Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest.

July 24th, 2025, the Is John Roberts to blame for Everything edition. I'm'm David Claus of CityCast. John, Emily, and I, we've been chit-chatting. It's practically like noon already because we've just been sitting here chit-chatting. But you know what that means? That means we're lubed, we're oiled up, we're ready to go. All the joints are moving. That was John Dickerson chuckling. He heard me say the word lube. Didn't like it.

Co-anchor of the CBS Evening News. You're setting expectations in the opposite direction where they need to be. You need to set them in the basement.

Well, in the basement in my house is just the Peloton. That is

Emily Bazelon, who is silently observing in horror of the New York Times Magazine and Yale University

Law School. Hello, Emily. No horror here. Silently observing without horror. This week on the Gab Fest, which is her new motto.

We will explain how Trump's lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, the Epstein scandal,

democratic efforts to revive themselves, Trump's effort to depict Barack Obama as a traitor,

all fit together.

Then is John Roberts responsible for the superpowered Trump

presidency and the authoritarian dictatorship we seem to be careening towards? Then the fascinating

and quite astonishingly brazen effort by Texas Republicans to do a mid-decade redistricting to win four to six more house seats

for Republicans. Plus, we will have cocktail chatter. Hi, this is Ava from Vanta. In today's

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say that because I work here. Get started today at banta.com. So the Epstein situation, I don't know

what else to call it, took a series of weird jags this week, lots of jags. Everything was going on.

The House Speaker shut down the House for six weeks to prevent Democrats and disrunned to

Republicans from forcing some votes about releasing Epstein files, although a House committee

...