David French fried

Mollie Hemingway: "David French is now far to the left of Ketanji Brown Jackson."

David French — Harvard-trained lawyer, former Army JAG officer, writer and New York Times columnist — is a principled man, just ask him. He has many principles, just ask him. Principally, he sticks to his principles until a pretty new principle comes along. His longest lasting principle is his devotion and dedication to destroying Donald Trump, a position French has held a record eight years for him. When he said Never Trump, he meant it. He’s a man of his word — until a new word pops up.

That’s just like Nikki Haley who vowed in August to support the Republican nominee so she could get free time on TV in the presidential debate. Now she says she might not.

In 2017, French was among the conservative big wigs who signed the Southern Baptist Convention’s Nashville Statement. It stood up for Christ and against sexual perversion. It opposed homosexual marriages and transsexuality. (I try not to fall for lefty euphemisms. It will remain Red China as long as communists control it.)

A short time later, French wrote, you know what? Homosexual marriage ain’t so bad. He gave an explanation that to my disappointment did not include abandoning his wife for another man. He later explained himself after his critics laughed.

French wrote, “Sometimes — when the political and cultural winds shift enough — I’ll also feel obligated to explain why I haven’t changed. For example, it’s now a virtual article of faith on both right and left that the Iraq War was wrong. I strongly disagree. I continue to believe the war was just and right, and I’ve tried to explain why.

“Where have I changed? To take a few notable examples, I definitely changed my views of Donald Trump. I used to believe I could support him — that he was the worst Republican in the primary, but still worthy of my vote. But that was wrong. I changed my mind in 2016 and never looked back.”

So principles change with the wind, but never his hatred of President Trump. Heck, French began by supporting homosexual marriage. Then he opposed it. Then he supported it again. Unprincipled, you say? That’s three principles on one issue. How many men can say that?

In defending homosexual marriage, French wrote, “My reasoning tracked my lifelong lifelong civil libertarian beliefs. In a diverse, pluralistic republic, granting the same rights to others that we’d like to exercise ourselves should be the default posture of public advocacy and public policy. It’s why, for example, I fiercely supported the rights to free speech and free association even in the face of deep and profound disagreements. I applied that same reasoning to civil marriage.

“But then I changed course—in part because I became concerned that the movement for same-sex marriage would be ultimately ruinous for religious liberty. And I had real reasons to be concerned.”

But that was then, this is now — or at least it was November 20, 2022. Perhaps he has acquired a fourth principle since then. Aunt Clara on Bewitched collected doorknobs. He collects principles.

Sohrab Ahmari, who helped draft the Nashville Statement that French signed, took exception to the change of heart, which he called David French-ism.

He wrote, “What is David French-ism? As Irving Kristol said of neoconservatism, French-ism is more a persuasion or a sensibility than a movement with clear tenets. And that sensibility is, in turn, bound up with the persona of one particular writer, though it reaches beyond him to pervade a wider sphere of conservative Christian thinking and activism.

“It isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French. Then again, it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives. Which is why I recently quipped on Twitter that there is no ‘polite, David French-ian third way around the cultural civil war.’ (What prompted my ire was a Facebook ad for a children’s drag queen reading hour at a public library in Sacramento.)”

Choosing between good and evil, David French and Bill Clinton pretend there is a third way. But in choosing political candidates, the two say there is only one way: Never Trump.

This is not to be confused with the Chicago Way where a little bit of corruption is worth the price of getting things done under the first Mayor Daley. As the Italians say, public money is like holy water; everyone helps himself to it. In Chicago, 60 years later, the corruption is rampant and nothing gets done. When you sit on a Great Lake, who needs holy water?

French, the principled man, eventually landed a columnist gig at the New York Times as the House Conservative. The job is to dump on conservatives to the amusement of NYT’s staff and readers. He did not disappoint them this week as he ginned up his Never Trump rhetoric to attack a unanimous Supreme Court decision that state politicians cannot arbitrarily declare an insurrection and throw a president off the ballot.

That’s what Colorado tried to do. In 2020, it had 21 presidential candidates on the ballot, including Kanye West. This year, state officials tried to ban the eventual Republican nominee. The Rocky Mountain state has become Colofornia.

French wrote, “As of Monday, March 4, 2024, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is essentially a dead letter, at least as it applies to candidates for federal office. Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that reversed the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision striking Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot, even insurrectionists who’ve violated their previous oath of office can hold federal office, unless and until Congress passes specific legislation to enforce Section 3.”

Actually, the nine justices upheld the section by requiring an insurrection before disqualifying a nominee.

But French’s principle today is that you can bounce someone off the ballot simply by declaring him an insurrectionist. You don’t have to prove it in court because the political and cultural winds just blew down due process in David French’s world.

In response to the column, Mollie Hemingway tweeted, “David French is now far to the left of Ketanji Brown Jackson.”

He also is more Never Trump than his former home, National Review, which ran an editorial, “Supreme Court Lets Voters Decide on Trump.”

It said, “The better path, as we have argued consistently, was for the Court to rule on the basis of the explicit text of Section 3: Trump did not engage in insurrection in the sense meant by the Constitution. Neither did other officials who may have fanned the flames before the fact but took no active role in the rioting on January 6. No court will now decide whether Trump is an insurrectionist. None of the dozens of criminal charges against him accuse him of being one. The decision will, instead, be made by the voters.”

There’s a novel idea. Let the people decide and not the men of many principles that change in the political and cultural winds.

The National Review, however, could not help itself from taking an erroneous shot at The Donald. Riot? What bricks did they throw? What store did they torch? What car lot did they demolish? But at least NR admitted kicking Trump off the ballot was a dumb move. Most people saw this attempted 14th Amendment cancellation of Trump for what it is: an overreach.

Matthew G. Andersson had a good take, writing, “Contrary to mainstream media assertions, the Supreme Court did not just make a simple technical ruling: it was obligated to contemplate the entirety of the appellate case, while pushing the issue of Article 3 evidence, effectively beyond state partisan electoral tactics, and into broader congressional territory, while preserving judicial review as a further, albeit imperfect safeguard.”

The unanimous decision by the court was not just a victory for President Trump but by upholding the Constitution — you really have to have an insurrection before labeling a man an insurrectionist — this was a victory for the rule of law.