Today in Conservative Media is a daily roundup of the biggest stories in the right-wing press.

The New York Times reported last week that President Trump pulled the trigger on firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller only to back down when White House Counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign in opposition to the move. That set off another round of speculation: What happens if Trump actuallydoes it? Sen. Lindsey Graham reissued a dire warning to the Trump White House Sunday that jettisoning Mueller would lead to the end of his presidency. Graham also reupped the idea of legislation designed to protect Mueller from Trump’s whims. On Monday, the editors at National Review took issue with that idea, arguing that any congressional attempt to reign in the president’s executive authority would amount to the realconstitutional crisis.

Prosecution is an executive power. Under Article II, all executive power belongs to the president, which is why the chief executive is empowered to remove all subordinate executive officers without cause. Congress has no power to diminish the executive’s constitutional authority by statute. The courts have no power to interfere with the executive’s constitutional prerogatives, such as terminating underlings or investigations. Thus, a legislative scheme to bar the president from removing the special counsel absent a cause proved to the satisfaction of a federal court would be blatantly unconstitutional.

On Monday evening, the Senate failed to pass a restrictive abortion bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks. The largely symbolic vote that was aimed at putting vulnerable Democrats on the record on the issue was, as expected, unable to overcome a Democratic filibuster by a 51-46 tally. The vote wasn’t a straight party-line affair however; two Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted with the Democrats in opposing the restriction while Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and Joe Donnelly of Indiana voted for the bill. Despite those votes, when it comes to abortion, John McCormack in the Weekly Standard finds pro-life Democrats, whom he calls an “endangered species,” are on the verge of extinction.

In other news

Republicans weren’t too thrilled with the politics intertwined with Sunday night’s Grammys, but Hillary Clinton’s performance was particularly irksome to the conservative set. Kyle Smith at National Review felt that Clinton “embarrassed herself” by reading anti-Trump lit aloud from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. “Leave aside the indignity of Hillary Clinton, a former first lady, secretary of state, and presidential candidate, appearing in a cheap throwaway gag at the Grammys during which she reads a bit from the book Fire and Fury about President Trump’s love of junk food,” Smith writes. “Losers don’t get to taunt winners. This isn’t a matter of sportsmanship, but a matter of dignity: A loser humiliates herself by poking fun at the guy who beat her.” Also unimpressed, Breitbart picked up on Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump’s zing on Fox News about Clinton’s Grammy performance Sunday night, quipping that if Clinton “wanted ‘to read something,’ … the ‘33,000 missing emails that she has somewhere that no one has heard about’” would be a good place to start.

Finally, in the most red-meat quote of the year (so far), Breitbart gobbled up Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s positive appraisal of Trump’s first year in office, describing it as “woke.” McConnell said 2017 as “the best year for conservatives in 30 years.”

• Today in Conservative Media