Three reasons why Biden’s infrastructure deal is a long way from done

President Joe Biden puts his arm on Republican Senator Rob Portman.Kevin Dietsch/Getty

The image and the words coming from the White House certainly looked and sounded promising on Thursday afternoon. There was President Biden, flanked by a bipartisan group of senators declaring in front of reporters that “we have a deal.”

For the majority of Americans who wanted some kind of infrastructure bill (including former president Donald Trump) it certainly sounded like good news.

However, Biden’s remarks conveyed a tone that this is a done deal. The Dow Jones Industrial Average leaped up 200 points minutes after the announcement.

Here is the thing: At the moment it remains more likely that this bipartisan deal will fail than succeed. And even if it does pass, it will be a while before Biden signs it.

Here are three reasons why:

There aren’t the votes in the Senate

This is an evolving news story and things can change but at the moment, the necessary votes in the Senate to pass this bill are not there. Under the rules for how this bipartisan bill will be passed, 60 votes will be needed to avoid a filibuster. That means that 10 Republicans will need to sign on.

In the early days of negotiations, there was a group of 11 Republicans and 10 Democrats who gathered together to hammer out a deal. In the end, just five Republicans went to the White House where a deal was agreed upon. This group of Republicans including Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney, Maine’s Senator Susan Collins, Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski, Ohio’s Senator Rob Portman, and Louisiana’s Senator Bill Cassidy.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has yet to say anything about whether he will give Republicans the green light to support the deal. But even presuming that five additional Republicans agree to sign on, all Democrats would have to agree also. And there are concerns from more progressive members — Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, among others — that the bill doesn’t go far enough, particularly on climate change or raising taxes on the rich.

And by the way, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, hasn’t come out in favor of this bipartisan bill either, but he did say Wednesday night that he “was happy” about the negotiations.

There probably aren’t the votes to pass it in the House

The only major politician who went on the record giving a subtle brush off to the “deal” is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She didn’t come out against it, but she did issue a demand: she will not schedule a vote on this deal until the Senate passes a significantly larger $6 trillion version first that would only require 50 votes under what’s called a budget reconciliation process.

Without getting into the weeds, this would basically require Democratic Senators like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to back a huge bill they have just tried to work against by forging this bipartisan compromise.

Yet, if the bipartisan plan does get voted on in the House, consider this: House Democrats only have a majority by four seats. While there will undoubtedly be a few Republican votes for the plan, watch what progressive Democrats do in the House. This was the bill that was supposed to address climate change in big ways and the bipartisan plan is significantly scaled back on this front.

The major detail in the matter is not resolved

All of the public handshaking on the deal is about spending, a place where there was significant room for compromise. The sticking issue for the past few months has been how to pay for it all. Democrats said they wanted to raise taxes on the rich. Republicans ruled that out immediately. It still remains unclear how this deal is paid for, but when that eventually comes out, the legislation will likely lose more votes.

In the end, the bipartisan bill may pass, particularly if more progressive members agree with the idea that they will pass both the bipartisan deal and the rest of the Biden proposal in a later bill. But there is a long way to go.