Robert Mueller scores major victory over Donald Trump

| 8:01 pm EDT April 27, 2018
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Donald Trump’s unhinged, self incriminating, and mentally unstable meltdown on Fox & Friends on Thursday morning served to dominate the news cycle to the point that it left precious little room for any other political news to make the headlines. To that end, even as Special Counsel Robert Mueller scored a major victory over Trump, it managed to remain largely under the radar.

The Senate has long been talking about a bipartisan bill to make it more difficult for Donald Trump to try to fire Robert Mueller. This legislation would be largely symbolic, as even if it passed the Senate, it probably wouldn’t pass the House – and even if it did, there wouldn’t be the votes to override a veto. If Trump did try to fire Mueller he’d be committing an illegal act of obstruction of justice anyway, so it’s not as if Trump would be interested in following the law at that point anyway. So the point such a bill, even if it didn’t become law, would be to send a message to Trump that Republicans in the Senate had no intention of allowing him to fire Mueller.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to make himself look guilty in the Trump-Russia scandal by insisting he won’t allow such a bill to come to the floor for a full vote. But the members of his own party who control the Senate Judiciary Committee went ahead and voted on it yesterday anyway, and it passed committee with a 14-7 vote. Four Republican Senators voted in favor of the pro-Mueller bill, including Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, who have sometimes been on Trump’s side.

We’ll see if McConnell further incriminates himself by keeping the bill from a full Senate vote. But either way, the message has now been sent: some powerful Republican Senators are making clear to Donald Trump that they won’t allow him to fire Robert Mueller, and if he tries, they’ll resort to various other means to stop him. We’ll see what Trump does, but as he becomes even more scared of his own shadow lately, this probably greatly decreases the odds he’ll try to fire Mueller.