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I’ll confess to being torn about the major television networks’ decision to air President Trump’s speech tonight on the border wall. On the one hand, the networks said no to President Barack Obama when he asked for airtime to give a speech on immigration in 2014. They said it was too political to deserve a free prime-time spot — and Trump’s speech is clearly political, as well.

But if they had said no to Trump, the decision would have dominated the political conversation for at least a couple of days. The issue would be a fight between Trump and the media as much as it would be about the government shutdown or immigration policy. And I think fights between Trump and the media tend to benefit Trump. They turn attention away from his own presidential incompetence and misbehavior toward journalists, who aren’t exactly the most popular group of people in the country.

Of course, this whole situation means that Trump is effectively rewarded for his scorched-earth style of politics — with a prime-time address. But don’t despair. The speech probably won’t matter, as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion explains. “We have plenty of evidence on this one: Presidential speeches rarely change minds,” he writes this morning. “Voters most likely to tune in to such a speech are the partisans least likely to change their minds, either about the policy or the president.”

I do hope the networks fact-check Trump as soon as the speech is over. It’s likely to be filled with his usual array of false claims.

Gerrymandering

In the run-up to the midterms, some wild claims made the rounds about the likely impact of gerrymandering. One much-quoted analysis predicted that Democrats would need to win the popular vote by 11 percentage points to retake the House.

These claims — which mostly came from the political left — were wrong. Democrats won the popular vote by 9 points and also won a 36-seat majority in the House. Gerrymandering wasn’t as big of a deal as many had feared.

Since the midterms, though, we’ve seen a mirror image version of those wild pre-election claims. The new argument — mostly from the political right — is that the midterms have shown that gerrymandering isn’t a problem at all. “The Gerrymander Excuse Implodes,” a Wall Street Journal editorial declared.

This argument is also wrong. Gerrymandering remains a problem. In many states, politicians have drawn oddly shaped congressional (and state-legislature) districts to keep members of their own party in power. The practice is “an insult to voters, whichever party is in charge,” the editorial board of the The Charlotte Observer recently wrote. “It essentially robs millions of voters of their voice, since the outcome is preordained.”

The problem exists in states where Democrats last drew the districts, like Illinois and Maryland — and it’s even more severe in Republican-drawn states, like Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The simplest way to see gerrymandering is to compare the current House to the previous one. In 2016, Republicans won the House popular vote by a mere 1 percentage point — but that translated into a 47-seat advantage, even larger than the current Democratic margin. Gerrymandering continues to make the votes of some Americans count more than others.

The good news is that some states are starting to draw districts more fairly, thanks either to judicial rulings or voter initiatives. In November, anti-gerrymandering ballot measures passed in Colorado, Michigan and Missouri.

But the ultimate solution should be federal — to create a uniform set of rules and keep both parties from being tempted to gerrymander. Which brings us to the news on Friday that the Supreme Court agreed to hear two gerrymandering cases. …

The justices and democracy

Unfortunately, the justices may decide to make the gerrymandering problem even worse.

When Anthony Kennedy was on the court, the court repeatedly sidestepped a definitive ruling on the issue, as Amy Howe of SCOTUSblog explains. The four justices appointed by Democratic presidents favored such a ruling, but the five Republican-appointed justices did not. And other than Kennedy, who seemed torn, the Republican justices were willing to uphold gerrymandering plans.

Now that Brett Kavanaugh has replaced Kennedy, the legal scholar Richard Hasen predicts that the court is likely to support gerrymandering — by reversing lower-court rulings that have found it to be unconstitutional. Even worse, Hasen writes in The Atlantic, the court could eventually hear a case challenging ballot initiatives that restrict gerrymandering. If so, the court would be engaging in an aggressive move to reverse the democratic process.

This is likely to be a long fight. I continue to think a federal law to restrict gerrymandering is the best long-term plan.

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David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt • Facebook

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