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Immigration, energy, abortion: Scalise announces first legislation for House GOP

House Republicans will focus on IRS funding, energy production, immigration, crime and abortion with their first items of legislative business after they take control of the House next week.

Steve Scalise (R-La.), the incoming House majority leader, announced on Friday a slate of eight bills and three resolutions that he will bring up in the first two weeks of the 118th Congress.

“The American people spoke on November 8th and decided it was time for a new direction. The last two years have been tough on hard-working families as they have grappled with drastic increases in the cost of living, safety concerns with violent crime skyrocketing in our communities, soaring gas and home heating prices, and a worsening crisis at our Southern border,” Scalise said in a letter to colleagues on Friday. “In the 118th Congress, we will work to address these problems by passing bills that will improve the lives of all Americans.”

None of the legislative items appear likely to pass in a Democratic-controlled Senate and signal that Republicans will put a heavy focus on messaging as they control the chamber in a divided Washington for the next two years.

The first bill, as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) revealed in September, will rescind a boost to IRS funding that passed as part of Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act in August. Republicans have repeatedly falsely said the boost will authorize 87,000 new IRS agents, but that estimate includes support staff and non-agent IRS employees and replacements for those who leave over a decade.

Two of the GOP bills concern the country’s management of petroleum and energy production.

One bill would prohibit “non-emergency drawdowns of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve” without a plan to boost energy production on federal lands. Republicans have heavily criticized President Biden for releasing oil from the strategic reserve.

Another bill would restrict the Energy secretary from selling petroleum from the strategic reserve to China.

In two other bills, the House GOP turns its focus to immigration and border issues.

The Border Safety and Security Act would allow the Homeland Security secretary to turn away certain migrants in order to achieve “operational control” at the border. Republicans have repeatedly accused Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of not meeting the legal standard of “operational control” at the border by preventing unlawful entries and contraband.

Another bill would require the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is used during sales of firearms, to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement if a person in the U.S. illegally attempts to buy a firearm.

Two more of the bills revolve around abortion, an issue that helped define the midterms after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade over the summer. But Republicans are not proposing any kind of national abortion restriction.

They will bring up the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would require care to be given to an infant who survives an abortion procedure. Democrats have argued that a 2002 law already guarantees infants’ legal rights.

Another would permanently codify the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion procedures, and expands the prohibition to bar federal funding for insurance plans that offer elective abortion.

Additionally, Scalise said he will bring up a resolution condemning recent attacks on anti-abortion centers and churches.

The House will also establish a select committee on China, which will formally be called the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The select committee has been a longtime priority of McCarthy, and he has announced Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) as his pick to chair the panel. Republicans have expressed optimism about the potential for bipartisan cooperation in that committee on China policy.

Lastly, House Republicans aim to address crime with a bill to require prosecutors to report how many cases they decline to prosecute and other metrics and a resolution to express support for law enforcement and condemn efforts to defund or dismantle such agencies.

The legislative slate comes as Republicans have still not formalized committee assignments or chairs for contested posts and as McCarthy faces opposition that threatens to keep him from becoming Speaker. Republicans have also repeatedly criticized Democrats for not bringing bills to the floor through the regular order of going through committees first.

Scalise addressed matters of regular order and the lag in organizing committees in his letter to colleagues.

“We understand that developing a good process will lead to better legislative outcomes. Returning to work in person, empowering each committee, moving legislation through regular order, encouraging Member input, and allowing adequate time to read legislation will be major priorities of our incoming majority. We are excited to make those principles a reality in the House,” Scalise said. 

“We do also recognize that it will take some time for our committees to organize and start moving legislation through regular order. In the meantime, we will begin bringing up meaningful, ‘ready-to-go’ legislation in the House.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Southwest faces lingering questions after winter storm meltdown

Southwest Airlines restored its flight schedule on Friday, ending a weeklong stretch of mass cancellations that disrupted millions of travelers’ holiday plans. 

After canceling roughly two-thirds of its flights since the start of the long holiday weekend, Southwest canceled just 1 percent of its Friday trips, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. 

But questions remain about how quickly Southwest can make customers whole, whether it can prevent this kind of meltdown from happening again and how lawmakers and regulators in the nation’s capital will respond to the fiasco. 

Southwest promises reimbursements 

Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said Friday that the airline will cover stranded travelers’ unexpected costs, a key sticking point for enraged customers. 

“We’ll be looking at and taking care of things like rental cars, hotel rooms, meals, booking customers on other airlines, so that will all be part of what we’re covering here as we reimburse our customers and make good on this issue,” Jordan said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”  

Southwest executives said Thursday that it will take several weeks to process requests. The airline launched a page for travelers to ask for refunds and reimbursements, and another to help thousands of passengers find their lost luggage. 

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has pressured Southwest to promptly reimburse travelers, warning that he would use his authority to levy fines against the airline if it doesn’t make customers whole. 

“No amount of financial compensation can fully make up for passengers who missed moments with their families that they can never get back — Christmas, birthdays, weddings, and other special events,” Buttigieg wrote in a letter to Jordan Thursday.  

“That’s why it is so critical for Southwest to begin by reimbursing passengers for those costs that can be measured in dollars and cents.” 

Buttigieg said that customers should submit a complaint to his department if Southwest denies them compensation. 

An unprecedented meltdown 

While last week’s winter storms forced other airlines to cancel a relatively small number of flights, they completely derailed Southwest’s antiquated scheduling system, which employees say has needed an overhaul for years.  

At the height of the crisis, Southwest was unable to locate many of its pilots and flight attendants, let alone route them to the correct plane. Southwest had to cancel nearly two-thirds of its trips to get the situation under control. 

“I’ve been around the business for close to half a century, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Rob Britton, a former American Airlines executive who teaches crisis management at Georgetown University. “We’ve seen other outages and debacles, but all of those things pale in comparison to this absolute mess.” 

Southwest’s Jordan said Friday that the airline faced worse weather impacts than its competitors — the winter storm hit two of its largest hubs — but acknowledged that Southwest needed to make more investments in its operations.  

“It really was the scope of the problems attempting to be solved, just to move crews around, keep the airline moving,” Jordan said.  

Southwest employees warned for years that the airline was prioritizing short-term profits and investor rewards instead of updating its aging infrastructure.  

Southwest shelled out $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the three years leading up to the pandemic and was the first major airline to reinstate its dividend when restrictions attached to federal COVID-19 relief expired.  

“Years in the making, this meltdown happened because Southwest’s management lost touch with its employees and became fixated on accounting metrics, stock buybacks and institutional investors,” Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, wrote in an opinion piece Friday. 

Murray predicted in November that Southwest was “one IT router failure away from a complete meltdown” during a busy travel period such as Christmas. He added that the airline should “release a clear plan and timeline for replacing Southwest’s IT infrastructure and obsolete crew-scheduling systems.” 

Other experts have blamed Southwest’s point-to-point system, which allows the airline to offer more direct flights than its competitors but can strand crew members when things go wrong. 

Customers reported being unable to reach Southwest representatives for days to reschedule their flight or locate their luggage.  

Things were only made worse because Southwest does not have any interline agreements with its competitors. Those deals, which are struck between several of the top carriers, would have allowed Southwest travelers to rebook their flight on another airline with relative ease. 

How will Washington respond? 

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are promising to investigate Southwest, which received more than $7 billion in federal aid from Congress to keep its employees on the payroll and operations intact during the pandemic.  

But lawmakers haven’t expressed interest in passing legislation to address the meltdown and ensuing customer complaints. Instead, they’re putting pressure on Buttigieg to crack down on Southwest and other carriers using laws already on the books. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) criticized Buttigieg on Twitter Thursday, arguing that the meltdown could have been avoided if the secretary had instituted tougher rules that would result in fines if airlines overbooked flights or canceled flights at the last minute.  

While Buttigieg issued record fines against Frontier Airlines and a handful of foreign carriers in November for violating refund rules, Khanna tweeted that the penalties were “inadequate” and “didn’t go after the worst offenders,” referring to the big four carriers. 

A DOT spokesperson said that airlines agreed to provide free rebooking and pay for food and lodging in the case of cancellations after Buttigieg urged them to improve their customer service plans in August.   

“The department will hold Southwest Airlines accountable, including pursuing fines against the carrier if there is evidence that the carrier has failed to meet its legal obligations,” the spokesperson said.

All eyes are on Buttigieg’s proposed airline refund rule that would require airlines to give timely cash refunds to customers when their flight is canceled or significantly delayed.  

Senate Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) called for the rule to require covering secondary costs such as travel, lodging and food. A group of 34 bipartisan state attorneys general said it should include penalties for airlines that sell tickets without having adequate staffing.  

The department is beginning the process of reading through thousands of comments on the rule after the comment period expired on Dec. 16.  

Source: TEST FEED1

Trump blasts Democrats, Supreme Court after House releases tax returns

Former President Trump ripped Democratic lawmakers Friday for releasing several years of his tax returns, warning of dire consequences for the nation while touting his ability to avoid paying income taxes.

“The Democrats should have never done it, the Supreme Court should have never approved it, and it’s going to lead to horrible things for so many people. The great USA divide will now grow far worse,” Trump said in a statement issued shortly after House Democrats released six years of his personal and business tax returns.

“The ‘Trump’ tax returns once again show how proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions as an incentive for creating thousands of jobs and magnificent structures and enterprises,” he continued.

Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees tax policy and the IRS, on Friday released redacted versions of Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2015 through 2020. The panel released a report last week summarizing Trump’s records, which showed how the former president avoided paying taxes in several years by using tax credits and policies meant to encourage business investment. 

The Ways and Means Committee’s investigation also revealed that Trump was not audited during the first two years of his presidency despite the IRS’s policy of annually auditing the president.

The committee received Trump’s tax returns earlier this year after the Supreme Court struck down a lawsuit from him to protect them, ending a two-year legal battle over the documents. 

Trump was the first president since Richard Nixon not to release any of his tax returns to the public while in office, refusing repeated requests to do so throughout his presidency.

Democratic lawmakers who sought Trump’s returns argued that it was essential for Americans to know if the former president was following federal law and if the IRS was fulfilling its duty to audit the president. 

“A president is no ordinary taxpayer. They hold power and influence unlike any other American. And with great power comes even greater responsibility,” said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) in a Friday statement.

“We are only here today because four years ago, our request to learn more about the program … was denied,” Neal continued.

Trump and GOP lawmakers countered that there was no legitimate reason for Congress to seek Trump’s personal financial information and denounced the Democratic efforts as a political witch hunt.

“Democrats have charged forward with an unprecedented decision to unleash a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president, overturning decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since Watergate,” Rep. Kevin Brady (Texas), the ranking Republican on Ways and Means, said in a Friday statement.

“This is a regrettable stain on the Ways and Means Committee and Congress, and will make American politics even more divisive and disheartening. In the long run, Democrats will come to regret it,” he continued.

Updated at 12:09 p.m.

Source: TEST FEED1

READ: Trump's business taxes released by House Ways and Means

The House Ways and Means Committee on Friday released six years’ worth of former President Trump’s tax returns, totaling more than 45 documents with hundreds of pages.

The reveal comes after a years-long battle to release the information.

Here are a look at Trump’s business taxes from 2015 to 2020.

Source: TEST FEED1

READ: Trump's personal taxes released by House Ways and Means

The House Ways and Means Committee on Friday released six years’ worth of former President Trump’s tax returns, totaling more than 45 documents with hundreds of pages.

The reveal comes after a years-long battle to release the information.

Here is a look at Trump’s personal taxes from 2015 to 2020.

Source: TEST FEED1

Ways and Means panel releases Trump’s tax returns

The House Ways and Means Committee released six years of former President Trump’s business and individual tax returns on Friday, totaling 46 documents with hundreds of pages and more than a gigabyte’s worth of data.

The dump of raw returns comes in the final hours of Democratic control of the House and a week after they were summarized in two congressional reports that found Trump was reporting huge losses, greatly offsetting his tax liability, in some cases reducing it to zero.

The reports from the Ways and Means Committee and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) also found that Trump was not being regularly audited by the IRS, in an apparent violation of IRS policy, which mandates that sitting presidents are to be audited under normal IRS procedures.

Tax experts say they are interested to get a closer look at Trump’s accounting methods and the ways he was able to get out of paying taxes.

Trump reported large business losses, usually in the tens of millions of dollars, in every tax return obtained by the Ways and Means Committee. Several of these losses derive from a larger $105 million loss that was then spread out to reduce Trump’s tax liability.

This is an established accounting practice to get out of paying taxes in the real estate industry, tax experts say.

“The losses seem to be from K-1s (Partner’s share on income and Deductions) received from entities and partnerships that he has shares in,” New York tax attorney Steven Goldburd said in an email to The Hill. “As a real estate professional he is entitled to take these losses. These losses can be from actual losses, but more likely from real estate depreciation expenses. These entities may not actually [be] losing money, but in fact have the depreciation that are wiping out the partnership’s income.”

Analysts are also looking at foreign bank accounts and payment information that may give a clearer picture of Trump’s relationship abroad.

“I’m going to be looking for things like foreign ownership, foreign accounts, foreign ownership of Trump businesses, payments to foreigners,” Steve Rosenthal, an expert with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, said in an interview. “There’s bound to be some items that may yet pop out to external reviewers that [the JCT] missed.”

The Committee released returns on eight of Trump’s nearly 500 business entities. Those eight returns comprise two of Trump’s branding trademarks, three that pertain to his golf club in Bedminster, New York, and two high-level holding companies that contain the others.

“Those two upper-tier entities sit at the top of Trump’s LLC empire. The numbers all roll into those, and I’d like to see some aggregate numbers there,” Rosenthal said.

Democrats released the tax returns as part of a probe into the IRS’s presidential audit program, but Republicans interpret the release as a personal attack against Trump.

“With the publicly released transcript of Democrats’ secret executive session, Americans now have confirmation that there was never a legislative purpose behind the public release of these confidential records and that the IRS was conducting audits prior to Democrats’ request,” Ways and Means Republican leader Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said in a statement on Friday.

“Despite these facts, Democrats have charged forward with an unprecedented decision to unleash a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president, overturning decades of privacy protections for average Americans that have existed since Watergate.”

Brady also warned of future committee actions related to the release of personal tax returns. The Ways and Means Committee will be led by Republicans when control of the House switches next week.

“Going forward, all future Chairs of both the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee will have nearly unlimited power to target and make public the tax returns of private citizens, political enemies, business and labor leaders or even the Supreme Court justices themselves,” Brady said.

Source: TEST FEED1

The Hill's Morning Report — Committee to release Trump's fill tax returns on Friday

Editor’s note: The Hill’s Morning Report is our daily newsletter that dives deep into Washington’s agenda. To subscribe, click here or fill out the box below.

Former President Trump’s actual tax returns are set to be released on Friday, following the release last week of six years of tax return information as part of reports into the presidential audit program. The documents revealed that Trump wasn’t being regularly audited by the IRS and was reporting big business losses each year.

While tax experts aren’t expecting huge revelations from the raw returns for 2015 to 2020, the more detailed documents could provide additional information on key areas of interest regarding the former president’s businesses and professional associations, writes The Hill’s Tobias Burns.

“Those of us who are interested in his relationship with Russia will be looking for any kind of confirmation of what Don [Trump] Jr. said in 2008 that Trump interests had received much of their money from Russian sources,” former CIA officer and journalist Frank Snepp told the Hill. 

Meanwhile, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is closing up its business with the release of thousands of pages of transcripts — and the interviews with various people surrounding Trump have included a number of bombshells. The Hill’s Stephen Neukam has rounded up the five most interesting things mentioned in the interviews, from the allegation that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned documents during the transition, to indications that the committee agreed to shield the testimony of a number of witnesses from the Department of Justice — including those dealing with criminal proceedings stemming from the Capitol breach.

▪ The Hill: Trove of Jan. 6 panel depositions offers new insights on fateful day.

▪ NBC News: Federal judge says Trump may have signaled to supporters “to do something more” than just protest.

▪ The Hill: Donald Trump Jr. details efforts to sway father on Jan. 6 in panel deposition.

Minority Leader and House Speaker hopeful Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is in the very last stretch before the Speakership elections on Jan. 3. Some members expect the Speakership fight to go to multiple ballots and possibly last days, as infighting between GOP lawmakers is threatening to derail the proceedings (NY1).

The fight over the gavel could have an unintended victim: House staff. As Politico reports, guidelines sent to committees lay out a messy, complicated process for how the race will have a trickle-down effect on everything from paying committee staff to student loan repayments. 

“Committees need to be aware that should a House Rules package not be adopted by end of business on January 13 no committee will be able to process payroll since the committee’s authority for the new Congress is not yet confirmed,” according to the memo sent out to House committees.

Politico: Battleground Republicans say they’ll only vote for McCarthy for speaker. More than a dozen GOP lawmakers, including members-elect, wrote in a letter that they would not back any “so-called shadow ‘consensus candidate.’”

Related Articles

▪ The Hill: Questions loom at CNN after difficult year. 

▪ Politico: The presidential race is entering a new phase. Here’s who’s best positioned.

▪ Vox: The best, worst, and just plain dumb of American politics in 2022.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ MORE POLITICS

Rep.-elect George Santos’ (R-N.Y.) general election opponent on Thursday called for a House investigation into Santos over biographical fabrications he told on the campaign trail.

“We call upon Congress and demand Congress conduct a House ethics investigation into George Santos,” Robert Zimmerman (D) said Thursday.

Zimmerman’s comments come a day after Republican District Attorney Anne Donnelly promised to prosecute Santos if he committed any crimes. Federal and state authorities are also probing Santos’s finances and fabricated backstory he spoke about while he ran for office — concerning where he worked, went to school and even volunteered (Politico).

▪ The Washington Post: A tiny newspaper on Long Island broke the Santos scandal, but no one paid attention.

▪ The New York Times: What can the House do to address Santos’s falsehoods?

▪ The Washington Post: Santos said 9/11 “claimed my mother’s life.” She died in 2016.

The outgoing Democratic Congress has proved a disappointment for immigration activists, writes The Hill’s Rafael Bernal. Over the past two years, a number of immigration reform bills simmered on the legislative back burner and sometimes caught flickers of national attention, but leadership never found the right time to give immigrants top billing.

Republicans are expected to crack down on environmental and socially conscious investing, known as environmental, social and governance investing (ESG), when they retake the House next year. The broad term encompasses attempts to invest ethically, and can include actions by the government, investment firms and banks or individuals. 

But GOP members argue that ESG could harm the fossil fuel industry — the main driver of climate change — and that the government should not be providing incentives to foster it (The Hill).

▪ The Hill: Treasury delays new restrictions for electric vehicle tax credits, drawing Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) ire.

▪ Politico: Senate GOP dealmakers depart just as Congress control splits.

As defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s (R) election challenge nears an end, GOP strategists suggest she may soon take a conservative media gig or perhaps pursue national political aspirations, writes The Hill’s Zach Schonfeld. Whatever path she takes, they stress that her staunch views won’t win over Arizona independents and moderate Republicans. 

The White House launched its first major broadside in response to incoming House Republicans who are likely to spearhead aggressive oversight of the administration. In letters to those lawmakers, a top lawyer for the president pledged that the administration would operate in good faith with them, but also said that oversight demands made by congressional Republicans during the last Congress would have to be restarted (Politico).

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ INTERNATIONAL

Russia attacked Ukrainian cities with scores of missiles in one of its heaviest barrages of the war, pressing further with a campaign to destroy civilian targets as officials in Moscow denounced the prospects of peace talks in the coming months (Bloomberg News and Reuters).

“Senseless barbarism,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. “These are the only words that come to mind seeing Russia launch another missile barrage at peaceful Ukrainian cities ahead of New Year.” 

For months Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has asked Western countries for further air defense help to combat the Russian attacks. The United States last week announced nearly $2 billion in additional military aid, including the Patriot air defense system, which offers protection against aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping via video conference, where Putin said Xi would make a state visit to Russia in spring 2023, marking a public show of solidarity from Beijing for the war in Ukraine. Putin added the visit would “demonstrate to the world the closeness of Russian-Chinese relations” (Reuters and CNN).

▪ The Atlantic: How China is using Putin.

▪ Reuters: Most Ukraine regions suffer power outages after Russian missile barrage.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: The bravery and the recklessness of Ukraine’s improvised army.

Israel’s government was sworn in Thursday, putting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back in charge of a right-wing and religiously conservative administration that will likely test ties with the United States and Europe, amid fears that it will undermine the country’s democracy and stability.

The policies the government — Israel’s most right-wing to date — has pledged to pursue have raised concerns about increased tensions with Palestinians, the undermining of Israel’s judicial independence and a rollback of protections for the LGBTQ and other marginalized communities (The New York Times).

Biden on Thursday marked Netanyahu’s swearing-in by saying that his administration will continue to support the two-state solution in the Middle East, warning that he will oppose policies that endanger it (The Hill).

The Washington Post: Pelé, Brazil’s “king of soccer,” dies at 82. Quick, agile, adept with both feet and laser-like with his headers, he helped Brazil win three World Cup titles.

OPINION

■ Sudden Russian death syndrome, by Elaine Godfrey, contributor, The Atlantic. https://bit.ly/3YRNvJH 

■ Why 2022 was a very good year, by Jonathan Alter, contributor, The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/3vn0zJt

WHERE AND WHEN

🎆 Happy New Year from us at Morning Report! We hope you had a wonderful 2022, and can’t wait to keep you informed about all the newsy things 2023 is sure to have in store. Kristina Karisch will be back in your inboxes on Jan. 3, and Alexis Simendinger returns to the newsletter on Jan. 4.

👉 The Hill: Share a news query tied to an expert journalist’s insights: The Hill launched something new and (we hope) engaging via text with Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack. Learn more and sign up HERE.

The House will convene on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

The Senate will convene at 9:30 a.m. for a pro forma session.

The president has no public schedule. He and first lady Jill Biden are in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands, with their family.

The vice president is in Los Angeles with second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

The first lady is in St. Croix with the president.

ELSEWHERE

➤ AIR TRAVEL

Progressives are taking aim at Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over the Southwest Airlines holiday travel fiasco that continues to cause mass delays and cancellations across the country. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a leading left-wing lawmaker, took to Twitter on Thursday to question the Transportation Department’s handling of the debacle, referencing a June recommendation from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) asking department officials to demand airlines compensate travelers for canceled or significantly delayed flights and cover their basic expenses like food and accommodations (The Hill).

“We’ve never seen a situation, at least not on my watch, with this volume of disruptions, so this is going to take an extraordinary level of effort by Southwest,” Buttigieg said in a televised interview with ABC earlier this week. “And we will mount an extraordinary effort to make sure that they’re meeting their obligations.” 

Southwest, which has been caught in a vexing tangle of misplaced staff, thousands of canceled flights and technical problems since last week’s storm, said Thursday that it plans to return to normal operations on Friday “with minimal disruptions.” According to FlightAware, more than 2,300 of Southwest’s flights — or about 58 percent — were canceled on Thursday (The New York Times). The Wall Street Journal reports that employee volunteers rebuilt crew schedules manually after storm disruptions overwhelmed systems and led to thousands of canceled flights.

▪ Bloomberg News: Southwest’s silver lining: memories of gaffes fade fast.

▪ The Wall Street Journal: Southwest promises to reimburse customers affected by meltdown.

➤ PANDEMIC & HEALTH 

Hospitals across the country have experienced near-constant crises since the pandemic hit in 2020, Vox reports. In addition to the persistent threat of COVID-19, there were unexpectedly brutal waves of respiratory syncytial virus last summer and again in the fall. Monkeypox put hospitals on high alert for a very different kind of infectious disease.

The fragility of the U.S. health care system was laid bare by the pandemic. Heading into 2023, there is little sign of relief for overworked and overwhelmed health care providers.

“The future is not next year. The future is 10 years from now that you’re working on right now,” said Terry Scoggin, CEO of Titus Regional Medical Center in Mount Pleasant, Texas. “It’s hard to get people to think about 10 years from now when they haven’t gotten over what happened 10 months ago.”

The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) process for approving the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, was “rife with irregularities,” according to the report from a congressional investigation, which was released on Thursday. The report shows the agency’s actions “raise serious concerns about FDA’s lapses in protocol,” in approving a drug that harbored great concerns over efficacy. The 18-month investigation, initiated by two congressional committees after the FDA approved the drug, also strongly criticized Aduhelm’s manufacturer, Biogen (The New York Times).

▪ The Hill: Biden administration seeks to rescind Trump-era “conscience” protections for health workers.

▪ The New York Times: After half a century, Anthony Fauci prepares for life after government.

Information about COVID-19 vaccine and booster shot availability can be found at Vaccines.gov.

Total U.S. coronavirus deaths reported as of this morning, according to Johns Hopkins University (trackers all vary slightly): 1,092,456. Current U.S. COVID-19 deaths are 2,530 for the week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The CDC shifted its tally of available data from daily to weekly, now reported on Fridays.)

THE CLOSER

And finally …  👏👏👏 Bravo to winners of this week’s Morning Report Quiz! We asked about political moments that defined 2022 and readers delivered. Thank you to everyone who’s answered the quiz for your thoughtful guesses each week.

Here’s who Googled or guessed their way into The Hill’s championship trivia team: Paul Harris, Patrick Kavanagh, Cliff Grulke, Bob McLellan, Jane Heaton, Charles Hantl, Amanda Fisher, David Peikin, Richard Fanning, Barton Schoenfeld, Neil Bergsman, Harry Strulovici, Vita Treano, Steven Abern, Mike Purdy, Barbara Golian, Jack Barshay, Randall Patrick, Dom Sacco, Steve James, Joan Domingues, Corinne Khederian, Jerry LaCamera, Stan Wasser and Luther Berg.

They knew that when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) mixed up the Gestapo and the Spanish cold soup gazpacho — resulting in the ever-memorable term “gazpacho police” — she was criticizing routine security checks by the Capitol Police.

They knew that prior to assuming the presidency in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky had a career as a comedian. 

They knew Liz Truss cemented her record-breaking short term as U.K. prime minister when she resigned after only 44 days in office. 

And finally, they knew that much of Sen.-elect John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) social media strategy hinged on trolling Republican opponent Mehmet Oz’s long-term residence in New Jersey.

Stay Engaged

We want to hear from you! Email: Alexis Simendinger and Kristina Karisch. Follow us on Twitter (@asimendinger and @kristinakarisch) and suggest this newsletter to friends!

Questions loom at CNN after difficult year 

CNN is facing a turning point in 2023, after a bruising year that brought significant change to the network’s corporate structure, editorial leadership and programming.   

People inside and around the network for much of 2022 have described a feeling of unease, which was punctuated by a round of layoffs rolled out in December by new president Chris Licht.  

Licht is the new man in charge at the cable news giant, tasked with increasing the network’s dipping profitability amid a bleak economic outlook for all major news organizations.   

Licht took over in May, replacing Jeff Zucker following the company’s sale to media conglomerate Discovery. One of Licht’s first tasks was shuttering its heavily promoted paid subscription streaming service, CNN+, less than a month after it launched.  

The failure of CNN+ underlined the corporate divisions that have made Licht’s job so difficult. CNN’s previous management was sold on the new streaming service, but its new leaders were against it even as they negotiated to buy the larger TimeWarner from AT&T.   

The CNN+ move, which reportedly caused hundreds of employees to lose their jobs, was unsettling to many inside the network and prompted Licht to say at the time he did not anticipate further cuts at the outlet.  

But it was an inauspicious start that is haunting the network and Licht heading into 2023. 

“I still don’t think there’s any confidence in him, that he can articulate a vision, or that he can take us where he says he wants to go,” one source at the network told The Hill this week. “And no matter how hard he tries, he’s not going to disabuse anyone of the notion of more layoffs coming in 2023.”  

Licht has acknowledged the underlying anxiety at the network, telling the journalist Kara Swisher in a November interview such apprehension is “completely understandable,” given what has transpired since he took over. 

“Look, that’s the beauty of working with journalists,” Licht said. “They want to know what’s the plan? This is a group of people that will follow me to the end of the earth if they believe I know what the hell I’m doing and that there’s a plan.”

CNN did not comment for this story.

Under Zucker, CNN enjoyed a boon in ratings, but had developed a reputation as being aggressively anti-Trump in its programming and overly combative in its coverage of the former president. Licht has signaled an interest in shifting that perception.  

“At a time where extremes are dominating cable news,” Licht told advertisers during CNN’s UpFront session just days after taking over, “we will seek to go a different way, reflecting the real lives of our viewers and elevating the way America and the world views this medium.”   

During his first months on the job, Licht has made a series of editorial moves that raised eyebrows inside and outside the network, particularly with progressives who saw CNN as offering too much of an olive branch to GOP or conservative viewers.  

Licht has pushed back forcefully on characterizations that he is dragging CNN to the political center.    

“The uninformed vitriol, especially from the left, has been stunning,” Licht told The New York Times in comments published this month. “Which proves my point: so much of what passes for news is name-calling, half-truths and desperation.”  

John Malone, the cable news magnate who sits on the board of CNN’s new parent company Discovery, before the sale and Licht’s hiring said he “would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists.”  

Licht has repeatedly said he is on the same page as WarnerBros. Discovery Chair David Zazlav and CNN’s other corporate leaders.  

In the end, his success may come down to ratings and revenue. Cable networks are generally seeing ratings dip, though declines at CNN have been the sharpest. In total day viewers this year, Fox News averaged 1.4 million compared to 733,000 who watched MSNBC and less than half a million at CNN, according to Nielsen Media Research figures.

“The underlying issues that will impact Licht’s tenure will be economic. And they will be driven by a board that wants to see its stock price rise,” said Margot Susca, an associate professor of journalism at American University with expertise in the economics of news companies. “This company is still 50 billion dollars in debt and doesn’t have the Trump bump. … It’s lost Trump driving audiences. I don’t think his [Licht] decisions should be looked at as political decisions; his decisions should be looked at through the lens of economics.”   

In September, Licht canceled CNN’s flagship morning show “New Day,” another Zucker brainchild, and tapped Don Lemon, one of the network’s most recognizable prime-time hosts, to anchor a revamped morning news program along with Poppy Harlow and Kaitlin Collins. The program has struggled in the ratings during its first two months.   

In prime time, CNN remains without a permanent host in the advertiser-rich 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. weekday time slots, where the race for audience share is fierce and partisan opinion programming on competitor networks reigns supreme.   

“When I hear about what’s happening at CNN today, I think that someone somewhere is trying to return to those old and earliest days of the network,” said Lisa Napoli, an author on media issues who wrote a recent book about Ted Turner and CNN’s origins. “Which is a valiant pursuit, especially to those of us who remember those days before glitz and name-brand anchors and opinion and screech domineered the landscape.” 

 Some of CNN’s challenges aren’t specific to CNN.  

News fatigue is real, particularly after the Trump presidency and coronavirus pandemic, said Frank Sesno, former director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University, who previously spent years as a reporter at CNN.  

“And then there’s the confusion about ‘what is cable news anymore.’ Is it news? Is it talk radio with a camera? Is it debate and discussion,” Sesno said. “And coming out of the Zucker era and into the Licht era, CNN has very publicly said they are trying to calibrate more toward the news and less toward opinion. So there’s a swirl of change, activity and confusion and that’s what they’ve got to navigate.”  

Hanging over CNN’s political coverage in 2023 will be how much airtime to give to Trump, whose 2016 presidential run benefitted from near-constant cable news coverage. 

“We have fact checkers ready to go. We will put things in perspective. We will not let everything he does consume the news cycle,” Licht said during the November interview with Swisher. 

Trump’s specific attacks on CNN have had lasting impacts on the network Licht inherited, experts say.  

“This is a company that is trying to still shed the moniker of ‘fake news media’ and for many parts of the country that moniker stuck and trust in the network was impacted,” Susca said. “So I think Licht as a choice is really fascinating. There are few other people who know how to engage audiences that advertisers find attractive. Whether that means the audience will be informed remains a big question.”  

While Licht has acknowledged finding a path to increased profitability and reputational rehabilitation with more Americans for CNN won’t be easy, he remains committed to his vision for the network headed into his first full year as the chief executive of one of the largest news brands in the world.   

“I want CNN to be essential to society,” he told the Times. “If you’re essential then the revenue will follow.” 

Source: TEST FEED1