Washington Post White House correspondent Seung Min Kim reports that President Joe Biden will meet separately on Thursday with Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The purpose of these discussions is to come to an understanding on “the pending reconciliation package.”

Let me put this in some perspective. The nice thing about the reconciliation package is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can use special budgetary rules to bypass the legislative filibuster. This means he can pass a huge vitally important portion of Biden’s agenda without the assistance of a single Republican vote, but it also means that he needs all 50 Democrats to go along with the plan. If they do, Vice-President Kamala Harris can break the 50-50 tie. This filibuster bypass won’t work for voting rights legislation, so the Democrats face a choice achieving nothing or changing the filibuster rules to allow for a simple majority vote. To change the rules they would again need all 50 Democrats to sign off, and that’s a tall order, especially because Sinema and Manchin have expressed deep reservations and skepticism about weakening the filibuster.

Andy Kroll of Rolling Stone reported this week that Biden is prepared to make a pitch to reluctant Democratic senators.

With a make-or-break vote looming in the Senate on a sweeping voting-rights and anti-corruption bill, President Joe Biden and his advisers have said in recent weeks that Biden will pressure wavering Democrats to support reforming the filibuster if necessary to pass the voting bill.

According to three people briefed on the White House’s position and its recent communications with outside groups, Biden assured Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he was ready to push for filibuster reform. Biden’s pressure would aim to help Schumer convince moderate Democrats to support a carveout to the filibuster, a must for the party if it’s going to pass new voting protections without Republican votes. According to a source briefed on the White House’s position, Biden told Schumer: “Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls.”

Phone calls from the president can be very persuasive, but when you really want to get down to business it’s best to have a face-to-face meeting. Evidently, Schumer has let Biden know that it’s now time for Biden to sit down with Sinema and Manchin and cut through the bullshit. Only, in this case, the meetings are about the budget reconciliation package. The voting rights discussions will come later.

It’s also significant that Biden has carved out time to meet with each of the senators individually, which is probably both a sign of respect and also a way of maintaining maximum influence. He doesn’t need to be outnumbered when he’s making an argument.

If these meetings go well, any further bitching about the budget reconciliation bill from Sinema and Manchin will be following a carefully plotted and White House-approved script. Whatever concessions they eventually get will have already been authorized in the West Wing even if it looks quite different to the naked eye.

If the meetings do not go well, a real sense of panic will set in in the White House and I think it will be easily detectable to even half-ass observers of Washington politics. The panic will come from each end of Pennsylvania Avenue, because if Sinema and Manchin don’t get with the program after face-to-face meetings with Biden, there’s a good chance they never will.