Good Wednesday morning. I'm Jake Sherman and welcome to your Politico Playbook Audio Briefing. Stay tuned

after the show for a message from Jewel Labs. And I'm Anna Palmer. Joe Biden was at a fundraiser last night in Houston.

The Houston Chronicle quoted Biden as saying, America's less divided today on issues than when I got to the Senate as a 29-year-old kid.

Then we were divided on everything from war to the women's movement to civil rights across the

board. But our politics is broken. You got to wonder how many Democratic primary voters agree

with this. Spotted at the Biden event, per the pool report, Texas representative Sheila

Jackson Lee and Sylvia

and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. The numbers look good for Biden. Mark Caputo writes that two

polls of likely Democratic primary voters completed last week showed the former vice president with a

21 percentage point lead over the second place candidate. The story everyone talking about,

Mitch McConnell

weighed in on a potential Supreme Court vacancy in 2020. McConnell responded that Republicans would fill the

seat even in the middle of a 2020 election. McConnell's spokesman David Popps, the difference between

now and three years ago when McConnell famously blocked Merrick Garland is that the White House was

controlled by a Democrat

and the Senate by Republicans. Now they are both controlled by the GOP. You might not like it,

but this is broadly consistent with where McConnell has been on this issue. Here he is on March 1,

2016. Hat tipped to NBC's Frank Thorpe, who dug this up. McConnell says, quote, you'd have to go back to

1888 when Grover Cleveland was in the White House to find the last time a vacancy created in a

presidential year was confirmed by the party opposite the occupant of the White House. So this

vacancy will not be filled this year. Our colleague, Melanie Zanota, was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Justin Amash got a hero's welcome at his first town hall since calling for Trump's impeachment.

Amash seems to be the most forceful and have the most clarity of any Democrat or Republican lawmaker when it comes to impeachment.

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