbeat after both sides had panned other offers.

At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki declined to address the new plan but said: “We expect this week to be a week of progress.”

Here’s Jen Psaki once again trying to portray a sense of hope and positivity while saying absolutely nothing about whether or not the GOP plan would be dead on arrival.

Both of the details of this proposal that have been announced are going to be problematic in the ongoing negotiations, but it’s also easy to see the strategy being worked out in the background. First, there’s the price tag. The Republicans are nearly doubling their previous offer, bringing it up to a trillion dollars. That’s more than a lot of the Republican members wanted to spend, but still almost three-quarters of a trillion less than what the Democrats are asking for. Thus far the motto being chanted by Biden and the Democrats has been “go big.” They’re going to have a hard time selling their members on the idea that “only” a trillion dollars qualifies as “big” in 2021. But they really only need a dozen or so Republicans to make it work, so if that were the only stumbling block we might have been within reach of a deal.

It’s not the only stumbling block, though. The bigger issue will be where this extra money is coming from. Biden still wants to pay for it by jacking up the corporate tax rate, but that’s a non-starter with Cocaine Mitch and his crew. Instead, the GOP is proposing that the money be clawed back from some of the COVID relief funds that remain unspent and reappropriated for infrastructure. There’s still more than 700 billion in unspent relief money, so that could go a long way. But Democrats are sure to cry foul, insisting that every dime of that needs to be spent on their various wishlist items, even if the pandemic is largely behind us and the economy is open again.

So why keep putting out offers like this if they are likely doomed to fail? Because when this is all over, whether there is no infrastructure bill at all or the Democrats find a way to sneak it through by abusing the reconciliation process, Mitch McConnell wants to have some cards left to play. By making these moves, when he’s asked why there was no bipartisan deal, he will respond by saying that he tried to meet the Democrats in the middle multiple times. He will point to how he doubled the size of the package and even gave ground on some of their priorities. But Biden and Schumer barely budged and took a “my way or the highway” approach, so the ball is in their court.

That’s not how most of the media will spin it, of course. But the game that’s afoot at the moment really has less to do with actual infrastructure spending than it does with the midterms next year.