Podcast Time: the 3WHH on Sister Souljah, and Ricochet with Gerard Baker

Another two-fer podcast Saturday, with the 3WHH back to full strength (both in personnel and in whisky), 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.

I lead off wondering if Gavin Newsom, and Senate Democrats, are at last having their “Sister Souljah” moment about the transgender millstone around their neck, though I point out that Democrats will have great difficulty pulling this off, and lay 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.

Listen here, or over at Ricochet when it goes live, or from your favorite podcast outlet.

And then there’s the Ricochet podcast, where James Lileks, Charles C.W. Cooke and I kick around the entire scene with Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker. Both podcasts end with the sad note (heh) of Hunter Biden’s pending bankruptcy. Who could have seen this coming—except everybody?