Toon: The 60% Solution

At the risk of giving GQP politicians ideas...

On April 29, well ahead of its usual timetable of issuing rulings in June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a congressional map that had been the result of a lawsuit against Louisiana's 2021 redistricting plan. A lower court had ruled that the 2021 map packed the state's Black voters into a single congressional district in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Supremes continued their gutting of that Act, decreeing that as long as lawmakers are not actually wearing swastikas and Klan robes when they draw congressional district lines, they can discriminate against whomever they want.

Louisiana Republicans immediately called a halt to the state's primary elections in which early voting was already underway, so that they could re-redraw district boundaries. (Yesterday’s Senate primary went right on ahead as scheduled.) Fellow Republicans in Tennessee, Alabama, and Utah hurriedly followed suit.

This mid-decade scramble to jigger maps to tilt districts against Democrats was started by Donald Gimme-Gimme Trump's gerrymandering demand to the state of Texas — a demand with which Texan Republicans eagerly and speedily complied. 

Democrats have attempted to answer Texas's unprecedented move, but with mixed results. California drew up new Democrat-favoring maps; but Maryland refused to. New York is constitutionally prevented from mid-decade redistricting, and Virginia's high court tossed out a pro-redistricting popular vote on a legislative technicality that nobody seems to quite understand. The Supreme Court in D.C., after rushing to overrule the lower court ruling in Louisiana, has just decided to let the ruling in Virginia stand without comment.

Is my cartoon really such a far-fetched notion? I wouldn't put it past today's ReTrumplicans to push exactly this idea through every legislature in Dixie and the Great Plains.

Ice Cream, Ice Cream Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink

"The Navy's First Lord Passes the Grog" by Edmund Duffy in Sun, Baltimore, May 31, 1926

I enjoyed the characterizations of a seaman and Navy Secretary Curtis Wilbur in Edmund Duffy's cartoon, so it gets to lead off today's Graphical History Tour. 

The U.S. didn't have army bases all over Europe during Prohibition, but recruits in the U.S. Navy got to take shore leave in ports where beer, wine, and liquor were sold like, well, beer, wine, and liquor.  

To combat naval inebriation, Wilbur authorized the sale aboardship of chewing gum and the like as something to replace the sailors' appetite for booze. In Duffy's cartoon, Wilbur is mollifying a tar with the offer of an ice cream cone —vanilla, of course — just the thing for a tar's night on the town.

"The Circus" by T.E. Powers in New York Evening Journal, ca. May 7, 1926

T.E. Powers correctly pointed out that the Republican Party platforms of 1920 and 1924 were solidly in favor of Prohibition. He overlooked, however, that there was still significant support of Prohibition within the Democratic Party, particularly in the deep South and the West.

"Something Bound to Happen" by Harold Talburt for Newspaper Enterprise Assn. ca. May 23, 1926

A bipartisan proposal to allow the manufacture and sale of less intoxicating beverages such as beer and wine had support among Americans who were not so devoted to complete and total abstinence. Liquor would have remained illegal under most versions of modification, with acceptable levels of Alcohol By Volume (ABV) in legalized libations set by the government.

A primary election in Pennsylvania may have been a bellwether of actual public sentiment on the Prohibition issue.

"A Soaking" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Evening Tribune, May 20, 1926

Philadelphia Congressman William Scott Vare won the three-way Republican primary race for Senator over Dry candidates Governor Gifford Pinchot and incumbent Senator George W. Pepper on May 18. Vare ran on an anti-Prohibition platform, charging that the Volstead Act was resulting in a police state, and blaming Prohibition for a 300% rise in alcohol-related crimes in Philadelphia.

"The Ship of the Desert" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 20, 1926

The Philadelphia Inquirer dismissed Vare's calls for relaxing, if not repealing Prohibition as a distraction from his well-earned reputation as a machine politician. Nicknamed the "Duke of South Philadelphia," Vare was cozy with gangsters Waxey Gordon and "Lucky" Luciano. The cartoons of its editorial cartoonist, William Hanny, while highly critical of Vare, were mostly predictions that voters would send him down to defeat. 

"And That's What Little Candidates Are Made Of" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, May 28, 1926

National cartoonists conveniently overlooked the other major race in Pennsylvania, to succeed Pinchot as Governor. John S. Fisher narrowly edged out former Lt. Governor Edward E. Beidelman, who, in his legal practice, was more closely associated with the Wet cause than Vare.

"The New Band Wagon" by Wm. Sykes in Life, May 27, 1926

There is a good chance that we shall return to Pennsylvania's Senate campaign in future Graphical History Tours, so let's not get ahead of ourselves there. Suffice it to say for today's purposes that Vare's plurality win encouraged a number of politicians elsewhere to voice their reservations against the Noble Experiment.

"Page Moses" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, May 29, 1926

But repealing — or modifying — a Constitutional Amendment was never intended to be an easy task. Any celebratory champagne toast would have to wait.

Chewing gum, anyone?

🍸

And so ends Graphical History Tour for another day. Be sure to check in again tomorrow for a much more recent editorial cartoon from your humble scribbler!

Q Toon: A Gentleman in Moscow

Gay Republican operative Richard Grenell is reportedly interested in snagging a prominent foreign policy position in the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™, including the post of U.S. Ambassador to Russia, vacant since last June.

"He had an interest in the job – or at least he floated the idea to select colleagues," one anonymous source close to Grenell told the Daily Mail of London, while acknowledging that "Putin's regime is extremely anti–LGBTQ."

Thirty years ago, Republicans' objections to President Clinton's nomination of James Hormel to be U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg included the claim that the fact of Hormel being openly gay would be an insult to Catholic Luxembourgers. If the citizens or government of Luxembourg were truly upset, however, I don't remember hearing anything about it, and I'm certain that the U.S. Senators who raised such a stink about Hormel's nomination would have been sure to point out any complaints.

Two decades later, during the First, Almost As Corrupt Trump Administration, Ric Grenell raised his hosts' hackles as U.S. Ambassador to Germany; but it was because he insisted on meddling in domestic German politics. It had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. 

Trump's State Department is apparently in no hurry whatsoever to put anybody in charge of our embassy in Russia. Trump crony Michael Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner have been Trump's de facto conduit to the Kremlin (when he isn't getting his instructions directly from Putin), operating without the nuisance of having to get confirmed by the Senate. The two are likely to play a more important role in U.S.-Russian relations than whoever eventually becomes the next official ambassador, anyway.

As for the former Acting Director of the Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Grenell just wants to get any foreign service appointment at all. He appeared most recently in my cartoons in March, when he was reportedly angling for a position with Kristi Noem's "Shield of the Americas."

By the way, if anyone has heard from Kristi Noem's "Shield of the Americas," please contact the Bureau of Missing Persons.

text?

This Week's Sneak Peek

What, another Ric Grenell cartoon? Oh, well — Scott Bessent will have to wait for some other time.

So I was mindful of being inclusive when creating the host in this week's cartoon. She's completely made up, by the way; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

I suppose I could have drawn Eugene Daniels or Jonathan Capehart, but there is no way that Grenell would be caught dead on MS NOW.

Revenge of the Sixths

This week's Graphical History Tour ventures once again into the Bergetoon vaults to haul up the stuff I was drawing about forty, thirty, twenty, and ten Mays ago.

1986

in Ranger, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, May 1, 1986

Today, Donald Joffrey Trump complains that our NATO allies are not stepping up to help him in his unilateral war excursion in Iran. Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan was similarly disappointed that only Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain lent any support to "Operation Eldorado Canyon," air attacks on purported terrorist centers in Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya.

The two military operations have some elements in common, Libyan involvement in significant terrorist attacks chief among them. Yet several distinctions must be made. Reagan consulted Congress before initiating this military action. The administration also kept our European allies up to date. Operation Eldorado Canyon was launched in express retaliation for a Libyan-sponsored bombing of a Berlin nightclub popular with U.S. servicemen (two were killed in the bombing and 79 injured).

And whatever other faults he had, at least Reagan didn't start bickering with the Pope.

1996 

The university newspapers for which I drew way back in the 20th Century always suspended publication in May for finals and graduation, so my cartoons in those months were mostly on local or special interest topics.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May 3, 1996

The NIMBYism at the heart of this one is probably fairly universal, however.

Lutheran Social Services (LSS) provides housing, counseling, and child care services to underserved and at-risk communities. Its bid purchase a house on a semi-rural road in Mount Pleasant as an eight-bed halfway house for male parolees raised instant objections from neighbors. 

One neighbor complained that the parolees would get to "live in a $170,000 home because they committed a crime." Another told the Journal Times, "If it's not safe for these men to go home, it's not safe for them to be in my neighborhood. ... Some little child is going to be molested. Some woman is going to get raped. Someone is going to get beat up. Someone's house is going to get broken into."

LSS countered, "We will know exactly where every resident is every moment of every day." Their residents were to be carefully screened, and offered alcohol and drug abuse treatment, occupational and educational opportunities, and counseling.

But at a packed community meeting, LSS yielded to pressure from residents and state legislators, and announced that it would look for another site elsewhere.

No, it didn't end up being at the local shopping mall.

But these days, our local mall would welcome just about any tenant at all.

2006

May, 2006

To get really, really parochial, this is a cartoon I was asked to draw for the 25-year reunion of my college graduating class. It must have gone astray when I sent it in (perhaps because recipients of my e-mails see my husband's name as the sender, and we've both kept our maiden names). In any event, it didn't make it into the evening program.

It was a challenge trying to winnow down the collective experience of our four years; I was by not the sort of undergrad who participated in every major occasion, and lived off campus one year. The snippets that I focused on included:

•  the time ABC Sports decided to cover a football game at our college and asked the music department to come up with a halftime show
• the college's intention to tear down an old dormitory, Ytterboe, and the construction of a new one that got its name after we left
• the streaker at our graduation (didn't every graduation have at least one in those days?)
• the time Vice President Walter Mondale came to campus to swear college president Sidney Rand (New Dorm would be named after him) in as Ambassador to Norway
• our campus ID "caf" card
• the record album of of student performers at the Lion's Pause (an old theater in Ytterboe's basement)
• and of course, the hair and clothing styles of the time.

The hardest part of the drawing? Definitely the grooves of the record album.

2016

for Q Syndicate, May 2016

Here's a cartoon that brings together local, national, and special interest topics.

My hometown congressional district was represented by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) ten years ago. In May of 2016, he employed the power of his gavel to prevent passage of a component of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed time and time again to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ employees.

In this case, it was an amendment by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY) to a Defense Department bill; his amendment would have mandated that defense contractors not discriminate against LGBTQ+ employees and applicants. With time expired for House members to cast their votes, Maloney's amendment appeared to have passed by a vote of 219 to 206.

But Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) held the vote open so that Republican party whips could pressure enough of their members to switch their votes to defeat the amendment. As soon as seven Republicans had changed their votes from Aye to Nay, the gavel finally came down.

Maloney's amendment was thus defeated by a single vote, and the defense contracts of antigay wedding cake bakers and florists were saved.

Sort of. An Obama administration executive order was already in place protecting LGBTQ+ defense contractor employees.

Until, of course, the Electoral College awarded the presidency to one Donald Bifftannen Trump four years later.

ENDA is likely to come up presently in another Graphical History Tour, so please keep it in mind.

Q Toon: Monkey Business

Congressional Republicans have proposed five anti-LGBTQ+ riders to the National Security and Department of State Appropriations Act, a must-pass funding bill for the State Department.

The riders range from restricting Pride flags in federal buildings to banning transgender healthcare; all attack the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans and have nothing whatsoever to do with funding the State Department or national security.

You might be thinking, wait, haven't Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ executive orders already accomplished all of the crap in those riders? Yes, exactly. 

But the point of Congress passing these discriminatory and homophobic provisions into law would be to prevent some future, more enlightened administration from signing an executive order to return things to pre-Trump conditions. It would take another act of Congress to undo this act of Congress.

So I came up with this literal interpretation of the figurative term "riders." Since primatologists have recently discovered that homosexual behaviors are not exclusive to humans and bonobos, I might have tried to depict the Republican riders as some creature more associated with LGBTQ+ophobia instead. 

But having the bicyclist carrying five GOP elephants would have been a difficult draw.

Besides, pachyderms aren't all that straight and narrow, either.

This Wookie's Sneak Peek

 May Dave Brubeck be with you.