Morning Brief: House Vote On Shutdown, Women’s Health Gets A Reboot, & Media Blames Usual Suspects

The House races to vote on a resolution that could end the government shutdown, the FDA removes black box warnings for hormone replacement therapy drugs, and we look at the role media bias played in shaping Americans’ views on the shutdown.

It’s Wednesday, November 12, 2025, and this is the news you need to know to start your day. Today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below, and the video version can be seen on The Daily Wire:

House Shutdown Vote?

Topline: The government shutdown appears to be on the verge of finally ending, as both parties debate the future of healthcare, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) fends off calls for his resignation.

The federal government may finally reopen on Wednesday. The bill broke through the Senate with the help of eight Democrats. That bill will now go to the House, and it is expected to begin voting today at around 4:00 p.m. ET.

This is a major development following the longest government shutdown in American history, and it comes at a time when D.C. is deeply politically divided. There has been a lot of pushback, not only against the Democrats who voted to reopen the government, but also against Minority Leader Schumer, who is now facing calls to step down or even be primaried in 2028.

What does D.C. do next? Once the government is back in operation, the focus will shift back to healthcare, but the debate will look different. During the shutdown, Democrats said they wanted the continuing resolution to be contingent upon continuing subsidies for Obamacare. Now, as part of the Senate deal, Democrats want to bring that discussion back next month, since the government will only be funded through the end of January if the bill passes. The shutdown debate could flare up again if lawmakers don’t figure this out before funding runs out.

If the subsidies don’t continue, opponents have said that a coming premium spike is proof that the Affordable Care Act was not sustainable in the first place.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said that this deal was the Senate’s, and that the House didn’t make any promises on its end, so there hasn’t been a commitment yet to finding a solution to Obamacare subsidies.

Trumpcare: There has been discussion on tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts. President Donald Trump has also floated giving some of the subsidy money back to the American people. Trump has argued that many of these subsidies only benefited large insurance companies.

“Instead of going to the insurance companies, I want the money to go into an account for people where the people buy their own health insurance. If we did that, that would be so exciting. Call it Trumpcare,” the president said.

HRT Black Box Warning Axed

Topline: The FDA is removing “black box” warnings from hormone replacement therapy for menopause symptoms. The reversal is earning high praise from both the medical establishment and medical outsiders. 

The warnings were slapped on HRT for menopausal and perimenopausal women more than two decades ago by the FDA. But FDA Commissioner Marty Makary says those warnings were unnecessary, harmful, and based on a significantly flawed 2002 Women’s Health Initiative study that connected this treatment to an increase in breast cancer risk.

Why it matters: While currently fewer than 5% of menopausal women take HRT, Dr. Makary says between 50 and 70 million women have been denied or discouraged from taking the treatment since that study was mainstreamed. Makary also says the vast majority of those women were denied life-changing or even life-saving treatment. 

“Women who go through menopause and start hormone replacement therapy have profound short-term and long-term health benefits, including reducing the risk of bone fractures by 50-60% later in life, reducing the risk of fatal heart attacks by 30-50%,” Makary told Morning Wire. “That’s the number one cause of death in women – and reducing cognitive decline. There may be no medication in the modern era, aside from perhaps antibiotics or vaccines, that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level more than hormone replacement therapy started within 10 years of the onset of menopause.”

Makary noted that this treatment is for the vast majority of women in this phase of life, though he said there are rare exceptions to that, for example, if a woman currently has breast cancer. Women should talk to their doctors before receiving treatment.

View from the experts: Major medical groups are supporting this. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which represents more than 60,000 physicians and medical professionals, praised the FDA for empowering women.

The Menopause Society, the American Association of Clinical Urologists, and the National Consumers League, a consumer advocacy organization, also applauded this change from the FDA. Also of note, Harvard Medicine Magazine last year acknowledged that this Women’s Health Initiative study “has widely been considered flawed.”

Democrat-Media Complex

Topline: With the government shutdown poised to end on a sour note for most Democrats, it has become painfully obvious just how eager some in the media were to put their thumbs on the scales. 

The legacy media coverage was biased against Republicans over the shutdown, and the numbers prove it. The Media Research Center conducted a study of the first full month of the shutdown, from October 1 to October 31. It looked at the evening news broadcasts on the three major networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – and discovered that 87% of the network news coverage during that time had been skewed in favor of the Democrats.

The center evaluates only the statements made by anchors and experts who are supposed to be nonpartisan, which would exclude comments from elected Democrats or Republicans, or from pundits who are decidedly partisan. Using that framework, it found 83 statements about the shutdown that were critical of Republicans and only 12 that were critical of Democrats.

Those same people, despite discussing the shutdown on multiple broadcasts, showed very little interest in discussing why the government was shut down or who repeatedly voted against the clean continuing resolution that would have reopened the government. According to the center, “On both ABC and CBS, only 12.5 percent of reports on either network mentioned this basic detail. On NBC, that fact was included in just 31 percent of newscasts.”

View from the media: On CNN, the network is laying it on thick against Schumer and highlighting the blowback against him within his own party. CNN pollster Harry Enten sounded off: “ What about Democrats nationwide feeling about Chuck Schumer? I think the word of the day is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible.”

The hosts of ABC’s “The View” have been gunning for Schumer since March because, as they said, he “caved” to avoid a shutdown early in Trump’s term. They re-upped calls for him to step aside on Monday, and on Tuesday, they spent some time yelling at Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman for voting in favor of his constituents not starving.

There’s a bit of a pile-on effect happening right now. The argument appears to be that the compromise has given President Trump yet another win, which is something Democrats and many in the legacy media hate to do.