| When President Biden announced he'd reached an agreement with a bipartisan group of 10 senators on a $973 billion infrastructure package, he also made clear he'll only sign that bill if it's also accompanied by a separate bill that includes Democratic priorities, and would be passed without any Republican support. "If this is the only thing that comes to me, I'm not signing it," Biden said of the bipartisan deal. "It's in tandem." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the same promise, saying she won't call for a floor vote on the bipartisan bill unless a reconciliation bill has also been sent to the House. Democrats had been signaling for weeks that they were pursuing both bills as options. But on Thursday it became clear that the dual-track bills were a path for Biden to both claim victory in a serious bipartisan negotiation and deliver on the Democratic priorities he and congressional Democrats had promised in the 2020 campaign — as well as keeping his own party happy. But Republicans see it differently — and Friday, signaled Biden's insistence on a second bill, presumably with a far higher price tag and a boatload of Democratic priorities Republicans aren't interested in passing, could sink the whole deal. "No deal by extortion!" tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) "It was never suggested to me during these negotiations that President Biden was holding hostage the bipartisan infrastructure proposal unless a liberal reconciliation package was also passed … I can't imagine any other Republican had that impression." And the top Senate Republican, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), accused Biden and Pelosi on Thursday of holding "the bipartisan agreement hostage, demanding trillions of dollars in wasteful spending and job-killing tax increases in return for even considering it." "The top two Democrats literally pull a rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators with these unserious demands," McConnell said. It's easy to see why the two-track plan appealed to Democrats; it was a win for bipartisanship, and a win for the small group of Democrats who insist bills need to be passed through regular order — while still providing a pathway to the trillions of dollars in spending on issues such as combating climate change, creating clean energy jobs and hugely expanding Medicare that liberals were upset didn't make it into the bipartisan bill. It was a way for Democrats to get everything they wanted. The dual-track plan didn't come completely out of the blue. Several GOP senators even said they felt they should push ahead with a bipartisan bill even knowing Democrats would likely pursue their own priorities in a separate bill. But Republicans suddenly seem to be asking themselves, what's in this for us? Why would they sign off on a bipartisan deal, only to watch Democrats quickly pass the items the GOP wasn't willing to include in the first bill in a separate one soon after? Democrats didn't have a lot of time for that argument, saying it's been pretty clear for weeks that they've been pursuing both a bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill, the latter being a procedural maneuver that allows Democrats to pass certain budget, spending and tax bills with only their 50-vote majority and Vice President Harris's tiebreaker. "You don't have to pretend to believe that Republicans haven't been reading the news for the last two months when legislative leaders said explicitly that we were moving on two tracks," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted. Biden and Democrats are essentially making a bet that this whole process has gone too far for Republicans to back out — that voting against the bipartisan deal would make it look like they're not interested in any kind of infrastructure investments. But Republicans, as McConnell said, feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them — and lawmakers who feel embarrassed by the process seem less likely to cross the aisle to vote for any kind of bipartisan deal. Democrats say they want to move both bills through Congress in July, leaving Republicans little time to decide whether to pull the plug on the whole thing. | 
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