The World and Everything in It: February 20, 2023

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Journalists demand records from the board that oversees Puerto Rico’s economy. The Supreme Court considers whether they can have them.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, economist David Bahnsen will be along, and he’ll talk about buying and selling real estate. Listener questions again today.

And the WORLD History Book: this week marks the 100th anniversary of an important English libel case.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, February 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time for news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden to travel to Poland / Kamala Harris remarks / Graham on F-16s » President Biden is flying to Poland this week to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He’ll meet with Polish and NATO officials to talk over ongoing support for Kyiv.

Vice President Kamala Harris over the weekend condemned Russia’s invasion.

HARRIS: The United States has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity.

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham says he agrees with Harris on that point. He said the West should provide whatever Ukraine needs to fight back—including U.S. F-16s—and that most U.S. lawmakers agree.

GRAHAM: Virtually unanimous belief that we should be training Ukrainian pilots on the F 16. Today, so they get the jets as soon as possible.

President Biden is slated to arrive in Warsaw tomorrow.

Another earthquake survivor pulled from rubble over weekend, updated death toll » 
Rescue teams in Syria and Turkey are still finding earthquake survivors—who have endured nearly two weeks buried under rubble.

AUDIO: [Arabic]

This man spent almost three hundred hours under shattered concrete and debris. He alerted his rescuers to other survivors elsewhere under the same building.

AUDIO: [BLINKEN and TURKISH OFFICIAL]

Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken visited earthquake-ravaged parts of Turkey on Sunday. And with regard to victims in Syria, Blinken said…

BLINKEN: We’re doing everything that we can, including making certain that there is absolutely no doubt that whatever sanctions there are against Syria don’t affect humanitarian assistance.

The death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has surpassed 44,000. Tens of thousands more people are injured.

Blinken China meeting » Secretary Blinken also spoke Sunday about his weekend meeting with China’s foreign minister Wang Yi in Germany.

Blinken said he warned that China’s violation of U.S. airspace with a spy balloon “must never happen again.”

He told ABC’s This Week:

BLINKEN: I can't speak to their original intent. What I can tell you is this once over the United States, the balloon attempted to surveil very critical, important military installations. We protected the sensitive information that it was trying to surveil.

Blinken said he also warned his Chinese counterpart against supplying weapons to Russia for its war in Ukraine. He said U.S. intelligence reports that Beijing may be considering providing “lethal support to Russia.”

Jimmy Carter enters hospice care » AUDIO: Lord, we'd be amiss this morning if we did not lift President Carter to you. Lord, we pray that you be with his family…

An interim pastor at Jimmy Carter’s church in Plains, Georgia offering a prayer for the former president, who entered hospice care over the weekend.

After a series of hospital visits, he decided to forego further medical interventions and spend his remaining time at home with his family.

At the age of 98, Carter is the longest-living president in United States history.

Southern border » Lawmakers from Texas are renewing their calls for the White House and Congress to tackle the border crisis.

Congressman Lance Gooden:

GOODEN: Immigration and border security are two very different things, and Republicans know that we have an immigration issue, but we can’t address that until we secure the border.

Some House Republicans are pushing to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. They cite a record high of more than 2 million migrant encounters in the last fiscal year. And they say more than 1,400 migrants have died near the border since President Biden took office.

The White House claims the GOP isn’t serious about working together on solutions.

Asbury revival » After 12 days of continuous worship, a chapel service at Asbury University in Kentucky is winding down. University officials say they are no longer going to allow Hughes Auditorium to remain open to the public for 24 hours a day.

WORLD’s Zoe Schimke was on-site over the weekend as hundreds of people came in from all across the country to Wilmore, Kentucky.

SCHIMKE: It’s absolutely profound to me to see hundreds of happy, relatively calm, orderly people who don’t know each other willing to brave the cold and long lines just to get inside this chapel to have an experience.

Asbury University officials are now restricting the 8-to-10 pm gatherings in the chapel to just high school students and young adults under 25, although afternoon services will remain open to the public until Wednesday.

School administers say they want to ensure security and keep students accountable for their responsibilities.

Ant-Man tops weekend Box office » Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania conquered the weekend box office.

AUDIO: [Ant-Man and Wasp trailer]

The film grossed $104 million in its opening weekend domestically.

Avatar: The Way of Water came in second place with another $6 million. That was just enough to make it the third highest-grossing film of all time with more than $2.2 billion in total ticket sales. It bumped another blockbuster by director James Cameron from the spot: 1997’s Titanic.

The highest grossing film of all time is another James Cameron movie—the original Avatar with $2.93 billion in total ticket sales.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead on the Legal Docket: a case involving financial oversight for Puerto Rico.

Plus, the WORLD Radio History Book.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday February 20th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

The Supreme Court was on winter recess last week and so heard no oral arguments. Nor did the justices announce any opinions.

But the court did say it may release opinions next week.

We’re still catching up on cases the court heard last month. Today, just one oral argument.

And for that, we turn to legal reporter Jenny Rough to set this up.

JENNY ROUGH, REPORTER: Right, Nick and Mary, today’s case concerns the Financial Oversight Board set up to help Puerto Rico. Help it through its economic crisis.

And the issue before the Supreme Court centers on a legal doctrine known as sovereign immunity. It refers to the fact that the government cannot be sued without its consent.

The doctrine is rooted in British common law, the idea that the King could do no wrong. You couldn’t sue the king! Of course, we don’t have a king. But we do have the Eleventh Amendment that prohibits lawsuits against states and the federal government in federal court. And also to Indian tribes under other laws.

There are exceptions. One of those exceptions is that Congress can enact a statute that abolishes sovereign immunity for certain types of lawsuits.

REICHARD: Right, but this case doesn’t involve a state, the federal government, or a tribe. It involves a U.S. territory: And that’s what Puerto Rico is.

I’ll list out the facts here: For decades, Puerto Rico has had money problems. By 2015, the island had accumulated over $70 billion of public debt. It couldn’t even provide essential services to its residents.

So Congress enacted the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. Known by the acronym PROMESA. It aimed to try to fix some of the problems. PROMESA established a board of seven people tasked with negotiating with the island’s creditors and working toward a restructuring plan.

ROUGH: Well, that board created documents about what it was doing, and a media company wanted access to them. Everything from financial statements to emails to text messages. The board turned over some documents, but not everything the company requested. So the media outlet sued the board in federal district court.

The board argues the case should be dismissed.

REICHARD: Two legal issues come into play here. One: Whether Puerto Rico—as a territory— has sovereignty, analogous to state sovereignty. Two, whether Congress abolished that sovereignty when it enacted PROMESA.

The Supreme Court took up the case only to decide the second issue. But oddly, almost the entire oral argument focused on the first question.

ROUGH: Lawyer Mark Harris argued on behalf of the board. When he refers to CPI, he’s talking about the media company suing to get the board’s documents.

HARRIS: ​​In 2016, Congress established the oversight board and assigned it the critical task of leading Puerto Rico back to fiscal health. CPI has raised the issue of whether Puerto Rico and, therefore, the Board is entitled to sovereign immunity. The Court has repeatedly held for more than a hundred years that Puerto Rico has immunity. It held that way before Puerto Rico's constitutional assembly in the 1950s. And, since then, it has said that Puerto Rico has a degree of autonomy comparable to a state.

Comparable to a state.

Chief Justice John Roberts wanted to know if Puerto Rico’s status as a territory made a difference.

ROBERTS: You analogize in your argument to the sovereign immunity of states, the sovereign immunity of tribes, and I wonder if Puerto Rico's situation, though, is significantly different. Puerto Rico, obviously, at points in the past, had the sovereignty of Spain, but that did not carry over in any sense. So the question would be not the extent to which the Constitution recognized the existing sovereignty. The question would be did the Constitution, in any way confer sovereignty, create sovereignty, with respect to Puerto Rico?

HARRIS: The question of whether or not there is sovereign immunity, again, I think there's two steps that are involved. One of them is that Congress has to confer attributes of sovereignty onto the entity. Usually, it does that by an organic act. Here, there were several organic acts. But then even more important than that was the constitutional assembly in the 1950s, which, as this Court has said many times, really made Puerto Rico unique and gave it—

ROBERTS: Well, that's right. That's sort of my point, unique, and so I'm just wondering how far you can stretch the analogy.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was born to Puerto Rican parents, helped the board’s lawyer out. She brought up other territories that have been granted immunity from lawsuits.

SOTOMAYOR: Territories like Louisiana and others didn't have their own sovereignty before they became territories of the United States, correct?

HARRIS: Correct.

SOTOMAYOR: They had sovereignty of France or of other countries, correct?

HARRIS: In most cases, yes.

SOTOMAYOR: And, historically, no territory was dragged into federal or state or territorial courts unless their sovereignty had been waived, correct?

HARRIS: Yes.

SOTOMAYOR: So, in 200 years of our history … no sovereign, which I think we have given to mean no governing entity, would be dragged into a court without the consent of the sovereign, correct?

HARRIS: Yes.

But Justice Elena Kagan said that for the court to just assume Puerto Rico and by extension its financial oversight board has sovereignty immunity presents a strange problem. Typically, when the court assumes something, it’s because it doesn’t matter. The assumption won’t affect the outcome one way or the other. But here, it would.

KAGAN: And that's a funny kind of posture, you know, because the assumption will essentially determine the disposition of the case. You're going to get immunity but only because we've assumed that you should get immunity. And I wonder if you have any precedent for that, any cases in which we've done something similar, any authority to suggest it's appropriate. I don’t know of any authority to say it’s inappropriate. It just seems quite weird to me.

HARRIS: We were not able to find a case where it seemed that the existence of immunity would not have mattered to the outcome where the Court just assumed it. Nevertheless...

Lawyer Sarah Harris argued for the other side on behalf of the media company that seeks the board’s documents. She said Puerto Rico’s board isn’t immune from being sued because the Act explicitly says any action against the board shall be brought in federal court. The statute then lists a couple of exceptions.

In other words, she argued it wouldn’t make sense for the act to say federal courts can hear cases against the board only for the federal courts to say they can’t hear cases against the board.

HARRIS: The board is not immune because PROMESA’s text clearly says the board will be a defendant in all kinds of actions, especially constitutional ones. Congress created a forum for the board to face suit.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett had an idea of how this case might be resolved.

BARRETT: Ms. Harris, why not just vacate and remand to the First Circuit, given the complexities of this question? You raise good points, the government's raised good points, on this common law immunity question and the question of whether territories have it. Why not just vacate and let the First Circuit, you know, which has this long line of precedent, but it hasn't really fully engaged the question? Why not let them do it?

HARRIS: Well, I think it would be unfair to give the other side a mulligan. We've argued all along that Puerto Rico doesn’t have Eleventh Amendment immunity. It is their affirmative burden to show that there is immunity.

That might be the route the court takes, even if the parties don’t want it. And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

I’m Jenny Rough.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen.

He’s head of the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group and he’s here now.

David, good morning!

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Well, good morning, Nick. Good to be with you.

EICHER: We received the new consumer price index, producer price index, and retail sales for January. What was noteworthy about those reports last week?

BAHNSEN: I think the retail sales number was much stronger than expected. And I have sort of adopted a theory that one of the macroeconomists I follow shared with me that it was the first month in January that the Social Security payment increase kicked in: Everyone who receives Social Security got an 8.7% increase in their benefit versus last year’s monthly benefit, which amounts to an average of $140 a month across 70 million people.

And so I wonder if there’s some connection with a little increase in spending around that benefit increase. It’s not really provable or falsifiable, which is never great when doing economics, but that’s an interesting concept to me; that makes sense prima facie. The Consumer Price Index didn’t have any surprises, this disinflation continues, it came down.

But the Producer Price Index was a bit higher, mostly from energy inputs. Energy had been dropping so much that it had a little push back higher, which wasn’t a big surprise, but it caused the numbers to be up. And then food inputs on a wholesale level were down 1% on the month. So there was a mixed bag in there. But you didn’t see big disinflation in the producer price numbers like you had been seeing in the consumer numbers, and most of that’s still going to be playing out months ahead in housing.

EICHER: First listener question today has housing in mind, David:

NASELLI: Hi, this is Andy Naselli. I teach systematic theology, New Testament, and ethics at Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, and I’m one of the pastors of The North Church. Here’s my question for you. What advice would you give to a married couple with children who are thinking about selling their home right now so that they can buy another home that would better serve their family? Some people are saying that this is the worst possible time to buy a home in the last fifty years since housing prices are so inflated and since interest rates for mortgage loans are so high.

Let me add, Pastor Naselli included a word of thanks that I’ll pass along to you, David. He read your book with Doug Wilson from last year, titled, “Mis-Inflation” and found it an insightful book.

BAHNSEN: First of all, I’m thankful for the kind words. But in terms of the last 50 years, we are not looking at the worst time to buy a house. There was that little period called the financial crisis of 2008, and I can assure you that what was going on in housing then was significantly more dysfunctional and problematic than what we face now.

But his question is interesting, because he refers to both a buy and a sell. And in theory, there’s a neutralization at play. If you’re buying too high, then you’re also selling high, and if you’re selling low, then you’re also buying low. So unless one is talking about wanting to sell a $300,000 house to buy a $800,000 house, then we’re basically talking about an economic hedge, because you’re buying and selling at the same time. The issue then presents not as financial, but as practical and personal: Situational.

Is there a real benefit around a family’s work situation? Their goals, their needs, their size and space requirements, the neighborhood, the community, proximity to church? All of these qualitative things are what people should be basing a purchasing decision on. And this is one of the most important things I can say—going beyond the merely economic and financial—that I talk about all the time: These are what I want people thinking about buying a house.

In other words, don’t worry about the cost if you can afford it, and you are buying the property for the purpose of living in it. It’s when people are looking at their house as a baseball card to be traded that all the bad things happen. But when you’re basing the decision in sensible practical family considerations, I’ve never seen anything go wrong.

EICHER: Last question today is really a followup to our discussion last week on the subject of the national debt. David Jamison of Charlottesville, Virginia, wants to know: What happens down the road as we just keep adding to the debt year after year? David, what do you say?

BAHNSEN: First of all, my exhortation to Christians and conservatives and those who believe in a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility is, “Let’s not fall prey to Chicken Little predictions, because we’re wrong about those over and over again.” And one of the reasons they’ve been able to add the last 20 trillion to the debt is that many of us who were believing the end of the world was coming on were wrong over and over and over again. And the reason is that we all underestimate the creativity of their ability to kick the can down the road. We are making dire predictions around stuff that is inherently unpredictable.

How long will the bond market facilitate an overly indebted country? Well, apparently the answer to that is more than 31 trillion. Because we continue to fund debt to fund our nation’s operations with no problem in capital markets all the time. People thought when the Fed stopped buying, there wouldn’t be buyers of the debt. The Fed hasn’t been buying any bonds at all now for over six months, and they’ve had no trouble at all getting a bid. So I don’t know exactly where it goes.

What I do know is it’s unsustainable. And I don’t attach a specific timeline. I’m always sensitive TS Eliot’s language here about how the end of the world come with a whimper, not a bang. And I don’t know that we’ll necessarily have this moment where all of a sudden there’s an apocalypse around our debt crisis. I think it could be like Japan’s suffocation: A very slow drip that just puts downward pressure on economic growth and downward pressure on standards of living. And that that becomes this equally immoral and unacceptable consequence, and yet, not one that has that kind of weeping and gnashing of teeth component that many people are expecting.

There are a number of ways in which it could look going into the future. A value added tax, perhaps the election of a whole lot of fiscal hawks; we could elect people who would actually do start doing draconian spending cuts (there’s certainly gonna have to be entitlement reform at some point.) I don’t think we’re going to do entitlement reform until we have a crisis. But I hope I’m wrong about that. But that’s what my political experience has been with the American voter.

EICHER: I don’t think I ever expected to say I hope you’re wrong. Well, you may have a question for David Bahnsen.

If so, send it on over. The email address is feedback@worldandeverything.com. Keep them coming.

Thank you to Andy Naselli and David Jamison this week.

David Bahnsen is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of The Bahnsen Group. His personal website is Bahnsen.com.

See you next time.

BAHNSEN: Yes, Nick. See you next week.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Groundhog Day was two weeks ago, but for a plane-full of travelers trying to make it from New Zealand to New York it was like the movie. 

AUDIO: Groundhog Day!!! Get out and see that hog out there. Soooie, sooie! snort-snort-snort

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Last Friday, passengers boarded the plane—a non-stop flight from Auckland. The plane landed 16 hours later right back where it started.

After about 8 hours into the trip, the Air New Zealand flight got word of an electrical fire at JFK. So the airline chose to turn the plane around, which was judged the least worst option.

The airline did apologize—profusely—promising to book each passenger on the next available flight to New York.

AUDIO: Groundhog Day!!! Get out and see that hog out there. Soooie, sooie! snort-snort-snort

Oh, not that again!

I guess the only question that remains is whether they arrive in New York much-improved people.

REICHARD: Character building!

EICHER: It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, February 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up, the WORLD History Book. One hundred years ago, a famous eugenicist sues a Scottish doctor for libel. WORLD’s Paul Butler recently caught up with that doctor’s grandson and brings us his story.

PAUL BUTLER: On February 21st, 1923, an academic and a doctor appear before London’s High Court. The conflict began the year before.

SUTHERLAND: In 1922, Dr. Sutherland…received a writ from Dr. Marie Stopes…

Mark Sutherland lives in Sydney, Australia. Doctor Hallidy Sutherland was his grandfather.

SUTHERLAND: And she sued him for libel because in 1922, his book Birth Control was published. The full title is Birth Control: A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against the Neo-Malthusians…

Malthusians are those who see population growth as being exponential yet food supplies and other resources as finite and linear. So Malthusians are strong proponents of population control and birth control. The eugenics ideology of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s applied those ideas aggressively—particularly for those who were poor, weak, and unhealthy. It led Marie Stopes to open a London slum birth control center in 1921.

Doctor Sutherland criticized her work in his book…

SUTHERLAND: And he said that she was handing out contraceptives that were extremely dangerous for poor women to be using.

Sutherland accused Stopes of “experimenting” on the women.

SUTHERLAND: So she sued him for libel.

During the case Sutherland was able to explain his use of the term: “experiment.”

SUTHERLAND: She was not always careful about the women she was looking after. So one of the things that was brought up in the case was a device known as the gold pin or gold spring. And effectively this device was then very new. People didn't know if it promoted conception, if it prevented conception, or if it was, in fact, an abortifacient. So on that basis, Dr. Sutherland was able to justify the word experiment, exposing the poor to experiment.

The trial lasted for five and a half days. The first question for the jury: “Were the words…defamatory of the plaintiff?” They answered: “Yes.” The second question: “Were they true in substance and in fact?” The jury said: “Yes.” The third question: “Were the comments fair?” They replied: “No.”

Sutherland’s barrister successfully argued that because the comments were true, it wasn’t libel—and Sutherland won on that legal footing—though many in the press saw it as persecution of Stopes and her work. But Mark Sutherland says it deserved criticism.

SUTHERLAND: The fact of the matter is, is that while Stopes was giving these contraceptives free of charge or at cost to the poor women who wanted them, at the same time, she was lobbying politicians—including Prime Minister Lloyd George—for the compulsory sterilization of men and women who were poor…The fact of the matter is, Stopes used quite vituperative language to describe these people. She described them as throw outs, wastrels, the spawn of drunkards, and so on…

Undaunted, Stopes appealed and the court reversed the original verdict in July 1923—levying 100 pounds in damages against Sutherland.

He appealed to the House of Lords in 1924—Britain's Supreme Court at the time—and he eventually won. He became an internationally best-selling author in the 1930s and was well-known for a time…but by the 1950s Western culture embraced Stopes’ promises of sexual freedom and Sutherland faded into oblivion.

SUTHERLAND: He was effectively—in modern parlance—canceled…

Growing up, Mark was told that his namesake only took on Stopes because the once nominal Presbyterian had become a Catholic convert as an adult.

SUTHERLAND: According to these people. He didn't like Protestant Britain not adhering to Catholic Catholic teachings on contraception. And that's why he attacked her.

But in 2003, Mark Sutherland discovered a suitcase of original documents from his grandfather…

SUTHERLAND: I found his papers in my mother's cellar in Britain. I realized that a great injustice had been done because Dr. Sutherland was much more sophisticated and a real person than this cardboard cutout villain. And what I want to do is to restore his reputation.

Mark says his life's work is to reintroduce audiences to the very timely writings of Dr. Hallidy Sutherland.

SUTHERLAND: One might think with the proliferation of abortion and contraception right around the world, that Dr. Sutherland lost the historical argument. But if you read his 1922 book: Birth Control, and read the final two paragraphs, you'll see that it's come to pass. He said that what's going to be happening in the future is that people will say, where are our children? Children, children, we must have children at any cost and it has happened. This Malthusian agenda has been with us for a long time. It's not new. It's not sciency. It's based on an English cleric Malthus getting it wrong several hundred years ago, the latest iteration would be by the Davos set. But that's why we need to remember the history. If we forget the past, then we are—as the cliche goes—condemned to repeat the mistakes.

Mark Sutherland is author of Exterminating Poverty: The true story of the eugenic plan to get rid of the poor, and the Scottish doctor who fought against it. Each day this week, he’s posting court summaries of the 1923 libel case on his website. I’ve included a link to that in today’s transcript.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: high stakes in Wisconsin. The outcome of a primary there will likely determine the future of abortion in the state.

Plus, a story about employing people with disabilities.

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

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