Hey, good morning. I'm Rachel Bade. It's Monday, April 17th. Congress is back in session today,

and pardon my French, but damn, there is a lot of shit happening. I'm going to start in the Senate.

Is Senator Diane Feinstein's career over? That's probably the number one question facing the Senate.

Following calls for DiFi to resign amid her two-month-long absence,

the California Democrat last week agreed that she would step down from the Senate Judiciary Committee

so that Democrats could continue to confirm judges.

The thinking behind that was that it would buy some time for her

and basically stave off an avalanche of

Democrats calling for her to resign for the good of the party. The one problem with that is that

Republicans are going to need to sign off on this swap, and it's not looking pretty at this point.

One senior Republican aide told me yesterday that this is, quote, complicated, even for Republicans.

On the one hand,

Dify is a long time and well-respected colleague who has spent more than 30 years in the chamber,

but on the other hand, Republicans are loath to be accused of helping a Democratic White House confirm liberal judges. In fact, this morning, we can already rule out Democrats receiving

unanimous consent to make this change. Senator Tom Cotton over the weekend tweeted that,

quote, Republicans should not assist Democrats and confirming Joe Biden's most radical nominees to the courts.

His office confirmed to me last night that he will likely object to any UC

request. That means Chuck Schumer is going to need 10 Senate Republicans, basically 60 Senate votes,

to make this change officially happen. Everybody is going to be watching one person, Mitch McConnell.

I called a number of McConnell allies over the weekend, and most of them predicted that

McConnell would probably balk at this idea of an exchange, but they weren't certain.

But even if Democrats were able to offer McConnell some sort of sweetener that gets him to

...