The World and Everything in It: January 16, 2023

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Should lower court judges be able to set aside a policy of a federal agency and then block it from going into effect nationwide?

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

Also today the Monday Moneybeat, economist David Bahnsen joins us; we’ll talk about relief from high prices and David answers listener questions.

And the WORLD History Book. Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we’ll return to the first national observation of the holiday.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, January 16th. 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: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Ukraine » AUDIO: [Ukraine air raid siren]

Residents in Kyiv ran for cover on Sunday as a series of explosions cracked the skies over Ukraine’s capital. Officials say no one was killed in the attack.

But that was not the case in the city of Dnipro where at least 30 civilians died.

Moscow’s forces launched 33 cruise missiles on Saturday. Ukrainian defenses shot down 21 of them, but the rest found their marks.

AUDIO: [Ukrainian]

A survivor of the attack said the area has no military targets.

Rescue workers continue to search for survivors under the rubble of an apartment building.

Nepal plane crash » In Nepal, at least 68 people are dead after a plane crashed while descending near an airport in the town of Pokhara.

AUDIO: [Hindi]

One local resident said he was sitting on his back porch when he saw a plane overhead suddenly veer sideways and plummet to the ground.

Authorities have not yet determined what caused the crash. Air traffic controllers lost contact only minutes before the plane went down.

Congo church bomb » 10 people are dead and dozens more wounded today in eastern Congo after a bomb went off during a church service. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: The blast ripped through a Protestant church in the town of Kasindi Sunday morning.

Photos of the blast show the dead scattered among shattered glass and lumber.

A local Islamic States affiliate has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Eastern Congo has suffered violence for decades amid terrorist attacks and bloody conflicts between armed groups and militias.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Biden speaks at MLK’s old church on eve of MLK Day » MUSIC: [“We Shall Overcome”]

President Biden marked Martin Luther King Day by delivering a Sunday morning address at the Atlanta church that King once pastored.

BIDEN: My message to the nation on this day as we go forward, we go together. We choose democracy over autocracy, a beloved community over chaos. We choose believers in the dreams. To Be doers to be unafraid, always keeping the faith

Biden is the first sitting president to deliver a Sunday speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock serves as senior pastor of the historic church.

Biden documents » Meantime, in Washington, fallout continues from the discovery of documents marked classified at President Biden’s old office and in his personal home.

Democratic Congressman Dan Goldman told CBS there’s a difference between this situation and former President Trump’s possession of classified documents.

GOLDMAN: This administration is doing things by the book. There is a divide and a separation between the Department of Justice and the White House that certainly did not exist in the last administration.

But Republican Congressman Jim Jordan says the biggest difference is how the Justice Department is handling the two cases.

JORDAN: It’s this double standard. Biden mishandles classified inflation, they get treated a certain way. And then of course, President Trump gets his home raided 91 days before this midterm election.

Attorney General Merrick Garland last week appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s possession of the documents.

CA weather + emergency declarations in CA, Alabama » California is bracing for more severe weather this week as the death toll from recent storms continues to mount.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters over the weekend:

NEWSOM: Nineteen people now have died and, you know, for all the focus that is wildfires in the state of California, just consider the last two years. We never had anything like that in terms of civilian deaths. So these weather events are taking more lives in the last two years than the wildfires.

On the other end of the country, at least 9 people died in Alabama and Georgia after severe storms and tornadoes tore through both states.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: Legal Docket.

Plus, economic news on the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning, January 16th. Thank you for joining us 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 now for Legal Docket.

It’s been eight months since someone leaked the draft opinion in the Dobbs case back in May. Along the way we’ve learned outside investigators questioned law clerks and that some clerks lawyered up after handing over their cell phones. But that’s about it.

REICHARD: On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported a winnowing down of the number of suspects who might’ve leaked the draft. But it’s still not narrowed down to a single culprit just yet.

Outside pressure may bring more urgency. House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan suggested that perhaps his committee is better suited to investigate, given this long delay.

EICHER: Alright, we’ve got two oral arguments today. The first one deals with an area of law most everyone agrees is broken and that is, immigration law, the system around it. 

Here, Texas and Louisiana challenge the way the Department of Homeland Security sets priorities on removal of those in the country illegally. DHS directs its immigration officials to concentrate on three categories: one, suspected terrorists; two, people who’ve committed serious crimes; and three, migrants caught at the border.

REICHARD: The two states sued, arguing the directive violates laws already on the books. Those require deportations beyond just those three categories.

A federal judge in Texas agreed and so he tossed out the guidelines as arbitrary and capricious and as violating the Administrative Procedures Act. He then applied his ruling nationwide. 

Now the federal government challenges that ruling. Listen to US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar:

PRELOGAR: There are more than 11 million removable non-citizens in this country, and DHS has about 6,000 interior enforcement officers. To focus the agency's limited resources on threats to public safety, national security, and border security, DHS adopted enforcement priorities.

Prelogar argued that DHS simply cannot deport every alien who legally could be deported.

Besides that, she argued, these states don’t have standing to sue in the first place. She says they fail to lay out any direct injury or cost to them that can be remedied.

But Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone counters that and as he does you’ll hear him make reference to a few things you may not have heard of: “I-N-A” That’s an initialism for Immigration and Naturalization Act. Also, APA—that’s the Administrative Procedures Act I mentioned a moment ago—and he’ll refer to Article III of the Constitution, which concerns the Judicial branch of government.

STONE: The states proved their standing at trial based on harms well recognized by this Court's precedents, prevailed on merits arguments grounded firmly in the INA's text, and petitioners respond by attempting to rewrite the law of Article III, the INA, and the APA. They are wrong.

But several justices worried what a win for the states might mean. Listen to Justice Elena Kagan here. She’s speaking to lawyer for the states, Judd Stone:

KAGAN: I mean, we're just going to be in a --in a situation where every administration is confronted by suits by states that can, you know, bring a policy to a dead halt, to a dead stop, by just showing a dollar's worth of costs?

But Texas argues this is far more than a dollar’s worth of costs. Because of the DHS guidelines, Texas taxpayers have far more aliens to feed, house, and legally process. That’s a good bit more than a dollar.

Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wondered whether Texas created some of its own problems:

JACKSON: In other words, aren't the costs associated with Texas's decision to incarcerate or parole certain non-citizens if the federal government decides not to detain them, aren't those a result of the state's own policy choices.

Stone answered that’s not the way previous rulings have approached the problem.

Prelogar for the federal government argued that the lower court judge here overstepped his authority. He can’t invalidate agency policy nationwide; he can only set it aside in the very case before him.

But justices who came up through the US Courts of Appeals stuck a verbal arrow through the heart of that argument.

Here’s one, from Chief Justice Roberts. The term “Vacatur” you’ll hear him use simply means setting aside a judgment.

ROBERTS: Our position on vacatur, that sounded to me to be fairly radical and inconsistent with, for example, you know, with those of us who were on the D.C. Circuit, you know, five times before breakfast, that's what you do in an APA case. And all of a sudden you're telling us that, no, you can't vacate it, you do something different. Are you overturning that whole established practice under the APA? 

PRELOGAR: Yes, I acknowledge, Mr. Chief Justice, that the lower courts, including the D.C. Circuit, have in our view been getting this one wrong.

ROBERTS: W- Wow.

And Justice Samuel Alito pointed out that a win for the federal government on what counts as standing is inconsistent:

ALITO: An injury that would be sufficient for Article III purposes for an individual or for a private entity is not sufficient in your view for the states? There's a special rule for the states?

PRELOGAR: With respect to quasi-sovereign and sovereign interests, yes. And the reason that we think the Court has -- 

ALITO: So this is a rule of special hostility to state standing.

Prelogar ended her argument by pointing out that for the states to win here, murderers and terrorists could go free while states spend time chasing illegal aliens who aren’t dangerous.

PRELOGAR: That is a senseless way to run an immigration enforcement system, and it is not the statute that Congress enacted.

Yet, doing things the way Prelogar argues means states would never have standing to challenge DHS guidelines.

My sense is the states will prevail on the standing issue. On the merits—whether the DHS guidelines can prevail— I don’t have a sense for that.

EICHER: Now for our second and final argument today, titled, Moore v Harper.

This is a dispute out of North Carolina over a gerrymandered congressional map. Gerrymandering refers to the way political parties draw voting districts to their own political advantage. It’s not always illegal, and both Republicans and Democrats do it and both often complain when the other does.

This time, the Republicans in control of the State House drew the map. North Carolina’s Supreme Court struck it down, so the legislature drew a second map. Still not happy, the state court put a special master in charge of drawing another one.

REICHARD: Speaker of the House in North Carolina, Tim Moore, took the lead in challenging the lower court’s action at the US Supreme Court. He argues that the U.S. Constitution is clear as to who controls elections: the state legislatures. Not the courts.

Here’s what the U.S. Constitution says about it. “The times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” The Elections clause, Article I, Section 4.

And “each state shall appoint in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors.” Article 2, Section 1.

Key word in that? Legislature.

Lawyer for Moore and the state legislators, David Thompson:

THOMPSON: The elections clause requires state legislatures specifically to perform the federal function of prescribing regulations for federal elections. States lack the authority to restrict the legislatures’ substantive discretion when performing this federal function

THOMAS: For the first 140 years of the republic, there was not a single state court that invalidated on substantive grounds any congressional redistricting plan...

One of the three lawyers arguing against that view and in favor of allowing courts to redraw voting maps was Neil Katyal:

KATYAL: For 233 years, states have not read the elections clause the way you just heard, the blast radius from their theory would sow elections chaos, forcing a confusing two-track system with one set of rules for federal elections and another for state ones. Case after case would wind up in this Court with a political party on either side of the V. That would put this Court in a difficult position…

The justices must decide whether state legislatures have sole authority to regulate federal elections, without constraint by state courts or other laws. One side says yes, the other says no.

The “yes” side, argued by Thompson, had a tough time of it. You’ll hear Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in turn:

SOTOMAYOR: If judicial review is in the nature of ensuring that someone’s acting within their constitutional limits, I don’t see anything in the words of the Constitution that takes that power away from the state.

KAGAN: If I could, Mr. Thompson, I'd like to step back a bit and just, you know, think about consequences, because this is a theory with big consequences.

Big consequences like letting legislatures restrict voting rights or inserting themselves into the role of certifying elections.

Why get rid of checks and balances on those things?

KAGAN: And -- and you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most, because legislators, we all know, have their own self interests. They want to get re- elected. And so there are countless times when they have incentives to suppress votes, to dilute votes, to negate votes, to prevent voters from having true access and true opportunity to engage the political process.

But Thompson said the Constitution already contains guardrails needed to avoid all of that:

THOMPSON: Your Honor, so our -- our position is that checks and balances do apply, but they come from the federal Constitution and the panoply of federal laws like the Voting Rights Act and other statutes that are highly protective of voters. So there is a check. There is a balance. And there's also a political. So we've got the legal check from federal law, and we've got the political check that the founders envisioned of going to Congress.

Mainstream media headlines were the “hair on fire” sort, shouting “Democracy in the Balance” and all that.

No doubt, if the Supreme Court upholds the map drawn by the Republicans in North Carolina, it will help the GOP. But as The Wall Street Journal opined: this also happened in reverse last year in New York. Democrats gerrymandered and its state court threw it out. Had that court stayed out of it, Nancy Pelosi might still be Speaker of the House, a positive outcome for Democrats.

This one’s not so clear, so I’ll not make a prediction.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

NICK EICHER, HOST: A man in California says a phone call saved his life.

During a recent rainstorm, Mauricio Henao was sitting in his car at the bottom of a hill outside his Malibu home when his girlfriend rang—and asked him to grab something she’d left behind.

He got out of his Toyota Prius, crossed the street, and entered his front door, moments later he heard a loud crash. He told KTLA TV what happened next:

HENAO: And I ran out and saw my car...it was just crushed.

His driver’s seat was filled with a four-foot boulder, right where he'd been sitting seconds earlier.

HENAO: The rock is the size of the whole hood. The windshields are all broken and like the frame of the car is just all twisted.

The rock slide comes as Southern California continues to deal with the aftermath of recent storms.

HENAO: I'm really shook up, honestly, I don't think I'll park here again after this. I’m a little traumatized from this whole ordeal.

But not too traumatized evidently, as he snapped a smiling selfie in front of the totaled car. He must have good insurance.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: It's time now to talk business markets and the economy with financial analyst and advisor David Bahnsen. David is head of the wealth management firm, The Bahnsen Group, and he is here now. David, good morning to you.

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

EICHER: Well, before we get to listener questions, and I'd like to do several here today, David, I do want to touch on the CPI report for December that came out last week, the Consumer Price Index. It was a drop from November into December and by the Wall Street Journal's reading it was the first month on month decline since April of 2020. How do you read the CPI report, David?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, it was almost perfectly in line with consensus expectations and, certainly with my own. No question that there's been disinflation across the board. And in fact, overall, on the headline number, there was deflation in December, prices actually dropping. But the most substantive thing is that core goods inflation—year over year—was 2.1%. That's now down from when it was up in the 7% range. Total inflation and the CPI had gotten up to nine and then it's come down to 6.5. And I would think that when the shelter component normalizes, you're really going to get down to three quite easily. And the reason for that is that the way in which they measure housing is still showing housing prices and rents going higher, which everybody knows it is not. And yet it's the way that as measured that takes into account leases signed a year ago when prices were most certainly higher. So I think that the consumer number was interpreted in the bond market accurately. Bond yields collapsed, interest rates dropped, and I think that the good news is this inflation story is well on its way out. And the bad news is that the story of pre-COVID is coming back, which is the story here to stay, that we are going to be in a very difficult time to get economic growth as a result of the downward pressure on growth, which is reflected on downward pressure on bond yields, as a result of excessive indebtedness in the economy.

EICHER: All right, well, let's jump into listener questions. David, this one I think you'll appreciate—Dan Hoyt. He and his family are listeners in Illinois.

DAN HOYT: Hi friends. My family regularly watches World Watch together, and then discusses any questions that kids may have about the stories. My two and a half year old wanted in on the action. He asked, how does the government give people money? First, I laughed. Then I marveled at his insight in recognizing wealth transfer as a central theme in the political discourse of our country. Then I realized he had stumped me. I'm aware of some methods such as tax credits, Social Security checks, and food stamps. However, I'm guessing there are many other mechanisms the government can use to transfer wealth. So, Mr. Bahnsen, what are all the ways the government gives people money? Thank you for your regular investment in my family through this program.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I love the question. And let's start with two distinctions. There is a way in which the government gives people their own money back. Those are things like tax refunds and even a form of tax credits, which is basically money that someone will not have to pay in taxes that they otherwise would have, because of some form of a tax credit. There's different things people do. But when you're talking about actually just giving people money—and quite specifically giving people someone else's money—there are things called transfer payments. And the mechanism for doing that in our country is largely through entitlement payments, which are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. And now, of course, people can point out people pay for Medicare and Social Security. And that is correct. There are premiums that are charged through payroll taxes that both employers and employees pay throughout their lifetime, and then one gets a payment back in retirement. The reason it's called a transfer payment is that there's no connection between what one pays in and what they end up getting out that is quantifiable. There are people that are higher income subsidizing those lower income, hence the term transfer payment. It's a redistribution. Now there obviously are things that are just direct needs-based payments such as food stamps and welfare. The Welfare Reform Act of 1995 did provide a sort of work requirement that is largely been either altered or eliminated in recent times, not entirely. But those are the mechanisms by which someone can receive money from the government. And, again, there's different political views and so forth around which of these are acceptable and which are not. But that's the mechanical answer how the government goes about giving people money.

EICHER: Okay. David, here is listener, Donald Smith.

DONALD SMITH: Hello, David. I'm a retired elevator mechanic and I'd like to hear your opinion regarding right to work laws. It seems to me contrary to the free market system for the state to interfere with contracts freely entered into between labor and management.

EICHER: All right, David, how do you evaluate ‘right to work’ laws?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, the question is whether or not they're contrary to a free market system. But I think people need to remember what ‘right to work’ laws are. All they are, are laws that prohibit someone from requiring somebody to pay dues for a union. So, somebody is very free to not join the union and therefore not have to pay dues. And so there's a sort of presupposition in the question that is circular. Freely entered into between labor and management, but the whole point is that the employee didn't enter into the agreement and therefore all right to work laws do is say you don't have to. But the right to work laws do not require or allow someone to have their cake and eat it too. They cannot refuse to pay union dues, and then get the benefits of union. They simply get to pick if they want to have to join the union. And so if we weren't talking about organized labor, if we're talking about any other type of affiliation or so forth, if we said, you can come to our church, but in order to worship here, you have to tithe. You can imagine what constitutional questions that would bring up. At the end of the day, the law that allows an individual to not have to be subjected to a market intervention by forcing something, that is the way I would be interpreting right to work laws. And I think it is a very good example of non-intervention by the state, not forced intervention.

EICHER: Here is listener Jamie Lorenz.

JAMIE LORENZ: I have a question regarding investment strategy based upon which political party comes to power and news headlines. I suppose the crux of the question is, Can investors realize reliable profits based upon people's reaction to the headlines and who gets elected? For instance, with the recent downturn in Tesla's stock price, there seems to be a very heavy correlation to Musk's purchase of Twitter and the leftist backlash against that. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time.

BAHNSEN: This is going to be the easiest one for me to answer. I want to emphatically beg listeners to hear me. The answer is no. There is no correlation between political parties in power, headlines, and what one can expect in investment markets.

First of all, the idea that there was political opposition to Elon Musk buying Twitter and now Tesla's stock price has gotten hit is what we call the post hoc fallacy: after this, therefore, because of this. Google's stock is way down in that same time period. Apple stock is way down. And by the way, almost every stock is down: tech and NASDAQ and so forth. And so no, I don't believe it's connected at all. And I think that it has caused more damage to investors than almost anything I've seen. Republicans who assumed that the stock market would tank under President Obama and it went up every single year he was president. Democrats who assumed the market was going to tank under President Trump and it rallied huge both right after he got elected and throughout his presidency. So, again, you just cannot correlate what happens in one's political preferences to what happens in markets. This is a really important lesson.

STEVEN HAMPSHIRE: Hi David. I'm Steven Hampshire, a chaplain serving on a warship in San Diego, California. With immigration making headlines, I recently read Roy Beck's newest book Back of the Hiring Line: 200 Year History of Immigration Surges. Beck argues that periods of low immigration were actually good for the black community, which I find fascinating. My question for you is twofold: Who do you tend to agree with in this line of thinking? And second, could this also be a contributing factor to the number of workers who are increasingly opting out of the workforce?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I really do not agree with the premise and I've studied this a great deal, but a lot of it's just basic economics. What I'm not commenting on is immigration policy, where how the government secures the border, the legalities that need to happen for one to enter the country, national security interest. Those things are all very important. There's different opinions around them. That's not the focus of my comment.

My comment is on the question, which is economically, do you think less immigrants coming in could be better for a particular group? And my answer is that there's absolutely no historical precedence that anytime you have less workers it is better for an economy. Because I am a supply-sider and believe in the Christian idea of work being the driver of economic growth, I think more workers creates more goods and services. And then it allows for more choice for consumers. Each immigrant represents both a new producer and a new consumer. And this is true whether they're black, brown, white, or anything else. And so I don't think that there is racial significance in this issue. And in fact, Ellis Island immigration, which again, many point out that they were coming in legally, there was a significant process, and a lot of assimilation culturally, so that's different in that regard.

But economically, everybody understands that Ellis Island immigration was radically beneficial to economic growth in the country. And so the premise that by having less immigrants come in, you could have one particular group—regardless of who that group is—benefit, by less competition in the workforce, I think is a really anti-market presupposition. I do not believe that you benefit a particular community racially or any other category of community. I don't think you benefit them by trying to stave off competition.

And I just want to point out that we are having less children in America right now and I wish that that was not true. But if we are going to have less children than is the breakeven rate, and you're going to have less immigration, then you're going to have a declining population, which obviously is negative for economic growth. And economic growth going down is bad for all classes of people—socioeconomically, racially, whatever the case may be. I hope that's helpful.

EICHER: All right. Well, if you have a question for David Bahnsen, please do get in touch with us at feedback@worldandeverything.com. I can summarize your question for you if you email it to me, but I think as you heard today, it was so much better to have you appear on the program. So if you have a smartphone, I'd ask you to make use of your Voice Memo app. Then make a recording of yourself asking your question. You can email the file to that same address feedback@worldandeverything.com.

Thank you to Dan Hoyt, and of course his inquisitive son, also to Donald Smith, Jamie Lorenz and Stephen Hampshire. And again, special thanks to David Bahnsen. For thoughtful answers to thoughtful questions.

David is founder managing partner and chief investment officer of the Bahnson group. His personal website is Bahnsen.com. Thank you, again for your questions. You keep sending them, we will keep answering them.

David, thank you, and we'll talk again next week.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, January 16th. 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. Coming up next, the WORLD History Book.

Today, the first national observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Plus, the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision claiming a constitutional right to abortion.

EICHER: But first, the birth of a famous guitarist and influential music producer. Here’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: We begin today in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 14th, 1948. Baseball hopeful Joseph Henry Burnett Jr. and his wife Hazel welcome their first and only child into the world—they name him Joseph Henry Burnett III—we know him today as “T-Bone.”

SONG: I'M GOING ON A LONG JOURNEY NEVER TO RETURN by T-BONE BURNETT

Burnett grew up familiar with Christianity. He was raised Episcopalian by his mother. His grandfather served with the Southern Baptist Convention.

At a young age he fell in love with music—listening to his parent’s records. In his youth he picked up the guitar and began making his own music.

T-Bone worked in the music industry as he could, but his big break came in 1975 when Bob Dylan invited him to join the Rolling Thunder Revue.

ROLLING THUNDER REVUE

After 14 years of ensemble work in the industry, he went out on his own in 1980—releasing a handful of solo albums. A couple years later, entertainment reporter Bobbie Wygant interviewed T-Bone for NBC5 Dallas-Fort Worth.

WYGANT: Do you consider yourself a born again Christian?
BURNETT: No, I say I’m an Episcopalian. I mean “born again Christian” is redundant. I try to express my belief and feelings in my songs and try not to talk down or preach to people.

His long-lasting career includes collaborations with some of the biggest names in music across musical styles: Elvis Costello, Alison Krauss, Elton John, Roy Orbison, John Mellencamp—becoming a sought after producer. Perhaps one of his most popular producing projects was the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack.

SONG: O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU

In 2020, PBS Newshour asked him how he approached his craft as a music producer:

BURNETT: One thing I know is all the best art is made by artists working at full autonomy. The more strings you attach to an artist, the more autonomy you take away from him, the less able he is to make music…

At 75 years old, T-Bone is still very active in the music industry…in recent years he’s invested a lot of time and money into analog recording advancements and has become a severe critic of social media companies and the entertainment industry.

O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU

Next, January 22nd, 1973…

CBS NEWS: Good evening. In a landmark ruling the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite announcing the Roe v Wade decision.

CBS NEWS: …the decision to end the pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.

By a vote of 7 to 2, the Supreme Court overturned individual state bans on abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. The majority decision asserted that bans deprived women of a fundamental liberty without due process of the law—appealing to the 14th amendment. CBS reporter George Herman:

HERMAN: Only in the final stages of pregnancy may states intervene and say no to abortion. The court's decision written by Justice Blackmun thus sets limits on the right to abortion on demand. One limit is the time when doctors believe the fetus may be able to survive outside the mother's womb.

Early pro-life advocate James McHugh—speaking on behalf of the Catholic Church—predicted that this decision would erode our culture’s commitment to life.

JAMES MCHUGH: In this instance, the Supreme Court has withdrawn protection for the human rights of unborn children. And it is teaching people that abortion is a rather innocuous procedure provided that there are proper legal safeguards. I think that the judgment of the court will do a great deal to tear down the respect previously accorded human life in our culture.

50 years later, McHugh’s predictions arguably have come true, since the Supreme Court Decision of 1973, more than 54 million babies in the U.S. have died by the procedure. And even though Roe v Wade has been overturned, the battle for life continues—not only on the local level—but also in the human heart.

And finally, January 20th, 1986. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is observed federally for the first time. Audio here from ABC Nightly News:

PETER JENNINGS: It took the United States Congress 16 years to finally endorse a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it finally happened. And here in Atlanta today, which was the seedbed for his commitment to civil rights, there's been a major celebration.

The calls for a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. began shortly after his assassination in 1968. Democratic Michigan Congressman John Conyers was the first to propose a bill to that end…it was rejected. For nearly 15 years, Conyers tried again and again, each time failing, but by 1980 things began to change—partly due to Stevie Wonder…and his song “Happy Birthday”—a rallying cry to honor King’s legacy.

SONG: HAPPY BIRTHDAY BY STEVIE WONDER

On November 2nd, 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law—designating the third Monday in January as a federal holiday.

REAGAN: If all of us young and old, Republicans and Democrats do all we can to live up to those commandments, then we will see the day when Dr. King's dream comes true. And in his words, all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning. Land where my father's died, land of the pilgrims pride From every mountainside Let freedom ring.

It took 17 more years before all 50 states fully recognized the holiday. Today, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is more than a day off, it’s become a day set aside to encourage community service and improvement.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: A major religious liberty victory for Christian colleges.

Plus, church attendance after Covid. We’ll talk about whether it’s recovered.

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.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

This year, we’ll be following the ESV Daily Bible Reading Plan. The idea is to encourage us all to read through the Bible together this year. We’ll choose a short passage from the scheduled reading for each day. Today, from the Psalms. The Bible says: "Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you." (Psalm 16:1-2 ESV)

Go now in grace and peace.

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