Washington Wednesday: Fair play?

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 14th of January. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday!

The Supreme Court yesterday heard oral arguments in two cases involving whether men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. The decision will affect millions of female athletes.

EICHER: WORLD had reporters inside and outside the court and we will break down the oral argument Monday morning on Legal Docket.

But today, the issues for everyday Americans. Girls and young women who want fair competition, safety, and privacy. Balanced against those who would have the law treat gender identity as sex.

Here is WORLD’s Juliana Chan Erikson.

JULIANA CHAN ERIKSON: While the Supreme Court justices debated the issue inside, supporters from both sides were jockeying for space on the steps of the court.

SPEAKER: Trans girls are a part of human rights.

On the left side, about 200 people gathered to support the male athletes who want to play on female teams. Here’s Stephanie Vader, a Methodist minister.

VADER: What brings me here is that I think all human beings should have access to the things that bring them joy. And I know for many people who are athletes, that playing sports brings them great joy.

Another advocate said this case could extend far beyond who can play on sports teams.

AUDIO: Depending on how they decide, it could affect anything under Title Nine and 14th Amendment, whether that protects trans people at all.

On the other side, another few hundred people rallied to defend a sex-based definition of women’s sports.

HART: My daughter plays competitive lacrosse as well as a competitive swimmer. And I, I think that she should be able to compete fairly and safely in any sport that she chooses to compete in.

Kit Hart’s daughter is 14. Hart compares sex-based categories for sports to age-based categories.

HART: An eight year old is never going to be able to compete with a 14 year old for obvious biological reasons, and that's the same as sex.

Currently, 29 states have laws or agency rules requiring student athletes to play with the team corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. The other 21 states and the District of Columbia allow athletes to play on teams according to their self-prescribed gender identity.

MCNABB: There's a reason why there are separate sports to begin with, because there wouldn't be separate sports if there wasn't a difference.

Payton McNabb played volleyball in high school until she went up against a biological male playing for an opposing team in 2022.

SOUND: [Loud spike, crying, and whistle]

That spiked ball left McNab with multiple head injuries, ending her high school volleyball career and derailing plans to play softball in college. She’s since recovered physically, and now works to protect women’s sports and private spaces.

MCNABB: We've worked so hard to get these bills across, and these girls are feel so relieved that they're protected in their home, and now like the court's going to rule on if that's even allowed. If what's been promised all along, which is protection and equal opportunity and a trust in your system, is actually going to prevail.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Juliana Chan Erikson in Washington.

MAST: Joining us is to talk about it now is political scientist Hunter Baker. He is a WORLD Opinions Contributor and provost at North Greenville University. Good morning, Hunter!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning!

MAST: Hunter, we will have a good deal of coverage of this over the coming days, so I want to focus, with you, on the politics of this. This seems like a winning issue–some two-thirds of Americans have said they support sports organizations relying on sex, not gender identity for athletics. So will this be something candidates will focus on in the mid-terms? What will the ramifications of this decision be come November?

BAKER: I think there's a real question as to how current this issue is with the voters. Certainly there was a period there where I think voters had a lot of concern about it and where you saw it in electoral results. But then we look back at something like Winsome Sears gubernatorial run in Virginia, and she really did emphasize it. She, I would say she made that the cornerstone of her run, and it really didn't do her much good. Now, what I would say about this is, is that if the court delivers kind of an expected result, just reinforcing the idea that we are going to stick to biological sex and things like athletic competition, then I don't think that that will have much effect. But if the Court were to come back with an unexpected result that sort of got everybody excited in a bad way again, you know, that people became concerned about this issue coming back to the fore, then that probably would have some political payoff, especially for the Republicans.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, I think it's pretty clear this issue of no men in women's sports is highly popular with many voters, and I believe that Team Trump sees it that way too. What they don't see that way is the pro life issue; they see it as a political liability. They may be right, they may be wrong, but that's how they see it. So here's what I think the political calculus may be here: those who are opposed to gender ideology and those who are opposed to abortion, they are basically the same voter block, and I think Team Trump may be prioritizing the popular social conservative issue over the unpopular one. So just purely a political consideration, whether they are right or whether they are wrong. I think that's what's happened here. What do you say about that?

BAKER: I think that that's definitely a concern, both with Donald Trump and maybe, maybe to some extent with the Republican Party. I think that what conservatives think is that the transgender issue is basically, say, a 65-70% issue in their favor. And the other side is to some extent trapped supporting an unpopular position. So you tend to want to try to just push that over and over again to try to gain that advantage, because it's working for you. Republicans and Trump, I think that they see the pro-life issue differently than the transgender issue. You know, obviously we had Dobbs overturning Roe v Wade, and that was just the beginning, right? All that did was to really open the abortion issue up to the democratic consideration of the American people. 

And so it really should not be surprising that you lose some of those battles, maybe many of those battles up front, because you've really got to go all the way back to the beginning of trying to litigate this issue with the public. And so I think a lot of Republicans, certainly Trump, Trump, who has his sort of his political instincts, he looks at it, he says, "Okay, I gave it back to the States, and Republicans, pro-lifers are losing a lot of those races." And he doesn't want to put his capital behind that, and so he wants to say, "I did what I said I'd do, and now I'm kind of out of it."

EICHER: Well, shifting gears, Hunter, I want to talk to you about a remarkable escalation in the President's feud with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell. For Powell's part, he has largely tried to stay above the fray, but now he's got the Justice Department having opened a criminal investigation into him over cost overruns related to the renovation of the Fed's headquarters. Now Powell is firing back in unusually blunt terms for him. Here is Powell in a video posted this week:

POWELL: The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

Well, what do you think about this, Hunter? Is Powell right to frame this as a fight over Federal Reserve independence, or might he be resisting legitimate oversight?

BAKER: I've paid a lot of attention to Jay Powell during his time as the head of the Federal Reserve, and in a lot of ways, I think that he has been very admirable. He has very strongly resisted the temptation to get involved in politics, even when he was baited. Very much an honest broker. I think that the media would often try to get some sort of negative comment from him on Trump, and he would basically say, "I won't have a comment of that type for you." So he was, he was very good about that. And I think that he would acknowledge in a very tempered way, when Trump was doing something well. I noted in that first term, one of the things that you saw was that people at the bottom of the economic scale seemed to be benefiting, that they were having improvements in wages and income. And so Powell was there to say that, and you know, to kind of give credit where credit was due. 

Now, what has happened since is there have been some missteps, and there have been some things that are questionable. In terms of missteps, Powell and the Federal Reserve poured way too much money into the bucket trying to fight against the COVID problem, you know, trying to keep our economy going. And we saw kind of the way we overshot with inflation toward the end. So I think that they kept the pump primed too long. And so there's a reaction to that. 

The other thing is, is that in the run up to the election, the last presidential election, they cut rates. That wasn't necessarily expected that they would cut rates, and sometimes that looks like you're trying to prime the economic pump for the party that is in office. So that was somewhat questionable. But do I think that Trump has really been fair to him? Do I think that he's pressuring him too much? I would say so. I think that it's important for the Federal Reserve to be independent. You know, we look back to another example of Richard Nixon pressing Federal Reserve Chair Arthur burns, and I think that that was not good, and I think it's not good here.

MAST: Well, Hunter, another major flash point this week is Greenland. What began years ago as a strategic thought experiment has escalated into a full blown international standoff. The president is again declaring that the United States must control Greenland to counter the Russians and the Chinese in the Arctic. But both Denmark and Greenland have firmly rejected any notion of a US takeover. Danish leaders are warning that a US military move against Greenland would risk shattering the NATO alliance. So against that backdrop, the former UK ambassador to the United States, Lord Peter Mandelson, told the BBC this is not likely to end with force.

MANDLESON: We are all going to have to wake up to the reality that the Arctic needs securing against China and Russia. And if you ask me who is going to lead in that effort to secure, we all know, don't we, that it's going to be the United States, unless we in Europe, unless we in Britain, are prepared to stump up the forces and the radars and the anti-missile systems and the air defense systems to protect Greenland and the Arctic. Are we? No, we're not, and that's why we're, at the end of the day, going to be dependent on the United States to do so.

So Hunter, let's strip away this Saturday morning cartoon version of the President's rhetoric, comments about dog sleds and the like, and the strategic stakes here do seem quite real. Do you see this as Lord Mandelson does, a serious national security priority dressed up in undisciplined language, or as a dangerous escalation that risks turning a legitimate concern into a geopolitical crisis?

BAKER: Oh, I'm sure that it's serious. I'm sure that Greenland matters from a national defense perspective, and I'm also sure that it matters in terms of potential natural resources and minerals and things of that nature. When it comes to Trump, we have to read him. We have to figure out when is he being serious, and when is he going farther than anyone else will go in order to set up the most advantageous bargaining table. I think that he may be doing that here. I just don't think that he's playing the part of the of the Athenians against the Melians in the Melian dialog, where it's basically saying, "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must." I don't think he's quite going there. But I do think that he is waving the big stick and what he wants is maximum accommodation when it comes to what the partnership is going to look like in terms of setting up the defense.

MAST: Well, Hunter, I want to go back to Lord Mandelson's warning that the West needs to wake up to Arctic security realities. What if we don't? If the US and its allies simply try to avoid the discomfort, avoid the confrontation, avoid the hard conversations, what are the real consequences of sleeping through this moment? Who fills the vacuum in the Arctic? If the United States decides this is too politically or diplomatically messy to lead?

BAKER: I mean, the worry is, is that you end up with with Russia, maybe Russia enabled by China in some way. And yes, that is frightening, it is concerning. And I think that part of why this area is important is because of potential missile defense kind of concerns. So no, we can't ignore it. But I think that Trump should recognize that the Danes are probably pretty good partners here. And I think that they are going to be willing to work with him and I think that, I think that we're going to do something together. I think that's where we're going to go.

EICHER: Well, Hunter before we go, Scott Adams died yesterday. He was just 68 years old, he was a major cultural figure from the 90s and early aughts. He was creator of the comic strip "Dilbert". For more than 30 years, that comic strip skewered corporate life and became a fixture in newspapers worldwide. But Adams's career collapsed in 2023 after some racially charged comments on his podcast led publishers to cut ties. Adams would describe this as his being canceled, not just criticized, but take a step back and assess the legacy of Scott Adams, both the cultural impact of "Dilbert," and Scott Adams' involvement in politics.

BAKER: So first of all, I just want to say that his comic strip came along at just the right time for me when I was beginning a corporate career. And I just have to say that he made corporate existence a lot more fun for many of us, and certainly I had some of those comics posted in my cubicle. He wrote some really interesting books, sort of offering people ideas about success, I think that several of those were huge sellers. 

But in 2016 he started to get involved in politics. And he got involved, you know, he kept, he kept claiming that he was a Hillary Clinton supporter, which he later said that was to protect himself, while simultaneously pointing out the unusual effectiveness of Donald Trump. I think that he's the one who who came up with the phrase linguistic "kill shot" to describe some of the very effective remarks that Trump would make and the way he would label some of his enemies. So I think that he lost some of his mainstream support as he waded into politics, but boy, he sure was interesting for a lot of us there for many years.

MAST: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and commentator for WORLD Opinions. Thank you so much, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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