♪ ♪ 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 roundtable. joining us chief legal correspondent jan crawford, congressional correspondent scott macfarlane, chief election and campaign correspondent robert costa, political correspondent caitlin huey-burns, and senior white house and political correspondent ed o'keefe. it is great to have you with us. scott macfarlane, i want to start with you. the 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 underappreciated and underreported issues of the 2024 election was this incredibly narrow margin republicans preserved in the u.s. house, even more narrow

than the one that gridlocked them the first two years. 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 speaker vote was like "gilligan's island." a three-hour vote was a multiarc drama with characters not including thurston howell. it's just the top layer of this very treacherous cape for them, choosing a speaker. what does this speaker need to concede to win the post? we saw the prior speak her to concede positions on the pivotal rules committee to some contrarian voices where bills went to die instead of to get set up for a vote, and that's why so many democratic votes were needed for so many pivotal things because the rule committee was jammed up by contrarians. >> robert costa, 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. 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, i'm told, this atmosphere of calm when it comes to some of the nominees, the process, laying out the agenda for next year. top of the agenda, tax cuts, trying to expand those trump tax cuts from 2017. of course, mass deportations part of the 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 is now come rt toable 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 missives, at times on truth social, his platt -- platform, but he's behind-the-scenes because he knows what he wants to do. he's been here before. >> ed o'keefe, president biden remains president even though some americans may have to be reminded of that fact. what is ahead in the waning days of his presidency in terms of travel and possible pardons? foreign trip, one those of us anticipated might happen, a trip to the vatican to see the pope and then to see the italian leadership as well. they've been in far closer contact than i think 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 -- >> climate change -- >> -- state of democracy and just general concern for social justice. >> refugee flows. >> exactly. that will be a critical political meeting but a real personal capstone for the second catholic president, and it spems as well to one of the things he's been focused on over the last several weeks and will continue to be. we're waiting to hear about clemency and pardons. will they be for the every man or for notable political figures like jesse jackson jr., the former congressman from illinois, or others who have ended up in the legal system and maybe are well known and are now appealing for some kind of leniency or forgiveness, and so those 37 death row clemencies we saw before christmas, a good example of what's to come and what he's eager to do and a good example of what little he can do

because congress has no interest in working with him. they can't even sort out what to do with themselves. he's using the executive privileges he has in the waning weeks. >> jan, as you know better than anyone at the table, this year was a clash of law and politics unlike anything we have seen in our modern american history. the judicial system in our country, according to gallup, 20% below our peer countries of 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, towo tiered? >> that's a hard question to answer. >> i always give you the easiest ones. >> i'm going to try, major. you have to look past this year and go further back. it really started and took off in the wake of the dobbs decision, the court's ruling

that overturned roe v. wade. the outrage was so extreme you saw 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. the public starts to belief this court is corrupt, that this is on the take, none of which is true. this is still a court -- you may disagree with their decisions -- is 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 in this titanic vstruggle over law, not politics. even immunity decision. that decision was so misreported, to say 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. when we look at public opinion polls, sure, the court has taken a hit, but that's true over the years. the court often takes a hit. so do other constitutions. in the court's opinion, the public opinion remains much higher than our other institutions including the white house, congress, and, by far, the news media. >> congress at 17%. caitlin, jan mentioned the jobs decision. one of the things 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 traveled the country, you tell us, it's an important issue but there are other things on the minds of women voters in this country. >> we say voters have the capacity to talk about a lot of different things at once and we saw in the wake of that decision in the midterms, that was top of mind for people. it was the first way to exercise their views across the country on this issue.

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 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 family's budgets, paying the bills, going to the grocery stores, these fundamental things, and also it was kind of a reminder that we've been treating women as a monolithic group in the wake of dobbs and this election showed 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

women's rights, abortion rights, but they had other avenues to express that, and that's really what helped. and donald trump also 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 flowed through immigration. i wonder what your perspective is on this online feud that's gone on the last three or four days between parts of the maga universe over h-1b visas set aside for high-skilled laborers. elon musk, vivek ramaswamy and nominally president-elect trump, hard-right nativists using expletives on social media, typically reserved for their political foes, not for those in the maga tent, assailing one another. what it do you make of all of that? >> the coalition that lifted donald trump back to power included silicon valley executives, elon musk, trump inner circle member, deserves credit for pouring a lot of

money in the final months into the campaign. but, at the end of the day, this was a campaign where so many voters at rally after rally we covered were holding up signs that said mass deportations now. the message was obvious. it was in your face. and for the idea president-elect trump is going to back away from his immigration position because of some whisper in his ear from a silicon valley billionaire is just not happening based on my reporting. >> and, scott, very quickly, do you think that -- we have about 30 seconds before we need to go to break -- 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 waited on is going to be the first throwdown of 2025, 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 circumventing democratic concessions for the debt ceiling. >> predictions, stories undercovered, with our panel.

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welcome back to "face the nation" and our correspondents roundtable. predictions, caitlin huey-burns? >> i think 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 was rooted in immigration. what this looks like, we saw in our polling, support for mass deportations. what does that look like and how do they handle that when we see how that looks like on television, explaining the policy and what the 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, took the bench in 2006. after nearly two decades on the report. >> marcus freeman and the fighting irish will win the sugar bowl on january 1st. >> this is normally my prediction with alabama. >> i'm stepping into your territory. >> i'm happy to give it to you. >> governing by crisis in 2025. ed, when we first met over a decade ago, we were covering crisis on capitol hill, crisis perfsist persists. and caitlin huey-burns and scott was there as well. they only have a handful of seats for the republican majority. they can only do so much, as scott said. 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 on paul ryan and it worked. watch out, speaker johnson.

>> be careful. be advised. >> look what faces him. the other one, real quick, washington commanders will get a stadium here in the district of columbia because that congressional vote that authorized the land -- >> happened right before congress adjourned. >> it was a great surprise. it will happen this year. >> scott macfarlane? >> long before the next election some people will be 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 is exhausting, and we're coming into a relatively polarizing moment with trump coming back into office. you're going to see a lot of retirements in odd number years including 2025. >> i think that's one of the reasons you're going to see justice alito step down. >> one of the other things we do in the year end correspondents table is dig in what was undercovered or underreported. jan? >> undercovered, underreported would be, to me, joe biden's obvious cognitive decline that became undeniable.

>> at the presidential debate. >> unquestioned. and 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 yet he insisted he could run for president. we should have 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 in "the washington post" that his advisers are saying he regrets that he dropped out of the race, that he thinks he could have beaten trump. i think that is either delusional or gas lighting -- >> president biden has said 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? >> the biggest story that's underreported, the battle for working voters across the country. i spent time with shawn faine of

the uaw. wo is aligned with labor, the industrial worker in this country, the democratic party or the republican party? it remains a key story, deserves more attention. >> caitlin huey-burns? >> i mentioned how we cover women voters, but also there is an aspect to which we underestimated or perhaps the public underestimated 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 the cycle making this bet if he leaned into his personality and made no qualms about it, 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 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 specified if it's anybody or just some people. will it include some people who gassed and beat police officers with baseball bats or just those who pleaded guilty to misdemeanors? he's never been pressed to specify if it's all or some and what's the political impact, voters really want that? does he gain political capital or lose it if he pardons everyone? >> ed o'keefe? >> once again, we don't cover the western hemisphere enough and why people come from the far reaches of south america. >> what is the gravitational pull of the united states in those particular countries? >> it is more critical than ever 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 betwee 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, marco rubio, within days 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 as there should be. >> and attention paid to those accepting this administration incoming intends to deport. >> because they understand that's the gateway. >> to better relations with this administration. >> if you start with that and ensure they're being treated fairly on their way back, they're willing to have the conversation. >> no better way to close out a calendar year than the correspondents roundtable at "face the nation." it's been my honor and privilege to have you here. ed o'keefe, caitlin huey-burns, scott macfarlane, robert costa. we'll be back with more "face the nation." please stay with us. or chronic kidney disease, farxiga can help you keep living life,

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its first severe case of bird flu found in a patient in louisiana. for more, we're joined by dr. leana wen, a former baltimore health commissioner. it's great to have you with us. bird flu, is this report out of louisiana worrisome, and, if so, why? >> well, it's one more sign that the drumbeat of bird flu coming closer to humans is becoming a major threat, so we've already seen this year there have been a number of species close to humans that now have bird flu outbreaks. we have outbreaks in poultry in all 50 states, 16 states have outbreaks in cattle. in california in the last 30 days 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 and we really don't know the extent of bird flu that's out there in humans. but this particular case someone who is 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 toreceptors. it has been around for a long time -- >> about 30 years. >> -- it hasn't been a major issue among humans, it hasn't spread among mammals. now there is this mutation and another concern, too, major, we are in flu season and it's possible that a single person could have bird flu and seasonal flu at the same time. >> something called reassortment. where things change because of one illness becoming another illness through reassortment of a mutated virus? >> that's right. and so the virus could exchange genes, you could develop a new hybrid virus, and if you now have a virus that's more contagious and causes more severe disease, that's when it becomes a major threat to humankind. >> what should be happening in the biden administration right

now that isn't going on? >> there are two main things that they should be doing in the days that 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 the virus isn't there. it means we aren't looking for it. we should be having rapid tests, home tests available to farmworkers, to their families. 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 importat thing is this is not like the beginning of covid where we were dealing with a new virus, we didn't have a vaccine. there actually is a vaccine developed already against h5n1. the biden administration has contracted with manufacturers to make almost 5 million doses of the vaccine, however, they have not asked the fda to authorize the vaccine. there's research done on it. they could get this authorized now and also get the vaccine out to farmworkers and vulnerable people. i think that's the right approach. we don't know what the trump

administration will be doing around bird flu if they have people coming in with anti-vaccine stances, could they hold off authorizations? if they don't want to know how much bird flu is out there, could they withhold testing? that's a possibility. i think the biden administration in the remaining days should get testing and vaccines widely available so it empowers state and local health officials and clinicians to do the right thing for their patients. >> dr. wen, is bird flu in humans super dangerous? >> well, the world health organization estimates that in prior outbreaks of the bird flu the mortality rate is 52%, 52%. however, in this most recent outbreak it seems that most cases have been mild and some people have asim tympasymptomat. they have farmworkers who are generally healthy as opposed to

what happens when you get to children, to pregnant women, to older individuals with chronic illnesses. we don't know how deadly, how dangerous bird flu is going to be for those individuals and, again, that's one more reason why we don't want it to spread and acquire more mutations. >> 30 seconds. norovirus is what you call it. stomach bug is what i would call it. numbers are surging. it's the holidays. what should people do to protect themselves? >> wash your hands really well especially if you're going to buffets, if you're touching surfaces, before you touch your mouth, your nose. norovirus is the most common foodborne illness. it's hard to avoid when it's been in your family. don't prepare food if you're having symptoms. you don't want to spread it. >> dr. leana wen, we appreciate it. we will have more questions for dr. wen when we come back. first a quick break.

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