The World and Everything in It - July 11, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down over a dozen opinions at the end of its term. You’ll hear a synopsis of them.

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

Also today the Monday Moneybeat: I’ll talk with economist David Bahnsen about the Elon Musk Twitter deal, about jobs, recession, and the assassination of Japan’s ecomomic pioneer.

Plus the WORLD History Book—fifty years ago this week, the chess match of the century.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, July 11th. 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, Paul Butler with today’s news.

PAUL BUTLER, NEWS ANCHOR: Biden mulling public health emergency for abortion access » President Biden says he’s thinking about declaring the efforts of some states to protect unborn lives a public health emergency.

That would free up taxpayer dollars to promote abortion.

And Biden on Sunday called on pro-abortion activists to continue rallying against pro-life laws.

BIDEN: Keep protesting. Keep making your point. It’s critically important.

His remarks came two days after he signed an executive order on abortion access.

The order spelled out instructions to the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. He wants those agencies to try and ensure access to abortion-inducing drugs and to protect women’s ability to travel across state lines to end a pregnancy.

And Vice President Kamala Harris Sunday again called for legislation to expand abortions nationally.

HARRIS: But we also need Congress to act, because that branch of government is where we actually codify, which means put into law.

But Virginia’s Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin said this matter should not be decided in Washington.

YOUNGKIN: The Supreme Court’s decision, I agree with — that this is a decision for states to make by elected officials.

Youngkin has called for legislation to protect unborn children after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Virginia.

Russia missile strikes kill 15 » In Ukraine, dozens of emergency workers dug through the rubble of three more apartment buildings on Sunday after more Russian missiles struck civilian targets.

AUDIO: [Vyatcheslav Koltsovytch speaking in Ukrainian]

The missile strike killed 15 people.

Vyatcheslav Koltsovytch with the State Emergency Service in Donetsk, says two of the buildings have partially collapsed and workers are frantically searching for survivors.

AUDIO: [Vyatcheslav Koltsovytch speaking in Ukrainian]

Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, says the Russian missiles were truck-mounted rockets.

The residential buildings were in Chasiv Yar, a town of about 12,000 in the Donetsk region. Moscow last week suggested that Russian forces might scale back attacks for now to rest and regroup. But Ukraine’s government says the shelling from Russian forces remains relentless.

Sri Lanka » The president of Sri Lanka says he will step down next week after a public uprising over his government’s handling of the country’s economic crisis.

Protesters stormed the homes of the president and prime minister and say they don’t plan on leaving until the leaders have formally stepped aside.

Under the country’s constitution, if both leaders resign, the speaker of parliament would temporarily take over as acting president.

Lawmakers would then elect a new leader to serve the remaining two years of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s term.

Japan election » Members of Japan’s LDP party placed paper roses next to names on a wall chart at party headquarters on Sunday. Each rose indicated a victory in the upper house of Parliament. WORLD’s Josh Schumaher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: The LDP won a vast majority of seats in the upper house, giving control of the government to the party of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Abe was assassinated on Friday while campaigning. Police arrested a suspect at the scene.

Security was tight during the final stage of the campaign on Saturday. Candidates avoided fist-bumping or standing close to voters.

The victory will likely guarantee current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida three more years to push policy agendas, including beefing up national and reforming the country’s pacifist constitution.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

CBP clears horseback border agents of whipping accusations » Customs and Border Protection has announced that after a long investigation, they found no evidence whatsoever that border patrol agents on horseback whipped migrants at the border in the Del Rio sector.

Those accusations made big headlines last year.

But the agency is disciplining four of those agents for alleged administrative violations, working in an unsafe manner and unprofessional conduct.

Some had criticized the Biden administration for publicly treating the matter like a scandal without all the facts. And Republican GOP John Katko accused the administration of trumping up violations to save face.

KATKO: They had to do something to justify the fact that they were found innocent of the charges of strapping, whipping people. They weren’t.

Meantime, the state of Texas has begun conducting its own border enforcement operations, picking up illegal migrants within the state and returning them to the border. But it’s unclear what happens once they’re back in Border Patrol custody.

Thor: Love and Thunder tops weekend box office » At the weekend box office, another big Marvel blockbuster hits the big screen.

TRAILER: The old ex-girlfriend. What’s it been like three, four years? Eight years, seven months and six days, give or take.

Thor: Love and Thunder scored a big debut with $143 million over the weekend domestically. That’s a bit below the expectations of some, but a big opening nonetheless.

And Minions fever is still going strong. The Rise of Gru finished second with another $46 million.

I’m Paul Butler. Straight ahead: analysis of the final Supreme Court decisions for this term.

Plus, an event that marks the inauguration of Islam.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning and a brand new work week for The World and Everything in It. Today is the 11th of July, 2022.

Good morning to you, I’m Mary Reichard.

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

Today, we wrap up the remaining opinions from argued cases in the term just ended for the US Supreme Court. And we will breeze through them as fast as we can, so here we go! Fourteen of them.

REICHARD: First: victory for the veteran who sued for job discrimination.

LeRoy Torres served in the US Army Reserve, He also worked as a state trooper. The army deployed Torres to Iraq in 2007. There, he and other soldiers constantly inhaled noxious fumes from burning trash. After honorable discharge from service, Torres developed lung problems.

He asked for a different job with the state agency he’d worked for in order to accommodate his new health problems. But the state refused, offering him the same job and telling him he’d be fired if he didn’t do it.

Torres sued under a federal law that requires employers to restore the same or similar job to a returning service member. The state agency claimed immunity from suit.

The dispute had far-reaching implications, as Justice Stephen Breyer put it during oral argument in March:

BREYER: This has the potential of being a pretty important case for the structure of the United States of America. The war power is not copyright, and it is not the Indian Commerce Clause. It is, and, you know, as Lincoln said, will this nation long endure? We hope it is never necessary, but maybe that question will come up, okay? Now you see why I think it’s very important.

Writing for the majority, Justice Breyer said that ratifying the Constitution was a package deal—and the States agreed their sovereignty would yield to the national power to raise and support the Armed Forces. The bottom line of the 5-4 ruling? Texas does not have immunity from this type of lawsuit.

EICHER: Moving on: another 5-4 decision that benefits people convicted during a time when racially disparate penalties on crack-cocaine charges were in place.

Carlos Concepcion received 19 years in prison for crack possession. A year later, the law changed in such a way that would have made his sentence shorter. Naturally, Concepcion sought to take advantage. Even the Justice Department agreed he was eligible for sentence reduction, but the question was what factors judges had to consider.

Bottom line here is that lower courts may consider changes to the law involving crack-cocaine when resentencing criminal defendants.

REICHARD: Third, a unanimous win for two physicians convicted by a jury of prescribing controlled substances outside the usual course of professional practice.

The doctors challenged the jury instruction; they wanted the jury instructed on subjective intent; that is, so long as the doctors believed they were prescribing for a legitimate medical purpose, they’d acted lawfully.

The federal government argued for an objective standard that doesn’t consider physician intent.

But all nine justices agreed with the doctors and sent the case back for further review. Justice Breyer wrote the opinion: Once the doctors proved they were authorized to dispense controlled substances, Breyer wrote, the burden is on the government to show beyond a reasonable doubt that the doctors knew they were acting in an unauthorized way.

EICHER: A major decision now that limits the power of the federal government. The case involves regulation of carbon emissions from power plants. It goes back to the administration of President Barack Obama, and specifically that Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency exceeded its authority. According to the court, the EPA overstepped when it issued carbon emissions caps to restructure the American energy market.

You could hear the eventual majority ruling in this comment from Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral argument in February:

KAVANAUGH: One thing we said is that Congress must speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance. And the second thing we said is that the Court greets with a measure of skepticism when agencies claim to have found in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy.

This ruling signals an end to courts deferring to broad agency actions.

The three liberal justices in dissent thought that members of Congress often don’t know enough to regulate sensibly on such issues and that expert agencies are appropriate to address problems.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch in a concurring opinion wrote that “lawmaking under our Constitution can be difficult, but that’s a virtue, not a bug, of our system. It is a purposeful design to protect individual liberties from authoritarian power.”

REICHARD: Okay, the fifth decision ends former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy. The 5-4 court said allowing migrants to stay in the United States while their immigration hearings play out doesn’t violate a Clinton-era 1996 migrant detention law.

Justice Kavanaugh joined the liberal justices to form the majority.

The dissenting justices pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security lacks capacity to detain the avalanche of aliens at the border, so it just releases untold numbers of them into the country. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the minority, says that’s a violation of “clear terms of the law, but the Court looks the other way.”

EICHER: Now for the sixth opinion: another 5-4 in a surprising lineup of conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett joining liberal justices Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor to form the majority. 

They sided with the Department of Health and Human Services—specifically how HHS interprets a statute that calculates how hospitals serving poor patients are reimbursed by Medicare. The legal question? Whether an administrative agency may issue a rule based on a legal interpretation that a federal court said was not open to interpretation. The opinion says HHS is in the right and reverses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

REICHARD: Next, states now have more prosecution power for crimes on Native American lands.

Just two years ago, a split bench upended years of practice to say only the federal government or tribal courts can handle those cases. Oklahoma challenged that, saying the federal government wasn’t doing its job and letting a lot of perpetrators go.

This split ruling narrows that one. States again now have concurrent authority to prosecute, along with tribal and federal governments, in these cases: specifically involving non-Native people who commit violent crimes on Native lands against Native Americans.

Justice Gorsuch is known as a champion of Native rights and wrote a fiery dissent: “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts.” The court’s three liberal justices joined him.

EICHER: Eighth opinion says Republican lawmakers in North Carolina can intervene to defend the state’s voter ID law, even though the state’s Democratic attorney general says he already is.

Here’s a quote from the opinion: “The facts [here show] how divided state government can lead to disagreements over the defense of state law in federal court.” “We need only acknowledge that a presumption of adequate representation is inappropriate when a duly authorized state agent seeks to intervene to defend a state law.”

That’s a victory for the Republicans, eight justices to one. Only Justice Sotomayor dissented. Liberal justices Breyer and Kagan were with the majority.

REICHARD: Moving right along with opinion number nine. The majority says a prisoner can file a federal civil-rights claim to contest the manner in which he will be executed.

Here, the question was what procedure must an inmate use to challenge the method of execution?

Capital offender Michael Nance wants to be executed by firing squad but Georgia doesn’t offer that. It authorizes only lethal injection. Nance did not bring this challenge as a habeas-corpus application. Instead, he brought it as a civil-rights claim, and a 5-4 majority says he can do that.

EICHER: Next, a decision that says a police officer cannot be sued for failing to read Miranda rights to an accused person prior to questioning him. You know the Miranda rights from cop-shows: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.

Terence Tekoh was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, but the arresting officer didn’t read him his rights.

A jury later acquitted Tekoh. Then he sued the officer for violating his civil rights.

Here’s lawyer for the federal government, Vivek Suri, during oral argument:

SURI: Miranda recognized a constitutional right, but it's a trial right concerning the exclusion of evidence at a criminal trial. It isn't a substantive right to receive the Miranda warnings themselves. A police officer who fails to provide the Miranda warnings accordingly doesn't himself violate the constitutional right, and he also isn't legally responsible for any violation that might occur later at the trial.

A 6-3 court agreed, reversed the Ninth Circuit appeals court, and remanded the case for further proceedings.

REICHARD: Okay, we’re on a roll! This next opinion is a victory for a hospital accused of bias against patients with kidney failure. 

An employee health plan at Marietta Memorial Hospital pays less money for dialysis than it does for other treatments. Dialysis provider DaVita sued, saying that violates Medicare law. A 7-2 court says it does not and remanded this case as well.

EICHER: Next, the court ruled in favor of a criminal defendant as to what counts as a “crime of violence” in federal gun cases that carry mandatory minimum sentences.

Quick background: Justin Taylor and an accomplice planned to steal money. The accomplice pulled a gun on the target and killed him, then ran away without the cash. Taylor received a conviction for “using a firearm to carry out a crime of violence.” He argued a mere attempt to rob can’t be a crime of violence.

And a majority of seven justices agreed with him.

REICHARD: This next opinion is unanimous that a state’s workers’ compensation law discriminates against contractors with the federal government.

This case arises from cleanup of a nuclear waste site that the Department of Energy oversees in the state of Washington.

Some of those doing the work are federal contractors. State law presumes cancer and lung disease will result from this work, and that’ll trigger workers’ compensation benefits. But the federal government contests that part. Washington State later changed that law, so it said the matter was moot.

But the majority justices decided the case is not moot, that the state law is not constitutional because it discriminates against the federal government without authorization of Congress. And the new state law isn’t without questions needing answers. So, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is again overruled.

EICHER: Okay, final opinion. The court ruled against a death row inmate who was seeking a neurological evaluation to get him off death row.

When Raymond Twyford was a teenager, he attempted suicide and that left bullet fragments in his brain. He points to that now as possible evidence of brain damage that might mitigate his sentence.

The court ruled the prison is not obliged to transport Twyford to a medical facility in search of new evidence because the inmate did not show that a brain scan would be admissible. Three liberal justices dissented.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time now for our weekly conversation on business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen, head of the Bahnsen Group . Good morning!

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

EICHER: Before we get into economic data, I suspect you’re following the Elon Musk and Twitter deal. But now, it appears the deal’s in big trouble. What happened? Why is it falling apart?

BAHNSEN: Because the stock is way down. And he was overpaying and he's trying to get out of the deal. It's very simple.

He's gonna get sued. And he's going to make his case for why he want[s] out of the deal. The deal is airtight, the issues he's publicly presented are not going to hold up. But he can stall and really make it very difficult for the deal to get closed. And ultimately, I just think they'll end up settling, settling could mean closing the transaction at a much lower price. Or it could more than likely at this point mean, he just walks away and pays them money for his trouble. The deal has a $1 billion breakup fee, but that's the minimum. The billion is just if for any reason the deal doesn't happen. The billion is not to say I'm allowed to walk away from the deal. He's not allowed to walk away. And so he could be forced to actually comply. His best bet would be if he can't get the financing, but he does have the financing. And these investment banks are not prone to go perjure themselves by saying, oh, yeah, we were unwilling to do the debt, you know; they, they are willing to do it under certain conditions. So it's a really messy situation, and I don't expect it to get resolved anytime soon. But whether or not the resolution ends up being that Elon Musk owns Twitter, I actually don't really have a good feel for that right now. What I do know is he's not going to own Twitter at $44 billion. And one way or the other, Twitter's gonna get something out of this, either cash or a deal done at a lower price.

EICHER: Pretty solid jobs report for the month of June—372,000 jobs. So, continued strong job growth—unemployment rate still below 4 percent—but yet we’re talking recession. How can that be? What’s your assessment?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I mean, it isn't just my assessment. This is indisputable. If you have a recession, with job creation, like this, and unemployment like this, then it's just never happened in human history. There's still nearly, you know, 11 million job openings as well. So what you have is very low unemployment, still a strong ability to get a job, positions that are unfilled. I am increasingly seeing certain data points that are quite contradictory to the recession narrative. You don't have a recession, when people who want work can get work. And yet the idea that we end up going into recession, it simply means that we believe that dynamic will change, that all of a sudden jobs will start to go away, that employers who right now are looking to hire will stop hiring and will start firing. And that is entirely possible. I don't hold that as an impossible condition. I think it's unlikely in three to six months, but it becomes more possible if economic conditions worsen in nine to 18 months.

Now, there's plenty of data points that coincide with the recession narrative. So this is what we have to deal with in economics all the time is conflicting data. Things are never as simple and easy as we want them to be. But it was a strong jobs number. And the thing I like to push back against consensus is this continued narrative of oh boy, this is bad news that the jobs number was so good, because it means inflation is still strong and the Fed is gonna have to cut. Those who believe people being employed as inflationary do not understand economics.

EICHER: And before I let you go, we should mention the assassination of the former prime minister of Japan—Shinzo Abe. He was longest-serving prime minister—still relatively young—most recently having left office in 2020. But importantly, a major economic player on the world scene.

BAHNSEN: Shinzo Abe, actually much like we referred to Reaganomics, has the Japanese economic policy named after him, Abenomics. There's plenty of people who can criticize it. There's plenty of people who can say it's worked out quite well for Japan. He inherited absolutely no good options - 25 years of deflation and a real economic stagnation. And I'm not interested in assessing the good and bad points of Abenomics. I am just blown away that a person who is equivalent to Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama in our country was killed and the American press is barely even talking about it. That, you know, remember in Japan, they don't separate the Fed and the White House the way we do in the United States, the BOJ and their equivalent to Prime Minister office is essentially heavily accorded together. And remember, he was over it in 2006 to 2020. This isn't like the guy back in Jimmy Carter years, you know, this was like yesterday, and he was there for 15 years, double the length of Bernanke, double the length of Obama. And it's as if the equivalent of Obama and Bernanke, both were killed in the third largest economic country in the world. And the American press is not even talking about it. I think it's a huge story. And I do not think that we should ever pass over the assassination of a major country's top leader. It's really quite surreal.

EICHER: All right, that's David Bahnsen. He's a financial analyst and advisor and head of the financial planning firm, the Bahnsen group. David’s daily writing is at DividendCafe.com. You can read him online or sign up there to receive his daily missive by email.

David, thanks again.

BAHNSEN: Thank you. 

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Monday, July 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Next up: the WORLD History Book. This week marks the 50th anniversary of a chess game that fascinated the world, as well as the 10th anniversary of an American denomination’s compromise with the culture.

REICHARD: But first, we look at an important event in the founding of Islam. Here’s WORLD arts and media editor Collin Garbarino.

CALL TO PRAYER

COLLIN GARBARINO: Fourteen hundred years ago, Muhammad left his home city of Mecca for the city of Medina. Many of his closest supporters emigrated to Medina with him.

More than a decade earlier, Muhammad began claiming he had received revelations from God. He preached a radical monotheism that put him at odds with the predominantly polytheistic inhabitants of Mecca. Eventually Muhammad and his band of followers left Mecca to avoid further persecution.

Muslims call Muhammad’s departure for Medina the Hijrah. Median welcomed Muhammad. And the tribes in his new home invited him to become the city’s ruler.

Historian of Islam Bernard Lewis explains the legacy of Muhammad’s dual role as prophet and king.

BERNARD LEWIS: And he did what rulers do. He not only promulgated laws, he enforced them. He raised armies. He fought wars, and so on and so on. So that in the sacred traditions of Islam, you have all sorts of matters, which in the western world would be regarded as secular, and in the Islamic tradition they’re in no way separable from the rest. I mean the whole idea of a separation between church and state is alien to Islam.

Muhammad waged war on Mecca from his new home in Medina, eventually conquering Mecca not long before his death.

Muslims view the Hijrah as inaugurating the Islamic era, and the event marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. But the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar which means it moves faster than our solar Gegorian calendar. In our calendar, it’s been 1400 years since the Hijrah, but in the Islamic calendar, the year is 1443.

Next, July 11, 1972, fifty years ago today, the World Chess Championship between American Bobby Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky began in Reykjavik, Iceland. But observers at that first game weren’t sure if the match would actually take place. Spassky showed up for the game and made his move, even though there was no sign of Fischer.

ANNOUNCER 1: Well, Spassky’s waiting.

ANNOUNCER 2: Right, and uh, waiting and wondering if Bobby will show or not show. And there’s absolutely dead silence in the hall.

Fischer showed up nine minutes late, claiming to be delayed by traffic. The notoriously demanding Fischer then complained about the placement of the TV cameras. Fischer lost that first game and forfeited the second—still objecting to the cameras and spectators.

It was a rough start to a match Fischer had bragged he would win handily. In an interview with 60 Minutes before the match Fischer seemed dismissive of his opponent.

MIKE WALLACE: This championship match between you and Spassky, is it in any sense a grudge match?

BOBBY FISCHER: In a sense—I mean not personally against me against Spassky because I don’t care two cents about him one way or the other. He’s just a guy. It’s against the Russians, you know, and all the lies they’ve been saying about me.

WALLACE: Do you worry about Spassky?

FISCHER: Not overly. I mean he’s a little better than I think than the other Russians I’ve taken on in this series.

Fischer thought about quitting after the forfeiture, but President Nixon’s adviser Henry Kissinger telephoned Fischer and asked him to continue. People were referring to this as the Match of the Century. The Soviets had won the World Championship 24 years in a row. And the United States and the Soviet Union were still engaged in the Cold War.

Fischer rallied during subsequent games, winning the best-of-24 contest 12 ½ games to Spassky’s 8 ½. Fischer became the first and the last American-born chess player to be the undisputed world champion.

And finally, ten years ago, on July 10, 2012, the Episcopal Church USA voted to allow their priests to bless same-sex unions.

MODERATOR: Results of the lay order: 86 “yes,” 19 “no,” “divided” 5. “No” plus “divided” is 24. In the clergy order: 85 “yes,” 22 “no,” “divided” 4. “No” plus “divided” 26. The motion is carried in the lay order by 78 percent. The motion is carried in the clergy order by 76 percent. The motion is carried. We reconvene tomorrow at 11:15. Thank you.

At their triennial General Convention Episcopalians created a liturgy for “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant.” Bishops were given discretion as to whether they would allow their priests to use the new liturgy.

At the time of the vote, the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges would still be five years away. But eight states had already legalized same-sex marriage. Supporters of the decision argued blessing same-sex unions would help the shrinking denomination stay relevant with younger Americans by adapting to new cultural trends. Many parts of the global Anglican Communion objected to the American denomination’s departure from the Bible’s teachings.

This concession to the LGBT community hasn’t helped the Episcopal Church USA reverse its decline. It recently reported its membership had shrunk more than 17 percent over the last ten years.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Collin Garbarino.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: a green card backlog—nearly one and a half million cases are now pending. We’ll hear why and what’s being done to remedy the situation.

Plus, a visit to Amish country—where we’ll meet a family paying a high price for following Christ.

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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Go now in grace and peace.

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