Q Toon: The Overturners

Our ethically challenged Supreme Court is set to hand down their rulings for the year this month. Given the right-wingers' determination to overturn precedent wherever it suits them, we can anticipate some doozies.

Justices Thomas and Alito in particular have expressly condemned established case law involving privacy rights under the 14th Amendment that has granted citizens the right to contraception, extramarital sex within one's own home, and same-sex marriage. (Those 14th Amendment rulings include mixed-race marriage rights, too, but least one of them seems okay with leaving that precedent alone. Although overturning Loving v. Virginia could render Justice Thomas's ethical dilemma moot.)

The Justices in today's cartoon have already overturned half a century of precedent on abortion rights— which, frankly, shouldn't have surprised anybody as much as it did. The Court had been hacking away at the edges of Roe v. Wade for most of those fifty years, stocked as it has been by every Republican administration with committed anti-abortion activists.

Those Republican Justices are equally committed to bolstering the rights of corporations over individuals of lesser means. The monies, properties, vacations, and campers Justice Thomas has accepted from well-heeled amici curiae would have made Abe Fortas blush. But you really can't argue that such corporate largesse influenced his opinions. That stuff was not so much bribes as loyalty perks.

And then there's United States v. Trump. Handed the open-and-shut question in April of whether a Former President Named Donald Trump has absolute and permanent immunity against being charged with his crimes, the Supremes decided they needed more time to think about it. Perhaps our Constitutional Originalists and their ouija boards will have figured out by the end of June how the Founding Fathers meant to grant Trump immunity without extending the same to Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter.

Oyez, oyez, oyez.

Q Toon: Sitting Ducks

We interrupt our regularly scheduled cartoon to bring you this breaking cartoon:

 

Q Toon: Match Game

There were a lot of plaudits from religious liberals for Pope Francis last week after he gave his blessing for civil unions for same-sex couples.

Subtitles in the documentary "Francesco," premiered at the Rome Film Festival, translate the Pope's comments as: “Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it. What we have to have is a civil union law—that way they are legally covered. I supported that.”

This is a reiteration of his previously offered opinion on the topic, although some conservatives quibble that "civil union" is an inaccurate translation of his phrase, "convivencia civil"; they claim he merely referred to "civil cohabitation," whatever difference that makes in the context of having a law about it.

Here in the United States, marriage equality has been the law of the land since the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, but two, perhaps now three, of the Justices are eager to overturn that ruling. The others in the Court's right-wing majority might have been less inclined to annul over half a million marriages overnight, but they might be amenable to taking Pope Francis's cue by floating the possibility of foisting something less than marriage upon us as a consolation prize. 

My husband and I got married shortly after the ruling in Obergefell came down, having gotten a civil union six years earlier. The two are not the same thing: there is no federal law recognizing civil unions; the IRS has no provision for couples civilly unioned filing jointly. (See, there isn't even a verb for it!) Hospitals, especially those with a faith-based affiliation, are free to interpret HIPAA laws to exclude non-married couples. 

It's no just a question of having to deal with bakers and florists who believe in being assholes for the Lord.

Well, anyway, kudos to Pope Francis for being more enlightened than your immediate predecessor.

I just wish we didn't have Supreme Court justices heading us back to the Dark Ages.

Q Toon: Mutare Decisis

Amy Coney Barrett has been spending this week telling a Senate panel that as a nominee to the highest court in the land, she can't imagine how she might rule in cases involving abortion rights, gun control, the Affordable Care Act, or marriage equality,  or any of the other hot-button issues she has written about — not even whether Donald Trump can unilaterally postpone a federal election fergawdsake! — because the role of a Supreme Court Justice is not to prejudge cases before they come before the Court.

Meanwhile, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who no longer have any Senate confirmation hearings to worry about, just told the nation last week how eager they are to get a case before them that would allow them to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that established marriage equality under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Now that two of the five Justices who ruled in the majority are no longer on the Court, Thomas and Alito are not only telegraphing how they would rule in a case challenging Obergefell, they are openly inviting such a case to come their way.

If it seems peculiar that I should ignore the newest nominee to the Court to draw a cartoon about the Justice who has been around the longest, it's partly because opposition to the Coney Barrett nomination is already a lost cause, and always has been. So was opposition to the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and support of the nomination of Merrick Garland.

Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have been committed to packing the courts of this country, at every level, with right-wing activist judges come hell or high water. They have had a few disappointments along the way: Nixon named Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court to advocate aggressively for business interests, only to have Powell write the decision in Roe v. Wade. Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign pledge by putting Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court, only to have her earn a reputation as the swing vote there. Gerald Ford nominated John Paul Stevens, and George H.W. Bush named David Souter to the Court, only for them to side with the Court's liberals.

Right-wingers came together and vowed "No More Souters," and for thirty years — a full generation — there hasn't been. Republican senators scuttled George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers not over the issue of cronyism, but because she had not previously demonstrated a commitment to toeing the party line from the bench. So we got Thomas's fellow home-wrecker Samuel Alito instead.

If the present Coney Barrett nomination is a lost cause, the resistance to right-wing activism must look to the future. As the longest-serving Justice on the Court, Clarence Thomas may very well be the next to retire. But don't count on it; Justice Steven Breyer is ten years older than he.

What you can count on is that there will be at least one other Supreme Court appointment in the next four to eight years, and I for one would prefer to see a Democratic president when that happens, and — given Republican Senators who promised four years ago not to let Hillary Clinton fill any vacancies on the Court even if she won the 2016 election — a Democratic-majority Senate.

In the meantime, you can count on the Supreme Court to gut the Affordable Care Act, women's reproductive rights, gun control legislation, and marriage equality. That's what the mission of Republican court-packing has always been, confirmation hearings testimony notwithstanding. Again, I would prefer to see a Democratic president and a Democratic-majority Congress in office to pick up the pieces when those rulings come down.

But that's a discussion for another day. Shall we make it Saturday?

Q Toon: The Trumply Trio

Hard to believe, but it was less than a week ago that Donald Joffrey Trump named Amy Coney Barrett as his third nominee to the Supreme Court.

During Tuesday night's sh!tshow, Trump argued that he gets to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat, even as votes are being cast in the 2020 presidential election, because he was elected president in 2016 for four full years, not three. It's the same argument that Democrats used four years and eight months ago, because Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and reelected in 2012 for eight years, not seven.

And yet there is Neil Gorsuch, sitting comfortably in Merrick Garland's seat.

Well, as we've already discussed, it's patently obvious that Republican arguments as to who gets to name whom to the Supreme Court in an election year are nothing but self-serving. Republican presidents get to do it, Democrats don't.

As if Mrs. Coney Barrett's nomination were not enough of an affront to the legacy of Justice Ginsburg, Republicans instantly commandeered the late Justice's nickname and cranked out "Notorious ACB" t-shirts for their faithful throng.

To paraphrase a memorable moment from a gentler era's debate, we knew RBG. RBG was a friend of ours. You're no RBG.