The World and Everything in It: November 21, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

The administrative state’s been called the fourth branch of government. But two cases before the Supreme Court challenge that extra-constitutional assumption.

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

Also today the Monday Moneybeat: today, the collapse of the crypto-currency company FTX. Is it a systemic problem or just one bad apple. And listener questions.

Also the WORLD History Book. Today, considering a frequently overlooked founding document written long before the Constitution or the Declaration.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, November 21st. 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. Here’s Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump special counsel react » Democrats on Capitol Hill say Attorney General Merrick Garland made the right move by assigning a special counsel on Friday to investigate former President Trump.

California Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren told CBS …

LOBGREN: Well, I think from what the attorney general said, he sought to depoliticize this investigation. Obviously, career professionals are doing it.

But Republicans say whether the investigation is in fact depoliticized will depend on the people carrying on the probe.

The former president said over the weekend that he was surprised by Garland’s special counsel announcement.

TRUMP: I thought the investigation with the document hoax was dying or dead or over - and the investigation into Jan. 6 and my very peaceful and patriotic speech was dead.

Trump Twitter » Trump also reacted Sunday to news that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has reinstated the former president’s account. Twitter announced last year that it was permanently banning Trump after the Capitol riot.

TRUMP: Truth Social has been very, very powerful, very, very strong. And I’ll be staying there. But I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. And I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it.

Trump launched the Truth Social platform after Twitter banned him.

Elon Musk announced the move to reinstate Trump after polling Twitter users to ask if he should do so. The vote was close, but 51% said yes.

Biden turns 80 » President Biden turned 80 years old on Sunday.

The oldest president in U.S. history hit his milestone birthday at a personal crossroads. He and his family will have to decide in the months ahead whether he will seek reelection. He’d be 86 at the end of a potential second term.

His team has begun quiet preparations for a campaign. Biden said at a recent news conference—his words—“My intention is that I run again,” but he added: “We're going to have discussions about it.”

Ukraine » Russia continues to bomb and shell Ukraine’s energy grid.

U.S. Secretary of State Lloyd Austin:

AUSTIN: Russia isn’t just waging a war of aggression. It’s also deliberately attacking civilian targets and civilian infrastructure with no military purpose whatsoever.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Sunday powerful explosions shook the ground in Zaporizhzhia, the site of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.global UN officials are calling for “urgent measures to help prevent a nuclear accident” in the Russian-occupied facility.

A heavy barrage of Russian military strikes—almost 400 on Sunday alone—also hit Ukraine’s eastern regions.

U.S. bombers NOKO  » U.S. Air Force B-1B bombers flew over the Korean Peninsula in separate joint exercises over the weekend with South Korean and Japanese warplanes. That was in response to North Korea’s test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters:

HARRIS: This conduct by North Korea most recently is a brazen violation of multiple UN security resolutions.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un boasted that a recently tested ICBM is another “reliable and maximum-capacity” weapon to contain U.S. military threats.

The United States responded to the North’s weapons launch by flying supersonic bombers in a show of force.

Pyongyang’s ICMB launch was part of the North’s ongoing barrage of recent missile tests.

Snowstorm » AUDIO: [Snow shovel] 

New Yorkers may recognize that as the sound of a shovel scooping snow from a driveway. There is plenty of that going on in the northeast today.

Parts of New York finally caught a break Sunday after a massive storm dumped potentially record-setting amount of snow in areas east of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.

New York Governor, Kathy Hochul:

HOCHUL: As someone who is from Buffalo and has lived in Upstate my entire life, we’ve seen a lot of snow, but when you hit 80 to 85 inches, that is one to tell your grandkids about.

Many businesses in the hardest-hit areas remained closed, but highways reopened and authorities lifted travel bans in many areas.

But bands of lake-effect snow were expected to bring up to 2 feet by this morning in some parts of the state that were largely spared in earlier rounds.

CO shooting » Five people are dead after a gunman opened fire inside a gay night club in Colorado Springs over the weekend.

Police Chief Adrian Vasquez told reporters …

VASQUEZ: The suspect entered Club-Q and immediately began shooting at people inside. At least two heroic people confronted and fought with the suspect and were able to stop the suspect from continuing to kill.

The 22-year-old suspect also shot and wounded 18 others. Police arrested him at the scene.

He was reportedly armed with two guns, including a “long rifle.”

Investigators were still determining a motive, and the attack was being investigated to see if it should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: on Legal Docket: two cases involving efforts to reign in federal agencies.

Plus, the latest economic news on Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday morning, November 21st and this is The WORLD and Everything in It. Thanks for listening and good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Today, we cover two oral arguments the US Supreme Court heard earlier this month.

Each one involves the opportunity to rein in the considerable power of federal agencies.

Specifically, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the implications go far beyond these cases.

REICHARD: Here, an accountant in one case and in the other, a company that makes equipment for police. Each says it's been treated unfairly by the agencies. That they made unreasonable demands and meted out punishment that can’t be contested without first going through a long and expensive process within the administrative system. A system in which the agencies make the rules, make allegations, and then serve as investigator, prosecutor, and judge.

EICHER: The accountant and the company say the administrative law judges who heard their cases are so unaccountable that it violates the Constitution. Further, they say, they ought to be able to take their complaints about the agencies straight to federal court.

But the government says no. They need to wait until all administrative proceedings are final. But that of course takes years.

REICHARD: I’ll review the facts in just one of these cases, as the legal questions are essentially the same. And for our purposes today, I’ll use courtroom audio from both arguments.

Axon Enterprises—A-X-O-N—we’re not talking about the energy company, Exxon. Axon Enterprises makes tasers and body cameras for police. Four years ago the company acquired a competitor that was failing.

Soon after that, the FTC told Axon the acquisition could violate antitrust law, because the deal reduced competition too much.

The FTC started its investigation and made so many demands that Axon quickly spent more than a million dollars in legal fees and with no end in sight.

EICHER: That wasn’t worth it, so Axon offered to drop the acquisition.

The company’s legal brief describes what happened next: “the FTC demanded that Axon turn [the other company] into a ‘clone’ of Axon using Axon’s intellectual property” and threatened Axon with having to face “an administrative proceeding” if it refused to comply.

All this could have bankrupted Axon, so it sued the government to stop what it considers an abuse of power and a violation of the constitution to boot.

But lower courts ruled in favor of the FTC. They held that Axon had to go through all internal proceedings to their conclusion before they could challenge the agency in court.

Again, a process that could take many years.

Axon says it should be able to go straight to court. So it hired Paul Clement to make that case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

CLEMENT: Congress has expressly granted district courts original jurisdiction over all civil actions arising under the Constitution, and it is common ground that Congress has never expressly withdrawn or restricted that jurisdiction with respect to the constitutional claims at issue here.

REICHARD: Justice Samuel Alito asked an obvious question of Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, who defended the agencies in both disputes.

ALITO: What sense does it make for a claim that goes to the very structure of the agency having to go through the administrative process?

Stewart said something about agency expertise, and that sometimes an agency will lose a case it adjudicates. So why clog up the federal courts with challenges?

But Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t see the sense in that:

ROBERTS: …well, doesn't that underscore the need for direct -- a direct proceeding to raise the constitutional claim rather than waiting however many years before the agency? This is a series of cases that are a constellation around some fairly basic propositions. And to have it go over and over and over again, it does make the case about the need for direct resolution of a related claim pretty strong.

EICHER: Things weren’t going well for the government. Justice Elena Kagan said as much:

KAGAN: I told Mr. Clement that I thought his worst factor was meaningful review. I -- I think that the other two factors are pretty darn bad for you.

REICHARD: She means the agency can do a meaningful review of certain issues. But other factors to analyze do not bolster the agencies’ arguments. For example, collateral; meaning, unrelated to the subject matter of the dispute.

Here, a claim that the agency’s very structure is unconstitutional is completely unrelated to the subject matter of the administrative proceeding.

KAGAN: So why aren't those two pretty easy wins for Mr. Clement?

REICHARD: Yikes! Not something you want to hear from a Supreme Court justice about your opponent.

Lawyer Gregory Garre for the accountant in the other case pounded on the effect of a runaway administrative state on individuals:

GARRE: This case illustrates the crucial importance of this district court jurisdiction for everyday Americans who find themselves trapped before an unconstitutional agency decisionmaker.

Administrative agency proceedings have no right to a jury, only limited discovery, and no counterclaims. These are the due process protections in regular law courts.

Some conservative justices wondered why these cases were even before it now. Back in 2010, the court handed down a decision in a case called Lucia v the SEC. There, a man pointed out the administrative law judge who ruled against him wasn’t properly appointed.

He won. Justice Elena Kagan announced the opinion:

KAGAN: So we conclude that Administrative Judges of the SEC are officers of the United States and must be appointed in the way the Constitution prescribes. Because the ALJ who conducted Lucia's hearing was not appointed in that way, it gets wiped off the books. He is entitled to a new hearing before a properly appointed new official.

EICHER: So then the SEC had to remand all pending cases for new proceedings before an administrative law judge properly appointed.

But Stewart for the government said Congress made the rules, and those rules say people have to finish the in-house process before going to court.

He says: Keep to the problem the agency is trying to resolve first. Don’t bring in broader conflicts too soon:

STEWART: That is, usually, we would say we'll try particularly hard to avoid constitutional challenges if it's possible to do so. And so it would be peculiar to say at a stage of the proceedings where you couldn't raise any other sort of challenge, you can raise a broad-ranging constitutional challenge to the very composition and structure of the agency.

REICHARD: Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed sympathetic:

SOTOMAYOR: I don’t know why we should be permitting district court interference in the process that Congress has given to the agency to conclude that matter.

Opportunities to trim back the power of these agencies have come and gone before. The FTC and the EPA got their powers clipped back just in the last term.

I think the writing is on the wall this go round…and a majority will permit court challenges to administrative state power. If they do, they could restore the founders’ vision of separation of powers … and prevent concentration of power and preserve the system of checks and balances.

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.

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

David, good morning!

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

EICHER: So the collapse of the big cryptocurrency exchange FTX was more than a week ago, but it was only last week that we really started picking through the rubble of this story.

And it seems that with every day, we start to see what a mess this is, so I’ve been looking forward to talking with you about it. But big picture: Does this story speak more broadly to the issue of cryptocurrency, do you think, or is it just a picture of one bad apple?

BAHNSEN: No, it’s definitely a bigger story than just one bad apple. Because what the one bad apple reveals is how many other bad apples there are, and how much of the earlier price hike of cryptocurrencies was actually related to leveraged buying: People buying other cryptocurrencies with money they didn’t have. It shows that they’ve introduced a Ponzi like dynamic in the normal market functioning of cryptocurrency. Then when you have someone taking that money and using other people’s money as leverage and so forth, that adds another level of grift.

One of the concerns people have had in the crypto space from day one—and skeptics like me have constantly asked—is what is the functionality outside of criminality? I’ve been unable to see who would use crypto aside from hackers and criminals who have adopted it at a high rate. What an incident like this seems to reveal with its offshore component is that these exchanges engage in the skirting of different margin requirements and other regulatory aspects of financial markets.

Even the most mainstream and the most conventional… I mean, this guy had naming rights at the Miami Heat arena. He was the second biggest donor to the Democrat Party. His parents are professors at Stanford. He was a sponsor at all kinds of financial conferences I attended. This wasn’t some dark shadows, Russian hacker-type actor, this guy was in the mainstream of the financial world and a big proponent of ESG: Kind of modern spokesperson for the crypto world. And it has imploded in a way that I think is going to reverberate for quite some time.

EICHER: You mentioned ESG and I’d intended to ask about that as well, David.

FTX was a major beneficiary of so-called sustainable investing—ESG investing, environmental, social, and governance. It’s the hot new thing.

But Sam Bankman-Fried, the head honcho of FTX, really let loose with some serious cynicism about ESG with this quote in an interview with Vox: That ESG is—and I quote—this “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

So again, I have a similar either/or. Do you think ESG is flawed at the core or has it just as Bankman-Fried says become “perverted beyond recognition”?

BAHNSEN: Oh, I think it’s corrupt to the core. I think it was always intended as nothing more than a shadow for environmental extremism that everyone who adopted it engaged in. So for marketing reasons, I think it was grift.

And I don’t think it ever had a real fundamental virtue behind it. And then what it did—and I’ve written about this at National Review and other places—is that it allowed all kinds of other people who wanted to feel good about themselves—to feel like they were doing something good without having to make any sacrifice. That’s sort of the way of the world, that you can atone for sins without any sacrifice.

Things like ESG produced that tokenism. And what happened—in my opinion, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit—is it sort of coincided with a period where big tech firms were performing really well in the stock market and energy firms were not. It enabled people to feel like wow, I can get better returns and save the planet. Because apparently owning Facebook was gonna save the planet and owning Exxon was gonna ruin it.

Well, then what I bring up ESG in the context of this FTX crypto implosion is that this guy’s company was getting a score for governance, from these ESG scorecards that was higher than Exxon’s. Well, I don’t know what governance they were doing. But the guy who ran the Enron cleanup has been appointed the new Deputy CEO hoping to fix FTX’s mess. He said in all of his years of his being one of the most high-level corporate cleanup specialists in the world, he’s never seen worse lack of governance, lack of internal controls, virtually no accounting whatsoever. I mean, generally, corruption involves sophisticated accounting to cover up stealing; their problem here was they simply didn’t even have records. So this is a big mess. ESG has once again taken a big exposure, and you are right. Even this individual basically admitted, yeah, it’s always been kind of a way to sprinkle virtue on top of our day to day market activities.

EICHER: And with regard to the markets or any of the economic data, David, any reverberations from all this?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think it was a reasonably slow week for economic data. And I guess I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been a bigger contagion effect from this FTX explosion. I mean, there is; across the crypto world now there is over $2 trillion of wealth destruction. You would think that would have started having a bigger impact into other things. But it sure feels to me like this is going to be a dot com moment where the people who took the risk get hammered, but the rest of the people are kind of left alone. And that’s what you kind of want to see.

EICHER: We have time for two listener questions, let’s jump right in.

GAFFIN: Good morning. This is Rich Gaffin in Washington DC. I'm wondering if David Bahnsen could comment on the utility of price earnings ratios for valuing stock indices. The markets are down this year. But even so, the price earnings ratio of the s&p 500, for example, is higher than the ratios historical average, particularly if you look at periods where interest rates are comparable to what they are today. So is it reasonable to think that the ratios will revert to the mean at some point, and if not, why not? Thank you.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I have written about this subject immensely this year at Dividend Café, and I actually just wrote a lengthier piece about it a few weeks ago. I agree with the premise, but perhaps I might apply it differently.

I don’t think that the case needs to be made that the price earnings ratio—which is just a way of saying the valuation of the market—is at a level now that requires it to go lower. There are a few things that can happen that might keep that from happening. One is that interest rates drop, and so the P/E, adjusted to the interest rate, becomes a little more normalized. Another is that earnings rise. And so the P/E ratio then therefore drops because the denominator changed. There’s a few different factors that could change that. However, I certainly agree that it makes the case that the return expectations will be different. To believe they’re going to get the returns from the market in an index [during] the next decade the way they got it the last decade, when the price earnings ratio was expanding, the valuation of the market was expanding dramatically, I think is crazy. I believe that whether or not it reverts to, let’s say, a 16 times P/E ratio in the market, it’s not going to go back up to a 24 times or 23 times ratio. And so the valuation that he’s talking about right now that was really pricey, and now it’s a little pricey, and whether or not it gets cheap or not - that’s one thing that could happen, but what I don’t think it’s going to do is spend 10 years constantly going higher.

I think investors that are in in index right now that are dependent on that P/E ratio going higher, are going to be very disappointed. This is one of the reasons we advocate ay my firm for Dividend Growth Investing; we don’t think you can just buy the whole market and expect the P/E ratio to bring you to a higher return when the Fed is not bringing you down to a 0% interest rate. I essentially think that companies are going to have to be growing free cash flows for investors to make money.

EICHER: And, David, this is listener Morgan Buchek of Fairview, Texas.

BUCHEK: David I'm curious to know your thoughts on where to bank I've heard reports recently about Chase Bank canceling the accounts of conservative organizations so I would love to know your thoughts about that, thanks.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I will. Let me just first address the issue of banking at large.

I do generally prefer local banks. I think people benefit from a relationship with a regional or a local community bank, and my company and my family bank at a local Southern California bank that’s family owned by devout Christians. And we’re able to do a lot of banking transactions and be involved in a lot of business activities that require me to have a relationship with the people I’m banking with. And I don’t think you’re gonna get that at a Chase, or a Bank of America, or Wells Fargo in the same way.

As far as the issue of Chase in particular shutting down accounts, I have not heard that. So it would be better for me to be able to respond to specific allegations as opposed to a general concern. I certainly hope it’s not true. I’d be very surprised; they do not have that reputation. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan—which owns Chase Bank—has been reasonably good about resisting things like that, at least at a public level. So I’d have to hear more specifics to know. But no, I think that there’s an advantage to having a local relationship with a bank. And yet, I don’t think that there’s a huge concern at this time. I think big banks are going to continue to play into ESG and woke public marketing, but as far as behind-the-scenes being actually discriminatory? I honestly haven’t heard that yet. And yet, you know, the world’s moving quickly.

EICHER: All right, that’s our time for today. If you have a question for David Bahnsen, please get in touch at feedback@worldandeverything.com. I can summarize your question if you just put it in writing in an email. But, we love hearing your words in your voice. Just make a voice memo recording and email the file. Same address: feedback@worldandeverything.com.

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

Thanks to Rich Gaffin and Morgan Buchek for your questions and thanks to David for your answers. We won’t talk before thanksgiving, David, so I’ll wish you a Happy Thanksgiving with your family and look forward to talking again next week.

BAHNSEN: Well, Happy Thanksgiving to you and all the listeners. Thanks so much.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, November 21st. 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 on The World and Everything in It: the WORLD History Book. Today, the 30th anniversary of a devastating series of tornadoes that hit a major city. Plus, the longest continually running play debuted 70 years ago this week. But first, the contract that laid the foundation for our country’s constitutional republic. Here’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: Thanksgiving is just a few days away, so let’s start aboard the Mayflower as the Pilgrims arrive on this continent in 1620. Their charter from King James grants them his permission to join the Colony of Virginia in their search for religious freedom.

But storms have pushed them off course. So they land instead in what’s now the hook of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Provisions are running short, and it is late in the year. So the Pilgrims decide to winter over right where they are—but some of the non-sepratist passengers known as “strangers” say that invalidates their agreement. They threaten to exercise their liberty and leave.

The Pilgrims decide to establish their own government in hopes of preventing the split. They pledge allegiance to the king, but determine to rule themselves for the common good. Forty one men sign the agreement on November 11th, 1620. It becomes known as the Mayflower Compact.

Audio here from a Heritage Foundation presentation celebrating the 400th anniversary of the document:

MCCLAY: In that document, they committed themselves to…covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic …

Wilfred McClay is history professor at Hillsdale College.

MCCLAY: …this would turn out to be one of the most primal constitutional moments in history, one that established the principle of self-rule that would be the heartbeat of the American Republic, and its free institutions.

One hundred years ago, governor Calvin Coolidge said the Mayflower Compact was the “foundation of liberty” as it was democratic, acknowledged liberty under law and order, and gave each person the right to participate in the government—while at the same time promising to be obedient to its laws.

Once again, historian McClay:

MCCLAY: … The signatories were following the same pattern of self-government that New Englanders would use in organizing their churches. Just as in the congregational churches, ordinary believers came together to create self-governing churches. So with the Mayflower Compact, a group of ordinary people came together to create their own government, and in doing so asserted their right to do so.

The original compact document is lost to history. But three versions of the text exist from the 17th century. Two of them, written by William Bradford, including one from his journal. That copy is in a vault at the State Library of Massachusetts.

Next, November 25th, 1952. Mystery writer Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap opens in London's West End. It’s based on a radio drama she’d written for the queen five years earlier to mark her 80th birthday. After that broadcast Christie decided she’d turn it into a short story.

AUDIO BOOK: Mollie Davis stepped back into the road and looked up at the newly painted board by the gate: Monksville Manor Guest House…

It was published in the United States as Three Blind Mice in May 1948. Audio here from an undated audio version of the story posted to YouTube:

AUDIO BOOK: So the great experiment was set underway with advertisements put in the local paper and The Times and various answers came…and now today, the first of the guests were to arrive…

The story begins with a murder and then switches scenes as guests begin to arrive.

AUDIO BOOK: The only thing that was wrong was the weather…for the last two days it had been bitterly cold and now the snow was beginning to fall. She hoped anxiously that the pipes wouldn’t freeze. It would be too bad if everything went wrong just as they started…

The guests get snowed in and a police officer arrives with questions about the earlier murder—linked to the manor by a notebook found at the crime scene. Soon another murder happens—this time at the manor—and the race is on to discover who the murderer before he, or she, strikes again. Each of the guests have secrets that cast suspicion.

Christie decided to turn the short story into a play. She asked that it not be published in the United Kingdom as long as it continued to run on the stage. Little did she know then how long that would be. The play ran without interruption until March 16th, 2020, when it was shut down due to COVID restrictions. Mousetrap re-opened last year. It has been performed at the St Martin’s Theatre more than 28,500 times—selling over 10 million tickets over the last 70 years.

The play has an unexpected ending, and the program asks the audience not to reveal that ending after leaving the theater. Though if you really want to know, plot synopsis are available online.

And finally today, a somber anniversary.

WEATHER WARNING: The National Weather Service in League City has issued a tornado warning…

On November 21st, 1992, a deadly tornado strikes Houston, Texas.

NEWSCAST: Good evening, everyone. Hundreds of Houstonians are without homes tonight. Thousands of others without power after a series of twisters struck randomly around the Harris County area today.

It is the beginning of one of the largest tornado outbreaks in U.S. history.

NEWSCAST: And what a weekend this has been for the 1000s of Houstonians touched by the devastating series of tornadoes the cleanup is just beginning today.

A cluster of six tornadoes hit the Houston area. Later the same day, an F4 tornado strikes near Brandon, Mississippi. It stays on the ground for nearly a hundred miles—volunteer fireman Alton Webb is one of the first on the scene.

WEBB: Everything basically was just gone. I mean, it was just just nothing but debris everywhere. I could hear people calling for help. Now that’ll put a chill down your spine, that's for sure because it's just you know, you don't know what to do first…

The weather system spawns at least 95 tornadoes over a 41-hour period—hitting Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland.

By the time it’s over, 26 people are dead, 641 injured, and leaving behind over $300 million in personal property damage.

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

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: The border crisis and its widespread effects. Schools in New York City have been inundated with migrant students. We’ll hear how those school districts are faring.

Also the Republicans won control of the House, but barely. So what does it mean moving forward?

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

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

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