The Hill’s Morning Report — Political focus on Ohio derailment intensifies

by Alexis Simendinger and Kristina Karisch - 02/23/23 6:30 AM ET

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First came 11 train cars filled with hazardous chemicals that derailed along with 27 other cars because of a suspected wheel bearing failure. More than two weeks later, the community of East Palestine, Ohio, unnerved by the threat of poisons in its air and water, wants results from investigations, legal action and improved problem-solving by federal and state officials.

The 38 cars that derailed 17 days ago included cargo of vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene — all toxic to humans and the environment. The train derailment contaminated at least 15,000 pounds of soil and 1.1 million gallons of water, according to freight rail carrier Norfolk Southern.

A crisis that began on Feb. 6 has escalated beyond the town and the office of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine to engulf Norfolk Southern and the freight rail industry. Lawmakers continue to criticize President Biden and his Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.

The National Transportation Safety Board today in Washington will release a preliminary report on the derailment (WKBN). Biden, while traveling in Warsaw on Tuesday night, released a statement holding Norfolk Southern responsible while again pledging federal assistance to East Palestine.

The White House said the president on Tuesday from Europe phoned Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), DeWine, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), EPA Administrator Michael Regan and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio).

▪ The Hill: The freight rail industry’s lobbying against stronger safety standards is under scrutiny.

▪ Pro Publica: A Norfolk Southern policy lets a company monitoring team order crews to ignore safety.

Leaping into the fray, former President Trump, who won Ohio by 8 points in 2020, traveled to the accident area on Wednesday as he vies for the GOP nomination in 2024.

“You are not forgotten,” he told a small group of local leaders, first responders and the media at the local fire station in Little Beaver Creek, Ohio, while pledging to donate bottles of cleaning supplies and pallets of bottled water, which he said were collected through organizations that carry his name (WKBN).

Trump accused the Biden administration of “indifference and betrayal” (The Hill), adding “he had nothing to do with it” when asked about his former administration’s decision to ease rail safety requirements (Yahoo News and Ohio Public Broadcasting).

Trump was joined by Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Mayor Trent Conaway of East Palestine, whose office is formally nonpartisan. The mayor on Monday told Fox News that Biden’s trip to Ukraine was a “slap in the face” because the president did not come to Ohio (WKYC). “He can send every agency he wants to, but I found that out this morning in one of the briefings that he was in the Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us, and I’m furious,” he said.

EPA is now in charge of the environmental investigation in East Palestine (The Washington Post). The Federal Emergency Management Agency and a team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also have been dispatched to the state.

Buttigieg, who earlier this week said he’d visit the train derailment site when the time was right, will arrive today (The Hill). Criticism of the secretary’s initial response has been bipartisan (Bloomberg News) and he conceded “lesson learned” during a Tuesday interview with CBS News from Washington.

“I was focused on just making sure that our folks on the ground were all set, but could have spoken sooner about how strongly I felt about this incident, and that’s a lesson learned for me,” the secretary said.

Buttigieg on Tuesday announced a package of reforms, two days after he told Norfolk Southern to fulfill its promises to clean up the rail wreckage in East Palestine and help the town recover. He said his department holds the railroad accountable for any safety violations that contributed to the derailment.

“While ensuring the safety of those impacted by this crash is the immediate priority, we also have to recognize that this represents an important moment to redouble our efforts to make this far less likely to happen again in the future,” Buttigieg said (PBS NewsHour).

Related Articles

▪ The New York Times: Trump visits Ohio seeking to draw contrast with Biden.

▪ The Columbus Dispatch: White House blames Trump and Republicans over East Palestine, Ohio spill.

▪ Politico: Trump’s visit gives the Biden administration breathing room.

▪ CNN: The Pentagon released a fighter pilot’s selfie from the cockpit above the Chinese spy balloon as it hovered over the “central continental United States” on Feb. 3.

LEADING THE DAY

➤ INTERNATIONAL

Biden told ABC News’s David Muir Wednesday that it was a “big mistake” for Russian President Vladimir Putin to temporarily suspend his country’s participation in the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the two countries. The president was in Warsaw for a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and leaders of the so-called Bucharest Nine group of eastern European nations (NBC News).

“It’s a big mistake to do that. Not very responsible. But I don’t read into that that he’s thinking of using nuclear weapons or anything like that,” Biden said in the interview, adding he was “not sure what else he [Putin] was able to say in his speech at the moment, but I think it’s a mistake and I’m confident we’ll be able to work it out.”

Putin declared on Tuesday that Russia was suspending its participation in the New START treaty, first signed in 2010 and extended in 2021, which implements caps on the number of nuclear weapons deployed by each country and inspections of nuclear sites. He said support by the U.S. and other NATO allies for Ukraine was the reason for the suspension.

The Russian leader met with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on Wednesday; a meeting between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected by April. Word of Xi’s visit comes as Washington has said China is considering providing weapons for Russia in Ukraine, which would threaten to escalate the conflict into a confrontation between Russia and China on the one side and Ukraine and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance on the other (Reuters).

▪ The Wall Street Journal: U.S. considers release of intelligence on China’s potential arms transfer to Russia.

▪ Reuters: Biden, Putin display their alliances with Ukraine war backdrop.

The first year of the Russia-Ukraine war has been defined by the resilience of Kyiv’s forces and Moscow’s diminished military power. But as The Hill’s Brad Dress reports, the course of the second year will depend largely on forces outside of either country. Ukraine’s success in routing Russian forces hinges largely on how quickly the U.S. and Europe supply long-range missiles, tanks and potentially jets, while Russia’s hope for retaking momentum depends on Western unity disintegrating.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and United Nations Security General Antonio Guterres will discuss ongoing support for Ukraine as the U.N. Security Council meets this week amid the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion.

Blinken, while at the Security Council meeting in New York today and Friday, “will underscore U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and call upon the international community to endorse UN actions that will help secure a just and durable peace in Ukraine,” according to the State Department (Yahoo News).

The Hill: The Russia-Ukraine war has shattered the digital wall that often separated the government’s cyber experts from the private sector, forcing a new level of transparency on potential threats and engagement on geopolitical crises.

➤ POLITICS

Biden’s closest advisers have spent months preparing for him to formally announce his reelection campaign, but with the president still not ready to take the leap, some doubt is creeping into conversations around 2024. As Politico reports, “while the belief among nearly everyone in Biden’s orbit is that he’ll ultimately give the all-clear, his indecision has resulted in an awkward deep-freeze across the party — in which some potential presidential aspirants and scores of major donors are strategizing and even developing a Plan B while trying to remain respectful and publicly supportive of the 80-year-old president.”

2024: Self-professed “woke-fighting” author and multimillionaire Vivek Ramaswamy entered the Republican presidential race Tuesday. Ramaswamy opposes corporate efforts to advance political, social and environmental causes (The New York Times).

In the Senate, Jon Tester (D-Mont.) on Wednesday announced he’s running for Senate reelection. Faced with a tough election map next year, Democrats expressed relief (The Hill).

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) touched a nerve across the political spectrum this week with her call for a “national divorce” that echoed the nation’s nasty history surrounding secessionism and gave Republicans headaches during an otherwise sleepy time in Washington. The Hill’s Al Weaver reports that while Greene is known for incendiary rhetoric sure to provoke Democrats and Republicans alike, this instance has gone a step further, as any comments remotely tied to secession and the Civil War conjures up memories of one of the darkest periods in American history. Greene made similar statements in late 2021. What has changed is her stature. She’s a key ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, making her less of an outcast with some in the GOP.

“Having an extremist in Congress is not new. Having someone willing to say insane and incendiary things [is] not really new,” saidBrian Rosenwald, a political historian at the University of Pennsylvania. “What I think is new… is that here’s someone saying these things and doing these things and being embraced by leadership.”

▪ Business Insider: Greene defends her call to split up the U.S. by saying the country is moving towards another civil war: “We have to do something about it.”

▪ CBS News: Possible targets in Fulton County investigation of Trump, allies may try to quash charges.

▪ The New York Times: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump subpoenaed in the Justice Department’s Jan. 6, 2021, investigation.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the selection of Kristina Karamo, a far-right election denier to lead the state GOP is underscoring divisions within the party as Republican leaders hope to unify heading into 2024, writes The Hill’s Amee LaTour.

IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKES

➤ MORE ADMINISTRATION

Housing: In a bid to boost affordability while median home prices remain near record highs, the Biden administration will trim costs under a mortgage program for first-time and lower-income buyers, the White House announced Wednesday. The Federal Housing Administration will reduce the fee borrowers pay to have their mortgages insured by the agency by about $800 a year on a typical loan, or 0.3 percentage point. Officials expect the fee reduction to benefit roughly 850,000 home buyers and homeowners in 2023 (The Wall Street Journal and National Mortgage Professional).

▪ Fortune: Housing market once again braces for higher mortgage rates — here’s where eight experts see rates going this year.

▪ CNBC: U.S. home sales post 12th straight monthly decline; house price inflation cools.

▪ Axios: Mortgage applications plummet as rates jump.

Immigration: As the White House gears up for the end of one Trump-era border policy this spring, it wants to resurrect a version of another highly criticized immigration program put in place under the previous administration — which would mark the White House’s most restrictive border control measure to date.

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security and Justice departments announced a proposed rule that will ban some migrants from applying for asylum in the U.S. if they cross the border illegally, or fail to first apply for safe harbor in another country. Following a 30-day public comment period, the rule will be implemented when the COVID-19 public health emergency ends in May. Within minutes of its posting, the administration faced a flood of backlash from immigrant advocates and Democrats, as well as threats of lawsuits (Politico).

Former Biden White House official Andrea Flores, now the chief counsel for Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the administration for resurrecting a policy that “normalizes the white nationalist belief that asylum seekers from certain countries are less deserving of humanitarian protections.”

First lady Jill Biden met with Namibian President Hage Geingob on Wednesday to kick off a five-day, two-country visit to Africa. Her focus in Namibia is on the “role of young people in continuing to shape their democracy and advance health cooperation,” senior administration officials said on Tuesday. Former Vice President Al Gore in 1996 was the last senior most official representing the White House and U.S. government to visit Namibia (The Hill).

“We wanted to come because this is a young democracy and we want to support democracies around the world,” the first lady said ahead of the meeting.

🍽️ West Wing eats: The White House Mess, considered indispensable as an insider’s perk, will reopen for in-person dining on March 6 after a pause during the pandemic (Axios).

OPINION

■ All Americans deserve clean air and water — Ohio has been denied that, by Benji Backer, opinion contributor, The Hill. https://bit.ly/3ZwPkeD

■ Microsoft is sacrificing its ethical principles to win the AI race, by Reid Blackman, guest essayist, The New York Times. https://nyti.ms/3kseXht

WHERE AND WHEN

📲 Ask 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 hold a pro forma session on Friday at 11 a.m. House Judiciary Committee Republican members today will hold a field hearing in Yuma, Ariz., related to immigration policy and border security.

The Senate meets in a pro forma session at 9:30 a.m.

The president is at the White House where he will receive the President’s Daily Brief at 9:30 a.m.

The vice president is in Washington and has no public events.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is in Bengaluru, India, to participate in a Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors. The secretary this morning met with Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Yellen in the afternoon takes questions from the news media. In the evening, she is scheduled to meet with Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani.

The secretary of State is traveling to New York City to participate in a U.N. Security Council two-day ministerial meeting focused on Ukraine at the one-year mark following Russia’s illegal invasion. Blinken will meet with the U.N. Secretary General. Blinken will also speak to The Atlantic Live at 11 a.m. ET about Ukraine (C-SPAN coverage and information HERE).

The first lady is in Namibia and Kenya through Sunday.

Economic indicator: The Labor Department at 8:30 a.m. will report on claims for unemployment benefits filed in the week ending Feb. 18. The Bureau of Economic Analysis at 8:30 a.m. will report gross domestic product during the fourth quarter and for the entirety of 2022.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff will travel to Chicago to speak at a political finance event at 12:30 p.m. CT at the Westin Chicago River North.

The White House daily press briefing is scheduled at 1:30 p.m.

ELSEWHERE

➤ AIR TRAVEL & WEATHER

More than 1,700 flights were canceled in the United States on Wednesday because of a major winter storm that battered the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest with high winds and heavy snow (CNN). The National Weather Service said up to 2 feet of snow and winds of up to 60 miles an hour were expected in some spots during Wednesday and into today (CNN and Reuters).

The winter weather grounded air travel, forced hundreds of schools to close and made road travel difficult — if not impossible — in some areas. More than 50 million Americans were under winter weather advisories on Wednesday as the storm moved across a wide swath of the western and northern United States and into the East.

The storm has left drivers trapped in cars, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and prompted the first blizzard warning in Southern California in decades — and the worst won’t be over for several days (CBS News and NPR).

With snow expected to fall at a rate of an inch per hour and winds gusting over 30 mph, “it will be challenging for our snow plows, so imagine what it will be like for the average driver,” Anne Meyer, Minnesota Department of Transportation spokeswoman, said ahead of the worst of the storm. “This might be one night Mother Nature wins” (Star Tribune)

The weather also presents a big test for Southwest Airlines because it is still recovering from criticism after it canceled more than 16,700 flights between Dec. 21 and Dec. 31. The company’s CEO Andrew Watterson apologized in front of a Senate panel earlier this month for the holiday meltdown, which left thousands of people stranded.

“Let me be clear: we messed up. In hindsight, we didn’t have enough winter operational resilience,” Watterson said in written testimony ahead of the hearing (Barron’s).

➤ HEALTH & PANDEMIC

Have you ever gotten the hiccups, and fruitlessly tried everything to make them stop? You’re in luck, because The Atlantic has the solution, and it’s as free as the air you breathe. When Luc Morris, a surgeon at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center specializing in tumors of the head and neck, was a medical student, he wrote a letter to the editor of a specialist medical journal in which he laid out a potential treatment for “idiopathic persistent singultus,” a.k.a. the hiccups. The name he gave to the new technique was “supra-supramaximal inspiration,” and it boils down to a simple breathing exercise.

Exhale completely, then inhale a deep breath. Wait 10 seconds, then — without exhaling — inhale a little more. Wait another five seconds, then top up the breath again. Finally, exhale.

▪ Time magazine: COVID-19 rebound can happen even without Paxlovid.

▪ USA Today: Idaho bill would criminalize giving mRNA vaccines – the tech used in popular COVID-19 vaccines.

▪ WTOP: Restaurants, jobs asked for proof of COVID-19 vaccine. So did it increase D.C.’s vaccine rates?

The new scientific review on masks and COVID-19 isn’t what you think, Vox reports. A meta-analysis seeks to be the last word on the effectiveness of masks, but finding answers in science isn’t that easy.

Information about the availability of COVID-19 vaccine and booster shots 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): 1,118,763. Current U.S. COVID-19 deaths are 2,838 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

Take Our Morning Report Quiz

And finally … 🎭 It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for this week’s Morning Report Quiz! Inspired by Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, we’re eager for some smart guesses about carnival celebrations around the world.

Be sure to email your responses to asimendinger@digital-stage.thehill.com and kkarisch@digital-stage.thehill.com — please add “Quiz” to your subject line. Winners who submit correct answers will enjoy some richly deserved newsletter fame on Friday.

By what decade was Mardi Gras celebrated regularly in New Orleans?

The 1900s
The 1870s
The 1730s
The 1790s

Schools of which kind of dance launch elaborate floats and choreographed routines during Brazil’s annual Carnival in Rio de Janeiro?

Tango
Samba
Rumba
Paso Doble

Which city is famous for its masked carnival that ends on Shrove Tuesday?

Stockholm
Venice
Paris
Rome

To celebrate Fat Tuesday, people across Great Britain eat what food?

Donuts
Crumpets
Pie
Pancakes

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