Hi, I'm Dan Pramette, and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Monday, June 7th.

Jeff Bezos is going up into space, Vice President Harris is down in Guatemala,

and we're focused on the most consequential state in America, West Virginia.

West Virginia.

West Virginia is small.

It ranks 41st in terms of square miles and 40th in terms of population.

But its two senators, Democrat Joe Manchin and Republican Shelley More Capito, have the disproportionate

power to determine, respectively, if a Democratic voting rights bill can get through Congress

and whether President Biden

can get Republican support for his giant infrastructure plans. Here's the quick state of play.

Mansion is driving his fellow Democrats crazy because of his refusal to vote to end the filibuster

and his opposition to a voting rights bill that House Democrats already passed. He renewed that

opposition over the weekend in a Wall Street Journal, Abed, and what it

means is that Biden either needs 60 votes of support for anything, including infrastructure,

or needs to try jamming it through on a party-line vote via a method called reconciliation.

But the trouble with reconciliation is it also needs mansion support, and he's yet to guarantee

his vote for the

current and scale down White House ask on infrastructure. Capito, on the other hand, is the lead

Senate Republican negotiator on infrastructure with the White House. She met with Biden last

Friday and is set to meet with him again today. The big obstacle, so far, isn't so much the

dollars, the trillions versus billions,

...