The House voted Wednesday to advance a resolution honoring slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, clearing the way for floor debate later this week.

Lawmakers voted in favor of advancing the measure and a bill to avert a government shutdown in a joint mechanism known as a ‘rule vote.’

The rule was adopted in a 216 to 210 vote along party lines. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who is known to be opposing the federal funding bill, was the lone lawmaker from either side to vote ‘present.’

Massie explained to Fox News Digital that he vehemently supports the Kirk resolution, but opposed an unrelated provision in the rule that blocks Congress’ ability from weighing in on tariff policy.

‘I’m a cosponsor of the Kirk resolution, and obviously I will vote for it, but shamefully they turned off Congress’s ability to vote on tariffs with this rule,’ Massie said.

Rule votes are procedural hurdles that commonly tie together unrelated pieces of legislation that, if adopted, allow House lawmakers to debate each measure individually before respective votes. 

The current rule’s adoption means House lawmakers could vote on the resolution to honor Kirk on either Thursday or Friday.

A vote on the measure to avert a government shutdown – a short-term extension of current federal funding levels called a continuing resolution, or CR – is expected Friday morning.

It is not surprising that no Democrats supported the rule’s adoption on Wednesday; rule votes traditionally fall along party lines and have rarely seen bipartisan crossover, even if the legislation they include has wide support from both Republicans and Democrats.

And while Democrats are largely expected to buck the GOP-led government funding patch, the resolution to honor Kirk’s legacy is expected to get healthy bipartisan support.

The Turning Point USA founder was assassinated last week during a college campus speaking event in Utah.

The resolution to honor him, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., lauded Kirk as ‘one of the most prominent voices in America, engaging in respectful, civil discourse across college campuses, media platforms and national forums, always seeking to elevate truth, foster understanding and strengthen the Republic.’

It also said Kirk’s ‘commitment to civil discussion and debate stood as a model for young Americans across the political spectrum, and he worked tirelessly to promote unity without compromising on conviction,’ and it called his killing ‘a sobering reminder of the growing threat posed by political extremism and hatred in our society.’

Both Democrats and Republicans have released statements condemning political violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing.

The latter measure that advanced on Wednesday evening, the CR, will keep government agencies funded at current levels through Nov. 21 of this year – if it’s passed by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Donald Trump.

That bill includes a combined $88 million in added security funds for Congress, the judicial branch and the executive branch.

Conversations about boosting lawmaker security, in particular, had been ongoing but took on new urgency after Kirk’s death.

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sharply criticized Kash Patel’s tenure as FBI director Wednesday, telling reporters that he viewed Patel’s leadership as deeply partisan and a ‘terrible tragedy’ for the nation’s sprawling law enforcement agency. 

Speaking at a news conference alongside former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other House Democrats, Schiff took umbrage at Patel’s testimony one day earlier before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Schiff said further crystallized his concerns about politicization within the bureau.

The FBI ‘has been the premier law enforcement agency in the country, and the world, because they’ve been constantly professional and non-partisan,’ Schiff said Wednesday, noting the close working relationship he had with FBI agents during the years he spent as a federal prosecutor. 

‘It is a terrible tragedy, I think, for the men and women of the bureau to have such poor leadership that is replacing expertise with incompetence, that is replacing non-partisanship with the most rabid partisanship,’ Schiff told Fox News Digital. ‘And this is not unrelated to why we’re here today.’

His remarks come as Patel appeared on Capitol Hill Wednesday for a second day of testimony before the Senate and House Judiciary committees.

Both hearings were marked by sharp lines of questioning from Democrats, who grilled Patel on issues ranging from a flurry of FBI firings, the bureau’s handling of the Epstein files and concerns of politicization, among many other topics.

Schiff, in particular, pressed Patel on his tenure at the FBI, saying the bureau’s agents — mostly assigned to its 52 field offices across the country and loath to see their work politicized — wanted to know what, if any, marching orders Patel had received from President Donald Trump.

The heated back-and-forth devolved into a shouting match between the two as Schiff pressed Patel repeatedly on the firings of FBI agents and whether those individuals were removed for political reasons.

Patel, for his part, described Schiff as a ‘political buffoon.’ 

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Schiff said Patel’s appearance did little to assuage his broader fears of weaponization within the bureau.

‘You can’t have a vibrant democracy without the rule of law,’ he told Fox News Digital. ‘You can’t have the rule of law if you have a weaponized FBI and a weaponized Justice Department, and, sadly, that’s what we have here today,’ Schiff said.

He also weighed in on Patel’s remarks yesterday on the Epstein files, another issue that sparked intense criticism from lawmakers, after Patel claimed Tuesday that there was ‘no credible evidence’ that Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking women other than for himself. 

Schiff said it was a ‘startling claim,’ particularly from someone who had previously promoted the belief that Epstein maintained a vast client list of powerful people.

‘So, it was completely contradictory to everything he said in the past,’ he said. He also noted Patel’s ‘refusal’ to answer his questions on why Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to press Ghislaine Maxwell further on the Cabinet members she identified as being ‘close’ to Epstein or having a relationship with him during a two-day interview in July.

‘Blanche refused to ask who they were and just ignored her comment,’ Schiff added. 

‘And this is, again, the kind of incompetence we’re seeing,’ he said. ‘Incompetence is probably the most polite thing I can describe, but it certainly looks like a cover-up.’

The Justice Department and FBI have struggled to quell the mounting public pressure on them to release more information related to the Epstein investigation, underscoring the story’s sticking power in a fast-moving news cycle and among Trump supporters, who have been some of the leading voices in demanding the information be released.

Former Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., said he spoke more with President Donald Trump in the first two years of Trump’s term than with former President Barack Obama during Obama’s eight years in office.

In his new book, ‘Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense,’ released this week, Manchin outlined a cordial working relationship with Trump and a far chillier, less active back and forth with Obama.

Manchin, who switched from the Democratic Party to become an Independent before retiring from the Senate last year, wrote that he considered Trump a fellow ‘outsider’ when he arrived in Washington, D.C., for his first term and lauded him as the ‘most engaged president I ever worked with’ since former President Bill Clinton.

‘From the start, President Trump had an open line of communication with me,’ he wrote. ‘I spoke to him more in the first two years of his presidency than I did to President Obama during all eight years of his time in office.’

He noted, ‘If you want to have influence with Donald Trump, you have to be the last person he talks to about a topic,’ and said he would jokingly ask that the president ensure he was the last person he called.

‘He’d laugh, and we’d talk it out,’ he said.

He recalled his 2018 election campaign in the wake of Trump’s dominant, 40-point win in the state. Trump told Manchin that he was being pressured to campaign against him and promised he wouldn’t. Ultimately, Trump visited the state five times, but Manchin still came out on top.

He was later invited to the Oval Office to meet with Trump, where, in front of then-Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka Trump, the president ‘blurted to his other guests, ‘I told you we couldn’t beat him,’’ Manchin wrote.

Manchin’s relationship with the former president goes back to his time as governor of West Virginia, when Obama was still a senator. The two worked together on a coal deal in Illinois that had previously excluded West Virginia.

During the 2008 election cycle, he said he invited both then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Obama to come to West Virginia to campaign, but said Obama shook off the invitation and told him, ‘Let’s be honest with each other —­ my demographics don’t work well in your state.’

‘But he didn’t come, and that night belonged to Hillary,’ he wrote. ‘She made the most of her visit and won the primary by 41 points.’

He said their relationship became even chillier when Obama launched his ‘war on coal’ with a push for green initiatives that targeted fossil fuels and states like West Virginia.

Manchin argued that the Democratic Party had grown dismissive and lost touch with the working class as a means to reshape their agenda through a progressive lens. That led to a seismic shift in West Virginia’s political alignment, from Democratic to now largely Republican, he said.

And in the process that began when Obama won in 2008, he said that rural states like his felt ‘overlooked and undervalued.’

‘But that’s exactly how Democrats handled West Virginia, and no one embodied that disconnect more than President Obama,’ he wrote.

Fox News Digital reached out to Obama’s office and the White House for comment but did not immediately hear back. 

I’m writing today about anger.

And I’m ticked off about it.

I actually think it’s America’s biggest problem right now. Half the country hates the other half of the country. And vice versa.

There are online mobs ready to pounce on any available target. That could be loathsome human beings, like the remorseless madman who killed Charlie Kirk.

Or it could be a deranged person at a lower level, like the crazed, screaming woman who stole a Phillies home run ball from a 10-year-old kid. Or the man who brought his assistant and side squeeze to a Coldplay concert and was outed by the Jumbotron — which turned more serious when both were fired.

Can a country withstand so much rage?

Passion is good. Railing at people you don’t know, not so much.

The irony is that the vast majority of these people wouldn’t say such things to you on the street. Then they’d have to deal with your reaction. 

But in the dark expanse of social media, they can spew all kinds of garbage, curse like sailors — especially if they’re hiding behind screen names. That should be punishable by the death penalty — okay, maybe I’m getting too worked up here.

Some public figures harness anger as a political tool. In private, Donald Trump can be funny and charming. But his constant battles–with the media, law firms, universities, big cities, Democrats, judges, prosecutors, critics, adversaries, allies around the world–are fueled by his sense of grievance. Just read his Truth Social page.

I first began covering Trump in New York in the 1980s, and he was the same way. He would pick fights with the likes of Leona Helmsley, knowing it made good copy.

But I could also argue that without the contempt he has for people and institutions who stand in his way, the president wouldn’t be driven to accomplish all that he has in the past eight months.

Elon Musk clearly has the same anger-management issue, having declared ‘the left’ to be ‘the party of murder.’ 

So do such Democrats as Adam Schiff, who relentlessly hammered Kash Patel at a hearing this week, ‘You want the American people to believe that? Do you think they’re stupid?’ And so does the FBI director, ‘You are the biggest fraud to ever sit in the United States Senate, you are a disgrace to this institution, and an utter coward!’

But we all know the game. In our echo-chamber world, you have to be harsher and angrier than the last person to break through the static and have your sound bite featured on cable or X or podcasts. So these institutions reward outrage, faux or otherwise.

Silicon Valley giants make their money from engagement, and nothing fosters engagement like pissed-off people.

The last few Democratic presidents haven’t been purveyors of anger. (putting aside what they’re like behind closed doors). Joe Biden was so secluded we barely heard from him–we now know why–and was a backslapper and conciliator. Barack Obama was all about the audacity of hope. Bill Clinton ran as a southern moderate against the ‘brain-dead’ politics of both parties.

You have to go back to LBJ to find a Democrat who relished beating the crap out of others, based on his years of threats and arm-twisting as Senate majority leader. ‘Ah got Hubert’s pecker in my pocket,’ he would say, and other variations on that quote.

He also said this about disloyal lawmakers: ‘I want him to kiss my ass in Macy’s window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses.’

What has been truly sickening, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s heartbreaking murder, are the sickos who flooded social media to celebrate his demise. 

Professors, teachers, journalists and many others have been fired for such conduct, though they had no need to vent their fury online. They didn’t know Kirk. Who would want to employ someone so heartless that they don’t care about his wife, and the children, 3 and 1, who have to grow up without him?

No wonder I’m angry. This is disgusting and pathetic.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that this is one of the most famous lines in movie history, delivered by the sweating, wild-eyed anchor played by Peter Finch: 

‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’

The U.S. on Wednesday once again took aim at Iran and targeted its Axis of Resistance by designating four Iraq-based militias as Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

According to the State Department, the groups identified were Harakat al-Nujaba, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya and Kata’ib al-Imam Ali – all four of which were previously designated by the Department of Treasury as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) in 2023. 

‘Iran-aligned militia groups have conducted attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and bases hosting U.S. and Coalition forces, typically using front names or proxy groups to obfuscate their involvement,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in the statement.

According to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the four groups are all backed by Iran and form the core of an umbrella organization known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI), which gained prominence following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

The IRI is believed to be responsible for hundreds of attacks in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and was behind the killing of three U.S. service members during a drone attack in January 2024 in Jordan. 

‘The Trump administration broke the taboo during term one when it proved it could name, shame, and punish Iran-backed militias in Iraq without the country devolving into civil war,’ Behnam Ben Taleblu, Iranian expert and senior director of the FDD’s Iran program, told Fox News Digital. ‘Now in term two the administration is upping the ante continuing a campaign of designations against the agents of influence and terror of Iran in Iraq.’

The four terrorist groups also operate within the Popular Mobilization Forces, which is a coalition force of largely Shia groups that was formed to counter ISIS by the Iraqi government, but which is also strongly influenced by Iran. 

‘Tehran relies on these militias to literally have a state within a state in Iraq,’ Ben Taleblu said. ‘Sandwiching these and other Iran-backed terror groups between Treasury Department [Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons] SDN listings and State Department [Foreign Terrorist Organizations] FTO listings, as the Trump administration previously did with their patron, the IRGC, in term one is the right approach.’