As Republicans come off a big win with their tax bill, Congress has bought itself four more weeks to strike a spending deal to keep the federal government open.

On Thursday, Congress passed yet another stopgap government funding measure — a continuing resolution — keeping spending levels at status quo until January 19 to buy Congress more time to hash out a deal.

Tensions over government spending have run high in recent weeks, increasing the risk of a shutdown. Democrats have an opportunity to push some of their legislative priorities, like passing protections for undocumented immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which President Donald Trump is ending, and disaster relief funding.

But so far, they haven’t taken too hard a line — and Congress has punted all the biggest legislative fights to 2018. This CR will include temporary funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million kids, through March; temporarily reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the highly controversial law that allows the US to collect information on foreigners overseas without a warrant; and stop a looming sequester law that would have otherwise triggered $25 billion cuts to Medicare and other mandatory spending programs next year.

Now Democrats have to look to January to ensure their legislative priorities. If they hold firm, Republicans, who need at least eight Democrats in the Senate to meet the 60-vote threshold needed to pass a spending bill, will need to make some serious compromises to get a final spending bill through.

Being in the minority in both the House and Senate, Democrats don’t often find themselves in a position to leverage difficult bipartisan policy areas. As with all spending negotiations, this will be a game of chicken between Democrats and Republicans. If Democrats can stick together in withholding votes, Republicans will be forced to cave — or risk presiding over a government shutdown.

There is a lot of pressure for Democrats to get something on immigration — but they’ve folded so far

Minority leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have been meeting with top Republicans and the president on spending bill negotiations. They left the last meeting saying it was “productive” but reached no major agreements.

That’s some progress — but they’ve yet to see any results. Earlier this year, the two top Democrats pulled out of a meeting with Trump on government spending after the president tweeted that he didn’t “see a deal” happening with them. “Problem is they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes,” Trump tweeted.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders are still urging Democrats to keep immigration out of the spending negotiations. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who has been in on DACA negotiations, said a deal would be on the Senate floor in January — it’s not clear whether that would stand alone or be attached to the spending bill.

Ever since Trump said he would put an end to DACA protections, Democrats had said that, first and foremost, they want “clean” passage of the DREAM Act. Short of that, they say they would agree to some additional border security enforcement — but nothing close to what Trump’s White House has proposed.

Schumer said that deal would come by Christmas — but it’s clear that is no longer the case.

As Dara Lind explained for Vox, Democrats take the demands of their immigrant base very seriously these days, which means the amount of wiggle room they have is small. Already, senators like Kamala Harris (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have publicly vowed to oppose any government funding bill unless Congress takes action to protect DREAMers. They did not vote for the stopgap funding bill, likely because of this promise. However, red-state Democrats in the Senate are under more pressure to prevent a government shutdown.

Democrats in the House took a much harder line, with Pelosi telling her ranks to vote against the stopgap spending measure.

Now Democrats have one more opportunity to exercise their leverage on this issue.

"There's a lot of must-pass pieces of legislation that require Democratic support to get them over the finish line, and Democrats have made it clear that if the DREAM Act is not addressed ... they're not going to have any Democrats to get them over the finish line," Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told reporters.

Even if Democrats get in line, Republicans still have a lot of negotiating to do within their ranks around a deal for DREAMers. There are senators like Flake, who have supported the Democratic-backed DREAM Act and who recently received vague assurances from top Republican leaders of a seat at the negotiating table in exchange for a vote on the tax bill.

Others, like Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC), James Lankford (R-OK), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), have proposed the more conservative SUCCEED Act, which would create a 15-year path to citizenship for DACA recipients, would have a “merit-based” residency program for children who arrived in the United States before the age of 16, and wouldn’t allow recipients to sponsor family members to the United States on a green card — a direct nod to Trump’s recent calls against “chain migration.”

Meanwhile, Trump has been very mercurial on the issue. He has expressed sympathy for the DACA recipients but also touted his “tough on immigration” platform, calling down any proposal that offers a path to citizenship.

If Democrats stand firm, he might be forced to make major concessions on that front.

Democrats have a long list of priorities

Democrats have already secured some wins through the budget process. Earlier this year, top Republicans and Democrats came to an agreement on a spending bill for 2017 that nearly half the GOP conference hated. It didn’t fund Trump’s border wall, and it kept out provisions that would defund Planned Parenthood in exchange for an increase to defense funding and some border security money.

This time, however, Democrats are racking up an even longer list of priorities.

“These are all crises being created by congressional Republicans or the president,” one senior Democratic leadership aide said.

1) Trump said he would stop paying Obamacare subsidies — which will make premiums go up for middle- and higher-income people.

Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced a bipartisan health care deal in an effort to stabilize the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. It would fund key insurance subsidies while giving states more flexibility on Obamacare’s regulations.

The bill has overwhelming bipartisan support — but has gotten a lot of pushback from House Republicans. But Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who said she would vote for the tax bill, which repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate, if Republicans passed the Obamacare stabilization package, now says CSRs will be funded in 2018.

It’s highly possible Democrats will use the spending deadline as an opportunity to force Republicans to vote on the Alexander-Murray bill.

2) CHIP is getting a temporary renewal — and Democrats may want to use this deadline to make it more permanent.

Congress let the Children's Health Insurance Program, which covers 9 million kids, expire without a deal to extend the program last September.

This program has widespread bipartisan support, and the Senate is considering a bipartisan deal to extend the program for five years. But the tax bill effort put children’s insurance on hold. A proposal passed by the House attempts to offset CHIP’s cost by taking money from Medicare and the Affordable Care Act to pay for it, which Democrats have pushed back against.

CHIP is typically an easy lift, and Hatch, who oversees the Senate committee with power over the program, keeps saying it will get done. “We’re going to do CHIP — there’s no question about it in my mind,” he said. “But we’ve got to do it the right way. But the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have any money anymore.”

The current stopgap spending bill funds the program through March (and back-pays funding from last October, when the program expired).

Democrats will likely use the spending bills as the path forward to actually get longer-term funding on the books.

3) Relief funding, the border wall, Planned Parenthood, and everything else.

On top of DACA, CHIP, and Obamacare funding, Democrats will still have to put up a fight against a whole host of “nonstarters” that Republicans have been known to propose. For example, Democrats have made it clear that they will not allow funding for the southern border wall that Trump has insisted on since taking office. Every effort to defund Planned Parenthood has also been met with organized Democratic opposition.

And with the natural disasters in Florida, Texas, Puerto Rico, and California, there is already talk of increased relief funding, which fiscally conservative Republicans have grown increasingly reluctant to sign on to. There was a proposal for an $81 billion disaster relief package that is seeing some resistance from Republicans. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Congress will take that up in the new year.

Any one of these issues would be a major agenda item in any congressional term — and leaving them all to the end of the year only raises the stakes for the spending fight.

“We did this in April, and started out with 160 poison pills, the wall, and we sat down and got rid of all the poison pills and [the] wall,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who is the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said. “We did it before, and we’ll do it again.”

Trump has made spending negotiations way more complicated

Trump and congressional Republicans have finished tax reform — which is shaping up to be their only major legislative victory since they gained control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. It certainly won’t be a good look for them if they are unable to keep the government open.

“I can’t think of a bigger act of political malpractice after a successful tax vote than to shut the government down,” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) said. “Talk about stepping on your own message.”

But as with all bills, the final say on the budget is Trump’s. He has to decide whether he will sign anything short of his campaign demands. And it seems he has been less concerned with the prospect of a government shutdown than Republicans leaders are.

Rather, he has raised the stakes of shutdown by throwing so many policy deadlines to Congress on immigration and health care.

In May, Trump was reportedly talked out of vetoing the 2017 spending bill over a lack of wall funding. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess whether he would sign on to a deal that still doesn’t fund the wall but does fund Obamacare subsidies and offers a path to citizenship for DACA recipients — or any one of those.

What we do know is that the political calculus of a government shutdown has shifted over time from complete disaster to possible political strategy — and while Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have been rightfully wary of letting it get to this point, Trump and his conservative allies seem willing to go that far.

It’s possible Trump will get the blame; in the 1995 shutdown, Republicans’ approval ratings dropped, as did those of then-President Bill Clinton. But in the 2013 midterms, while Republicans in Congress again got the blame, President Barack Obama’s approval ratings remained relatively unchanged.

In both cases, as George Washington University political scientist John Sides pointed out, the negative impact was “short-lived.”

“Perhaps the bigger questions are whether it results in concrete policy gains by either side,” Sides said. “Clearly many Republicans believed that the 2013 shutdown didn't really cost them, which vindicated the strategy in their minds.”