CNN: “With just weeks to go before a deadline, what exactly Democratic swing vote Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia wants in a package is still proving hard to pin down. Manchin restarted talks with the White House weeks ago on the contours of a slimmed down package to combat inflation, raise corporate taxes and fund clean energy investments – but those talks haven’t yet produced a deal.”

“Manchin raised eyebrows on Monday by convening a bipartisan group of senators to try to find areas of agreement on energy security and climate change.”

“Mitch McConnell thought the Jan. 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol would finally vanquish Donald Trump, initially predicting that at least 17 Republican senators would vote to convict him in his impeachment trial, barring the former president from running again,” McClatchy reports.

But he was wrong and didn’t even vote to convict Trump himself.

Said McConnell, as quoted in This Will Not Pass: “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.”

George Will argues the U.S. Constitution should be amended to prohibit senators from becoming president.

“Seventeen presidents were previously senators. Seven of them – Harding, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Biden — became senators after 1913, when the 17th Amendment took the selection of senators away from state legislatures. The federal government’s growth, and the national media’s focus on Washington, has increased the prominence of senators eager for prominence, although it often is the prominence of a ship’s figurehead — decorative, not functional.”

“As president-centric government has waxed, the Senate has waned, becoming increasingly a theater of performative behaviors by senators who are decreasingly interested in legislating, and are increasingly preoccupied with using social media for self-promotion.”

Another nugget from This Will Not Pass, via CNN: Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) told Sen. John Thune (R-SD) early last year that he’d switch parties if Thune were the Republican leader instead of Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

“Running against Washington is nothing new. Running against Washington while your party controls the White House, Senate and House is something significantly more complicated,” CNN reports.

“That is the knotty path Senate Democratic incumbents are attempting to walk as they run for reelection while their party controls most every lever of an unpopular federal government. How these Democrats – Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Mark Kelly of Arizona, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada – handle dealing with and talking about President Joe Biden and Senate leadership will illustrate how Democrats view their own party’s control of Washington.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced positive Covid tests and their absences will almost surely delay several key — but contentious — confirmation votes, Politico reports.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “offered a conspicuous non-endorsement on Tuesday when asked whether he has confidence in Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) ability to continue serving,” Politico reports.

Said Schumer: “I’ve had a good number of discussions with Sen. Feinstein, but I’m keeping them to myself.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) met with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to talk about a reconciliation bill that could combat inflation, The Hill reports.

Manchin told reporters that he supports a corporate tax rate of 25% and a capital gains tax of 28%.

NBC News: “There’s a first-mover problem here. Manchin has his red lines but he’s not going to drive this effort and seems unlikely to lose sleep if a party-line bill never revives. White House and Chuck Schumer don’t want to get burned again.”

Even if Manchin backs rolling back the Trump tax cuts, the Democrats would still need to convince Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who has said she would not support raising corporate taxes.

“When former Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) was asked on the 2020 campaign trail about the recently purchased private jet she was flying around Georgia, the former CEO and multimillionaire senator defended the expense as saving taxpayer dollars,” the Daily Beast reports.

“But previously unreported corporate filings reveal something that Loeffler’s campaign disclosures did not: She was paying her husband’s company to operate the jet. And, according to experts, those campaign filings might not have been correctly reported, raising questions of whether she purposefully concealed the arrangement from the public.”

A new Morning Consult poll finds 57% of West Virginia voters approve of Sen. Joe Manchin’s job performance, up from 40% during the first quarter of 2021.

Over the past year, Manchin has even doubled his approval rating among West Virginia Republicans, to 69%.

“Police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, accused Sen. Mike Lee of lying about his reasons for opposing a full investigation into the events leading up to the attack,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports.

“The officers allege newly revealed text messages detailing Lee’s efforts to help former President Donald Trump reverse his 2020 election loss suggest he was trying to cover up his involvement.”

“Orrin Hatch, a conservative Utah Republican who came out of political nowhere to win a U.S. Senate seat in 1976 and ended his career 42 years later as the longest-serving Republican in the chamber’s history and one of his party’s most influential lawmakers of recent decades, died April 23 in Salt Lake City,” the Washington Post reports.

He was 88 years old.

Politico: “Ambitious Democrats are preparing for what happens when the 88-year-old California senator’s seat becomes available for the first time in a generation — a sea change for California politics that would likely launch a frenzied intraparty rush for the coveted post. Most everyone is operating under the assumption that Feinstein will not run for reelection in 2024. Contenders are stockpiling cash and quietly assessing their options.”

“A general reluctance to publicly encourage Feinstein to step down hasn’t stopped people from keeping open lines of communication to Gov. Gavin Newsom in the event the senator resigns and the Democratic governor gets to handpick her replacement.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) “says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump,” the Deseret News reports.

Said Lee: “He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is.”

He added: “Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding.”