Power Line

Friday was cap and gown day for Steve at Pepperdine's commencement for the School of Public Policy class of 2025, while John Yoo is on the road somewhere at an undisclosed location, so Steve and Lucretia kick around a couple of seemingly unrelated stories about the Amish (the ultimate opt-out community) and the latest Supreme Court argument involving human nature and the right of parents to opt-out from public school nihilism.And then as a chang of pace we offer Steve's recent conversation with energy journalist extraordinaire Robert Bryce (whose Substack is very much worth following). Bryce always has a way of explaining the often eyes-glaze-over numbers of the energy world, but in this interview extending himself into a one-man DOGE, revealing who is the number-one leftist advocacy group fattening at the federal funding trough.

Another whirlwird week of controversies that exceeded our bandwidth to keep up (or at least to compress into an hour), but John Yoo, this week's host, leads us in revisiting the question of "birthright citizenship" under the 14th Amendment, which the Supreme Court has rather unusually agreed to take up in May—surprisingly late for such and important oral argument. We take note of the growing number of scholars who think the current conventional wisdom is not a slam dunk at all! Apparently at least four Juctices agree.From there we discuss whether Trump's attack on Harvard is correctly calibrated, with Steve, in a rare moment, being more extreme than Lucretia on this issue. The Harvard controversy elides into a discussion of whether conservatives ought to be openly emulating the deep political strategy of Antonio Gramsci, as the Wall Street Journal pondered on Thursday. There is a lot of dissent on this point from "Vichy conservatives" who seem willing to continue losing slowly to the left.Finally, John can't help himself, and baits Steve and Lucretia on whether, on this 250th anniversary of the "shots heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord this week in 1775 really justified revolution against British rule. Lucretia makes quick work of this provocation, and a hush fell over the virtual studio.

John Yoo is back this week, bringing the 3WHH up to full strength again after last week's astonishingly congenial episode, which can mean only one thing—not even high tariffs, which this week's host (Steve) vainly tried to impose on ths discussion—could stop a vigorous free trade in ideas. After our discussion of where the tariff matter stands as of the end of this week, we turn our focus to the week's continuing legal and constitutional developments of the Trump juggernaut, most especially his heretofore neglected instruction to regulatory agencies to review and eliminate any and all rules and regulations that might now be considered unconstitutional in light of several Supreme Court opinions over the last few years that have started to curtail the reach and power of the administrative state. Finally, we try out a slightly new ending for this episode, with topical exit music designed in part to annoy Lucretia. Mission accomplished!

The 3WHH crew is down a glass this week because John Yoo is down with a bug and unable to join us—or was he afraid of subjecting himself to Lucretia, host for this week's episode. With fear, trembling, and trepidation Steve barved the peril with all the aplomb of the Black Knight in Monty Python, and yet by the end of this episode still ahd all four limbs attached! Lucretia's fancy whisky must have mellowed her, as this surprisingly convivial episode found remarkable harmony about the defects of the Democrat-media complex, and why it is just as debilitating to Democrats' fortunes as the state of California is. Also, was Obama overrated, underated, or just lucky?There was some divergence about tariffs, and we bet listeners can guess about how this split played out. And if you can't guess, then there's only one way to end the suspense.

As if to put an exclamation point to the crazy story of the week about the Trump national security team adding a hostile journalist to their Signal group chat about bombing Houthi and the Blowups, Steve accidentally texted the Zoom link to this week's taping to John Eastman (who was otherwise pre-occupied).In any case, after reviewing the completely out of whack signal-to-noise ratio of Signalgate, and the latest machinations in the lawfare against Trump, we take up as our main subject the question of whether the burst of enthusiasm among a few liberal thinkers to build stuff again—like liberalism used to in the New Deal—has much prospect of success. As Steve notes, Ezra Klein has called for "supply-side progressivism," but notes that the newfangled "abundance liberals" don't have a napkin or a curve, and if you don't have a napkin or a curve, it's just sparkling neoliberalism. Needless to say, John is mostly oblivious, and Lucretia is unimpressed. But maybe the movement can start with making their own blue hats, "Make Liberalism Great Again!"  Of course, the acronym this generates sounds like a mumble, but isn't another mumble a perfect fit for Democrats right now?

Trump does more consequential things in a day that most presidents do in a month, so we may need to measure his tenure in office in dog years. It must certainly seem like dog days for the left, which is lying prostrate on the ground much of the time, panting and out of breath, gnawing on a bare bone.After ticking through a number of happy stories this week—the end of DEI at Berkeley; Greenpeace getting nicked for $667 million dollars, Columbia University capitulating to Trump—we get down the the week's new frontiers of lawfare. Is this moment a "constitutional crisis," as the left claims, or is it a long overdue moment of constitutional challenge, with the aim being the restoration of the proper dimensions and functions of our republic?We marhc brisky through four aspects of the issue, including nationwide injunctions, oral orders from the bench, the autopen question for a president (Biden) who was on autopilot for four years, and Trump's retaliation against private law firms that allowed themselves to be adjuncts to the Democratic Party. All this, and a discussion of what we think is the first-ever judicial opinion rendered by video, by Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence Van Dyke, in a gun case.

The only truly functioning high-speed rail in America today is the Trump Train, and not even the prospect of a 200% tariff on the core commodity of this podcast—single malt scotch whiskies—can dampen the 180-proof spirits of Lucretia, host of this week's episode.But we still manage to get in some disagreements about how to understand what is going on, especially with the Ukraine War endgame. In fact, we got John Yoo to out himself as the OGNC ("original gangsta neo-con") on the question of whether American foreign policy has been overly dominated by Wilsonian internationalism for the last century, or whether it has been more realist. John was responding to my two Substack articles (here and here) on different aspects how idealism and realism play out in the Ukraine matter, disliking both. Lucretia responded with a great harumph.There was much less harumphing and more huzzahing for the humiliation and confusion of the Democrats this week, culminating in the Dem surrender over the budget continuing resolution. About the confusion of federal judges (this is putting the matter charitably) trying to block some of Trump's moves, John sees hope for optimism that these roadblocks will be overcome, while debunking the claim that Trump is causing a "constitutional crisis." (Link coming when his latest article goes live.) Steve merely longs for the good old days of Watergate.

The whole gang is finally back together behind the bar this week, with John Yoo in the host chair skillfully leading our unruly gang in a round-robin three-subject format that we're alternating this year.Steve leads off wondering if Gavin Newsom, and Senate Democrats, are at last having their "Sister Souljah" moment about the transgender millstone around their neck, though Steve points out that Democrats will have great difficulty pulling this off, and lays down two additional markers to judge whether Democrats will really make a serious move to the center. The underlying thesis is that the success of a political realignment is not merely changing your own party and assembling a new majority coalition, as Trump has largely accomplished, but the extent to which it compels the opposition party to change some of its core positions, as Democrats had to do after three landslide losses to Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and the Labour Party had to do after Thatcher kept crushing them in England at the same time.Lucretia then flags for us James Piereson's New Criterion article out Friday, "Too Many Democrats," and discuss whether faithfulness to the original intent of the Pendleton Act that set up a supposedly "neutral" civil service requires mass firings of Democrats in the bureaucracy, as well as voters waking up to the destructive incompetence of Democrat-run cities. And this leads to John's closing segment, drawing on his Fox News article up this morning, "Supreme Court's USAID move has a surprise benefit for Trump," in which ahe argues the Supreme Court's ruling mid-week on disbursement of AID funds was not the defeat people first thought. And we also debate just how to think about Justice Amy Coney Barrett's concurrence in this decision, about which our gang is divided.

Why let our frenemies at the Commentary podcast (frenemies since they dissed the sacred McRib recently) have all the fun with their emergency podcasts: after today's errant Supreme Court rulings, it was necessary for the 3WHH bartenders —well two of us at least—to jump to our mics to express our outrage, but also to celebrate briefly Trump's tour de force speech before Congress last night. And not to mention the second installment of our conversation with Richard Epstein, this time on his slim, commendable, and highly readable short book, How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution.So sit back and enjoy your midweek dram of neat single malt with us.

John Yoo is away this week, so the 3WHH has brought in a 180-proof guest in John's place—the great Richard Epstein, who speaks at an average rate of 125 words a minute, with occasional gusts of 200 words per minute. We discuss two of his many extraordinary books, the first being his 1992 title Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, which is newly salient in the aftermath of recent Supreme Court decisions like the Harvard/UNC case. Is it time to repeal (or substantially amend) the Civil Rights Act of 1964?In part two of our conversation, which we will release midweek, we take up his shorter book How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (only 137 pages, which is Richard writes before breakfast most days). While Lucretia and I concentrate on large philosophical currents that drove the progressive counter-revolution against the American Founding, Richard lays out some of the specific step-by-step erosions of the rule of law that are central to the saga.But as Lucretia and I began our taping mid-day Friday we caught the news that the newest front in the Ukraine-Russia War had suddenly broken out in . . . the Oval Office, so we share a few preliminary thoughts on what it all means.