Podcasts
March 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John Yoo and I are off galavanting in Florida, up to all kinds of mischief and boozy dinners, so this episode was recorded sans whisky but after a lot of fine wines. So this episode really could have been called “the three Bordeaux happy hour,” plus steak. We picked up where we left off last week, with some follow up thoughts on the defects of the criminal justice system especially
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March 15, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Willmoore Kendall Willmoore Kendall was one of the great political scientists of the postwar era, and has been back on our minds lately for a number of reasons. As a heterodox champion of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, a critic of the place of John Locke in American political thought, and a defender of majoritarian deliberation, his provocative ideas are making a comeback in the age of nationalist populism. Kendall died
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March 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The unifying theme to this week’s episode (recorded before a live Zoom audience) is that Republicans had a pretty good week, except for Sen. Mitch McConnell, who preceded falling down a stairway (Lucretia swears she didn’t push him, but we’re waiting for the video footage!) by falling for the liberal line that releasing the January 6 video footage is somehow a threat to the republic—almost as big a threat as
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March 8, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John Marini was one of the first conservative thinkers in 2016 to recognize that Donald Trump posed an existential threat to the administrative state, in a series of articles that are included in a recent collection we highly recommend, Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century. In this second half of our conversation (take in the first part here if you missed it), Glenn
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March 6, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Our ninth and final seminar of our series on The Federalist concludes our discussion of judicial review, with a detour to the famous case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that supposedly settled the matter, though Lucretia draws some fine and original distinctions between what John Marshall did in Marbury and what the Supreme Court did forever afterwards. From there we consider Hamilton’s argument in Federalist #84—the next to last
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March 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward
You mean I can get these in triplicate now!?! This week the Three Whisky Happy Hour tackles not only the “major questions” doctrine at the Supreme Court as it came to sight in the student loan case, but the major question about McDonald’s new (but unadvertised) triple-cheeseburger, whether the Democrats’ decision to hold their first primary of 2024 in South Carolina is a major or minor question, who is the
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February 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
The “administrative state” is an obscure and ungainly phrase, but in recent years the term has burst out into general use, though it is often conflated with another term currently popular—the “deep state.” They are not the same thing, though they do overlap, and “deep state” does enjoy the advantage of being shorter and pithier. What is “the administrative state”? It is a mistake to confuse it with mere bureaucracy,
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February 25, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This week’s Three Whisky Happy Hour finds host John Yoo envious that he isn’t in Florida with me and Lucretia (taping together for the one of the few times ever) presenting an academic paper on envy (irony alert), but we move on quickly to the spectacle of Georgia’s grand jury forepermix, which is enough to induce a grand mal seizure, and from there to the specter of the Supreme Court pondering
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February 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Settle down class, time for our next Power Line University lesson. This week we take up how The Federalist explains Article III, the judiciary, and especially the nowadays familiar power of judicial review, which is nowhere specified in the text of the Constitution, and was in fact an issue of controversy and confusion at the time of the founding. So we start our investigation with Federalist #78, where Alexander Hamilton
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February 18, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Getting together at the bar was a bit tricky this week since we’re all scattered to the wind and John Yoo thought it essential that he swing through a McDonald’s takeout window for the double-cheeseburger special with large fries, so he was late joining us. We were halfway through learning about the newest acronym in higher education—AANAPISI—when he finally turned up, but we managed to get though a lot of
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February 17, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Can it really be possible that this is the 400th episode of this ramshackle podcast? With such a milestone, it seemed a good occasion to get the Fantastic Four who work the site every day together at once (never simple to do), and we decided to do a dry run with a special Zoom webinar for our VIP subscribers which we held last Wednesday before I went out on the
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February 12, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Session 7 of our Power Line University short course on The Federalist met on Saturday this week, and took up Hamilton’s defense of the presidency from the anti-Federalist critics starting with Federalist 70, the paper where he discusses the famous phrase “energy in the executive.” Included in the usual inventory of Hamiltonian paeans to the executive is a look at his often overlooked views on the proper understanding of impeachment
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February 11, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, though this does not let John or me off the hook for our Stockholm Syndrome symptoms in any way. The run-up to America’s most holy secular observance—the Super Bowl—involves me sharing additional details about my Bill & Ted-style excellent adventure with Gov. DeSantis, Lucretia pondering Sy Hersh’s latest purported scoop on who blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline, and John starting to clear away some
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February 4, 2023 — Steven Hayward
John Yoo assumes the host chair for this week’s episode, and despite declaring this week to be a Ukraine-Free Zone, Lucretia still manages to get in a sequel to some of last week’s discussion threads. But the main event for the first third of this episode is reviewing the dreadful events in Memphis last week, though John has to go a stretch to reach the Dylanesque heights of “Memphis Blues
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February 2, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This week’s Power Line University seminar on The Federalist completes our discussion of the separation of powers in Federalists 47 – 51, and then takes an extended detour into the Progressive Era attack on the separation of powers and other basic principles embedded in The Federalist—and by extension, in the Constitution. There are few things more fun than beating up Woodrow Wilson, but we note several of the ways his
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January 28, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Many of The Federalist Papers bear the title, “The Same Subject Continued,” and with a lot of news about the Ukrainian situation coming out this week, we decided to continue last week’s vigorous argument over Ukraine with some of the new facts, such as how much of our own munitions inventory is being drawn down to supply Ukraine (see chart below), the decision to send Abrams tanks, the news that
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January 26, 2023 — Steven Hayward
This week we continued our leisurely stroll through The Federalist with an extended look at Federalist numbers 47 through 51, which explain the key concept of the separation of powers—a phrase that is nowhere found in the text of the Constitution, but which is clearly implied by the design and structure of the text. But Madison and Hamilton leave nothing to chance, citing “the celebrated Montesquieu” as a theoretical authority,
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