that s because you all have the same internet. xfinity xfi. so powerful, it keeps one-upping itself. can your internet do that? you know, i ve never linked the two bills together. i pray to god that let s look at each bill on its own merits. there s a lot of good in both of them. we should be able to come to that agreement. some of what we heard from senator joe manchin tonight as he left the capitol in the dark. we ve been looking forward to these two guests and hearing their take about what we ve witnessed. juanita tolliver, veteran
shannon pettypiece, veteran journalist, our senior white house reporter over at nbc news digital. we are reunited as well tonight with two of our friends from the post, ashley parker, pulitzer prize-winning white house bureau chief for the washington post. and robert costa, national political reporter. his latest book, co-authored with his friend and colleague bob woodward called peril is now of course a new york times best-seller. and robert, i d like to begin with you. you re in touch with folks at the capitol. what s the reaction going to be with the way pelosi played this tonight? there s concern in democratic ranks that this thing s on the rocks. but speaker pelosi, as you said, only brings a bill to the floor if she s confident in the votes. and she s trying to play on different fronts here to make sure that schumer doesn t feel like he s in a corner. she s working closely with the white house, brian dease and others and susan rice are over at her office talking you thi
that meeting was he tried to assuage concerns about what that top-line number would be. instead, trying to remind people what is at stake which is his agenda and the fact that if folks are so dug in on either side, they are going to get nothing. and that s not just on the president. that s on the democratic party. that s on their ability to run for reelection in the midterms. we also know that the president did float a potential top-line number saying that he, too, would like a $3.5 trillion social safety net bill. but it would likely fall in the realm of about $2 trillion. and he gave a range there. he s not sticking to one number but as you noted, moderates in the senate are saying that $1.5 trillion is joe manchin s number right now. and he hasn t come off of that all day. they are not any closer to getting some kind of framework with him and that makes it very hard for the speaker to decide on her next steps, as well, erin. of course, he hasn t come off that number, we know, in a
would be a vote on that $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. progressives have been arguing all along, they want the senate to vote first on a bigger social safety net bill, and they want some guarantees for moderates like kyrsten sinema and joe manchin about what they re going to be willing to support. last night in the capitol, there were hours of meetings with sinema and manchin trying to understand exactly where they might get to, and those meetings, you know, really ended with manchin coming out and saying $1.5 trillion is still the number he wants to be at. progressives are looking more towards $3.5 trillion. there s a lot to really continue to work through, and that s just how much of a price tag is on the bill. that doesn t include all of the other differences over tax policy, over what exactly should be funded in terms of paid family leave, extended child tax credit, those are issues that the party is also working through. the importance of this meeting today is to really just r
entitlement mentality. my goodness, you have infrastructure bill, you ve got this bill we have right now, and we have a reconciliation bill. i m willing to sit down and work through that 1.5 to get our priorities and they can come back and do later and run on the rest of it later. i think there s many ways to get to where they want to, just not everything at one time. okay, let s bring in our congressional correspondent, ryan nobles, and our senior white house correspondent, phil mattingly. guys, thank you so much for being here. ryan, what s been the progressive response? reporter: well, the progressives view $1.5 trillion as a nonstarter. that s not enough for them in this negotiation process and senator manchin putting it on the record today, not that big of a surprise. he s been hinting for a while that $1.5 trillion was his ceiling. he told dana bash that on her state of the union program not too long ago but this is what we know about what manchin is looking for, based on the