KIMBERLY STRASSEL: Reporters only want to talk about Russia, instead of what Team Trump is getting done.
Here’s what actually happened this week, the “news” that holds real consequences for real Americans:
• Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke signed an order to begin reopening Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil and gas exploration, reversing the Obama administration’s ideologically driven 2013 shutdown. The order even aims at opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to production—a move that is decades overdue. This could not only buck up the listless Alaskan economy but cement the U.S. as an oil and gas powerhouse.
• In related news, the Dakota Access Pipeline finally went live.
• The Fish and Wildlife Service took steps that may stop the Obama administration’s last-minute endangered-species listing for the Texas Hornshell, a freshwater mussel. That listing, based on outdated science, threatens significant harm to the Texas economy and was done over the protest of state officials and local industry.
• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross surprisingly said that he was open to completing the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, a far-reaching trade agreement being negotiated with the European Union.
• Sen. John Thune, the upper chamber’s third-ranking Republican, said his caucus had moved beyond meetings and on to “drafting” the base language of an ObamaCare replacement. The No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, vowed the Senate would “absolutely” have a bill by “the end of July at the latest.”
To be fair, since Strassel filed her column, reporters also want to talk about how Trump just doomed the planet to having weather.