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 lea...
Apr 19, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 15
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 ...
Apr 12, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 14
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...
Apr 05, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 13
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 ques...
Mar 29, 2025•1 hr 1 min
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 th...
Mar 22, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 12
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 whet...
Mar 15, 2025•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 11
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 ...
Mar 08, 2025•59 min•Season 1Ep. 10
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, ...
Mar 06, 2025•42 min•Season 1Ep. 9
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 substantia...
Mar 01, 2025•47 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Our long-running intramural argument on this podcast over the Ukraine War has become just like the Ukraine War itself—lots of casualties on both sides, but very little movement from week to week. But is Trump actually on the cusp of a breakout? There's one thing Trump did this week that is surely causing Putin to wipe the smile off his face, and no one seems to have figured it out. It's all part of Trump's Great Reset. There is more unanimity amongst the 3WHH bartenders about Gaza, and once agai...
Feb 22, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 7
With Lucretia hosting both the episode and the bar this week (with three different whiskies just for herself ), we manage to keep John Yoo from excessive gloating about the Eagles win in the Super Bowl by distracting him with his favorite subject—executive power, about which he seldom thinks there can be excessive use. But maybe we found some limits this time? The intensifying pace of President Trump's exertions of executive power look to be the most serious attempt to contain spending, reorgani...
Feb 15, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 6
We're only 19 days into Trump's term, but it seems like 19 months have passed already since January 20. When Alexander Hamilton wrote of "energy in the executive," he had no idea that a real estate tycoon would become the greatest example of this understanding of the presidency. This week's episode reviews five of Trump's biggest fights that are interrelated in ways that could rebalance out constitutional order in ways conservatives have hoped beyond hope for decades might be possible. Trump's c...
Feb 08, 2025•59 min
This wide-ranging, round-robin format episode begins with celebrating the end of "Dry January" (which we, um, didn't much observe), mockery of Bernie Sanders' obsession with "onesies," a brief account of a Steve roadtrip to Villanova University, and a declaration of war against the Commentary podcast. (It's serious: it involves McRibs.) After we clear away this opening frivolity, we get down to serious business. Lucretia is in high dudgeon about the Catholic bishops behaving just the way they di...
Feb 02, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 4
The 3WHH bartenders raise their glasses high for the first 100 hours of Trump II, which bid to replace FDR's famous "Hundred Days" for breathtaking executive action. You'd think that this is Trump's first term, and metaphysically, Steve argues, it is. In just the way we've come to expect of Trump in all things, he may have turned the usual presidential cycle on its head. Even John, champion of executive power, is impressed. And one more miracle: he actually gets rare praise from Lucretia for his...
Jan 25, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Nothing "jejune" about this edition, except perhaps for the first-ever use of "jejune" in a podcast, but it is the perfect term to describe Joe Biden's "farewell address," which, aside from its jejune content, is a most welcome sound, since he will be gone in about another 48 hours, never to be heard from again one hopes. This week we take up three topics—one from each of the bartenders: Behold, President Biden amended the Constitution on Friday—all by himself! Aside from the obvious absurdity a...
Jan 18, 2025•52 min•Season 1Ep. 2
With this episode the Three Whisky Happy Hour emigrates into its very own identity on Ricochet and Steve's new group Substack, "Political Questions," but not to worry—the old Power Line Show will live on in its old format as an interview show. The 3WHH, meanwhile, is rebooting with some new formats. We'll be doing some show with a single-subject format; on some we'll do a round robin of hot topics and reflections on currtent news items, and we'll even have some guests from time to time, as well ...
Jan 11, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Since so many of our fellow conservative podcasts are taking the holidays off, we decided to do another special mid-week edition to observe the new year, and gear up for some changes. Last year's end of year show featured some low-probability but plausible predictions for 2024 (inspired by the late Wall Street guru Byron Weins' annual practice, which was often right), and unlike other shows that never track prediction accuracy (like the McLaughlin Group, which had a terrible record once someone ...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 524
Our final podcast of 2024 looks back on the top story and bottom story of the year, and you won't be surprised to see some symmetries in our answers. But then we move on to the main event—a question from a listener (initials RW) about whether the 14th Amendment, rightly understood, actually permits the federal government to outlaw private discimination. We go several rounds (but not really enough rounds) about aspects of this issue before realizing after we finished that we didn't reach a verdic...
Dec 28, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 523
We were going to take up the transcendent matters appropriate for the climax of Advent, but the headlines won't let us! The dam started breaking this week about Joe Biden's unfitness for office, which, as the Wall Street Journal reported, began during the 2020 campaign. Just who has been president for the last four years? And aside from the perfidy of the complacent and compliant (to Democrats) news media, should there be a serious congressional investigation into what is clearly one of the grea...
Dec 21, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 522
This special mid-week holiday edition of the 3WHH makes up for the lost ground over the weekend, when schedules prevented the bar from opening at any of the usual meet-up times. Steve, this week's host, and Lucretia grill John Yoo about his latest article, " Globalization's Challenge to American Constitutionalism ," published at the sparkling new website of the Civitas Institute, where Steve also appears for the first time today on a separate subject, " The Future of Conservatism in America ." W...
Dec 18, 2024•58 min•Ep. 521
So your three bartenders weren't able to assemble even virtually this week for our usual format—John is away on a clandestine mission stalking the elusive McRib, while Steve and Lucretia are also largely indisposed. But fear not! We decided that in lieu of our usual snappy brickbats, we'd share with our insatiable fans the talks we gave a couple weeks back at the University of Florence about the American election. It was great fun and the student questions were great, but we're just offering her...
Dec 14, 2024•21 min•Ep. 520
The Three Whisky Happy Hour gang is finally all back in the U.S. after weeks of galavanting overseas, and boy is there a lot to catch up on. Among our topics this week are the signs and wonders that the Age of Trump is fully established; the Biden pardons; the farcical Penny trial; whether World War III is indeed under way, and the attempted coup in Korea, about which our resident Korea expert (and resident Korean!) John Yoo has lots of thoughts. Along the way some fresh new insults are thrown a...
Dec 07, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 519
Two-thirds of the 3WHH crew were back home in the states for Thanksgiving, while Steve is still galavanting around coastal Italy, defiling the reputation of this podcast by drinking Negronis at happy hour—a tergiversation that this week's host, John Yoo, does not let pass without censure. In any case, by the miracle of Zoom we managed to assemble for a holiday weekend special edition, where Steve and Lucretia push back on the emerging narrative that Trump's election victory was so narrow that it...
Nov 30, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 518
This week's special episode comes from Tuscany, where the Three Whisky Happy Hour gang put aside their whisky glasses and took up tasting chinati at Castello de Cacchiano between academic conferences in Milan and Florence. So for this week only, we become the Three Chianti Happy hour, though we had many more than three! We had to record this episode in two installments, as breakfast interrupted our first segment, and then returning only after a long day in the countryside sampling yet more chian...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 4 min
This is going to be unlike any previous edition of the Three Whisky Happy Hour, because it was literally recorded during happy hour at the annual meeting of the Federalist Society in Washington, in a corner of the mass reception hall where John Yoo and I invited all comers to swing by to offer a few comments. This completely unstructured (but therefore highly authentic!) conversation included Ilya Shaprio and Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute, the esteemed Roger Pilon, emeritus of the Ca...
Nov 16, 2024•33 min•Ep. 516
The Power Line single-malt whisky bar is still trying to process Donald Trump's decisive victory in the election, and this episode reflecting on the scene offers up a few fresh (we hope) takeaways from the result that we haven't yet seen elsewhere in the media, and then we turn our attention to some key priorities for the second Trump Administation starting in January. In such a target-rich environment, what should Trump aim at first on Day One in January: our ideologically corrupt universities,...
Nov 09, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 515
For our many regular listeners who were not able to join us last night for our live taping of this special mid-week episode that included Scott Johnson and (very late) John Hinderaker (hence the "Five Whisky Happy Hour"), much of what we talked about has been overtaken by subsequent vote counts and other results. But we did have a number of questions and issues that should still be of interest even after the dust settles today, such as why the polls were wrong again , what's wrong with the exit ...
Nov 06, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 514
In our last episode before the election, the 3WHH bartenders pour a stiff one in honor of the end of recycling, since were back to pure garbage now, though Biden getting in his last chomps of a baby was a special bonus to end the week. We spend most of this episode reflecting on the final week of the campaign, arguing about what kind of vote fraud may or may not take place, and offering our final predictions for both the election result and the aftermath. You think it's over Tuesday! Think again...
Nov 01, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 513
So it was Hitler week for Democrats, who are still fuming over being cooked by Donald Trump in a McDonald's deep fryer, and covering up their indigestion with an E.coli outbreak. Behind the public polls catching up with the terrible body language of Democrats and the news media lies a growing recognition that Kamala's brat summer has gone splat as election day approaches. The 3WHH team covers this, a few of the Senate races, the underrated scandal of suppressed science about gender bending medic...
Oct 26, 2024•52 min•Ep. 512
The news out over the weekend that Israel's attack plans against Iran have been leaked by our government and/or European governments ought to be a major scandal and cause for a serious criminal investigation, but in fact the real story to be followed may be much worse: is anyone asking whether Iran has penetrated our government—either with spies inside our intelligence agencies, or agents of influence in the State Department or even the White House? This seemed like a good excuse to revisit the ...
Oct 21, 2024•31 min•Ep. 511
