Following my column responding to David French’s column endorsing Kamala Harris, our old friend Jonah Goldberg weighed in. As usual, I agree with a lot of Jonah’s arguments as well as his cautions about the hazards of columnists’ endorsing candidates they think are bad. I’ve noted that the Harris nomination and the return of the Court-packing debate have compelled me to seriously consider supporting Trump this time around even though I still consider him unfit for the office, but one reason why I have not forced myself to make a decision in that regard is that I’d rather see more of the campaign play out first, on both sides, than be a hostage to fortune to things yet to come.

I have two quibbles with Jonah’s analysis.

One is that he doesn’t share my alarm about some of the things Harris proposes to do: “As Dan would surely admit, just because Harris got elected would not mean she could get everything she wanted out of Congress.” Now, many of my problems with Harris are about things she’s likely to try to do unilaterally through the executive branch, but the biggest one — Court “reform” — would not be attempted without Congress. It shouldn’t work without a constitutional amendment, but neither Harris nor Biden nor Senate Democrats proposing such bills have suggested that they would do this through an amendment. It’s true that the odds right now are against Democrats getting a trifecta, with control of the House and the Senate. But it’s also true that the margins standing in their way are extremely slim, and the two members of the Senate Democratic caucus who have thus far stood as an obstacle to the party’s worst radicalism (Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) are both retiring rather than face the party’s base this fall. So, we have proposals from the current president, endorsed by Harris, and which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he’ll pursue, that would require torching the Senate filibuster to pass, and that would cause irreparable harm to our constitutional system. I’m going to take that seriously even if the likeliest outcome is that Harris would start her term with a one-vote Republican margin in the Senate and maybe a one- or two-vote Republican margin in the House standing in her way. As we all remember, the composition of Congress can change, even between midterms, as a result of deaths, resignations, and special elections.

The other quibble is that I think this underplays my second objection to French’s column:

Dan’s criticisms fall prey to many of the same problems he ascribes to David. He accuses David of caving, hypocritically or at least without sufficient explanation, to the binary-choice distortion field. I think Dan’s got a point, but his point depends in part on the same thinking. Yes, Harris is terrible going by her record of past positions—and presumably some of her current ones, whatever they may be. Dan isn’t quite suggesting that David now supports Harris’ indefensible positions; he’s miffed that David is unforgivably silent about them. That’s a perfectly fine criticism of a column, but it’s not that powerful a condemnation of a vote.

To be clear: It’s perfectly intellectually respectable to take the pure binary-choice position that you will always vote for one of the candidates who is likely to win, and simply choose the lesser evil if both are bad. Many Americans vote that way. And it’s also perfectly intellectually respectable to take the pure anti-binary-choice position that you will never vote for a candidate who is unfit for the office, no matter how bad his or her opponent is. I criticize nobody for adopting either as a consistent ethos. It’s a very old debate, going back to 1848 when some anti-slavery “Conscience Whigs” such as Charles Sumner refused to vote for the slaveholder Zachary Taylor, while fellow anti-slavery Whigs such as William Seward and Abraham Lincoln supported Taylor on the grounds that he was the lesser evil compared with the Democrat Lewis Cass. My particular complaint is that French has been the most prominent exponent in American political commentary of the anti-binary-choice view for eight years, so it really was incumbent upon him to either bring his current endorsement in line with that principle or say why he no longer adheres to it. His column did neither.