The U.S. government shutdown ended this week after Democrats agreed to fund another stopgap bill to fund the government for an additional three weeks. In addition to tying over the government until February, the bill also provides funding for the popular Children's Health Insurance Program for another six years. Still, hot-button issues have yet to be resolved, particularly immigration reform, DACA, and Trump's hypothetical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The end of the funding freeze was quickly eclipsed by a bombshell report from the New York Times revealing that President Trump ordered the firing of Robert S. Mueller III, who is currently overseeing the investigation into the possibility of collusion with Russia during the 2016 Presidential Election. When confronted at the Congress Center in Davos, Switzerland on Friday, Trump dismissed the report, saying, "Fake news, folks... Fake news. A typical New York Times fake story."
But the report has been corroborated by multiple White House sources familiar with the issue. Trump allegedly claimed that Mueller was not fit for leading the Russia probe due to numerous conflicts of interest, the first of which being that Mueller had quit a Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia over a dispute aboutmembership fees. The other conflicts of interest mentioned were that Mueller had recently worked for a law firm that had represented Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, and that he had been interviewed to return as FBI director the day before he was appointed special counsel last spring.
However, when Trump ordered Mueller's firing, White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II refused to convey the command to the Justice Department, and declared that he would resign if he was pressed to do so. Though Trump has already raised many eyebrows with his unorthodox presidential behavior, some feel that firing Mueller would destroy any semblance of legitimacy in the administration. Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham stated on ABC's This Week that, "It's pretty clear to me that everybody in the White House knows that it'd be the end of President Trump's presidency if he fired Mr. Mueller." And yet, as there is no precedent to this situation, the real-world consequences of Mueller's potential firing remain hypothetical.
In terms of policy, this week marked a continuation of the Trump administration rolling back environmental regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was withdrawing its "once in, always in" policy on factories and manufacturers that are considered major sources of air pollution. Since the policy was introduced in 1995, such companies have been required to update their technology and comply with strict regulations to reduce their hazardous emissions, and once a company was on the EPA's watch list, it was never removed. The new policy will allow such companies to drop off the list once they meet the minimum requirements needed to be considered non-hazardous. Environmental groups have slammed the decision, which weakens a policy considered the "bedrock" of America's air protection legislation. Industry groups, however, are celebrating the decision.
