Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Jonah Goldberg. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss

Texas Democrats fleeing the state to avoid a hard vote on redistricting and gerrymandering that could put the House of Representatives in play.

And Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for delivering a report he didn't like.

We'll ask whether or not this is part of some larger war on the truth besetting American politics and society?

And then for not worth your time, we address the thorny eternal question that has divided

households for millennia. How early should you get to the airport? I'm joined today by my friends

and colleagues, Kevin Williamson, Chris Starwalt, and Megan McArdle from the Washington

Post. Let's get to it. So, Kevin, I think you're the one who's actually writing right now about

the redistricting stuff. The gistrate is Donald Trump wants to gain five seats. They think they can

gain five seats by doing a midterm, our mid-decade redistricting in Texas. And this is spreading out across the

country where Democrats are claiming that they will do the same thing, but there are problems

with that. So I guess I'll start with this, Kevin. Is this thing actually going to work in Texas?

I mean, are they going to do it? Probably. You know, it's a fairly, fairly doable thing.

One of my, one of my first real kind of political experiences, I must, I might still been a teenager. I was probably writing for my college newspaper, and Texas was doing a redistricting thing, and there was a big fight over it. And I talked to someone in the state senate there, I think it was state senator, about the process. And I was, you know, young and stupid and idealistic and talked about, isn't there a non-political way to do this? And it was the most,

I got the most epic scoffing at that I still remember 30 years later. And the point was,

of course, that redistricting is the most political thing a legislature does. There is no way

to depoliticize it. And it's always going to be that way. People overestimate, I think, the importance of it. And they underestimate some of the downsides of it, which you're going to see in Texas, where some very, very Republican districts are now just going to be slightly Republican districts, or still fairly Republican districts, but not as safe as they were before if they go through with it. This one's unusual in that they're doing it in the middle of the cycle and using some

errors in the census as an excuse for that. The census errors are real. That's not why this is

being done, of course. The thing I like to point about you in the case of Texas, particularly,

is that redistricting doesn't save you. And the Democrats ran Texas forever and ever and

ever, and they gerrymandered the crap out of this state. They had some crazy-looking districts.

And when Texans decided they didn't want to be a Democratic state anymore, they weren't. And Democrats

...