0 with randall carlson on fox news. tune in each night at 8:00. our friends, the fabulous, the honorable jason chaffetz is filling in for hannity tonight. jason, how are you doing? >> thanks. i love that interview with shawnte. ordinary people doing extraordinary things. great show, sean. happy holidays and happy new year. i appreciate it. welcome to this special edition of "hannity." i'm jason chaffetz filling in for sean. picture this tonight. president joe biden be basking in the warm caribbean air, listening to the sound of waves crashing on the shore from a luxury villa in the virgin islands. complements of a wealthy donor. at the same time, a winter nightmare is unfolding in buffalo, new york after days of blistering cold weather and nearly 52 inches of snow. dozens are now dead, thousands are without power. new york's governor referred to driving conditions as a war zone. police and national guard are going door-to-door plowing their way through the snow to perform welfare checks. the death toll in new york is expected to rise. thousands of flights have been cancelled or delayed, especially on southwest airlines that have stranded americans and their luggage all over the country and what is being described as a colossal failure at every level. here with a few report, katie byrne. katie? >> some southwest flyers never made it home for the holidays. many are still stranded tonight. for those that gave up and decided to drive home instead, now they're showing up to airports like this looking for luggage and told they won't see it till friday. >> i got a car the next day. i don't know how. i got it from enterprise. i drove two days. now we get to the airport, no bags. >> 2,500 flights have been cancelled. wednesday, it's an improvement from tuesday by not by much. travelers are growing inpatient. >> it's tiring and stressful. too much delays. cancellation every now and then. i have to sleep at the airport. >> the situation is not expected to get better this week with southwest operating a third of their routes through friday so crews can catch up. this started with a winter storm that hit before christmas. some say the airline is using outdated software that is creating staffing issues leaving passengers stranded. >> i spent $1,000 with a rental car, hotels, meals. >> the feds are looking into this. lawmakers say investigations will be coming in the new year. jason? >> as you might expect, president biden is blissfully unaware. he called a lid at 10:06 a.m. so he could bask in the caribbean sun. the president is on vacation after all. keep in mind, this comes after a recent beach vacation to the luxurious kiowa island in south carolina. another relaxing vacation in nantucket along with around 60 mini vacations to delaware this year alone. so with joe taking off so much time to recharge, who is running the show? well, it's certainly not biden's transportation secretary, mayor pete. it took him four whole days to respond to travel crisis caused primarily by southwest airlines. one prominent democrat, nina turner is voicing concern. "what's happening with railroads, airlines and the supply chain is a result of small city mayor being made the secretary of transportation as a means to pad his resume for president. secretary buttigieg is a prime example of falling up." joining us now with more, two republican members of the house transportation committee, south carolina congress woman nancy mace who was directly impacted by the travel chaos along with texas congresswoman beth van duyne. thanks for joining us tonight on hannity. i want to start with you, congress woman mace. you had some personal experience. how are you going to help solve this from a congressional viewpoint? >> well, not only that, am i on the transportation committee in congress, specifically the aviation subcommittee, this hit close to home. my teenage kids got stranded in baltimore trying to make it home on christmas eve. even today, five days later, we don't know where their luggage is. we've been personally impacted by this. the young lady operating the camera i'm in front of right now was stranded in denver for five days. she made it home but didn't see her son for christmas. still doesn't know where her luggage is. this has impacted thousands upon thousands of people. i was disappointed to hear the president basking in the caribbean right now. tens of thousands of people can't get on trains, can't rent cars or can't recoup their flights to get home. they're stranded across the country right now. i want to hear pete buttigieg saying he's going to audit and figure out where the $7 billion went that southwest received from american taxpayers tonight. that's what i want to hear tonight. >> that's the issue. congress passed presumably you voted against it, maybe you vote ed for it, $1.2 trillion in infrastructure. mayor pete, you know, there handed out a lot of money. but i -- he says he's going to hold them accountable. where is he? it took him four days to respond and make comments. >> it's not just biden that goes on vacation when he's most needed. buttigieg was not qualified. he's cabinet secretary. in his first year in office, when we have tremendous supply chain issues, people can't get the supplies that they need, when businesses are going bankrupt, where is he? he takes two months off for paternity leave. earlier this year, we had our rail strike. we were going to have again a massive amount of hit to our economy, you were going to have municipalities that couldn't get chemicals to treat their water supply. where was pete? that's right. i was on a family vacation in portugal. he couldn't be bothered not to go on vacation. this is a man that was not qualified for the job. he has never been on the job. we trusted him with 1.2 trillion of taxpayer dollars and you'll see how he has fallen on his face time and time again. >> i like that comment, this is somebody in his career that has fallen up. he had a failed presidential run. i don't see anything -- there's a reason why they call him pothole pete. what in his resume would lead you to believe that he could solve the major problems that we're having with rail, transportation and the airlines and whatnot. you'll get a chance to grill him and hold him accountable when republicans take control. what do you hope to do, congress woman mace, when he comes before the committee at some point? >> we'll have lots of questions. on the oversight committee, i'll have a gavel. one of five chairman. he has a lot to answer for when he comes to congress. what is he doing with the taxpayer dollars, how are they being distributed. how is he going to hold southwest accountable? what you're seeing today is the federal government rewarding bad behavior by having a private company be bailed out and subsidized by the american taxpayer. what is pete buttigieg going to do besides hold a press conference? this is one thing that i want to make clear. nina turner and beth van dyne are correct on pete buttigieg. this is what happens. you had democrats and the left spend millions against people like me in swing districts that want to hold the administration accountable, that want to holding asies accountable so republicans can't hold them accountable. it's important to support candidates like myself and beth van duyne. go to nancymace.org to hold the administration accountable when we're in the majority. >> you have your work load ahead of you. there's certainly is no excuse for the amount of money that these -- this administration has been given. but how they spent it, what they've done and how they've done it, go get them. next week you'll actually have the gavels in hand. thanks for joining us on "hannity." nancy mace and beth van duyne. thank you. without a doubt, if a republican jetted off during a crisis, they would be ex-scorated. but not joe biden. the very liberal associated press cheered for biden's big trip tweeting "president joe biden tuesday was headed to a place very familiar to him, the u.s. virgin islands to enjoy down time and warmer weather and ring in the new year with family." breaking news there. and cnn, that was even worse. take a look at this for the hard-hitting report from this news outlet. "the first couple are beach people said a family friend familiar with vacation preferences. others that know them well said there's little more that they enjoy when relaxing than pitching an umbrella on the beach, tossing a towel on the sand and closing their eyes under a warm sun. later in this so-called article, it read the first lady in particular finds peace in her books and soaking up the sun. i think you get the picture. here now with reaction, fox news contributor charlie hurt and the host of the larry elder show, larry elder. i know you both enjoy the sun. charlie, who likes -- who is anti-sun? i'm sure the first lady likes the warm sun on her eyelids as she lays back. this is really bad optics when you have millions of people that are affected at home. >> yeah, that a.p. story reads like and erotic novel written by stacey abrams. we all like the sun and the beach. nobody likes the beach the way joe biden does. he spends something like a third of his presidency at the beach, as his beach house in delaware. i get it. everybody needs a vacation. people understand that. but can you imagine if somebody -- when you had a storm like this, can you imagine if george w. bush decided in the middle of katrina to take off and go to the gulf and vacation somewhere? the media would absolutely destroy him. i think all of this is going to ultimately come back to bite biden. the big picture is this. joe biden has spent his life on a government salary. his wife is a school teacher. somehow they came in -- they spent their lives doing this and they have become so fabulously wealthy that they have vacation homes, that they jet around to places like st. croix at a time when people across the country -- you don't have to be in buffalo and you don't have to be riding southwest airlines to realize that americans are plunging themselves in to debt just to get by right now. this is going to come back to haunt these people politically. i'm glad it will. people -- this stuff -- people sort of -- they want people to have time to go on vacation, but this is getting ridiculous. >> yeah, look, everybody does need to do it. there's hardly a case to be made that joe biden is burning it at both ends, that he's working so hard that the poor guy just has to be let out there. come on. he doesn't have a case for that. if something is happening, it's a disaster, they want to see their leaders be there reacting, pulling the levers to make their life better and easier. these two, the secretary of transportation and the president of the united states clearly were not. >> you know, jason, i have never been one of those to criticize presidents for taking vacations. it's a rough, tough job. you always have your staff with you, you're always commander-in-chief 24/7. my problem is he should have been calling lids earlier. he should have called a lid every day at noon. maybe we would have avoided the disastrous pull out from afghanistan or reversing the donald trump policies on the border or maybe we wouldn't be paying people not to work or have joe biden standing up there saying if you take the vaccine, you won't get covid. as far as left wing politicians are concerned, i'm just assume that they stay away from the oval office and not make decisions and not undermine the country, not make us go from energy independence to energy dependent. not increase inflation. i would rather that joe biden have taken a vacation every single day with presidency rather than show up for work and make all of these decisions that are hurting our country. >> yeah, charlie, you know, one of the vacations he has been taking is obviously he's been neglecting the border. media continues to be such a disappointment. i don't know why i act surprised anymore. hardly do they ever hold this person accountable. he had so few interviews during the year. he barely got through one with an actress the other day. so the media continues to disappoint me. >> no, it is shocking the degree to which they have given up any even pretense that they're trying to cover any of this with any sort of critical eye. we saw it with president obama and then we saw it with president trump where they turned on him. they just completely incapable of treating them fairly at all. now they have gotten to the point that they don't try to treat stories remotely seriously. you know, we are in a situation -- this is why i think that ultimately the american voters, democrats and republicans alike will punish this guy for this stuff. as larry pointed out with all of these problems that, you know, every problem that people feel in their personal lives, whether it's inflation, the wide open border, gas prices, every problem you can draw a direct line to those problems from policies of this administration usually executive orders that this president has put in place himself. it's going to haunt him. they dodged a bullet in this last election, but they're going to pay the piper in the next election. >> larry, i have about 20 second or so. last word to you. >> jason, you're disappointed by the media, the same media that has been ignoring the twitter file story, the same media ignoring the borders. say it ain't so, jason. they have a double standard, selective outrage, hypocrisy. you know it, charlie knows it, i know it. >> listen, have a wonderful happy new year and thanks for joining us tonight on "hannity." coming up a new day on the hill with republicans set to take control of the house, the biden white house has to be nervous. details ahead with congressman james comer as this special edition of "hannity" continues.