3 Whisky Happy Hour

You've heard of the Avengers. And the Incredibles. We at the 3WHH consider ourselves The Uncensorables. (Only because Justice League is taken.) In any case, just when you thought it was safe to pass by the courthouse and law library because the Supreme Court term has finished, along comes a bracing district court opinion slapping the Biden Administration hard for its collaborating with social medi...

It's over. The fat lady has sung. The Supreme Court ended its current term with a big bang, delivering a long-overdue smackdown of affirmative action that with any luck history will say was a turning point for restoring the proper understanding of equality in our Constitution, though the follow up to overcome ther massive resistance of universities and their epigones in HR and DEI departments ever...

The submersible that is the Biden presidency looks to be under as much increasing pressure as the Trump reboot tour, and maybe both will implode? And when is the Supreme Court going to end the suspense and deliver the rulings on the big cases we've all been waiting for? The Court did deliver a disappointment of sorts in U.S. v. Texas , which rejected the state challenge to the Biden Administration...

By the end of the week when our three bartenders assembled, the Trump indictment had been pretty well munched and masticated, so there wasn't much left to say about the matter for the moment. But John Yoo has a wild idea to resolve the controversy: President Biden, he says, should pardon Trump right now, and say "Let's put everything before the voters next year on the issues." Of course the last t...

Who needs Steve's peaty, smoky whisky this week when Canada is supplying a surplus for half the nation? (But it ain't Canadian Club they're serving.) After clearing the smoke from our eyes—and our whisky glasses, we get down to business on what is known so far about the Trump indictment (we recorded before the full details of the indictment were released), and wonder if the Dept. of Justice isn't...

John Yoo is away traveling this weekend, so the 3WHH reverts to its old form, with Lucretia pummeling Steve like a chiropractor working on a stiff neck for his conventional thinking about the debt ceiling deal. But otherwise we're in a jolly mood this week, as we see signs that a "Revolt of the Normies"—that is sensible middle class Americans—against gender wokery is finally underway. Just ask the...

Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is one of the most productive—and provocative—working scholars today (with emphasis on working , as his output is prodigious). This classic format episode features Steve Hayward and Phil in a one-on-one conversation about three of Phil's major areas of current research, starting with his co-authored article that breaks new ground...

It's late in the 4th quarter for this year's Supreme Court season, and the Justices are starting to score with some long bombs. Our 3WHH bartenders celebrated with entire flights of whisky (our kind of diversity!) while pondering Thursday's clean sweep of two 9 - 0 decisions that reinvigorate the "takings clause" of the 5th Amendment, and clip the wings of the EPA without once mentioning either th...

The hiatus in Hollywood brought on by the current writers strike seemed a good occasion to check in with Christian Toto, proprietor of the indispensable HollywoodInToto website, as well as a podcast , and a terrific recent book, Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost Its Soul . Our conversation ranges widely from the problems of streaming services, the leftward lurch that has nearly killed...

With Steve Hayward back in the host chair this week, the 3WHH actually breaks some real news with special guest Kelly Janes Torrance, the op-ed editor of the indispensible New York Post . This week Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is attracting surprising interest from many conservatives, visited the Post for a grilling from the Post 's editorial board, and Kelly Jane opened up her reporter's notebook t...

Lucretia hosts this week's episode, and as Hamilton predicted about how executive power would promote sobriety, the awesome responsibility of the host chair led Lucretia to praise Kevin McCarthy for the second week in a row, and she even has nice things to say about Steve! After the smelling salts were passed round to John and Steve (and fresh glasses of whisky poured), the bartenders get down to...

With all three bartenders back together and John Yoo in the host chair, the gang wonders why it is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr is so far making the most sense in the 2024 presidential race, how it is that Kevin McCarthy has (stop the presses!) actually impressed Lucretia, and why the obviously political attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas expose the left at their power-grasping worst. But then we get...

Heather Mac Donald may be the most fearless journalist in America. She is relentless in her reporting, bracing in her truth-telling, and ferocious in arguing her case. Her new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives , explores how the current attack on meritocracy in the name of "equity" is rampaging through almost all Ame...

Who is the only federal judge to have played basketball in the Olympics for Cuba? Who is the only federal judge known for driving around town in a 1960s-era convertable Rolls Royce? Who is the only federal judge who was nearly deported? The answer is an n of 1 , as statisticians would say: Judge Carlos T. Bea of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who the Los Angeles Daily Journal was correct to call...

This week we took the 3WHH on the road for a special ad-free episode, as Lucretia and Steve recorded before a live audience at Commenter-Con II in Phoenix. Commenter-Con II is the inspiration of 'Ammo Grrrll" (known in real life as Susan Vass), with Power Line readers from 27 states turning up. It also coincides roughly with the 40th anniversary of Lucretia and Steve's very first argument, which,...

In what may be the most wide-ranging episode of the 3WHH yet, the troika ranges from the implications of the Fox News settlement with Dominion for the defective NY Times v. Sullivan doctrine, to an extended discussion of the natural law arguments on abortion—the topic aborted last week for lack of time—and lastly to a look at notable political movies with the unlikely offering from Lucretia that a...

This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Groff vs. Dejoy , involving a Post Office mail carrier named Gerald Groff, who, for religious reasons, wished not to work on Sundays. Previously the postal service had granted this accommodation, which was easy back when the Post Office didn’t do mail delivery on Sundays. But a few years ago the Post Office started contracting with Am...

Lucretia hosts the bar this week, as Steve and John extol the virtues of Japanese whisky while trolling the left for its latest futile attempt to take down Justice Clarence Thomas. Lucretia celebrates a brew pub in Arizona that stood up to the braying mob that resents real beer drinkers who like the Federalist Society, which deserves to go with a lighter highland malt. And in our "This Week in Dem...

You know how people who think they can top something crazy like to say, "Hold my beer"? Well, this week Budweiser decided to try to top Alvin Bragg's bogus indictment of Donald Trump by rebranding their "light" beer such that no one want to hold it even for Alvin Bragg. What explains this dumbest marketing move since the New Coke? And does the Biden Administration have a political death wish by de...

Lot going on this week, including Steve successfully completing his mandatory online "Abusive Conduct Training," otherwise known as Lucretia's How-To Guide to Blunt Speaking. Did you know abusive conduct ias bad ? How would we have known without an online training module? The good news for Lucretia is that "making unpopular statements about controversial issues" is not considered abusive. The bad...

We’re a day late getting to the whisky bar this week on account of complicated travel schedules. Lucretia sits in the host chair as Steve was still feeling light-headed from too much high-altitude skiing while John is his usual jaunty self, baiting Lucretia with his thoughts in the Boston Globe about how Alvin Bragg and the other chipmunks of the left are blowing it with their attempt to bring......

John and Steve 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 when it comes.....

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......

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....

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......