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Welcome to our VIP feature for Hot Air as well as a members-only show in the Hughniverse! Duane Patterson and I now are doing a Week in Review show for Friday evenings, exclusive to members in both platforms. Duane has been the Generalissimo behind the Hugh Hewitt Show for more than two decades, and we have partnered on weekly commentary since 2007.

Highlights from today’s show include:

• Tim Scott also got in the race this week, and Duane points to his interview with NBC as a sign of how the media hopes to manipulate the primaries. “I did a gag reel of all of the question sets that Tom Llamas asked him,” Duane says. “What do you make of Donald Trump’s attacks here? What do you think about J Six? What do you think about Donald Trump’s role in J Six? And Tim Scott’s like, You know, I’m running for president,” Duane says. When Scott pressed Llamas for a real issue, Llamas went immediately to abortion.
• I don’t think the Twitter Spaces was a catastrophe, I argue, but it’s still worthy of some criticism. “There is, I think, room to criticize DeSantis for relying on what was basically an untried platform at that scale,” I say, “for your very first stepping-out of the campaign.” It would have been better in retrospect, I argue, to do the announcement on stage at a rally and then do the Twitter Spaces.”
• Duane disagrees. “What my argument is,” Duane says, “the only people that are really making hay out of this are the people that he intended to screw over and lock out to begin with.” Once the glitches — Twitter’s fault, not DeSantis’ — got ironed out, the strategy worked. “When it was live,” he continues, “I heard the content and and the long form answers and the seriousness of what the subject matter was.”
• All of the nonsense attack stories coming from the media this week have one purpose, Duane argues. “It’s very clear what’s up here — mainstream media, legacy regime media want Trump to be the nominee. They hate Trump, they want Trump on fire somewhere,” Duane continues, “but only after he becomes the nominee. Because they believe in their heart of hearts that Donald Trump is the only Republican that can’t beat Joe Biden, and that’s their ultimate goal.”
• We both think that the Chevron deference doctrine for agencies is doomed after Sackett v EPA. The Supreme Court has dealt with the Waters of the US rule and the EPA’s changing definitions of it for decades, and “Alito finally said, basically if you read {the opinion] we’re tired of this shit,” I say, “so we’re gonna define it for you. … What this tells you,” I continue, “is that this court is done with offering ‘deference’… They’re gonna start losing a lot of these cases that they were winning in the past.”
• Duane agrees. “If they can’t show standing and they can’t point to the statute and say, This is what gives us the authority to do it,” he predicts the court will say, “they don’t have the authority to do it.”
• On the debt ceiling: “I say that they will come to a deal sometime late this afternoon,” I predict, “so that nobody takes a very close look at it over a holiday weekend.” Duane agrees: “So there it will be a bipartisan vote. They’ll come to an agreement. It will probably go through pretty quickly.”

There is still plenty more discussion in the show, so be sure to watch it all — and join us in the comments!