The World and Everything in It: July 1, 2024

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like me. My name is Sarah Ancheta. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, where I homeschool my four kids. I'm enjoying listening to World from Venice, Italy. I hope you enjoy today's program.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! A major shift at the Supreme Court, overturning a decades-old precedent and reining in the power of federal agencies.

MEGHAN LAPP: Finally, the little guy has a chance, has a shot in court.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That and more today on Legal Docket.

Also, the Monday Moneybeat. David Bahnsen is standing by and we’ll talk about the economic impact of that high court decision.

And later, the WORLD History Book. Today, the 125th anniversary of a simple outreach.

MORRIS: There is a need and there is a thirst for God’s word all over the world, and that is why we do what we do.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, July 1st. 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: Now the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Democrats defend Biden » President Biden and his political allies are working to contain something of a campaign crisis in the wake of his debate performance last week.

Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock told NBC’s Meet the Press:

WARNOCK:  I'm with Joe Biden, and it's our assignment, uh, to make sure that he gets over the finish line come November, not for his sake, but for the country's sake.

Some party officials and donors have reportedly been in a panic since the Thursday night debate in which the 81-year-old president appeared to show cognitive decline.

But Senator Chris Coons told ABC’s This Week:

COONS: Joe Biden has an incredible record and he knows as the American people do that when you get knocked down, you get back up and you fight harder, but that's what he's planning to do.

The senator there echoing President Biden’s own remarks in campaign appearances over the weekend. The president acknowledged a poor performance and vowed to bounce back.

Republicans respond » But Republicans say it was more than just a poor performance. Sen. John Barrasso said it was a public display of something the White House and Democratic leaders have been hiding for quite some time.

BARRASSO:  Democrats have been for years, months saying, “Hey, this guy is doing great. He's fit as a fiddle, sharp as a tack.” He is not. The American people and the world saw that the other night. 

And North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who is believed to be on Donald Trump’s short list to be his running mate said the White House can no longer brush off concerns about Biden’s age and health.

BURGUM:  People can't unsee what they saw. Two weeks ago, the White House was attacking journalists, saying that no, you can't say these stories about that Joe Biden isn't capable of serving right now. And then all of America saw it.

Push to replace Biden » Meantime, pressure is mounting for President Biden to release his delegates and allow the Democratic party to pick a different nominee.

Publications and media outlets like The New York Times, Newsweek, and Politico have called for Biden to step aside.

But Larry Sabato with the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics says …

SABATO: He doesn’t want to leave. He is fighting those who suggest that he needs to step down. He will continue to do so.

And publicly, the president has said he can do the job and has no intention of bowing out.

To change Biden’s mind, Sabato says it would take a coalition of current leaders and figureheads like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama …

SABATO: They would have to go to the White House and try to convince him, and he would be tough to convince. And they’ll also have to try to convince Jill Biden. And that may be even tougher.

What’s more, Sabato says to convince Biden top Democrats might have to go very public with the concerns they’ve reportedly expressed privately.

Israel/Mideast peace » Talks for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas have stalled. But diplomats from the West and some Middle Eastern countries are pushing for a truce that could calm attacks by Hezbollah and other Iran-backed terror groups.

But the Biden administration is getting some pushback in Washington including from Democratic Senator John Fetterman:

FETTERMAN: I can’t possibly support any kind of a deal for peace as long as Hamas can be in power on any of that. Hamas needs to be effectively neutralized before there’s any kind of peace.

Escalating cross border strikes between Israel and Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border appear to have at least leveled off of late.

But American and European diplomats are cautioning Hezbollah against taking on the military might of Israel. They say the group shouldn't rely on them to hold off Israeli leaders if they choose to carry out an offensive into Lebanon.

Hurricane » Hurricane Beryl is expected to slam islands in the eastern Caribbean today with Category-4 winds in excess of 130 miles per hour and potentially deadly floodwaters. National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan:

BRENNAN: Storm surge levels of 6-9 ft above normal tide levels with potentially catastrophic, dangerous breaking waves on top of that.

The storm is tracking west through the Caribbean, and at this point, it is not expected to impact the United States.

France elections » Voters in France could soon elect the country’s most conservative government in recent history.

Polls suggest the right-leaning National Rally party has a good chance of winning a majority in the lower house of parliament for the first time.

In the first round of voting yesterday, the National Rally arrived ahead with an estimated one-third of the votes. The decisive and final vote, however takes place next Sunday.

SOUND: [Inside Out 2]

Box office » At the weekend box office Inside Out 2 continued its reign in top spot.

SOUND: Hello. Ah! I’m Anxiety. Where can I put my stuff? A new emotion, wow! 

It earned another $58 million dollars. The animated feature from Disney’s Pixar has been the surprise smash hit of the summer.

The film steered away from injecting LGBT and other progressive messaging … and avoided the controversy that surrounded many of the company’s recent box office flops.

A Quiet Place: Day One finished in second place. The monster movie opened with a better-than-expected $53 million-dollar debut.

I’m Kent Covington.

Coming up, The Supreme Court reins in the power of federal agencies. That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this first day of July, 2024. If you’re way up north, Happy Canada Day! Thanks for joining us! Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

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

Today we expect the U.S. Supreme Court to hand down the final opinions of the term. Those include former President Trump’s appeal of immunity for official acts, and cases on social-media censorship.

Last week, the court handed down ten opinions, and we’re going through them slowly. And because of limited time, we’re spreading them out instead of cramming them all in this one space. We want to give them the time they deserve. So we’ll analyze three more today.

First, the power of the administrative state.

The ground may not have shifted, but it’s a seismic legal shift: a 6-to-3 court overturned case precedent from 40 years ago. The so-called Chevron Doctrine is no more!

Under Chevron the courts allowed executive-branch agencies to use federal statutes written with broad and often ambiguous provisions, and then give bureaucrats the power to spin out of them narrow and highly specific rules.

Courts then had to defer to the agency’s interpretation of law so long as it was “reasonable.”

But then along came two disputes: Loper-Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless v Department of Commerce. To say last week’s result took the power of legal interpretation away from executive-branch agencies and returned it to the judiciary is probably to understate the case.

REICHARD: Agree. Because with Chevron gone, it should return lawmaking to legislators to write clear laws and then face political accountability for their work.

Loper-Bright and Relentless involved commercial fisheries that had specific clashes with federal regulators that in the Chevron era they couldn’t hope to win. To illustrate the point, I called up a woman involved in the Relentless case. Meghan Lapp has worked in the fishing industry for 15 years, starting out building commercial fishing nets. She’s now the liaison for fishing vessels dealing with regulators.

Lapp told me the law for years required the boats to take on government observers in order to enforce federal law.

MEGHAN LAPP: So we do that, no problem. But then the government wanted more of them on our boats, but Congress hadn't given them appropriations, any money to expand their own program. So they said, “Well, you can pay for it directly.” And they forced us to pay for this directly, out of pocket.

EICHER: The out-of-pocket amount was steep: up to 20 percent of revenues, putting serious strain on profit margins.

The agency claimed authority to set the fees because the law Congress wrote said nothing about who paid for what. An ambiguous law that the National Marine Fisheries Service cleared up on its own: writing a rule saying the fisheries had to pay!

The stakes were high enough that the fisheries lawyered up. They turned to a group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a libertarian effort to rein in the administrative state.

REICHARD: One of its lawyers was in the courtroom as Chief Justice John Roberts announced the opinion. So I called him up. John Vecchione described the chief as unequivocal:

JOHN VECCHIONE: Chevron is overruled. When I heard that, I was like, that is perfect. Because there was a lot of commentators were saying, well, they might kaiserize it, which is a cutting back of the deference, but not getting rid of it. …and “Chevron is overruled,” is what you wanted, because he's often accused in his opinions of having overruled something, and won't say it. Kagan accuses him of that a lot of times. So here he was. He was brooking no nonsense. He overruled it. He overruled it on statutory grounds, saying that the Administrative Procedure Act…says that we decide what the law is.

EICHER: The three justices in dissent were Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown-Jackson. They made the point that federal agencies are filled with subject-matter experts who understand the complexity of the industries they regulate. And for the courts to sweep that expertise aside will cause large-scale disruption.

But Vecchione expounded on the court’s own experience:

VECCHIONE: The chief had a good answer to the fact that the Supreme Court has had to make up a lot of doctrines to get around using Chevron. And he says, "We've been doing this since 2016. We haven't used Chevron. So we should get rid of it for the lower courts too. Because when it gets up here, we try to avoid it. We're sort of wiggling around trying to, you know, avoid the doctrine. So why keep it?"

REICHARD: Some headlines I saw protested that this was pure “judicial arrogance.” And there is some truth in it; it just depends upon whose arrogance they don’t like.

After all, it was the late conservative justice Antonin Scalia who helped develop the Chevron Doctrine and came to regret it in practice. He witnessed creeping agency power as each new administration came in with different agendas.

Vecchione says the new ruling will bring a neutrality.

VECCHOINE: The lack of Chevron means in the Biden administration, they've got to match it up to the statute. If Trump wins, Trump's got to match it up.

EICHER: One criticism of the court’s action here is that it will collapse the entire federal regulatory framework, some of which has been operative for four decades. Vecchione says the court’s opinion specifically addressed that.

VECCHOINE: The Chief said all the old Chevron decisions on what statutes can do are not overruled. You know, everything we said before stays. This is going forward. Now that has a lot of handles on it, but the fact of the matter is, it's like a game of musical chairs. Well, the musical chairs just stopped in the Biden administration, their rulings on Chevron and the environmentalist ruling on Chevron. They all got Chevron deference, and all those laws were passed and have approval. So it stopped now, and it's got, they've got to show it. But it's not like the whole world comes apart right now.

Vecchione pointed out that some states have not used Chevron in years.

VECCHIONE: Congress has given the agencies a lot of power. Now they have to exercise it responsibly and show why their regulations comport with statutes. And that's a good thing. California hasn't had Chevron for years, and no one's ever told me that California regulatory authorities don't have enough power.

REICHARD: Back to our fisheries liaison, Meghan Lapp. Her take away from all of this?

LAPP: When you're fighting the government, when you're David, fighting Goliath, you have to refuse to lose. Refuse to lose, because that's how you win. And when they come at you again, you come back and you come back again until you win. And you know, this is a huge win for American fishermen. But it’s not just a win for fishermen. It's a win for all Americans. Finally, the little guy has a chance, has a shot in court. Finally, the American citizen has the same level of rights as the US Government in a court, and that's huge.

It’s also huge that this ruling will make it easier for courts to strike down things like the Biden administration’s new rules on Title IX. That’s the law aimed at protecting the rights of women and girls. The Biden Department of Education read into the statute definitions Congress simply didn’t write. On its own, the agency read in subjective feelings of “gender identity” and let them outweigh the physical protections for women and girls the law specifically intended.

EICHER: Next: another clipping of administrative agency power.

Here, the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled in an in-house proceeding that investment adviser George Jarkesy committed securities fraud. It ordered him to pay a $300,000 fine, plus nearly double that in what the SEC determined were illicit gains.

Jarkesy sued, arguing the SEC’s in-house system violates his right to a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment.

REICHARD: And the high court agrees with him: by a 6-3 vote, liberal justices in dissent. The decision says defendants facing civil penalties are entitled to a trial by jury before a neutral adjudicator.

Chief Justice Roberts announced the opinion, saying that allowing the executive branch agency to be prosecutor, judge, and jury is the “very opposite of the separation of powers” demanded by the Constitution.

I called up one of Jarkesy’s lawyers, Karen Cook.

KAREN COOK: The Dodd-Frank provision gave the SEC the ability to bring an enforcement action against anybody for anything in its in house courts, whether they regulated you or not. So this was an extraordinary grant of power that we had not seen before in other agencies. And it also gave the SEC the extraordinary power to decide which defendants got to go to federal court and have their constitutional rights protected and which ones would be relegated to their in-house courts, where there their own employees would judge their accusations.

EICHER: During oral argument in November, the Chief Justice made note of how expansive agency power has become:

JUSTICE ROBERTS: The extent of impact of government agencies on daily life today is enormously more significant than it was 50 years ago. I mean, the government is much more likely to affect you and proceed against you before one of its own agencies than in court.

Yet the dissenting justices thought this was another “power grab” by the majority that’ll throw the system into chaos. Though for lawyer Cook, it’s the opposite:

COOK: I think it was grabbing the power back that was taken away by the Dodd-Frank delegation of authority that allowed the administrative agency to decide if people got constitutional rights or not. You know, you have way more transparency in federal court than you do in these administrative proceedings. So you're not going to have more chaos. You're going to have less chaos. And so this is a separation of powers issue that one branch of government does not have the right to extinguish the authority of another.

REICHARD: As for George Jarkesy, an 11 year legal odyssey comes to a close. And Nick and David will talk about the economic impact in just a few minutes.

EICHER: Last opinion today involves January 6th Capitol riot defendants. This one is titled Fischer v. United States. A majority six justices tossed out the charges against one of those defendants.

REICHARD: And not the majority six you might expect! Liberal Justice Jackson agreed with her conservative colleagues. Conservative Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberals.

The defendant was Joseph W. Fischer. He was charged under what the lawyers refer to as “(c)(2).” It deals with evidence tampering and was passed after the Enron financial scandal.

It all came down to how to interpret a catch-all phrase tacked onto the end of the law. It lists several actions that are illegal related to physical evidence: things like mutilating or concealing a document with the intent to impair its use in an official proceeding. But the tack on uses the words “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding …”

EICHER: The key word otherwise. Jeffrey Green on behalf of Fischer had the winning argument back in April:

JEFFREY GREEN: Until the January 6th prosecutions, the "otherwise" provision had never been used to prosecute anything other than evidence tampering, and that was for good reason. This Court has said that "otherwise," when used in a criminal statute, means to do similar conduct in a different way. The government would have you ignore all that or disregard all that and instead convert (c)(2) from a catchall provision into a dragnet.

Dragging in conduct Congress never anticipated, including a 20 year sentence for that charge alone.

The dissenters found it sufficient that Fischer’s actions delayed an official proceeding, and that was good enough to meet the statute’s intent.

REICHARD: Fischer still has to return to lower court to see whether the indictment survives under this narrower interpretation of that law.

This is also a charge that Special Counsel Jack Smith brought against former President Donald Trump, among other charges. But as do most other January 6 defendants, he’ll still face other charges brought by the DOJ. Very few were charged only with this violation.

That’s it for today’s opinion analysis; more tomorrow, until we finish them all.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: 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.

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

EICHER: Well, let's begin today by returning to the big Supreme Court ruling on the power of administrative agencies, David. I know this one has substantial economic effects, or at least has the potential to have substantial economic effects. But as you heard our analysis a moment ago, this case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, that reverses a doctrine of law now 40 years old this year, giving substantial power to regulatory agencies, and now it's gone. This is one of the big ones, David.

BAHNSEN: There's no question that that was the biggest story of all of the Supreme Court rulings in terms of economic impact. In the details of it all, it will take a little time to be able to figure out what the actual applications are going to look like, but at a high level, I think the headlines are capturing this very fairly. And you may have noticed over the years, it's rare for me to say that media headlines are capturing something fairly, but I think that this is essentially what they are saying it is, which is the Supreme Court ruling in a manner that is limiting the regulatory power of the administrative state as it pertains particularly to some of these agencies that are not directly accountable and that represent an avenue for federal government expansion that comes at a cost in the economy: the cost of the regulation, the ambiguity it creates that hinders economic calculation. It's a profound ruling, and there was a lot of build up to what it would mean legally for some time. And I think coming at it from the economic angle, that's for good reason.

EICHER: Well, David, I'm curious about your economic takeaways from the Thursday night debate. I think we all watched with a kind of shock at how diminished President Biden showed himself to be. My own view here: this exposes big news agencies big time. They have the privilege of close access to the White House. They knew what we all saw with our own eyes. They've known it for a long time. They didn't say anything about it all these years until, of course, the evidence became impossible to ignore. But I digress here. All apart from that shock of what we saw on Thursday night, David, to the extent that anything came out on the economic front, what is your analysis of that?

BAHNSEN: Yes, I imagine that there are plenty of people that will give the appropriate political commentary on the debate better than I would. It does seem to be a strikingly bipartisan consensus about what a sad affair it was for President Biden and the clear revelation around his state, physically and mentally.

Economically, though, I found it interesting that there was so little substance around spending, around deficits, around the role that the big spending that has taken place and build up of excessive federal government indebtedness, the role that that has played with hindering economic growth. That's something I talk about all the time, but I'm not running for president, and I don't understand why the most obvious economic issue of our day, the hindering of economic growth taking place by a buildup of an unsustainable level of government debt, the only comment that came up about the unaffordability of Social Security was President Biden saying he wanted to tax millionaires more, which is just simply not a serious proposal, doesn't come close to covering the gap. And you know, candidly, President Trump has said he doesn't want to talk about entitlement reform either.

So that's okay, the debates are not generally going to be a great place anymore, since Lincoln-Douglas, for real substantial policy depth. There was far bigger political ramifications out of what took place the other night, but that doesn't change the fact that lingering out there is still questions that were not getting answered about an economic vision for our country.

EICHER: Well, David, this past week, we got a well-watched data point on economic conditions, specifically that of inflation. The indicator was the personal consumption expenditures report. It came out for May. Let's touch on that real quick.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think that the Fed, it wasn't a huge surprise, but it did come in, in line with expectations of basically just 0.1% on the month, only 2.6% year over year. And Nick, the other thing I want to point out that didn't get talked about a lot: goods prices on the year. So obviously, a lot in our economy is not goods, it is, we spend a lot of money on services too, but goods prices are in deflation. They now have had a negative price movement year over year. So when you look into the weeds of all this, there's a little bit more data there to unpack.

EICHER: All right, David, let's do this week's defining terms. And for that, I'd like to return to the beginning, speaking of government regulation. And there is an entire glossary of terms around the regulation of economic life, and a big one, I think, is at the heart of what drove all of the legal wrangling that led to the court's decision, effectively, to put a check on the administrative state. And that economic term is "regulatory capture." Why don't you define that this week and tell us why that matters?

BAHNSEN: Ultimately, Nick, regulatory capture is an economic theory that when you have overly empowered regulatory agencies, they end up not acting in the best interest of the public, but in the best interest of preserving their own power, which often comes paradoxically by regulating in the favor of those whom they're regulating, that it creates a crony capitalism. And regulatory capture over time is a byproduct of human nature.

This is not a difficult concept in economics or in political theory for Christians to understand, because we have a belief about human nature rooted in the doctrine of original sin. Lord Acton famously said that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Regulatory capture is just the byproduct of all of those realities playing out, and those who believe that a greater and greater and greater regulatory state improves and improves and improves the results for the public are not paying attention.

Regulatory capture refers to when greater regulation goes away from protecting the public and instead towards protecting the regulators and the regulated, as opposed to the broader common good. I have used the example here on Moneybeat and elsewhere in my writing for some time that as a heavy investor myself in oil and gas and in the energy sector, I don't have any doubt in my mind, the regulatory capture helps big energy companies and hurts small energy companies because of the ability of larger companies to navigate through the ramifications of regulation that smaller companies don't have such ability, with lobbyists and legal resources and and so forth.

So that's regulatory capture, and that's what hopefully the Supreme Court ruling in the Chevron case will help to alleviate, at least on the margin.

EICHER: Alright. David Bahnsen, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of the Bahnsen Group. You can check out David's latest book, Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life at fulltimebook.com. David, I hope you have a great week. We'll see you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick. Good to be with you.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, July 1, 2024. 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. Today, an iconic landmark is presented to the United States. And, placing Bibles in hotel rooms.

EICHER: But first, American soldiers set out for home. Here’s WORLD reporter Anna Johansen Brown.

NEWSCAST: At last, Americans are in sight of an end to their commitment in Vietnam, the third most costly war in American history.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: One sweltering day in July, a battalion of U.S. infantry takes off from Saigon. It’s July 7th, 1969, and these are the first US troops to be withdrawn from the Vietnam war.

During the first four years of armed conflict, the US military has been supporting South Vietnam in its fight against the communist North. But the fight has dragged on…with no end in sight.

CRONKITE: It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

As the list of casualties grows, so does anti-war sentiment at home.

SOUND: [VIETNAM PROTESTS]

In early 1969, newly-elected President Nixon announces a new strategy: Vietnamization. The plan is to withdraw US troops, but increase artillery and aerial bombardment, while giving South Vietnam the training and weapons they’d need to continue on in the fight.

Over the next four years, waves of American troops leave Vietnam. The last withdrawal is in 1973. Just two years later, North Vietnamese forces take control of Saigon, uniting the nation under communist rule. It leaves many Americans feeling disheartened, wondering if the sacrifice was worth it.

Next, we jump back to 1899 to rural America and the season of the traveling salesman.

John Nicholson and Sam Hill met at a hotel in Wisconsin. Both were salesmen who spent a lot of time on the road. The hotel was full up and only had one room left, so the two men shared it. They soon realized they were both Christians and decided to spend the evening praying together.

DOCUMENTARY: It was this accidental meeting in room 19 of the Central House Hotel that would become the humble beginnings of The Gideons International.

The two men felt that God was telling them to start a ministry. Their goal was to unite traveling salesmen for evangelism. On July 1st, 1899, their group meets for the first time…with all of three members in attendance.

It isn’t until 1908 that the Gideons launch their trademark strategy: Placing Bibles in hotel rooms.

Here’s Gideon member Brad Morris.

MORRIS: The ministry of the Gideons International is all about saved souls and our ministry is accomplished through this word, this book, God’s word.

Today, there are over a quarter of a million Gideons. Each year, they distribute over 70 million Bibles, an average of two Bibles every second. Every day, the organization hears testimonies of people whose lives were changed by that copy of scripture.

MORRIS: There is a need and there is a thirst for God’s word all over the world, and that is why we do what we do.

Recently, some hotel chains have decided to forgo any religious literature…including Gideon Bibles. But about 65 percent of hotels still accept them. So, next time you’re traveling, if you open that drawer in the bedside table, you’re still likely to find a copy of the Word of God…whether you’re a traveling salesman or not.

Finally, Independence Day, 1884, 140 years ago this week: France formally presents the Statue of Liberty to the American ambassador in Paris.

French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi began the statue eight years earlier.

But its story goes back even farther than that, to the 1860s. At the time, France had an authoritarian government. A group of French thinkers and abolitionists got together just after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Here’s Edward Berenson, professor of French history at NYU.

BERENSON: Their idea was to try to come up with a way of commemorating the life and achievements of Abraham Lincoln…and to make a critical comment on their own government. And so their idea was to sort of obliquely criticize their own government by talking about how much better the American system of politics was.

In 1870, Bartholdi began designing the statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World.” He got help from French engineer Gustave Eiffel to create the statue’s skeletal framework.

After the official presentation in 1884, the statue is dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic to New York harbor, where it is painstakingly reassembled. Lady Liberty opens to the public two years later, becoming a beloved symbol of hope for millions around the world.

DOCUMENTARY: When you come into New York harbor, and you see the symbol of America, it’s a lady with a torch of hope and torch of freedom. That’s why we call her lady…because she’s not a statue to us.

MUSIC: O BEAUTIFUL…

That’s it for this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: Analysis of the Supreme Court decisions we expect to see this morning. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964: three generations weigh in on a 60-year-promise. 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.

The Psalmist writes: “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” —Psalm 150:6

Go now in grace and peace.

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