Party Animal

Party Animal gathers conservative political argument around Jason Lewis, who represented a Minnesota district in Congress. The episodes available here do not share a single format, and that variety is the most useful thing to know about the show. One is a straightforward interview. Lewis welcomes back Dr. John Lott, president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of the bestseller More Guns, Less Crime, greeting him as an old buddy before running through his academic and government résumé. The talk is about money as much as guns. The two men work through trillions of dollars in covid spending bills, and through the Federal Reserve printing money because borrowing or taxing all of it would have shocked the economy. The cost-of-living bill that followed gets its due. There is an aggravated aside about how price indexes weight their basket of goods, depending on whether CPI or personal consumption expenditures is the yardstick. It closes on grimmer ground: two police officers killed in Burnsville, Minnesota, with early word that the person responsible was not supposed to have a gun. A second episode sounds nothing like the first. Titled 'PDPC Retail Audio Sample', it is a narrated passage of constitutional argument rather than conversation. Its claim is that the republic's most undervalued feature is the vertical separation of powers, the dual sovereignty of the federal government and the states, and it calls on Jefferson and Montesquieu to make the case. Federal judges are the villains, accused of stretching central power while overriding the states on term limits, religious displays, welfare rules, family law and criminal justice, even taking over local school districts. Its refrain, power divided is power checked, is also the title of the book on states' rights credited to Lewis. A third episode features someone else talking about Lewis. In 'Rush on key episode described in Party Animal', a speaker identified in the title as Rush says a Wall Street Journal piece by Lewis confirms his own read on what went wrong in Arizona, where Martha McSally lost to Kyrsten Sinema. His target is the never-Trump wing of the party, with Flake and McCain named, which he calls a bigger threat than the left. Across all three, the constant is Lewis: the questioner in one, the argument's namesake in another, the writer being cited in the third. The tone ranges from the easy warmth of old acquaintances, to the formal register of a written brief, to open combat over the party's direction. Where to start depends on what a listener is after. The Lott conversation suits someone who wants current policy talk, and the narrated passage suits anyone who wants the constitutional theory underneath it.