Of Graham Bondage

Since last week's Graphical History Tour memorialized a sitting U.S. Senator who claims not to be dead, this week's episode rustles up my cartoons about one of his Republican colleagues whose passing is less, ah, speculative.

April, 2010

Lindsey Graham himself barely appeared in what I believe was my first cartoon about him, sixteen years ago. An anti-immigrant Tea Partisan then from South Carolina, William Gheen, alleged that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed over his widely rumored homosexual orientation to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform.

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that Log Cabin closet," Gheen told a Tea Party Klatch. "Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

Whether in response to Gheen or not, Graham announced that he opposed the immigration bills proposed by the Democratic majority in Congress. As for Gheen, he has since migrated across the border to North Carolina, where he is President of an anti-immigration political action committee.

December, 2012

I drew this cartoon in response to Graham advocating against achieving marriage equality by congressional legislation or litigation in the courts.

Graham knew full well how unlikely getting a pro-marriage equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by Congress and ratified by 34 state legislatures would be. For years, Republicans pushed an amendment to do exactly the opposite, not to mention other amendments for all sorts of their pet peeves, without getting anywhere. 

October, 2014

Did you know that Lindsey Graham ran for the Republicans' 2016 presidential nomination? Even people who were paying close attention at the time may not remember it.

Graham was running for a third term in the Senate in 2014, and told Politico that in the (inevitable) event that he won reelection, he was considering looking into a 2016 presidential run. He made his official campaign announcement on June 1, 2015, but failed to qualify for a Republican presidential debate cattle call on CNN two months later.

The highlight of his presidential campaign was calling Donald Trump "a jackass" in successive interviews on CNN and CBS. Trump responded by telling Fox & Fiends viewers Graham's personal cell phone number.

By Christmas, Graham had suspended his campaign; he then endorsed Florida Governor Jeb Bush in January. Republican voters didn't listen.

October, 2018

Neither did the Electoral College.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham played a prominent role in the confirmation of Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees. Allegations that the second of them, Brett Kavanaugh, was a beer-swilling bro in college suggested the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" character Brick to me; casting Graham as Maggie followed as a matter of course.

That's Senators Maizie Hirono and Jeff Flake as Mae and Gooper (well, I needed somebody in those roles) and Trump as Big Daddy Pollitt.

March, 2021

Insinuating Lindsey Graham's Kinsey rating couldn't be the point of every cartoon I put him in. Sometimes, he was just a recognizable Senator to populate a cartoon about the Senate Republican Caucus. But as the supposedly closeted gay one, he afforded me the opportunity to draw a cartoon about a non-LGBTQ+ topic for the LGBTQ+ publications that run my cartoons. 

(Openly bi Senator Kyrsten Sinema also figured in this one. A two-fer!)

February, 2021

In the post for this week's cartoon, I included Lindsey Graham's "Count me out" comment on the evening after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, disassociating himself from Donald Trump. I also included Trump's more recent story of Graham then calling him up to apologize.

You certainly can't take Trump's word for anything, but Graham counting himself out on January 6 did not extend to his voting to convict Trump when the Senate voted on his impeachment trial on February 13.

Graham just couldn't stay mad at his latest infatuation.

September, 2022

Republicans who bothered at all to explain their votes against conviction claimed that since Trump was out of office, his attempt to overthrow the government should be a matter for the courts rather than the impeachment process.

As the prosecution of Trump for offenses starting with January 6, tax fraud, and sexual assault crept ever so slowly forward during Joe Biden's presidency, Lindsey Graham and quite a few other Republicans complained that pursuing justice in the courts was a bad idea, too.

In the fall of 2022, Citizen Trump was refusing to return classified papers included among dozens of bankers boxes of files he had spirited off to Mar-a-Lago, directing underlings to hide them away when the FBI showed up to seize them. Graham warned that if Trump were ever brought to trial for those actions, his hordes of MAGA minions would reprise January 6.

To his dying day, Graham was mute about any possibility of Antifa, DEI, or Woke Inc., getting violent over what now passes for the Justice Department's overtly political, Trumped up prosecutions of anyone who has ever crossed Donald Trump.

The Winter of Our Recycled Content

Daffodil shoots are poking through the slowly melting snow in the garden hereabouts. While Spring hopes eternal outdoors, today's Graphical History Tour parades through four decades of my March cartoons from 1986 to the present. 

Yes, I said "the present."

1986

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., March, 1986

Ronald Reagan had campaigned for the presidency in 1980 promising to rein in spending and to cut the federal deficit. Instead, thanks to tax cuts and increased defense spending, the deficit climbed year by year, topping $220 billion, not quite 5% of gross national product, by 1986.

Republican Senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman, joined by South Carolina Democrat Fritz Hollings (left to right in my cartoon), put forth a scheme to force future Congresses to slash spending or face automatic budget cuts beyond their control. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law in 1985, but the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional in 1986.

Gramm, Rudman, and Hollings later came out with a revised bill addressing the Court’s objections to Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I. Coupled with a tax hike, social spending cuts resulted in some reduction of the federal deficit, but it was right back to $221 billion by 1990.

A propos of nothing, $220 billion happens to be the amount Secretary of Special Military Operations Pete Hegseth wants over and above the Pentagon's 2026 budget in order to continue the Excursion in Iran.

1996

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., March 7, 1996

I really liked this cartoon, partly because it was my first truly successful caricature of Pat Buchanan.

Its problem lay in that it relied heavily on references to the 1995 film version of Richard III, which reset Shakespeare's play about England's last Plantagenet king into the late 1930's, depicting Richard as a murderous fascist grasping onto his usurped throne. I took the boar's head banners directly from the film (a white boar having been the actual heraldry emblem adopted by Richard himself).

Had there been more of an audience for updated Shakespeare histories, those references might have worked better. And why wouldn't audiences have flocked to see Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, Robert Downey, Jr., and Dame Maggie Smith bringing the bard from the 1480's into the 20th Century and the murders from offstage onto the screen?

I had been reading all of Shakespeare's history plays at the time, starting with Richard III, spurred on by first reading The Daughter of Time by Dorothy Tey. In her novel, Tey's detective, Alan Grant, is laid up in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound in a previous adventure, and passes the time investigating the murder, supposedly by Richard III or on his orders, of Edward IV's two sons.

I even bought the DVD.

Which sits unopened on the DVD shelf, still in its plastic wrapping from Barnes & Noble. 

It ain't exactly Date Night material.

2006

for Q Syndicate, March, 2006

Another problem with the cartoon about Buchanan was that the newspaper headline in it was kind of small. It was passable in a university newspaper, read by young adults with generally good vision. I couldn't foresee people reading it on an itty bitty phone screen; nowadays, I would have had to put the newspaper more in the foreground. or the headline in a "News Item" text box.

The church window in this 2006 cartoon has the same flaw. I had plenty of room to make the window much bigger, and I think the cartoon would have been improved if it were at least taller.

I don't think I was intentionally referencing this illustration by Maximino Cerezo Barredo of the biblical story of Jesus's temptation by the devil, although I was aware of and probably influenced by it:

"Cuaresma 1C" by Maximino Cerezo Barredo

The Temptation of Christ is read in Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopal churches every year on the first Sunday in Lent: after Jesus has fasted in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, the devil tempts him with power and glory. Liberation Catholic theologian Cerezo Barredo depicts the devil in clerical garb, offering Christ cash, a crown, and satellite communications, in what I interpret as a slam against televangelists.

2016

Sadly, this brings us to some 2016 election cartoons, as the tragic trajectory of how we got where we are today begins. Call it Act One, Scene One.

for Q Syndicate, March 2016

In a more recent election cycle, I thought of using the boar's head from Richard III as a leitmotif in my cartoons of Donald Dickon Trump. I was already drawing him with a pig snout by then, so why not just add the boar tusks?

The answer is that I tried it once, and besides being even more obscure than it was in 1996, it just complicated the caricature. Besides, the real Richard III was a capable soldier and commander in battle, in spite of developing scoliosis, whereas Trump claimed bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam draft (when he wasn't playing tennis and squash at Fordham).

I was still developing a caricature of Trump at this point; he has one of those faces with too much of a muchness, defying cartoonists to choose which feature to fixate upon. The pout? The ridiculous comb-all-over? The eyebrows? The wattle? The overlong tie? The tiny hands?

As for Hillary Clinton, considering how long she has been in the public eye — as First Lady, senator, Secretary of State, presidential candidate, and Republican bête noire — it annoys me that I have so few cartoons where I feel I have drawn her successfully. This is not one of them.

2026

Wait, what?

The Graphical History Tour doesn't usually make a stop at Yesterday Afternoon, but you've been such a wonderful tour group, you all deserve a little treat.

Trump's hand-picked Commission of Fine Arts revealed controversial designs for new dime and gold dollar coins to celebrate the nation's semiquincentennial and Trump himself. 

The dime kicks Franklin Roosevelt to the curb; instead, its eagle grasps the arrows of war but has dropped its olive branches of peace. The dollar coin features Donald Render-to-Caesar Trump.

for this blog post, March 21, 2026

This is not the design proposed by the commission, but perhaps you remember this little episode from when Time magazine wanted to get some campaign photographs for a cover story on Trump.

Federal law has long prohibited putting living persons on U.S. currency, but a special exception was made for coins commemorating the nation's 250th anniversary. I'll give you exactly one guess which president signed that legislation into law.

Can you imagine any previous president getting his own mug on golden dollar coins while he was still in office?

Can you imagine Donald Imperator Trump passing up the opportunity?

Q Toon: Our Tone

There were a handful of celebrity deaths over the weekend, and I tried to come up with a cartoon about Richard Simmons's passing. But everything that came to mind was either trite or in poor taste — as most memorial cartoons are — and given that the assassination attempt against Donald Trump was dominating news coverage to the exclusion of almost everything else, I couldn't bring myself to ink Simmons doing calisthenics at the Pearly Gates.

Or whatever I might have had Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Shannon Daugherty, James Sikking, Shelley Duvall, or Jacoby Jones doing.

Because a bullied young white man with a gun climbed onto a roof and took shots at Mr. Trump, there have been calls to "tone down the rhetoric," especially regarding criticism of the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States.

Republicans do not like Democrats calling their presidential nominee an American Hitler and a reprehensible, cynical asshole (whoops, those were from J.D. Vance) just because he wants to create a police state to round up all the Latinos, weaponize the Department of Justice and FBI, set up boncentration bamps, and persecute all his political enemies, and he never met a right-wing dictator he didn't like. I get it. Imagine being called a Communist for wanting affordable health care, or a Nazi for supporting women’s rights, or demonspawn for urging people not to gather in crowds during a global pandemic of a novel virus that was killing millions.

Toning down the rhetoric is not something we political cartoonists are particularly good at, but you will notice that I didn't draw Mr. Trump with a pig's snout, and I have (so far) refrained from giving him a middle name from dystopian fiction.

For my cartoon, I selected five examples of Republicans loose talk about guns and killing. The first (a paraphrase) dates back to 2016; the fifth (a direct quote) was earlier this month. I could have included many more — especially Republicans' virulent rash of gun fetish Christmas cards. 

(I didn't leave myself room to identify the fourth politician, and it occurs to me that readers may not know whether she is Lauren Boebert, Sarah Palin, or Kristi Noem. Is there any one of them that you think could not have said she was bringing a gun to settle political differences?)

Trump's responses to, not just hypothetical or rhetorical, but actual violence against Democrats is unforgettable:

When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

We're also told that he found the violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, thoroughly entertaining. Most of the rest of us did not.

So forgive me if I'm not ready to sing For He's a Jolly Good Fellow with his MAGA mobsters.

✍

By the way, it was Rep. Lauren Boebert.

Unique New York

Since New York Governor Andrew Cuomo abruptly announced his resignation this week, I decided I would dig up some of my old cartoons about New York politics for today. 

They say if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. But try telling that to Thomas E. Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, or this lady from one of Gotham's outer boroughs:

February, 1999

Or, for that matter, this gal from Flatbush:

Q Syndicate, May, 1999

New York politics can be pretty colorful, being so close under the bright lights of the national media as they are. Politicians from Brooklyn to Corning to Hyannisport to Little Rock are all drawn there, like moths to a flame.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Nov. 23, 2003

Somehow, I never drew any cartoons about Eliot Spitzer while he was governor of New York, in spite of his failed 2007 proposal to legalize same-sex marriage in the Empire State, or the sex scandal the following year which linked him to a high-priced prostitution organization and brought about his downfall.

The Business Journal, however, enlisted me to illustrate an editorial critical of him when he was New York Attorney General. The Beej had no love for the Democrat investigating Wall Street securities fraud cases that had been dropped by the federal Securities Exchange Commission.

Q Syndicate, April, 2009

This is an example of a cartoon that misfired badly.

Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, also took up the cause of marriage equality; but his proposal to legalize same-sex marriage caught marriage equality advocates unprepared. My cartoon to illustrate that could have used a second panel showing those advocates "scrambling to get into their tuxedoes"; as drawn, however, some readers understandably read it as a knock on the legally blind Paterson.

Marriage equality failed in the New York State Senate that year, eight Democrats joining all 30 Republicans to vote nay.

Q Syndicate, March, 2010

This cartoon came to mind last week when Steve Brodner noted on Facebook that Andrew Cuomo still has a $5.1 million book deal pending; Brodner invited his followers to submit possible book titles, saying that he would illustrate the best one. If I hadn't already drawn this cartoon about New York Congressman Eric Massa, forced to resign over allegations that he sexually harassed male staffers, I might be waiting to see if it would get the Brodner treatment.

Q Syndicate, June, 2011

You may have forgotten Eric Massa, but I'll bet most of you remember fellow Congresscritter Anthony "What's In A Name" Weiner. You might also sense a theme on what it takes to bring a New York politician down.

Q Syndicate, June, 2011

Before my cartoon in last Saturday's post, this was the only cartoon I had ever drawn of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Soon after taking office as Governor, Cuomo was able to succeed where Spitzer and Paterson had failed, signing the Marriage Equality Act into law on June 24, 2011. A certain President of the United States at the time was still reluctant to come that far.

Which would bring us to another recent President of the United States... you know... the one who expected to be reinaugurated yesterday...

But he was never actually a New York politician.

And the less said about him, the better.

Toon: Pence Flies Off Topic

Considering how many cartoons I drew with Mike Pence in them during the 2016 campaign and in the early years of the Corrupt Trump Administration, it has been a surprisingly long time since I've drawn him lately.

Never fear. After this week's Vice Presidential So-Called Debate, it was only natural that he should make another appearance — if for no other reason than to celebrate the fly that perched on his head for two minutes and nine seconds, during which it held a nation's undivided attention.

The main difference between these so-called debates and an actual debate is that in an actual debate, you have to respect whatever time limit you have been given, which Mike Pence and Donald Typhoid Mary Trump completely ignored. Short of getting the Oscars' orchestra to start playing candidates off when they prattle on too long, however, there seems to be nothing the moderators of these things are able to do.

You don't get to interrupt the person on the other side of the debate, either, but I guess Pence gets points for interrupting Kamala Harris only a small fraction of the number of times Trump interrupted Joe Biden.

But most importantly, You Have To Stick To The Question You Have Been Asked. Wander off into a completely different topic, and you flunk the debate right away. If you're in a spelling bee, you don't get to choose some word you'd rather spell instead.

Harris evaded a couple of Susan Page's questions about whether Democrats were going to "pack" the Supreme Court and so forth, but Mike Pence didn't just wander off topic, he vaulted over the fence, sprinted far afield, and blatantly refused to answer any question when he felt like talking about something else.

38:57 PAGE 

Senator Harris just said that climate change is an existential threat. Vice President Pence, do you believe that climate change poses an existential threat?

39:07 PENCE

As I said, Susan, the climate is changing. We’ll follow the science, but, once again, Senator Harris is denying the fact that they're gonna raise taxes on every American...

Or, at 14:21, Page asked Pence, in light of Trump's current health crisis, "...have you had a conversation or reached an agreement with President Trump about safeguards or procedures when it comes to the issue of presidential disability? And if not, do you think you should?" Pence ignored the question and went on and on about promising a coronavirus vaccine and warning that the 2009 swine flu epidemic would have been a lot worse if it had been a lot worse.

I do wonder about the debate prep these people go through. For the Harris-Pence event, the candidates prepared with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi playing the part of Senator Harris and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg standing in for the Vice President.

Do these stand-ins play their parts honestly, or do they act out the partisan caricatures they perceive of the other side?

Do they charge ahead over their allotted time and talk over the candidate they're training?

Yeah, that they probably do.

So Long As She's a Gentleman

"Pogo" by Walt Kelley, March 9, 1960

Senecaback Saturday offers a break from coronavirus (save to observe that there really was a St. Corona, and she really is the patron saint of pandemics. You can make this stuff up, but why would you?).

Instead, keeping in mind that March is Women's History Month, let's consider the history of women running for president of the United States.

Partisans of Senator Elizabeth Warren have complained that her late lamented presidential campaign was doomed by sexism. She entered the race amply qualified to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Not only did she have her plans, she was every bit a lefty as Bernie Sanders but without wearing the Socialist label.

Sexism in these matters being nothing new, of course...

"The Age of Brass" by Currier and Ives, 1869

Women couldn't even vote for president until 1869, and that was only in Wyoming. Elsewhere, female suffrage was pooh-poohed as a fantastically ludicrous idea, so Wyoming had to drive a hard bargain to keep women's right to vote when the territory was admitted as a state. Nevertheless, they persisted.

"An Unexpected Effect" by Charles J. Budd in Harper's Weekly, May 18, 1912

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (R-MT) in 1916, four years before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She ran unsuccessfully for the Senate two years later as a third-party candidate, losing partly because she had voted against U.S. entry into World War I. She was elected to Congress again in 1940, in time to vote against U.S. entry into World War II.

Uncaptioned, by Sidney Maxell for Guy Gannett Publishing Co., Portland, ME, October 29, 1950

In the years after ratification of the 19th Amendment (and even beforehand), a few women ran for president on minor party tickets. The first to try for the nomination of either the Republican or Democratic party was Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) in 1964. [Update: but see also here: Lucy Page Gaston was on the GOP ballot in 1920, if only in South Dakota.] Floated as a possible running mate with Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Chase Smith's high water mark in '64 was garnering 25% of the vote in the Illinois primary; placed in nomination at the GOP convention, she refused to withdraw her name from the final ballot, thus denying Barry Goldwater a unanimous nomination.

Jack Davis for Time magazine, January 31, 1972

Eight years later, Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY; the woman in Jack Davis's cartoon) was the second. Chisholm was less successful but won a meaningless "beauty contest" primary in New Jersey; still, she came in fourth when delegates voted at the Democratic National Convention.

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" by Pat Oliphant, August 25, 1987

The presidential campaign of Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-CO) in 1987 didn't get beyond the exploratory stage, sorely disappointing editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Oliphant has never spared complimentary cartoons lightly, so this one is a rarity. His Puck, however, unintentionally brings up a standard by which male presidential candidates are hardly ever judged.

"Doonesbury" by Garry Trudeau, May 28, 1999

Elizabeth "Liddy" Dole, a twice former cabinet secretary and the wife of retired Senator Bob Dole, declared her candidacy for the 2000 GOP nomination. She came in a distant third to heir apparent George W. Bush and Steve Forbes in the Iowa straw poll in August of 1999 and withdrew in October. She might well have been Dubya's vice president if the guy Bush put in charge of finding his running mate hadn't decided there was no better choice than the man in the mirror.

"Of Course I Do," July, 1984

Backing up a bit, and turning to my own cartoons, a woman had made it onto a major party ticket in 1984. Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate. What should have been a bold, historical move was tempered by the impression that Mondale had been pressured into his choice by the National Organization of Women and the National Women's Political Caucus.

"Sarah's the One," September, 2008

John McCain didn't have that problem when he chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. If anything, she seemed to be more popular with Republicans than he was. Her folksy, in-your-face style wowed party regulars while striking outsiders as fairly ridiculous. The "Caribou Barbie" moniker was sexist and unfair, but oh so deliciously clever. And, frankly, no worse than Dan Quayle had to endure.

"So Happy to Be Back in Waterloo," July, 2011

Another woman who ran for the Republican nomination and earned merciless ridicule was Minnesota's Michele Bachmann. Citing various outrageous statements she had made in Congress and on the campaign trail, Chris Wallace actually asked her on Fox News Sunday, "Are you a flake?" There was, however, a moment when she was leading polls of GOP voters, and she won the 2011 Iowa straw poll — but she ended up coming in sixth in the actual caucuses there in January, and dropped out of the race.

"That Time of Year Again," February, 2007

And so we come to Hillary Clinton. Having paid her dues as First Lady and then Senator from New York, 2008 was supposed to be her year. Unfortunately, she had gained a reputation for being overly calculating. Ruining her plans, Barack Obama swept the Democratic Party, which tends to have a thing for bright, shiny, new, exciting candidates (well, not this year, obviously), off its feet.

Besides, had she won, future historians would have been puzzled why the United States decided for an entire quarter century that the best it could do were Clintons and Bushes.

"I Don't Get It," March, 2016

Eight years later, she was back as the Democrats' heiress apparent. And we know how that came out.

Impeach Bill, Volume 2

Last week, Starrcrossedback Saturday thrilled and delighted dozens of you with a handful of my cartoons leading up to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

September, 1998

Just to summarize, certain Republicans eager to overturn the popular election results had been looking for grounds to impeach Clinton from the very day he was sworn into office. When his denial under oath of having had "sexual relations" with a White House intern was proven false by what the mainstream media delicately called "DNA evidence" on her dress, Republicans had their fumus boni iuris.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

In the U.S., there's always an election coming up; the Republican Congress launched their impeachment proceedings on October 8, with just one month left until midterms.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 10, 1998

Midterms in the sixth year of any presidency tend to go very poorly for the incumbent president's party, but 1998 turned out to be an exception to the rule. Republicans didn't lose enough seats to forfeit their majority in either chamber of Congress, but Democrats gained five seats in the House and held even in both the Senate and gubernatorial races.

in UW-M Post, December 15, 1998

Thus Democrats could complain loudly about Republicans' push to impeach, but they couldn't stop it, even though some Republicans hoped to find some lesser punishment the Congress might agree upon. Members of both parties offered bills to censure Clinton instead, a statement of formal reprimand carrying no enforcement or penalty, but none ever came to the floor for a vote.

Q Syndicate, December, 1998

Instead, the House voted to impeach Clinton on December 19, 1998, so Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist went right out and got some celebratory gold stripes stitched onto the sleeves of his judicial robe. (Yeah, Jerry Springer wasn't available.)  The Senate trial lasted from January 7 to February 12, forcing Clinton to deliver his State of the Union address while the impeachment trial was underway. But in the end, not only did Republicans fall short of the two-thirds majority vote to remove Clinton from office, they came up six votes short of even a simple majority.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

The problem Republicans faced was that the electorate knew that Bill Clinton was a philandering, slick-tongued good ol' boy when we elected him, and we didn't care.

Much the same as the Democrats' problem now: a well-distributed minority of the electorate knew that Donald Trump was a corrupt, self-absorbed, lying bully when they elected him. And they're never going to care.

in UW-M Post, February 2, 1999

In presenting Trump's case this week, attorney Jay Sekulow played remarks Chuck Schumer, Zoe Lofgren, Jerry Nadler and other congressional Democrats made last time around, making much the same arguments that Republicans are making this time around. That impeachment Clinton would negate the previous election. That going ahead would mean that every president with a Congressional majority of the other party will be impeached. That the process is political.

Well, yes. The process is political. The founding fathers envisioned it that way; that's why impeachment isn't decided by the courts. (The founding fathers envisioned that senators would be representatives of their respective state legislatures, not of their political party; but we're stuck with what the system has become, and I don't think repealing the 17th Amendment would be much of a help anyway.)

And maybe. The Republicans' defense team has already started their preemptive impeachment trial of possible President-to-Be Joe Biden, prosecuted by the former Florida Attorney General bought off by President Trump, Pam Bondi. If they retake a majority in the House in 2020 or 2022, they're all set to go. Just like they were in 2016 if the election had gone the other way.

But no. Removing a president does not negate the previous election. Bob Dole would not have been inaugurated president in 1999, and Hillary Clinton won't get to move back into the White House this year no matter what. Al Gore might even have been a stronger candidate in 2000 running as the incumbent. By the Trump lawyers' logic, the only U.S. President in history that any Congress was constitutionally allowed to impeach and remove from office was the unelected Gerald Ford — which, ironically, would have elevated a Democrat to the presidency.

Impeach Bill, Volume 1

StarrChamberBack Saturday offers you a break from the impeachment trial of Donald Joffrey Trump. I've already dealt with the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, and the cartoons I drew about the Nixon impeachment hearings were lost decades ago; so here's the first installment of a two-part reverie on the impeachment of William Jismerson Clinton.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 13, 1997

To begin at the beginning: Kenneth Starr had been appointed Independent Counsel by the District of Columbia Circuit Court to continue predecessor Robert Fiske's investigation into the purported "Whitewater Scandal." Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of some skulduggery in a realty deal back in Arkansas in which they had ended up losing money anyway. While the Fiske-Starr investigation turned up no crime with which either Clinton could be charged, the Independent Counsel's investigation branched out into several unrelated investigations, including the suicide of Vince Foster, the firing of some staffers in the White House Travel office, and a lawsuit by Paula Jones charging Bill Clinton with sexual harassment when he was Governor of Arkansas.

in the UW-M Post, February 12, 1998

In spite of voluminous leaks from Starr's office, most of the investigations went nowhere. The Jones investigation, however, inspired Pentagon employee Linda Tripp to record her phone calls with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, about the intern's affair with the President, and to turn those tapes over to Starr's office. When Starr's office deposed President Clinton over that affair, Clinton denied under oath ever having had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky.

in UW-M Post, April 23, 1998

Clinton had emphatically made that same claim in a televised speech in January, unaware that Tripp had convinced Lewinsky not to dry-clean a navy blue dress stained with presidential spooge, but to turn it over to Starr's office instead.

Q Syndicate, August, 1998

I had begun drawing cartoons for Q Syndicate the year before this, and for two individual LGBTQ newspapers before that. My cartoons for the national LGBTQ media touched on aspects of news stories that might have been overlooked by the mainstream media.

Q Syndicate, September 1998

The Trump impeachment trial may well be over before next Saturday, but I'll be back with the rest of the Clinton impeachment story anyway. See you then!

Q Toon: Never Gonna Pump You Up

Stephen Ross, billionaire chairman of something called Related Companies, hosted a lavish fund raiser in the Hamptons last weekend for the reelection of his longtime buddy Donald Joffrey Trump as President of the United States.

Ordinarily, some billionaire throwing his lot in with the most plutocratic president this nation has ever produced wouldn't be worth rolling one's eyes over, but Related Companies happens to own a couple of fitness companies that have actively courted LGBTQ consumers, Equinox and SoulCycle. And those customers aren't happy with the prospect of their membership dues supporting the Corrupt Trump Administration and its anti-LGBTQ minions in any way.

All but five of the 91 Equinox and SoulCycle locations, moreover, are located in districts that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton last time around. You don't find a lot of trendy fitness gyms in Boondocks Junction, Nebraska.

So anyway, Equinox and SoulCycle gay-list customers are tearing up their $3,000+ membership cards and mounting a boycott.

Management of the companies issued statements last week distancing themselves from the man at the top.

Melanie Whelan, CEO of SoulCycle, issued a personal, more emphatic statement later as well.
“At SoulCycle, we wake up every day committed to our community, and creating a safe space where all are welcome,” Whelan’s statement reads. “We believe in diversity, inclusion and equality."
She went on to say that she doesn't endorse the Trump fundraiser and says her company has nothing to do with it.
Her statement reiterated that Ross is a "passive investor," but that framing only created more anger in many Equinox and SoulCycle members who pointed out that passive or not, Ross still makes a profit through his stake in the brands. 

As is typical of financial dealings these days, Ross's "passive investor" relationship status is better described as "complicated."

It is true that Related is a minority investor in Equinox, which in turn owns SoulCycle. (As Dan Primack of Axios has explained, Related used to own a majority of Equinox but has sold stakes to other investors over the years, diluting its own position.) It’s also true that Ross owns just 60 percent of Related. So a majority of Equinox’s and SoulCycle’s profits are not accruing to Ross personally.
But “minority” ownership does not equal “passive” ownership, and the siting decisions for Equinox gyms and SoulCycle studios are heavily tied up in Related’s broader development strategy. Related is the landlord for many Equinox and SoulCycle locations, especially in New York, because Related seeks to place them where they will enhance the value of Related’s residential and office developments. This includes Related’s Hudson Yards megadevelopment on the West Side of Manhattan, which contains a flagship Equinox gym and the first-ever Equinox-branded hotel in addition to about a thousand apartments, millions of square feet of office space, and, of course, a SoulCycle studio.

At some point, the top 1% of the top 1% are going to figure out how to sponsor their Republican fund raisers anonymously so as not to upset the rest of the top 10%. In the meantime, those of us in the lower 90% can pat ourselves on the back for having boycotted SoulCycle and Equinox before it was cool. 

All This And 1992

As my Scrunchieback Saturday review of the climax of the 1992 election campaigns in Wisconsin and the U.S. continues, things are looking very good for the Democratic Party candidates.

Only a year earlier, President George H.W. Bush seemed a shoo-in for reelection. His popularity immediately after defeating Saddam Hussein's army in Gulf War I was off the charts; leading Democrats had demurred from the race; and Republicans had developed a lock on the southern states. But as the war euphoria wore off, popular anxiety over the economy lingered well after the recession of 1990-91, and the Democrats had named two southerners to their ticket. With Texan H. Ross Perot also in the race, southerners had plenty of their own to choose from. Bush found himself running second — occasionally third — in the polls.

The Bush team attempted to contrast Bush's heroic record as a pilot in World War II with Bill Clinton's student deferment and protests against the Vietnam War, but found that U.S. voters were less than eager to re-litigate the Vietnam era.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican Senator Bob Kasten found himself running behind his Democratic challenger, Russ Feingold. Democrats in the state benefited from having fresh faces on the ballot in a year favorable to fresh faces, and Feingold's sunny, upbeat, populist campaign contrasted with the nasty one Kasten had survived against Ed Garvey six years before.

In a move that no Republican would dare make today, Kasten aired TV and radio ads likening his own positions to those of Democrats Bill Clinton and Wisconsin's other Senator, Herb Kohl, owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. Coming from a Republican who had come into office with the Reagan sweep of 1980, the comparison just didn't ring true.

(Evie is Kasten's wife's name.)

Returning to the presidential race, this next cartoon comments on an argument President Bush made at a three-way debate on October 19. (With three candidates at each of the debates that month, the result was that the challengers were able to gang up on the incumbent.) I also tried to emulate Mr. Bush's speaking style.

As it turned out, President Clinton would enjoy having the power of a line item veto in 1996 and 1997, only for it to be ruled unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York.

Millionaire H. Ross Perot, meanwhile, conducted his campaign exclusively on television, guesting on Larry King Live, and purchasing air time for 30- and 60-minute infomercials as well as more traditional 30-second spots. He nevertheless maintained that he was the leader of a populist revolt against the two major parties.

Returning to the Wisconsin senatorial campaign: Russ Feingold aired several folksy ads of himself campaigning around the state, ending with him showing the back of his left hand to the camera as if it were a map of Wisconsin and pointing out wherever it was he planned to visit next. In one of these ads, he visited The Joke Shop in reliably Republican Waukesha County just west of Milwaukee. The ad included a brief exchange with store owner Jeffrey Campbell, who signed a release allowing the Feingold campaign to use him in the commercial, but later complained that the ad gave the false impression that Campbell, a Republican, supported Feingold.

The Kasten campaign responded with its own ad with the tag line, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"