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--:-- John Bickley: A second straight decline in the GDP signals that the U.S. is in a recession. I think we are. I think we have been. I've been saying it for a while. I didn't need to wait for today to suggest to me that we're in a recession. We speak to economists who explain what got us here and what to expect next.
--:-- John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, July 29th, and this is Morning Wire. A federal judge has blocked the Biden administration's Title IX guidance on gender identity and sexual orientation. We talked to a legal expert about the ruling and the controversial guidance it blocks. And more women are seeking sterilization after the landmark Dobbs decision. We discussed the trend and its implications.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. You can get this show and all of the content you love wherever you are, all on the Daily Wire app. Even if you're not a Daily Wire member, you'll be the first to know what's trending with mobile notifications for the latest news, and you'll get content from all of your favorite Daily Wire shows. Download the Daily Wire app and keep up with the facts no matter where your day takes you.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: All right, Cabot, so some are trying to dismiss declarations of a recession, but what do the numbers tell us?
--:-- John Bickley: Well, the widely accepted definition of recession going back decades is two straight quarters of declining GDP, and that's exactly what we have here. According to New Data Thursday, the U.S. economy shrank by 0.9 percent last quarter after falling 1.6 percent the quarter before. Now, in the past, the federal government has typically waited a few months to officially declare a recession. And the Biden administration is certainly going to do that. By every relevant definition we've got, though, the country has now entered a recession. So what has been the response so far from the White House?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Yeah, their message has really shifted over the last few months because, as you can imagine, they want to do everything possible to avoid using that word. A few months ago, the standard messaging from the White House was that the economy is growing and the recession is not going to happen. But then as inflation continued rising and the economy responded negatively, the message became, yes, the GDP might be shrinking, but the economy is still strong. And now that we've got clear evidence that matches the definition of a recession, the White House message has again shifted to now just outright denying that two quarters of GDP contraction that we've now seen even counts as a recession.
--:-- John Bickley: For example, here's White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre earlier this week. If things are going so great, though, then why is it the White House officials are trying to redefine recession?
--:-- Cabot Phillips: No, we're not redefining recession. If we all understand a recession to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth in a row, and then you have White House officials come up here to say, no, no, no, that's not what a recession is. It's something else. How is that not redefining recession? Because that's not the definition. No, it's worth pointing out, according to Joe Biden's own chief economic advisor, as well as virtually every economist over the last half century that is the definition of recession.
--:-- John Bickley: So the White House might be playing some semantic games here but it doesn't change the economic reality. On that note, I talked to Brandon Arnold of the National Taxpayers Union. Of course, the White House is denying this mainly for political reasons. But at the end of the day, it kind of doesn't matter. When you look at what people say about their own personal finances, it suggests people are not in a great spot. They've dipped into their savings far more than they ought to have. They're concerned about job prospects going forward. They're concerned about their own financial security. And that is what is most important, whether we're in a recession technically or not, is really secondary to how people are feeling about this economy and the direction they see it moving.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Now, we saw some action from Congress this week that was aimed at combating inflation. What can you tell us there?
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, for the better part of the year, Democrats have struggled to agree on terms for their Build Back Better package. But on Wednesday night, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin announced that they'd reached an agreement on a scaled-down version of the bill that would still cost around $433 billion. Among other things, the plan would expand funding for the IRS to help build out their auditing capacity, would offer billions in grants for clean energy and climate initiatives, and send billions more towards, quote, neighborhood access and equity programs. But most notably for a lot of Americans right now, the plan will also raise taxes on many households and businesses.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Here's Brandon Arnold on that front. Some of the big elements, the things that I'm watching most closely are the corporate minimum tax, the alternative minimum tax at 15% based on book income rather than taxable income. It's a whole nother system of taxation that would disincentivize investment in the economy. When corporations experience higher taxes, what they do is they reduce the amount of pay that goes to their employees, or even worse, they've raised their prices. Do we really want corporations raising prices at a time when inflation is at 9.1 percent? It's bad policy.
--:-- John Bickley: So there is a lot of concern from Republicans that the bill could be coming at the worst possible time as the economy is now dipping into a recession.
--:-- Cabot Phillips: Cabot, thanks for reporting.
--:-- John Bickley: Anytime. That was Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips.
--:-- Sarah Parshall Perry: So the guidance actually came out in 2021 and it was interpretive guidance. It was a document called technical assistance. And that's something that an executive agency offers if they are trying to clarify for the public what their rights and responsibilities are without making a formal rule. Generally, it will signal to the public exactly where the department is going to go in the future, but they don't have to go through what's called the Administrative Procedure Act which is just a fancy term for a formal rulemaking process.
--:-- John Bickley: The judge in Tennessee Charles Atchley determined that this was such a significant change in law expanding sex to include sexual orientation and gender identity, among other changes in federal law, that they should have followed a formal rulemaking process. And they couldn't skate the congressional responsibility that they had laid out in the Administrative Procedure Act to go through the arduous rulemaking process. In other words, they had tried to do too little when they were required to do so much more.
--:-- Sarah Parshall Perry: So where does this issue go from here? Schools temporarily don't have to enforce this new interpretation, but should we expect a formal rule change in the future?
--:-- John Bickley: So what this will do is actually put a procedural timestamp on the Department of Education. It has pumped the brakes because when we see guidance statements from an agency that says this is how we plan to enforce the law, you, of course, have to comply. Not technically, but it happens to be a bit of a bureaucratic threat with this ruling. This has essentially revoked that technical assistance. And the interpretation that the Department of Education has been using to include sexual orientation and gender identity has now essentially been erased. And now we're back to the drawing board the way it was under the Trump administration.
--:-- Sarah Parshall Perry: Now, the 2020 Supreme Court ruling, Bostock v. Clayton County, found that gender identity does fall under sexual discrimination. So will the Biden administration likely have the court on their side with this new rule change?
--:-- John Bickley: Yes, and actually for a couple of different reasons. So the issue at sort of the crux of the matter in Bostock v. Clayton County was employment discrimination. It fell under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits, among other things, any discrimination based on sex in employment. But Title VII's wording and regulations are different than Title IX's wording and regulations. Title IX is a specific prohibition on sex discrimination alone. No other categories are included. But more so than that, Justice Neil Gorsuch, in writing the majority opinion, was very careful to say that they were not prejudging any other issues on sex discrimination and mentioned specifically bathrooms and locker rooms as sort of a nod to Title IX.
--:-- Sarah Parshall Perry: So there are a number of questions that the Supreme Court left open. And because of the distinct differences between Titles VII and IX, the outcome really remains to be seen.
--:-- John Bickley: All right. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on and explaining that for us.
--:-- Sarah Parshall Perry: That was Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Sarah Parshall Perry.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: So, sterilization has become more popular among both men and women after the Dobbs decision. and even right before it came out. The chief healthcare officer of Planned Parenthood, Dr. Diana N. Contreras, said that Planned Parenthood saw a massive increase in people coming to its websites seeking information on how to get sterilized or get a vasectomy after the ruling was released.
--:-- John Bickley: One doctor from San Antonio said that she used to have a few patients come in for sterilization from time to time, but now she's doing consultations for the procedure every single day. According to the LA Times if women were already planning not to have kids they decided to get sterilized sooner or they were thinking more intensely about sterilization after the Supreme Court decision.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: A lot of women have said that they're doing this in order to keep some control over their bodies, since they believe that legislators might try to limit other procedures surrounding reproduction or cut back on the ability to use contraceptives, as you all reported on the show this week.
--:-- John Bickley: Here's one D.C. resident talking about her decision to have the procedure. I got my fallopian tubes removed because I know I don't want children, and I'm doing everything I can to make sure that doesn't happen, but in the case that it does, I don't have bodily autonomy.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: So the most common procedure is called tubal ligation, and that entails tying off or cutting the fallopian tubes. In some rare cases, it can be reversed with surgery, but even in the cases where the reversal succeeds, the woman is at risk for ectopic pregnancy. So for that reason, it's considered an irreversible procedure.
--:-- John Bickley: In rare cases, some women can still get pregnant after they have been sterilized, particularly if they're young, but it's generally considered to be almost 100% effective at preventing pregnancy.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: And how common is sterilization as a form of birth control? It's actually extremely common. According to the CDC, between 2015 and 2017, about 65% of women ages 15 to 49 in the U.S. were currently using contraception. And of those, the most common form used was sterilization. About 18.6% of women in that age group had undergone the procedure.
--:-- John Bickley: The second most common form of contraception was the pill at 12.6%. Now, the procedure is most popular with women over 40, with a plurality of women over 40 choosing sterilization as their primary mode of birth control.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: Now, can any woman opt in for this, or are there certain criteria that have to be met? Legally, any woman over 18 can pursue it, but in practical terms, it can be difficult to find a doctor who's willing to perform it on young women who have not yet had children. A lot of doctors are only comfortable performing it on women who have already had kids, or at least are over the age of 30.
--:-- John Bickley: There's also a lot of sensitivity around race and class stereotypes that may cause doctors to be more or less willing to perform the procedure on certain women. In the past, some women were forced to have sterilizations by the government against their will. In the 1930s, this practice was at its height as certain groups were thought to be unfit to procreate as part of the eugenics movement. California had the largest eugenics practice, which sterilized over 20,000 people beginning in 1909. Its eugenics law was repealed in 1979, but the sterilizations in state prisons seem to have continued past that. As recently as this past January, the state launched a reparations program for people who survived the government-run sterilization.
--:-- Charlotte Pence-Bond: Charlotte, thank you so much for reporting.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: Other stories we're tracking this week. White House logs reveal that President Biden met with over a dozen of Hunter Biden's business associates while in the Obama White House as vice president, Fox News Digital reports. Biden has repeatedly denied having any knowledge about his son's foreign business dealings.
--:-- John Bickley: 58% of Americans agree that Attorney General Merrick Garland should enforce a federal law that bans protesting at Supreme Court justices' homes. A district just outside of Wuhan, China, has locked down almost one million residents after four asymptomatic cases were detected in the district.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for listening to Morning Wire. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and you stand with our mission, please consider subscribing, leaving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.
