Senate Republicans hope to nail down the first step of their party-line funding package for immigration operations this week, but other legislative obstacles and divisions could slow the process.

Republicans and President Donald Trump are in agreement that the partisan budget reconciliation process is the key to bypassing Democrats’ blockade of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol funding.

But in order to hit that fast-approaching deadline, Senate Republicans largely want to keep the package as narrowly tailored as possible to avoid any hiccups in the process. The main plan from Republican leadership is to fund immigration operations for the next three years with the current reconciliation package and look to a future bill as a later landing spot for other issues.

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Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., will kick off the process with a budget resolution that will act as the guiding document for the GOP as they push forward into reconciliation. That resolution will tee up the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as the main panels running the process.

“I hope we can get moving on it as early as next week,” Graham said before lawmakers left Washington, D.C., for the weekend.

Despite keeping the resolution, in theory, as slim as possible, other lawmakers in the upper chamber and in the House want more added to the package.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow last week that he was making the case that Republicans should “go big” on reconciliation. Cruz said he wants a decade of funding for ICE and Border Patrol and, more broadly, tax cuts and affordability measures.

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“Right now, leadership’s plan is to have the skinny, anorexic bill that just has funding for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol. I think that is short-minded, short-sighted,” Cruz said.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., reiterated that the forthcoming package would have to “fall within the contours of what we’re trying to do here,” but he acknowledged that other Republicans viewed the current package as a vehicle that could fit several other issues.

“We have another vehicle available, we’ll see, but right now, keep it tight,” he continued. “That’s the plan.”

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Part of the problem with adding more to the package is that more committees would have to get involved, like during the crafting of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which involved every panel in the Senate and House and narrowly survived in the upper chamber.

And House Republicans are on the same page as Cruz — they want to supersize the bill to take advantage of the GOP’s trifecta in Washington, D.C., ahead of the midterm elections in the fall.

It’s a give-and-take between the chambers in their quest to end the longest shutdown in history. House Republicans aren’t keen on passing the Senate’s bill to fund the bulk of DHS, minus funding for ICE and chunks of CBP, until the reconciliation package passes.

But that could further prolong the shutdown, and Republicans in the upper chamber argue that DHS should be reopened while they hammer out the details for funding immigration operations in the background.

Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Fox News Digital that adding more to the package would slow down the process.

“Every time you add stuff to it, you add committees of jurisdiction, you add complexity, and you add more time,” Hoeven said. “So if they want it expeditiously, which is what we’re working on right now, then you wouldn’t add stuff, right?”

To paraphrase the late President Richard Nixon, what will Democrats do when they don’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore?

It’s a valid question. Currently, shared hatred of Donald Trump is the baling wire holding the fractured Democratic Party together. The party is deeply divided over nearly every facet of government and policy, with progressives and moderates warring over taxes, gender issues, AI, climate change, law enforcement and Israel.

It isn’t at all clear who the party’s leaders are. Is it Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose approval rating nationally among Democrats barely clears 40%, or is it leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who may challenge Schumer for his Senate seat in 2028 but who is currently, astonishingly, under fire from progressives for trying to reach moderate voters?

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is among those criticizing his party’s lack of “vision,” telling “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker, “We know very well what we oppose. What are we for?”

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He’s not the only Democrat critical of his party. At a recent DNC meeting in New Orleans, party officials were lambasted by progressives over their ongoing refusal to release the official autopsy explaining why they were scorched in the 2024 elections, a report that presumably could guide them forward. Axios has reported that DNC Chair Ken Martin fears the report could unleash “unnecessary party infighting”; he’s probably right.

Approaching the midterms, President Trump is less popular than he was during his prior term in office — by 7 points — but Democrats are a whopping 30 points behind where they were in 2018. Given the president’s many bold and controversial policy moves — from waging war against Iran, rebuilding the White House, implementing tariffs, bullying NATO and torching climate initiatives — those are remarkable readings. He has given the country — and Democrats — plenty to rail about.

Recently, scores of Democrats have threatened President Trump with impeachment or removal from office. Going into the midterm elections, Democrats, including California Rep. Ro Khanna and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, have promised that if they win control of the House, they will impeach President Trump again. In a recent MS Now interview, Khanna said, “Absolutely, he should be impeached now … and the Democrats will impeach him once we take back the House and should impeach him for all the things he’s done.”

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While not specifying what those “things” are, Khanna is, in effect, promising to put the country through more show trials and more bitter congressional hearings that do not improve the lives of average Americans and, assuming Democrats don’t achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict, are an exercise in futility.

Not only have Democrats threatened impeachment, they have also vowed to go after anyone who worked in the White House as part of the current administration and even private businesses that cooperated with the Trump White House. This, from a party that wails that President Trump is out for “vengeance” and has weaponized his Justice Department to punish his enemies.

The leader of that program was former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has ignominiously been drummed out of public office, accused of sexual assault. The ex-congressman proposed to act as judge and jury in making President Trump pay for his sins, promising: “We’re going into the majority a year from now. … We will bring oversight and accountability, we will subpoena the Department of Justice, but also private actors who have done these drug deals with the administration, college campuses, entertainment companies, law firms. Accountability is coming.”

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The singular focus on “resisting” Donald Trump may provide plenty of dopamine and give Democrats ample opportunity to get together and parade around in weird costumes, but it isn’t building credibility or a popular political party. A recent CNN poll shows only 28% of Americans hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party a few points higher at 32%.

If Democrats believed they had more to offer, they wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to reshape the electoral map in purple Virginia to their advantage and wouldn’t be working so hard to topple the Electoral College, which they believe favors Republicans. That effort is real and, according to a recent Washington Post op-ed, is gaining momentum.

When Trump leaves office, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will go after moderate Democrats full-bore. The Zohran Mamdani-Bernie Sanders faction will insist on pushing tax hikes that threaten our economy, limitations on data centers and Big Tech that will undermine our global lead in innovation, and workplace policies that will slow productivity, as they have in France and Germany, while stifling energy development in service to green activists who are ignorant of reality.

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Their growing clout among young — often ignorant — voters makes these threats real. The election of Mamdani, a young, telegenic socialist with no meaningful credentials, to be mayor of New York was a wake-up call to adults in the room. Democrats are increasingly being led and funded by ideologues whose agendas are unrealistic and impossibly expensive.

Sadly, young voters have not been taught why socialism has repeatedly failed, leaving the citizens of once-wealthy countries worse off. They believed that Mamdani could deliver free buses and control rents without destroying the housing market. They actually look forward to a government-run grocery store that magically prices goods below market; they didn’t grow up reading about how people in the Soviet Union had to stand in line for hours to buy a loaf of bread in stores where the shelves were perpetually bare.

History suggests that Democrats will retake the House in November. They will run on an “affordability” agenda and hope voters don’t ask why the most expensive places to live in the U.S. are all run by Democrats. They will mostly bury their differences and campaign on opposing the president.

But come 2028, Democrats will go to war — with each other. And hating Donald Trump will not be good enough.

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LEESBURG, Va. — Virginians head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on a congressional redistricting referendum that, if passed, could give Democrats a significant boost in the battle for the U.S. House majority in this year’s midterm elections.

If the ballot measure is successful, it would give the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature — rather than the state’s current nonpartisan commission — temporary redistricting power through the 2030 election. It could result in a 10-1 advantage for Democrats in Virginia’s congressional delegation, up from their current 6-5 edge.

That would give the Democrats four additional left-leaning U.S. House seats ahead of the midterms as the party tries to win back control of the chamber from the GOP, which currently holds a razor-thin majority.

“It’s the most partisan map in American,” former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin told supporters at his final campaign stop on the eve of the election in this northern Virginia town on the far end of Washington, DC’s suburbs.

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Pointing to the Democrats pushing new maps, Youngkin charged, “What they are doing is immoral.”

Teaming up with Youngkin to crisscross the state in leading the GOP opposition to the ballot initiative was former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, who told the crowd the Democrats’ map is one that “you draw when you’re drunk with power.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital ahead of their final election eve rally, Miyares charged that Democrats want to take away the voices of millions of Virginians and gerrymander the state.

Youngkin, pointing to the duo’s relentless campaigning in recent weeks, said “what we’re hearing over and over and over again is Virginians want fair maps. And what the yes vote represents are unfair maps.”

And the two Republicans reiterated their charge that the referendum was an “unconstitutional power grab” by the Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democrats who control the state legislature.

As Youngkin and Miyares were speaking in Leesburg, President Donald Trump took to the airwaves on a popular Virginia-based conservative talk show and later teamed up with House Speaker Mike Johnson to urge voters to defeat the referendum.

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Pointing to congressional Democrats, Trump warned that “if they get these additional seats, they’re going to be making changes at the federal level.”

Democrats counter that the redrawing of the maps is a necessary step to balance out partisan gerrymandering already implemented by Republicans in other states at Trump’s urging.

“By voting yes, you have the chance to do something important — not just for the Commonwealth, but for our entire country,” former President Barack Obama said in a video released Friday on the eve of the final day of early voting. “By voting yes, you can push back against the Republicans trying to give themselves an unfair advantage in the midterms.”

“By voting yes, you can take a temporary step to level the playing field. And we’re counting on you,” the former president added.

The video by Obama was the former president’s latest effort tied to the referendum. He has previously appeared in ads released by Virginians for Fair Elections, the Democrat-aligned group working to pass the ballot initiative.

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But Virginians for Fair Maps, the leading Republican-aligned group opposing redistricting, used past comments by Obama against political gerrymandering in its ads opposing the referendum.

“Because of things like political gerrymandering, our parties have moved further and further apart, and it’s harder and harder to find common ground,” the former president said in an old clip showcased in the spot.

Republicans are also pointing to comments from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Virginia governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, who acknowledged this past weekend in a Fox News Sunday interview that the new maps don’t represent Virginia’s partisan breakdown.

“Ninety percent of Virginians are not Democrats, that’s true,” Kaine said.

But Kaine added that “about 100% of Virginians want election results to be respected.”

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And Republicans are also taking aim at Spanberger, who won last November’s gubernatorial election by over 15 points as Democrats also captured the lieutenant governor and attorney general offices.

“Abigail Spanberger told everybody last summer that she had no interest in redistricting and then the first bill she signs is a bill to enable the gerrymandering of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginians don’t like this and that’s why independents and a lot of Democrats are voting no too,” Youngkin told Fox News Digital.

Minutes later, Youngkin told the crowd that Spanberger is “trying to disenfranchise million, millions, of Virginians.”

Republicans have trained their redistricting firepower on Spanberger since a poll two weeks ago from The Washington Post indicated that the new governor’s approval rating was barely above water, with the highest unfavorable rating for a new Virginia governor in two decades.

“She’s an unpopular governor with an unpopular agenda and she lied to the voters,” Miyares charged.

And Miyares and other top Republicans have accused Spanberger of pulling a “bait and switch.”

Spanberger, in an ad in support of the referendum, said she’s backing the measure because “it’s directly in response to what other states decide to do and a president who says he’s quote entitled to more Republican seats before this year’s midterms. Our approach is different. It’s temporary. It preserves Virginia’s fair redistricting process into the future.”

Supporters of redistricting have dramatically outraised and outspent groups opposed to the referendum, with Virginians for Fair Elections outraising Virginians for Fair Maps by a roughly three-to-one margin. Much of the funding raised by both sides came from so-called “dark money” from nonprofit public policy groups known as 501(c)(4) organizations that are not required to disclose their donors.

Despite the Democrats’ funding advantage, recent polling suggested support for the ballot initiative was only slightly ahead of opposition amid a surge in early voting, which ended on Saturday.

“They have outspent us three to one. They’ve raised over $70 million. And yet this is a close vote,” Youngkin said.

Pointing to the ads in support of the referendum, Youngkin said Virginians “aren’t believing the mistruths. They aren’t believing the lies on TV. They’re actually doing the work themselves and understanding that a no vote is for fair maps and a yes vote is for the most gerrymandered maps in America.”

And Miyares emphasized that Democrats “outspent us but we have the truth.”

Virginia is the latest battleground in the high-stakes fight between Trump and the GOP and Democrats over congressional redistricting.

Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, Trump last spring first floated the idea of rare, but not unheard of, mid-decade congressional redistricting.

The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s fragile House majority to keep control of the chamber in the midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

When asked by reporters last summer about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.

But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.

Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

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California voters in November overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that temporarily sidetracked the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and returned the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.

That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.

The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.

Republican-controlled Missouri and Ohio and swing state North Carolina, where the GOP dominates the legislature, have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push.

In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge late last year rejected a congressional district map drawn by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the midterms.

Republicans in Indiana’s Senate in December defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House. The showdown in the Indiana statehouse grabbed plenty of national attention.

Florida is next up.

Two-term Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and state lawmakers in the GOP-dominated legislature are hoping to pick up an additional three to five right-leaning seats through a redistricting push during a special legislative session that kicks off April 28.

Hovering over the redistricting wars is the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a crucial case that may lead to the overturning of a key provision in the Voting Rights Act.

If the ruling goes the way of the conservatives on the high court, it could lead to the redrawing of a slew of majority-minority districts across the county, which would greatly favor Republicans.

But it is very much up in the air when the court will rule and what it will actually decide.