Alex Samuels: The brutal body cam footage showing 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by Memphis, Tennessee, police officers was released late Friday. The videos prompted outrage from all corners of D.C. since its release. But whether it will spark action is another question.

The video has revived some bipartisan calls for police reform legislation.The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus also said that he and his group requested to meet with President Biden this week to quote “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system – specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement.”

But the negotiations aren’t necessarily starting from a hopeful place. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, both Democrats and Republicans drafted police reform bills. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House, but stalled out in the Senate in September 2021 after months of bipartisan negotiations. Essentially, the two sides couldn’t get past concerns about union involvement or qualified immunity — that’s the policy that often protects police officers from being held personally liable for their actions. And those sticking points haven’t necessarily been resolved.

And while there’s not a lot of recent polling gauging American’s views on policing, a spring 2022 study from the Gallup Center on Black Voices found overwhelming support for some level of change to how police officers do their jobs among Americans of multiple races and ethnicities.

But even if the public wants to see policing change, it’s not clear that lawmakers are on the same page. Let’s not forget, Republicans now control the U.S. House and reform legislation is likely not high on their to-do list. In fact, over the weekend, Republican representative Jim Jordan said the following:

Rep. Jim Jordan: I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.

Samuels: In the meantime, reporting suggests that Sen. Cory Booker will re-introduce a version of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as soon as this week — and negotiations should begin in earnest from there. So we’ll be keeping an eye on the police reform efforts and whether Congress makes any headway on this go-around.

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Nathaniel Rakich: Washington, DC, there’s a new sheriff in town. No, not me. A gaggle of insurgent Republicans called the House Freedom Caucus. After the dramatic vote for speaker of the House, this group is poised to wield a tremendous amount of power. So, what’s the deal with the Freedom Caucus?

Back in 2010 and 2012, the tea party movement swept a new brand of Republican into Congress: die-hard conservatives dead set against compromising with Democrats. They felt that even most Republicans didn’t fight hard enough for conservative principles, and they quickly became a thorn in the side of leaders in both parties. In 2011, they demanded spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, and in 2013, they shut down the federal government rather than agree to fund the Affordable Care Act.

Eventually, some of these renegade Republicans decided to create a formal group within the House and officially founded the Freedom Caucus in January 2015. And one of their first victories was forcing the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner — the poster child for the Republican Party establishment.

The Freedom Caucus’s obsession with smaller government can border on indifference toward any governing at all. Its members used to prioritize fiscal conservatism, but recently they’ve been criticized for obstructing just for obstructionism’s sake. In Boehner’s words, “They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against.”

And this year, one of the things many of them were against was Kevin McCarthy. At least 14 members of the caucus voted against him for speaker, helping to delay his election until the 15th ballot and fifth day of voting. McCarthy finally won them over, but not before making more concessions than a Regal Cinema. The biggest was reportedly reserving three seats for Freedom Caucus members and their allies on the powerful House Rules Committee — the committee that controls what bills come up for a vote on the House floor. As a result, traditional Republicans won’t have a majority of votes on the committee on their own; they’ll have to get support from either Democrats or, more likely, the Freedom Caucus.

And of course, the caucus holds the balance of power in the full House as well. The Freedom Caucus doesn’t publish a list of members — it likes the element of surprise, I guess — so we don’t know exactly how many members it has, but unofficial counts suggest it could be almost 40. Republicans have only 222 seats in the House, and a majority is 218, so they can’t pass anything on their own unless almost all of the Freedom Caucus is on board. That means any legislation that passes the House for the next two years will probably be super conservative — which will make it a non-starter with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

That’s a recipe for gridlock — which isn’t great considering the government is on track to both hit the debt ceiling and run out of money sometime in 2023. The Freedom Caucus will surely try to use these as bargaining chips to push conservative priorities again, but if it can’t reach a compromise — and remember, these guys aren’t known for their flexibility — it could plunge the country into an economic crisis.

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Maya Sweedler: One of the most important numbers coming out of 2022 is nine. That’s the difference between the number of seats Republicans won in the U.S. House of Representatives in November and the number of seats Democrats won.

If you’re thinking, “hey, that’s a pretty small number” — yeah, you’re right! Coming into the midterms, history suggested that the Republican Party would wind up with a much larger majority. Prior to the election, Democrats controlled 222 seats and Republicans 213, which meant Republicans only needed to pick up five seats to take the chamber — anything else would just be padding. And usually, the president’s party loses a lot of seats in midterm years. Since World War II, the party in the White House had lost an average of 26 House seats in midterm elections.

In 2022, Democrats only lost about one-third of that. While there are a ton of different explanations for why that is — redistricting, candidate quality issues, the Dobbs decision — the fact of the matter is that this number will be hugely important to the functioning of the government for at least the next two years.

We have a divided government. Democrats control the White House and the Senate, and now Republicans control the House. But winning just nine more seats than Democrats means that the Republican caucus has very little room for error. If more than four representatives defect, it won’t have enough votes to pass bills with a majority vote. We’re already seeing the headaches this could create for Republicans — just look at how hard it’s been for them to elect a new House speaker. Current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy needs 218 votes to become speaker of the House, and with a small but vocal faction of far-right Republicans opposed to his leadership, he has a lot of calls to make over Christmas.

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Monica Potts: One of the most important numbers of 2022 was 9.1 percent. That was the inflation rate in June — the highest yearly increase since 1981.

Inflation affected all Americans, but its severity varied by region. And as you might expect, low-income families were hit the hardest. Many struggled to afford basics like food and rent. A report from The Urban Institute found that about 1 in 5 adults experienced household food insecurity this summer, which matched heights reached early in the pandemic.

High prices changed the ways families made decisions both big and small. As the prices of goods rose, especially in the summer, families shifted their spending to buy cheaper brands and drove less. Increasing pet food costs may have led to fewer families adopting pets and more pets being relinquished to shelters. Some families downgraded their summer vacations. And Americans spent their savings, and saved less.

Inflation has since cooled a bit, but as of November, consumer prices were still 7.1 percent higher than they were at the same time last year. And that’s affected the way families are celebrating the holidays. In a poll from before Christmas, 57 percent of those surveyed said that it was harder to afford the gifts they wanted to buy, up from 40 percent the year before. And 11 percent of respondents in another poll said they anticipated taking on some amount of debt for their holiday shopping.

To control this high inflation, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate more than 4 percentage points over the course of the year, to the highest point in 15 years. Most observers agree that’s likely to cause a recession. What’s less clear is how bad it will be, and whether it curbs inflation as it’s intended to do. These are the unknown questions 2023 is poised to answer, and why the inflation rate is one of the most important numbers of the past year.

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Maggie Koerth: I have two important numbers for you this year. Some good news. And some bad news.

First, there’s four … That’s the number of harmful per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, that the Environmental Protection Agency released new concentration guidelines for this year. This is the good news.

Then, there’s four thousand seven hundred … That’s roughly the number of different PFAS chemicals out there, globally. They’re present in thousands of products you buy and use. They’re even in your drinking water. And this entire category of chemicals, including the ones developed to be “safer” replacements, have increasingly been shown to be dangerous to human health.

PFAS are a problem that date back to your grandma’s day. They were invented during the Great Depression and have been used in non-stick coatings on products like pots and pans since the 1940s. Since then, they’ve become part of how we make waterproof and stain-resistant fabrics and carpets, fire-fighting foam, cleaning products, paint, food packaging and more.

But these “forever chemicals” don’t break down. They just build up in the environment. And in the early 2000s, scientists started finding these chemicals in soil and water … and, eventually, in human blood.

To put it mildly … this is not good. Just a few parts per trillion in drinking water have been linked to a wide variety of health issues, from thyroid and immune response problems, to high cholesterol, to testicular cancer. This summer, the National Academies of Sciences reported that almost 100 percent of Americans have been exposed.

Despite all of this … or maybe, behind all of this … is the fact that PFAS aren’t well regulated. The EPA didn’t even have guidelines for what an acceptable concentration of PFAS in drinking water might be until 2016. At that time, they said that 70 parts per trillion was an acceptable amount of PFAS to find in water supplies. Now they’ve dropped that by more than a thousandfold. Scientists aren’t sure they even have the tools to measure PFAS at that level.

The EPA is in the process of creating the first federally enforceable regulations around two PFAS chemicals. That’s likely to happen in 2023. And individual states are taking action too. By 2030, new products containing any PFAS at all will be illegal in the state of Maine.

And things are changing at the industry level too. 3M, the company that first developed and still is the exclusive manufacturer of some of these chemicals, has said they will stop making PFAS by 2025.

So the publication of unenforceable guidelines covering 4 out of 4000 plus chemicals is just the beginning. We’re at the start of a serious shift in how the public – and the government – think about PFAS.