i'm jane pauley. we wish you a very happy and healthy 2025. and please join us when our trumpet sounds again next "sunday morning." ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ good morning, everyone. welcome to "face the nation." i'm major garrett in for margaret brennan. as we close out 2024, we of

course, want to look ahead to the economy, health care, immigration, so much more as washington ushers in a new congress and importantly a new administration. we begin with a "face the nation" tradition, our year-end correspondents round table. joining us, chief legal correspondent jan crawford, congressional correspondent scott macfarlane, chief election correspondent, robert costa, caitlin huey-burns, and ed o'keefe. it's great to have you all with us. scott, i want to start with you. . new congress will be sworn in this week. what position does mike johnson, the current speaker of the house, find himself in seeking re-election to that position? >> it's a tenuous position. it has the prospect and promise of having high drama friday when they begin the new congress, january 3rd by choosing the new speaker, one of the most un underappreciated and underreported issues of the election, was this incredibly narrow margin. republicans preserved it in the u.s. house, even more narrow than the one that gridlocked them over the past two years,

and of course, the first order of business is choosing a speaker. republicans have just one or two votes to spare on anything. that has the possibility of paralyzing things, and we saw two years ago,gilligan's island. it was supposed to be a three-hour vote, and it had so many characters, not including thirst and howell. here's the thing. this is just the top layer of this very treacherous cake for them, this picking a speaker because what does this next speaker have to concede to win that post? we saw over the last two years, the prior speaker had to conced positions on the pivotal rules committee, to some contrarian voices and the rules committees where bills went to die instead of go get set up for a vote and that's why so many democratic votes were needed for so many pivotal things because the rules committee was jammed up by contrarians. that could happen again. >> robert, i want to turn to you

because if he were so inclined, president-elect trump could clarify his preference here, and that would send an important signal to those republicans in the house majority to be still on the fence about this. yet he remains conspicuously silent. >> that decision is reflective of the dynamic right now down at mar-a-lago. the president's retreat in florida, there is high drama as scott reports on capitol hill, but in trump's inner circle, it's almost like the low-key second season of a tv show. that's how it's been described to me by allies of president-elect trump. he's being guided by susie wiles, his incoming chief of staff, and she's created this atmosphere of calm. when it comes to the nominees, the process, laying out the agenda for the next year, tax cuts trying to expand those trump tax cuts from 2017. of course, mass deportations also part of trump's plan. a border bill as well, and you do have controversial nominees in kash patel for the fbi, robert f. kennedy jr. for health

and human services, among others, but at its core, you have a president-elect who's now comfortable with power, comfortable with the people around him. this is so different, major, than what we saw in 2016 when we were covering that transition period. it had this theatrical element, trump welcoming people to bedminster for the showy appearances and interviews. now we rarely see the president-elect. he's firing off misses at times on truth social, his platform, but he's often at times, behind the scenes, getting ready for 2025 because he's been here before. he knows what he wants to do. >> ed o'keefe, president biden remains president althouh some americans might have to be reminded of that fact. >> yeah. >> what is ahead for the president in the waning days of his presidency in terms of travel and possible parties? >>e he's taken one final foreig trip, and that's one we anticipated might happen. that is a trip to the vatican to see the pope and then to see the italian leadership as well. they have been in far closer contact than i thin many people appreciate because the pope like

the president, shares a lot of the concerns about the state of the world, about what's going on in ukraine and gaza. >> conflict, climate change. >> absolutely. state of democracy and just general concern for social justice. >> refugee flows, exactly. >> exactly, and so that will be a critical political meeting, but also a real personal capstone for the second catholic president, and it speaks as well to one of the things he's been focused on over the last several weeks, and will continue to be. we're still waiting to hear more about for example, pardons and clemency. will there be more of those, and will they be for the every man or political figures, jesse jackson, the former congressman from illinois or others who ended up in the legal system or maybe are well known and are appealing for some kind of leniency or forgiveness. those 37 death row clemencies that we saw before christmas, a good example of what's to come and what he's eager to do, and also a good example of what

little he can do because congress has no interest in working with him. they can't even really sort out to what do with themselves, so he's using the executive privileges that he has in these waning weeks. >> jan, as you know better than anyone at this table, this last year was a clash of law and politics unlike anything we've seen in our modern american history. the judicial system in our country, according to gallup, 35% confidence. 20% low our peer countries on the free market democracies. how much of that is a reflection of this clash, the supreme court, or just a sense that our judicial system has become in the words of someone we've all come to know, two-tiered? >> that's a hard question to answer. >> you always get the easiest ones, jan. >> i'll try, major. because i think it goes -- you've got to look past just this past year and go further back. i think it really started and took off in the wake of the dobbs decision. the courts ruling that

overturning of roe versus wade, the outrage over that decision was so extreme that you saw, i think, a quite calculated effort to undermine legitimacy of the supreme court by democrats, senate democrats for example, hearings, stories about scandals, some of which were pretty overblown to say the least. so that has an impact on public opinion, you know, the public starts to believe that this court is corrupt, that this is, you know, it's on the take. none of which is true. i mean, this is still a court. you may disagree with their decisions. it's a very conservative court. it is not a corrupt court. these are nine justices who have very different views on how to interpret the constitution, who are kind of in this titanic struggle over law, not politics. even the immunity decision. i mean, that decision was so misreported to say that the court was going to save trump from a criminal trial. no, it wasn't. that was never the decision.

in fact, that decision is going to help protect joe biden from any future prosecution by donald trump if he wanted to do that. so, you know, we look at public opinion polls, sure. the court's taken a hit but that's true over the years. the court often takes a hit. so do other institutions. and the court's public opinion remains much higher than our other institutions including the white house, congress, and by far, the news media. >> congress at 17% according to ga gallup. jan mentioned the dobbs decision. one of the things that roiled through the political calendar year of 2024 was how important, how impactful would that decision be on turnout and the ultimate outcome of the election. as you tracveled the ucountry, u said, it's important, but there are other things on the minds of women in this country. >> we say voters have the capacity to think about a lot of different things at once. in the wake of that decision in the midterms, that was top of mind for people. it was the first way to kind of exercise their views across the country on this issue, but this

time around, voters had different ways to express their feelings about the dobbs decision. many of them had ballot measures in their states, a couple of them being battleground states that they could vote for codifying abortion rights into their state law and also vote for donald trump because they believed in his views on the economy, on immigration, or at least that he could, you know, solve some of their concerns about them, and as i spoke to women across the country, as we all spent the whole year talking to voters and really listening to voters, a lot of women talked to me about how concerned they were about safety, about the economy. a lot of them responsible for their families' budgets, going to the grocery store, these fundamental things, and also it was kind of the reminder that we've been treating women as kind of a monolithic group in the wake of dobbs, and this election showed that it's -- it's not as such, that they do care a lot about safety, the economy, those were overarching issues, but they also do care

about womens a rights, abortion rights, but they just had other avenues to express that, and that's really what helped, and donald trump also, you know, modified his positions, at least to satisfy some of those voters, at least that i spoke to. >> caitlin brought up women's concerns about security, that brings up immigration. i wonder what your perspective is in this online feud that's gone on between parts of the maga universe over h-1b visas which are set aside for high-skill laborers. elon musk, vivek ramaswamy, and donald trump on the side of that. others using expletives reserved for their political foes, assailing one another. what do make of all of that? >> the coalition that lifted donald trump back to power included silicon valley k executives. elon musk, trump inner circle say deserves a lot of credit for

pouring a lot of money in the final months into the campaign, but at the end of the day, this is a campaign where so many voters at rally after rally were saying, mass deportations now. the message was obvious. it was in your face, and for the idea that president-elect trump is going to back away from his immigration position because of some whisper in his ear because of a silicon valley billionaire, it's not happening based on my reporting. >> scott, quickly -- we got about 30 seconds. how much do you think that will be a part of the early congressional conversation? >> i think this battle over the debt limit, which elon musk weighed in on is going to be the first throwdown of 2025, and impact the first year of trump's term because they're going to need democratic votes to raise the debt ceiling. that won't satisfy the elon musks of the world. i'm not sure how trump circumvents democratic concessions for the debt ceiling. when we come back, you know it and love it. predictions, big story things that are undercovered, with our

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welcome back to "face the nation." our correspondents round table predictions, caitlin huey-burns. >> the biggest story to watch this coming year is how the president-elect, when he becomes president, handles immigration. we talk a lot about how the economy was the overarching theme of this election. immigration is what trump made his not only closing argument on, but his entire campaign. it was really rooted in immigration. so what this looks like, we saw in our polling, majority support for mass deportations. what does that actually look like? and how do they handle that once we see what that looks like on television, how they have people explaining their policy, and what those stories look like because of that, and whether the base is satisfied and whether the general public gets what they voted for on that. >> jan, 2025 prediction? >> i'll go back to the court. i think that donald trump will probably get his fourth

nomination to the supreme court either this year or maybe next year. >> because someone retires? who? >> justice sam alito. he was nominated and took the bench in 2006 after nearly two decades on the court. >> rob costa? >> we'll get that win at the sugar bowl. i'm stepping into your territory. >> i'm happy to give it to you. >> governing by crisis in 2025. when we first met over a tdecad ago, we were covering crisis on capitol hill, crisis persists. and kaicaitlin huey-burns as we and scott was there as well. look. they all have a handful of seats in the house for the republican majority. they can only do so much as scott said. the debt limit battle on the horizon, spending fights, deja vu. that culture of crisis governing to the brink of discussions is here again. >> ed o'keefe? >> i'll make the firmer prediction that based on all that chaos, speaker johnson won't be speaker by the end of 2025. did that a few years ago on paul

ryan and it didn't work. be careful. nothing personal. look at what faces him. the other one real quick, washington commanders will get a stadium here in the district of columbia because that vote that authorized the land -- >> it happened right before congress adjourned. >> and it will happen this year. >> scott? >> long before the next election, there will be people departing washington voluntarily. this is a challenging environment to be an elected official. they're getting thousands of threats a year on their lives, on their families. the travel's exhausting, and we're coming into a relatively pol polarizing moment with trump coming back into office. you're going to see a lot of retirements in odd-numbered years including 2025. >> i think that's one of the reason we'll see justice alito step down. >> whatdig into what was undercovered or underreported. jan? >> undercovered and underreported, that would be to me, joe biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable in the televised

debate. >> at the presidential debate with donald trump? >> unquestioned, and, you know, it's starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations. it's been reported in the "wall street journal," for four years, and he insisted that he could still run for president. he should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the democrats. it could have changed the scope of the entire election. yet still incredibly, we read "the washington post," and his advisers are saying that he regrets that he dropped out of the race. that he thinks he could have beaten trump, and i think that is either delusional or they're gaslighting him. >> president biden has said repeatedly he was sick during the debate, june 27th in atlanta and he's always been fine, and he leaves fine. that is his position. the position of many of his top aides as well, even though there is that reporting. >> robert costa in. >> the biggest story that's underreported, the battle for

working voters across the country. i spent time with the head of the uaw. who's going to win over that person who's aligned with labor, the industrial worker in this country? is it going to be the democrat you can party or the republican party? it remains a key story and deserves more attention. >> kaicaitlin huey-burns? >> i mentioned how we covered women voter, but i also think there is an aspect to which we underestimated or perhaps the public underestimated how trump's personality wasn't as much of a burden to him, and in some ways, it turned out to be a benefit with low-propensity voters and talking to the trump campaign throughout this cycle and reporting on it, they were making this bet that if he leaned into his personality, and made no qualms about it, made no apologies about it, that would kind of speak to this authenticity factor, this premium, that low-propensity voters, those not inclined to participate in elections might be inclined towards. it was a big bet. it paid off, and it will remain the biggest question i have is whether republicans can replicate any of that because so

much of their political wins this year are unique to donald trump himself. >> scott macfarlane, underreported? >> the scope and size and political impact of these forthcoming january 6th pardons. trump has never pspecified if social secur it's everybody or just some people? lit include people who gassed and beat police with baseball bats? he's never been pressed to specify if it's all or some and what's the political impact? did his voters want that? does he gain political capital or lose it? he pardons everyone. >> ed o'keefe? >> once again, we don't cover the western hemisphere enough, and why it is that people come from the far reaches of south america -- >> what is the gravitational pull of the united states in those particular countries? >> it's going to be more critical than ever in the coming year that we continue to explore and explain why it is they continue to do so despite the threats of being sent back, and watch also the cooperation between a lot of those countries, especially in central america with the united states

and the intrigue they have over the first latino secretary of state, the most senior latino ever to serve in an administration and in the presidential line of succession, marco rubio, i heard within days of the election from latin american governments, quite eager to get on the good side of marco rubio because they are thrilled to know there will be more attention paid to the hemisphere has there should be. >> and there will be attention paid in terms of accepting those -- this administration incoming intends to deport. >> yeah. because they understand that's the gateway. >> to better relations with this administration? >> yeah. that if you start with that, and, you know, ensure they're being treated fairly on their way back, that they'll probably end up taking no formal agreements, but a conversation. >> no better way to close out a year than the round table. it's been my honor and privilege. my thanks to all of you. we'll be right back with a lot more "face the nation." please stay with us. k with more the nation." please stay with us. or chronic kidney disease, farxiga can help you keep living life,

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last week the u.s. reported its first severe case of bird flu found in a patient in louisiana. for more, we're joined by lena nguyen. it's great to have you with us. so bird flu. is this report out of louisiana worr worrisome, and if so, why? >> well, it's one more sign that the drum beat of bird flu coming closer to humans is becoming a major threat. so we've already seen this year that there have been a number of mammalian species. 15 states have outbreaks in cattle in california in the last 30 days. there have been more than 300 herds that tested positive and now we have 66 cases of bird flu in humans. and this is almost certainly a significant undercount because we have not been doing nearly enough testing so we really don't know the extent of bird flu that's out there in humans. but this particular case, it's someone who was severely ill,

but not only that, researchers have isolated the virus in this individual who is sick in louisiana, and they found that this particular strain of the virus appears to have acquired mutations that make it more likely to bind to airway receptors. bird flu has been around for a long time. >> about 30 years. >> exactly, but it hasn't been a major issue because it spreads among birds. it hasn't spread among mammal, but now there is a mutation, and there's another concern which is that we are in flu season, and it's possible that a single person could have bird flu and seasonal flu at the same time. >> so something called reassortment. >> that's right. >> where things change because of one illness, becoming another illness through reassortment of a mutated virus. >> that's right, and so the viruses could exchange genes and develop a new hybrid virus, and if you have a virus that's more contagious and causes more severe disease, that's when it

becomes a major threat to huma humankind. >> what should be happening in the biden administration right now that isn't going on? >> there are two main things they should be doing in the days they have left. the first is to get testing out there. i feel like we should have learned our lesson from covid that just because we aren't testing, it doesn't mean that the virus isn't there. it just mean that is we aren't looking for it. we should be having rapid tests, home tests available to all farm workers, to their families for the clinicians taking care of them so we aren't waiting for public labs, and cdc labs to tell us what's bird flu or not, and the second very important thing is, this is not like the beginning of covid where we were dealing with a new virus and we didn't have a vaccine. there actually is a vaccine already developed, and the biden administration that has contracted with the manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine. however, they have not asked the fda to authorize the vaccine. there is research done on it. they could get it authorized now and also get the vaccine out to fa farm workers and vulnerable

people. i think that's the right approach because we don't know what the trump administration is going to be doing around bird flu. if they have people coming in with anti-vaxing stances, and they don't want to know how much bird flu is out there, could they withhold testing? i mean, that's a possibility, and i think the biden administration in their remare remaining days should get testing and vaccines widely available so at least it empowers state and local health officials and clinicians to do the right thing for their patients. >> dr. nguyen, is bird flu in humans super dangerous? >> well, the world health organization estimates that in prior outbreaks of the bird flu, that the mortality rate is 52%. 52%. however, in the -- in this most recent outbreak, it seems that most cases have been mild, and maybe some people even have asymptomatic infection, but we don't know what happens when bird flu affects more vulnerable individuals. people affected so far have been mainly farm workers who are working, plumlbly presumably, g

healthy. we don't know what happens when you get to children or pregnant women, or people with chronic illnesses. we don't know how deadly or dangerous this will be for those individuals and again, it's one more reason why we don't want it to spread and acquire more mutation. >> 30 seconds. neur norovirus is what you call it. numbers are surging. what should people do to protect themselves? >> wash your hands really well, especially if you are going to buffets. wash your hands if you are touching, commonly touched sur surfaces. norovirus is the most common food-borne illness here in the u.s. it's hard to avoid once it's in your family and also don't prepare food if you are having vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps because you don't want to spread it to other people. >> thank you so much for your expertise. we appreciate it. we will have more questions for dr. nguyen when we come back, but first, we're going to take a quick break. dr. wen when we come back. first a quick break.

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dr. leana nguyen, and a lot more "face the nation." stay with us, please.