Donald Trump helped kill Congress’ last big bid for an immigration compromise. As the Senate closes in on its next attempt, members of both parties are prepared for the former president to try it again.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s televised acknowledgement that he’s consulting with Trump on border policy is giving déjà vu to senators who witnessed the Trump administration’s 2018 squashing of a plan to pair border security provisions with help for undocumented immigrants. This time around, the Senate is on the verge of a different deal — linking border and immigration restrictions with Ukraine aid — while Trump’s influence in the GOP is peaking again.

“I hope he will dissuade people” from supporting any bipartisan border plan that emerges this year, said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). “Can he? I don’t know… Maybe. Maybe not.”

Now that he’s won the Iowa caucus and is barreling toward the GOP nomination, Trump has reason to feel emboldened about his ability to sway congressional Republicans. If Trump goes all-out against the emerging border-Ukraine compromise, it’s even harder to imagine that Johnson would go along — and GOP senators might start peeling off into the no camp, too.

Trump appeared to begin making his stance clear on Thursday, posting on social media that he does “not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people.” Conservative Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Wednesday night that the former president opposes an emerging Senate deal and wants Johnson to come out against it too.

“It’s certainly not helpful,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said of Trump’s potential opposition. “But in the end, people are going to have to do what they think is right.”

About six years ago, a bipartisan group of senators hashed out a significant border security deal that would have also protected hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation. At that time, Trump and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell were aligned on defeating the legislation, which went down on the floor. This time, however, McConnell is pushing back against Johnson and Trump’s resistance.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a lead sponsor of the 2018 border legislation, readily remembers the vote total (54) that brought down that immigration measure. It fell short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster even as Republicans held the House, Senate and White House. And Senate Republican leaders are now trying to remind Trump that if he wins back the presidency, he won’t get the sort of concessions that Democrats are considering now.

Rounds said in an interview that some Senate Republicans are working behind the scenes to get Trump on board with this year’s legislation, telling him it would help future presidents: “Whether he believes that or not, I don’t know. But I do.”

“Anytime you have a Republican frontrunner for the presidency, people will listen to what he’s got to say. But there’s a lot of really good logic involved in trying to get something done now,” Rounds added. “That would be helpful for this administration, but absolutely necessary for the next administration.”

The trio of senators working on this year’s immigration compromise have not yet clinched a deal, but their agreement would likely strengthen asylum standards, give the government new expulsion authorities for migrants and potentially curb presidential parole powers.

It would not include a path to citizenship for young, undocumented immigrants; for that and other reasons, it’s a far more conservative template than the 2018 bill. Instead, it would ride alongside a massive foreign aid bill that many Republicans also support.

“It was very different. There’s no path to citizenship in the bill. This isn’t about immigration, this is about border security. It’s a very, very different bill,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who opposed the 2018 legislation but was involved in the talks that produced it.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) was also in the room for those 2018 immigration talks and is now the lead negotiator on a Ukraine-border deal. Lankford has not endorsed Trump yet, though several of the former president’s backers for 2024 are in favor of a deal, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said he hopes Trump wouldn’t be able to tank the bill: “I think there are enough people like Lindsey Graham — who apparently are supporting it — that should help.”

Lankford said he did not read Trump’s comments as fatal, or even that critical.

“He was just saying we need to be able to fix everything,” Lankford said. “I don’t take it as adamantly opposed to this.”

Even if Trump does come out against the legislation, nine or more GOP senators could still shrug off his opposition. McConnell and Trump do not speak, and for now — with McConnell singularly focused on passing the agreement — it appears that the emerging deal could pass the Senate.

But senators want a bigger vote total to put pressure on the House, where the situation is much dicier. Few House Republicans supported the Senate’s recent bipartisan compromises on infrastructure, gun safety and same-sex marriage. Because Johnson faces regular threats to his speakership from the right, he’ll need broad GOP buy-in to call a vote on the Senate’s plan.

“That makes it harder,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah.). “President Trump obviously has a big influence in our party, and on some people more than others.”

But, Romney added, “we need to do something rather than to do nothing.”

Former Rep. Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party following a crescendo of Donald Trump criticism, said Thursday that he’s mulling a return to the GOP and a jump into Michigan’s open Senate contest.

“Contenders for the seat who are uninspired, unserious, and unprepared to tackle the chief impediment to liberty and economic prosperity—an overgrown and abusive government that strives to centralize power and snuff out individualism,” Amash wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, as he laid out his case for possibly entering the contest.

Amash didn’t outline a timeline for a decision but said “the stakes are high: freedom, social cooperation, and human progress itself.”

He gained national attention in 2019 when he became the first Republican to say Trump committed impeachable offenses, later leaving the party to become an independent. He flirted with running for president in 2020 on the Libertarian Party ticket, but ultimately didn’t pursue the bid.

There’s no clear frontrunner right now in the race for the GOP nomination to succeed retiring-Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.). Among the contenders: former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, businessman Sandy Pensler, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) and former Rep. Peter Meijer (R) — who succeeded Amash in Congress and also criticized the former president before recently reversing himself and vowing to support Trump if he wins the party’s 2024 nomination.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers is pushing leadership to allow new moms to utilize proxy voting up to six weeks after giving birth.

The resolution, led by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), would allow moms to spend time with their newborns, and supporters argue it removes a barrier to public service experienced by many women. Just 12 women have given birth while serving in the House.

“This place is completely out of touch with Americans,” Luna said at a press conference. “We’re not going to just let this go. So we will be eventually passing this, we just don’t know when.”

Luna acknowledged “hesitancy” among leadership to adopt the resolution, which Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) chalked up to the possibility both parties “sometimes want to have the members here to have their thumb over” them.

A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Jacobs added: “Anna and I’ve already done the hard work of finding an area where there’s bipartisan agreement, so I’m hopeful that we can have resolution.”

Other members speaking in support included Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii), Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Gaetz.

Burchett said he remains opposed to proxy voting in most cases, citing frequent use of the practice during the Covid pandemic, but called being a new mom a different situation.

“We shouldn’t force new mothers in Congress to choose between representing their constituents and caring for their child,” he said. “Mama should be with that baby.”

The Senate beat back an amendment from Sen. Rand Paul to limit foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza.

It failed 44-50 as the chamber neared a final vote on a short-term government funding patch that would keep the lights on until March.

“The only thing consistent about American foreign aid is that the money continues to flow, regardless of the behavior of the recipients,” Paul (R-Ky.) said. “You would think with the massacre and everything else why would we be giving any money to the Palestinians … shouldn’t they have to do something to earn the money?”

He added: “The time has come for the United States to mean what it says in the defense of human rights.”

Paul’s amendment would also have required a report from the State Department on human rights practices by the Palestinian Authority within 30 days of the adoption of the continuing resolution.

Nearly 200 congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have joined a Supreme Court brief urging the court to side with former President Donald Trump on the question of if he is eligible to be on Colorado’s ballot in the 2024 election.

The Supreme Court agreed to review a December ruling by a Colorado court that barred former President Donald Trump from appearing on the state’s Republican primary ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. The Colorado court cited the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on someone holding “any office … under the United States” if he has “engaged in insurrection.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise led the brief, which included McConnell and 46 Senate Republicans. They argue that the Colorado court decision infringes on congressional powers.

The brief from congressional Republicans does not weigh in on whether the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was an insurrection or not, even though that determination was at the heart of the Colorado court’s decision. Lawmakers spent much of the 37-page filing questioning whether Trump bore responsibility for the violence that day.

“It is hard to imagine an actual insurrectionist quickly asking for peace and encouraging disbandment,” the group writes, focusing on one of many actions Trump took that day to direct the crowd.

McConnell’s signature is particularly notable because he has repeatedly stood by comments he made in the weeks after the Jan. 6 attack, squarely blaming Trump for stoking the violence.

The last time Capitol Hill Republicans backed Trump in large numbers at the Supreme Court was December 2020, when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Their signatures on the earlier brief presaged the Jan. 6 vote itself, during which more than half of House Republicans backed the effort.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling will impact other states weighing blocking Trump from the ballot, including Maine, where a judge on Wednesday put on hold a decision to exclude Trump to wait for the high court’s decision.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this report.

House Democrats are reluctantly preparing to give Speaker Mike Johnson the votes he needs to keep the government open as Congress nears final passage of another stopgap funding measure as soon as Thursday afternoon.

Republican leaders are bringing that spending patch to the floor using a fast-track maneuver that requires two-thirds majority for passage, which will require a large bloc of Democratic support amid entrenched opposition from hardline Republicans. The situation puts Democrats in the awkward position of bailing out a GOP speaker caught between warring factions of his conference — Johnson would be unable to pass the funding bill with Republican votes alone.

Even so, Democratic leaders are urging a “yes” vote on the spending patch.

“The entire session has been the most clusterfuck session that I’ve seen,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), an Appropriations Committee member. But, he added: “You can’t shut down the government.”

Democrats’ readiness to make the stopgap vote easier for Johnson reflects renewed faith among some of them in the speaker’s ability to clinch a longer funding deal now that the deadline is set to slip to March. Now that Johnson has agreed to stick to the funding levels in last year’s bipartisan debt deal despite pressure from his right flank, the opposing party is a bit more prepared to work with him — a political trust fall of sorts.

“It just gives me more confidence that he doesn’t want to shut down the government,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). “It gives me more confidence that he’s not going to cave to the Freedom Caucus and take us to crazy places.”

Things might play out much differently, however, if conservatives push for a vote to oust Johnson to vent their fury with him. A rerun of the painful, chaotic October firing of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy would leave centrist Democrats with a choice between backing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) or bailing out Johnson.

For the moment, as some Democrats start to wonder aloud about the possibility of another speaker-ousting effort, there isn’t much appetite in the party to unconditionally save the conservative Republican. The centrist Blue Dogs are already signaling they wouldn’t lend Johnson a lifeline.

Some Democrats suggested that both parties’ leaders sit down to negotiate over the so-called motion to vacate the speakership. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), said in a brief interview that “there’s some Democrats who are willing to help out. But [Johnson has] got to be able to talk to Hakeem.”

Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), who represents a swing district and had briefly floated voting “present” to protect McCarthy, predicted a “spirited debate” in the caucus over a potential ouster but indicated that Democratic lawmakers would ultimately defer to their leadership.

Democratic leaders have largely batted aside questions about the speaker-tossing motion as hypothetical. Jeffries had pitched a power-sharing agreement with Republicans amid the fallout from McCarthy’s ouster but it largely fell on deaf ears.

Asked Thursday about the motion to vacate, Jeffries told POLITICO: “We’re focused right now on making sure that we avoid an unnecessary partial government shutdown. That’s what’s in front of us right now.”

Others had very little sympathy for Johnson’s predicament.

“He got himself into this mess. He signed up for this. This is what it is to lead,” said Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.).

One month into his term leading the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good is facing a new wave of intra-party attacks — from the Trump campaign to allies of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to, now, a military-focused PAC led by fellow Republicans.

Good is facing a challenge in June’s Virginia GOP primary from State Sen. John McGuire, a former Navy SEAL who last week got endorsed by the board of the SEAL PAC, which aims to elect conservative military veterans to Congress. While Good has endorsed the flagging presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), McGuire is a longtime backer of former President Donald Trump’s 2024 bid.

The SEAL PAC, notably, has its own ties to Trump. It’s led by Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), a former Navy SEAL and Trump Cabinet member. Zinke said in an interview that unlike the “reckless” Good, who’s used his Hill perch to suggest cutting off government funding in a bid to squeeze Democrats into bigger cuts, McGuire understands how damaging a shutdown would be to the country’s military.

“[Good] endorsed Ron DeSantis and continues to be an anti-Trump policy candidate,” Zinke, who served as Trump’s Interior secretary, told POLITICO. “SEAL PAC is proud … to announce it is endorsing McGuire for that seat.”

SEAL PAC is the latest member of a growing list of enemies Good has acquired within his own party. POLITICO first reported on the growing animosity toward Good, including McGuire’s challenge, and McCarthy’s refusal to rule out spending money against the Virginian after Good joined seven other Republicans in voting to oust the former speaker last fall.

“A tremendous amount of House Republicans are tired of Freedom Caucus members who threaten to primary and vacate [the speakership]. There are many more of us than there are of them, and we want to get on with the country’s business,” said one House Republican who is trying to help unseat Good, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the intra-party battle.

This week, Trump’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita also signaled to a local Virginia news outlet that his operation intended to go after Good.

“Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” Chris LaCivita told Cardinal News.

Good has defended his DeSantis endorsement as not motivated by opposition to Trump, but by his desire for a candidate who could serve two terms in the White House. He has reinforced his Trump support this week, touting the former president’s Iowa caucus victory by calling Trump the “best president in my lifetime.”

“I think people in the Fifth District of Virginia like what I’m doing. I’ve kept my word. I’ve been the kind of consistent conservative that they elected me to be and I expect they’ll get it right,” he added.

That did little to stop the intra-GOP attacks.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a Trump and McCarthy ally, slammed Good on Wednesday. Greene claimed that the once Trump-aligned Freedom Caucus, which evicted her from its ranks last year, has misled donors because its leadership is “filled with Never Trumpers led by their new chairman angry disloyal MAGA traitor Bob Good.”

Greene, who was booted from the group in part because of her penchant for publicly criticizing its members, added on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “President Trump is going to win in 24, and he needs loyal America First warriors NOT Congressmen on a power trip who will stab him in the back.”

Despite the outside blowback, Good still commands widespread support in the Freedom Caucus.

“Seriously, she is a distraction,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said of Greene. “And I do not think about anything she says.”

Boebert added that while she is a Trump supporter, conservatives should be free to endorse any presidential candidate: “It doesn’t affect our policies, our positions, and HFC is going to continue to lead the conference in a more conservative direction.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who has endorsed Nikki Haley in the primary, argued that Good could even leverage the outside barbs for his re-election campaign.

“He’s gonna win that race,” Norman said. “Bob is smart enough to do that. Use that as a plus.”

Anthony Adragna contributed.