Huey Long, the legendary populist from Louisiana, said “The time has come for all good men to rise above principle.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th century transcendentalist, said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Both aphorisms are much in play lately.

Republican Sen. Tim Neville, R-Littleton, is sponsoring a bill, SB17-062, on free speech. The bill “prohibits institutions of higher education from restricting a student’s constitutional right to speak in any way in a public forum …”

Anyone who supports the First Amendment should support this bill. Public institutions should not set aside special areas or “zones” for “free speech” to protect students from any ridiculous thing that someone may say in a public place.

Even so, Neville’s fellow Republican, President Donald J. Trump, threatened to withhold federal funding amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of California Berkeley, because some protesters there broke windows and set fires. The protesters didn’t want an alt-right speaker to lecture at the campus. The university ultimately cancelled the speaker’s event.

So what are the principles here? SB 62 would protect those Berkeley protesters who lawfully exercised their freedom of speech rights to protest the presentation of an alt-right lecturer who was going to make fun of the protesters’ beliefs – their type of speech.

But Trump apparently doesn’t make any distinction between those people exercising their rights lawfully and those breaking the law. He just wants to take the federal funding away from the university where the protests occurred as a form of punishment. But for what?  Allowing the protesters’ speech? Shutting down the protesters’ speech? Cancelling the alt-right speaker’s event? All of the above?

GOP U.S. senators prevented the nomination process of Judge Merrick Garland to go to the Senate Judiciary Committee and potentially on to the Senate floor for a vote. Why? Because, Sen. Mitch McConnell said the nomination occurred too close to the 2016 election. The GOP won that bet, but they violated the principle of allowing the president to appoint and have a hearing on nominations during the president’s term.

Democrats railed against the GOP and McConnell for preventing Judge Garland’s nomination’s right to a hearing. Now Democratic Senators have to weigh the get-even principle against their avowed support for the principle of giving presidential nominations a committee hearing and a floor vote.

President Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court. Democrats don’t want the guy. Will the Democrats double down on what the GOPers did in 2016 to keep Gorsuch off the Supreme Court in 2017? Will the GOP triple down to get Gorsuch on the court by changing Senate filibuster rules on their principled deliberative process?

In the 1960s, Republican senators joined with northern Senate Democrats to bring 60 votes for cloture, or a vote to stop a filibuster, to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That principled vote changed the United States for the better, and its 60-vote majority sent a message to the nation that the country was united on this issue.

Far too many politicians have been spiraling away from principle, rejecting consistency in integrity since that time.