Reports of His Death Are Greatly Appreciated

Graphical History Tour looks forward to remembering Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), reported to be serving out the remainder of his congressional term in a vegetative state.

McConnell was elected to the Senate in 1984, ousting a Democratic incumbent in the Reagan landslide that year. I drew no cartoons about McConnell that early in his career; perhaps Joel Pett can put a retrospective of his Lexington Herald Leader cartoons of the McConnell record. I'll leave it to him.

McConnell has been no stranger to purposeful inactivity.

March, 2019

McConnell's facial features, especially with his eyeglasses, suited him to caricature as an owl or a tortoise; influenced by Jon Stewart's characterization of him on The Daily Show, I drew McConnell as a turtle again and again. 

This cartoon dealt with Democrats' "Equality Act" to extend existing federal anti-discrimination protections in employment, housing, credit, jury selection, and education to include persons on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. The legislation passed the House, but McConnell kept it off the Senate's agenda.

February, 2016

McConnell's longest lasting legacy is likely to be the Republican supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The GOP had enjoyed a 5-to-4 majority on the Court when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, leaving an evenly split Court and one empty seat for President Barack Obama to fill. McConnell declared that the Senate would refuse to consider Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, supposedly because there would be a new president eleven months later.

"The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice," McConnell wrote, discounting the voice of the American people in 2008 and 2012. "Therefore this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."

September, 2020

Four years later, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, a mere seven weeks before another presidential election. Rather than let the American people weigh in on the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice, McConnell rammed Donald Trump's choice, Amy Coney Barrett, through the Senate faster than any SCOTUS nominee since President Martin Van Buren's nomination of Peter Vivian Daniel one week before leaving office in 1841.

July, 2018

Having declared during President Obama's first term that McConnell's primary goal was to make sure that Obama wouldn't serve a second one, McConnell's primary goal in Trump's first term was to make sure that Trump got everything he wanted.

Trump would name Brett Kavanaugh, not the Dictator of North Korea, to this particular Supreme Court vacancy. McConnell couldn't keep Democrats from asking Kavanaugh about sexual assault allegations; but as long as McConnell kept Republicans in line, Democrats couldn't keep Kavanaugh off the Court.

November, 2018

On the other hand, McConnell and his Republicans had blockaded several of President Obama's lower court nominations from getting through the Senate. While in the minority, Senate Republicans repeatedly filibustered Obama's nominations, and denied cloture votes to end debate; Senate Majority Harry Reid responded by limiting debate on district and circuit court nominations to 30 hours, and lowering the needed vote to confirm to 50% — the so-called "nuclear option."

When Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, McConnell changed Senate rules so that even a single GOP Senator could block a judicial appointment.

"A large number of vacancies were from states with two Republican senators or one Republican and one Democrat," [Sheldon Goldman, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst] explained. "Until McConnell and the Republicans upended the practice of senatorial courtesy, both senators had to sign off on the recommended judicial nominees. Republican senators did their best to delay the process. As we now know, that tactic of obstruct and delay was successful."

"That Obama left office with so many unfilled vacancies was largely by design — by Mitch McConnell," said the University of Vermont’s Lisa Holmes.

December, 2019

McConnell's ploy left 105 judicial vacancies — not counting that seat on the Supreme Court —waiting for Donald Trump to fill on his first inauguration day. He proceeded to nominate the most right-wing, reactionary ideologues the Heritage Foundation could dredge up, one after another. They included ten nominees in his first term rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association, seven of whom were confirmed by the Senate anyway.

January, 2022

McConnell (and now John Thune) had the advantage of having Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and John Fetterman willing, even eager, to reach across the aisle to make deals and pass legislation. For their part, Republicans have been content to let Democrats reach toward them; but the only Republicans who dare to reach across the aisle are the ones who are going home soon because they lost a primary race against someone even more opposed to bipartisan cooperation.

January, 2020

No assessment of McConnell's legacy would be complete without bringing up his role in the two impeachment trials (so far) of Donald Commodus Trump.

When the House voted to impeach Donald Trump in 2019, McConnell denied House managers' request to call four witnesses for the Senate trial, explaining, "The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury. To hear a trial. Not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it."

McConnell reportedly supported the second impeachment of Trump for inciting the January 3, 2021 storming of the Capitol. The Senate calendar prevented the trial from starting until after Trump was out of office, which McConnell used as his excuse for voting with 42 other Republican Senators for acquittal. 

He told the nation, however, "There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day."

Thus, Mitch McConnell, and the 42 other Republicans Senators who put party above country and acquitted on a technicality a scoundrel they knew to be guilty, deserve their share of the blame for returning that fascist tyrant to the White House four years later.

Eyes on Julies

It's sabbath time again, so strap on your dust masks and join our Graphical History Tour as we rummage through my old cartoon files. What cherished treasures shall we find from Julies (that is the plural of July, isn't it?) of ten, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago?

for Q Syndicate, July, 2015

Ten Julies ago, the sovereign state of Texas spared no expense to monitor a U.S. military exercise named Jade Helm. A Russian disinformation campaign was apparently responsible for convincing Lone Star politicians that Jade Helm was part of some nefarious scheme by the Obama administration to round up political dissidents and ... I dunno, ship them off to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, I suppose.

Weeks before the exercise began, [Gov. Greg] Abbott wrote a letter to the State Guard asking them to keep an eye on the operation so “Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed.”

Undeterred by embarrassment over his overreaction to a routine military training exercise, Gov. Abbott and the Texas State Guard have been keeping a close eye on the current round-up of political dissidents, and the infringement of safety, constitutional rights, private property rights, and civil liberties in Texas and elsewhere.

Ain't sneakin' a dang thing past them folks, pardner.

Insert here your own tasteless flooding remark that gets you cancelled by the vast right-wing conspiracy.

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Digging back another ten years to July, 2005:

for Q Syndicate, July, 2005

Dancing up a storm, four-year-old Jack Roberts upstaged his father's nomination to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in July, 2005. With a Republican majority in the Senate sure to confirm the President George Dubya Bush nominee, right-wing judicial activists also rejoiced.

He was replacing the far-right William Rehnquist, nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon and elevated to Chief Justice by Ronald Reagan, so Roberts's nomination wasn't exactly a tear-out-your-hair-the-sky-is-falling moment for liberal interests.

As Circuit Court of Appeals Judge in 2003, John Roberts had pooh-poohed concerns over what he called "a hapless toad" in a lawsuit brought against the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service by a San Diego real estate developer whose planned housing development included breeding grounds of the arroyo southwestern toad. Roberts, dissenting from the Court of Appeals finding, agreed with the developer's argument that the toads had no connection to any economic or interstate activity and had no commercial value, so their protection was unrelated to interstate commerce and thus unconstitutional.

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in InStep, Milwaukee, July 20, 1995

This was my first cartoon in one of Wisconsin's LGBTQ+ newspapers. I didn't start drawing regularly for InStep ("Wisconsin's LesBiGay Newsmagazine") until a year later, so I wasn't yet listed as a columnist or contributor on the masthead.

Jesse Helms, for those of you too young to remember, was a virulently antigay Republican Senator from North Carolina. His racist and homophobic campaign ads cemented his national reputation as the Senate's leading culture warrior. He authored an amendment, passed with President Reagan's full support, to the 1987 AIDS appropriation bill, prohibiting the use of federal funding for any HIV/AIDS educational materials that would "promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities" served to exacerbate the spread of the disease.

He stubbornly opposed all federal spending on HIV/AIDS research in each and every budget cycle (hence my cartoon) throughout his Senate tenure. He retired in January, 2003, died in 2008, and I'm not sorry that he's gone.

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As it happens, I cannot find a single cartoon that I drew the entire month of July, 1985.

It's not for want of cartoonable news stories. At the time, I had discovered that while the local university newspaper was only too happy to have my editorial cartoons, daily newspapers around the country were, shall we say, a bit more discriminating in their tastes. With the UW-Parkside Ranger on summer hiatus, the impetus to keep drawing (particularly while maintaining a second-shift job that had nothing to do with publishing) just wasn't as urgent.

Since I have nothing of my own to show for the month, I'll close instead with a July, 1985 cartoon by Steve Benson, who succumbed this week to a devastating stroke that he suffered soon after retiring from the edtooning biz last year.

"Could You Describe Your Feelings" by Steve Benson in Arizona Republic, July, 1985

Benson, a grandson of former Agriculture Secretary cum Mormon Church President Ezra Taft Benson, started out his career during the Carter administration as a conservative. But by the time I met him, at the 2015 convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, he had gone fully left-wing libertarian, proselytizing atheist, and rabble rouser. 

At the 2015 AAEC convention panel "Free Speech or Hate Speech?" Per the October 2015 edition of AAEC's Notebook: "Steve Benson arose to pose the question he was asked by one of his editors. If he were to do a Muhammad cartoon, he would be putting himself at risk—but also every other staff member of his newspaper (Arizona Republic). By what right was he entitled to endanger everyone around him?" I remember it as having been a much longer question.

By all accounts, he held strong opinions, and wasn't the least bit shy about sharing them at length. His conversion from right to left and from religious to atheist must have been a seismic shock to those who lived and worked closely with him.

I was not one of them. I wish I had had the opportunity to get to know him better, but by the time I finally made it to another AAEC convention, he had stopped attending them — permanently, as it turned out. I don't know why.

Maybe it's not exactly appropriate to wish Rest In Peace to someone who rejected the whole idea of any sort of afterlife, but... well... So long. Peace out.

And thanks for giving us hope that not all conservatives are lost souls.

Q Toon: Parental Rights and Wrongs

The Supreme Court wrapped up its work for the litigation season at the end of June, its 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority handing down a thoroughly predictable series of rulings in support of Trumpster goodthink.

Of interest and disappointment to the LGBTQ+ community, the Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor in favor of a group of parents who demanded to exempt their children from exposure to LGBTQ+ history and literature. The Muslim, Ukrainian Orthodox, and Catholic litigants had sued the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board to provide alternative curricula for their children. 

The dispute stems from the county school board’s 2022 approval of books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in its language-arts curriculum. One book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, tells the story of a little girl’s reaction to her uncle’s same-sex wedding; another book, Pride Puppy, describes a puppy that becomes lost during a Pride parade. 

The county initially allowed parents to excuse their children from instruction using the LGBTQ-themed storybooks. When the county removed that option in 2023, several parents went to federal court.

Writing for the majority, Dubya-appointed Justice Samuel Alito “what the parents seek here is not the right to micromanage the public school curriculum, but rather to have their children opt out of a particular educational requirement that burdens their well-established right ‘to direct ‘the religious upbringing’ of their children.’”

Clinton nominee Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, countered that the Court's grant of a parental right to veto LGBTQ+-positive public school curriculum materials on religious grounds could mean that “books on evolution and interfaith marriage, and history may be next.”

It's easy to imagine that today's Court majority would have no problem with that.

Meanwhile, the Supremes declined to rule whether parental rights exist outside of their religious rights. In U.S. v. Skrmetti, the Court ruled Tennessee's SB1 (the number indicating it was the state senate's most urgent business this session) banning medical care for transgender minors, even against the wishes of patient, parents, and medical professionals.

No, parents: you and your transgender child have no say in the child's health care. That is up to the State. No opt-out for you.

The plaintiffs had tried to argue that Skrmetti was about gender discrimination: e.g., a minor the state identifies as male could be prescribed hormone blockers, but a minor the state identifies as female cannot. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that argument, because the second patient is being discriminated against for being transgender, not for being female, and that's okay.

Influence of Skrmetti has already begun to spread to other transgender concerns. The Seventh Circuit vacated its prior rulin g against anti-trans bathroom policies in public schools. The Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have been instructed to review two decisions involving Medicaid exclusions for gender-affirming medical care, one involving public teachers health insurance plans, and one involving birth certificate policies.

If nobody can come up with a religious liberty argument in favor of transgender medical care, health insurance coverage, and lavatory use, perhaps, my cartoon character suggests, someone could at least raise a faith-based objection to the State mandating who The Lord Your God is.

But I suspect the theocrats on the Court would find some excuse to find reason to infringe that particular religious exercise.

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.

Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018

Toon: Temper Tantrump

Here's one more cartoon for good measure this week. 

Mr. Trump's performance at Tuesday's so-called debate has got people trying to figure out how to get the overgrown spoiled brat who literally cannot shut up for two minutes to adhere to the rules. He interrupted Joe Biden over six dozen times*, and not for quick outbursts, either. Again and again, and yet again and even more agains, he insisted on shouting over the Democratic nominee and the moderator, Chris Wallace, as well.

Proposals for any future debates include giving the moderator the ability to cut off the president's microphone, or having as moderator a middle school teacher. We could go so far as to hold the next debate on Ellen DeGeneres's "Game of Games" set, where the talk show host could open the floor beneath either candidate for infractions, or dump chocolate pudding on them, or strap them in place and yank them offstage through the wall.

But Ms. DeGeneres is trying to reclaim her image as a nice person these days, so perhaps she wouldn't be interested.

__________

* Update: Chris Wallace said on Fox News today that Trump interrupted Biden 145 times. But who's counting?

This Week's Sneak Peek

As you might have guessed even without the snippet from this week's cartoon, I'm finally posting something about last week's Supreme Court ruling.

I'll let you guess which one and whether I thought it was a good decision or not.

QToon: Balls and Strikes

"Judges are like umpires.... I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat." —John Roberts, at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, September 12, 2005

Brian Brown, the president of the antigay National Organization for Marriage and World Congress of Families, recently tweeted a photo of himself and and leaders of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith posing with Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito.

Since the Supremes have taken up three LGBTQ+ rights cases this year, a liberal advocacy group, Take Back the Court, is demanding that Kavanaugh and Alito recuse themselves from them.

The Supreme Court has become deeply politicized in recent years, thanks to a series of rulings like Shelby County v. Holder, Citizens United, and Rucho v. Common Cause that have undermined basic tenets of our democracy for partisan advantage. The successful and unprecedented efforts by political branches to manipulate the size of the court for partisan purposes and your behavior, Justice Kavanaugh, during your confirmation hearings, have only deepened concerns about the politicization of the court. Your decision to meet privately with an activist who has filed amicus briefs with the court in three pending cases seems to confirm the worst fears of his critics.

The public letter from Take Back the Court director Aaron Belkin concludes:

The credibility and impartiality of the current Supreme Court is in tatters. Posing for photographs with the president of an advocacy organization that has filed briefs in matters pending before the court makes a mockery of Chief Justice Roberts’ assertion that a judge’s role is to impartially call balls and strikes. If you refuse to recuse yourselves, this incident will further illustrate the urgent need for structural reform of the Supreme Court in order to restore a Court that understands its role is to protect individual rights and our democracy.

Brown's NOM has filed amicus briefs in the cases before the Court, urging the Justices to rule that employers have every right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ employees, applicants, and customers. Given how nominees to the Court these days bend themselves into human pretzels trying to avoid answering any question that might someday be relevant to a matter before the Court, it is at least curious that Kavanaugh and Alito would choose to grant such an ex parte photo op.

Recusals of Supreme Court Justices are not so uncommon as you might think. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from dozens of cases — 28 in her first year on the Court — because as Solicitor General, she had been counsel in some of the litigation of those cases. Sandra Day O’Connor removed herself from cases regarding telecommunications firms because of stocks she owned. Clarence Thomas recused himself from United States v. Virginia because his son was enrolled at The Virginia Military Institute.

Whether and how Thomas's wife's work as a conservative activist impacts his supposed judicial impartiality is a whole other issue; in his three decades on the Court, he hasn't recused himself from any LGBTQ+ cases to my knowledge.

After all, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and for that matter Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts were put on the Court to be conservative judicial activists. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has been determined to load state and federal courts with their loyal soldiers since Nixon was president, such as Lawrence VanDyke, whom I drew about last week.

If they recused themselves from every liberal v. conservative case, they wouldn't be doing the job they were trained, groomed, and hired to do.

Original Intent

Q Toon: Judge for Yourself

In among all the stuff in the Corrupt Trump Administration's news dump over the extended Thanksgiving weekend was a request to the Supreme Court to overrule a lower court injunction against Trump's executive order banning transgender service members in the U.S. military.

The move would bypass federal appeals courts, which is highly unusual but not absolutely unheard of in the case of a national emergency. If preventing transgender patriots from serving their country sounds to you like something that calls for the combined forces of Agent Bauer, the Impossible Missions Force, and the DC Comics line-up, Mr. Trump has an opening in the Justice Department for you.

Even more highly unusual was the response by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to Trump's complaining about another lower court ruling (this time on his draconian asylum policy) because it was delivered by an "Obama judge."

"We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges," Roberts said in a statement. "What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them."
"That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."

This direct rebuke of a president goes well beyond anything we have witnessed before. Justice Alito silently mouthed "not true" during a paragraph about campaign financing reform in one of President Obama's State of the Union addresses; but you didn't see him issuing an official statement defending corporations' and foreign entities' right to bankroll our elections. Unless you count his having signed on to the Citizens United majority opinion.

For the purposes of this week's cartoon, I'm conflating the transgender service member and immigrant asylum cases. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who blocked Trump's anti-trans policy, was appointed to  the United States District Court for the District of Columbia  in 1997 by Bill Clinton, not by Barack Obama.

Well, it's not as if Mr. Trump is a stickler for factual accuracy.

I might also point out that the humans and buildings in this cartoon are not drawn to scale, in case anyone was wondering.

No Supreme Court For You!

For most of my life, the Supreme Court has been dominated by its right wing. In fact, that's true of most of the history of our country; the Warren Court of the 1950's and 60's was the exception to a general tendency of the Court since the founding of the Republic to favor the rich and powerful. The Constitution was written, after all, by the landed gentry, not the Daniel Shayses, John Frieses, and Crispus Attuckses.

I alluded in this week's cartoon to the lack of requirements laid out in the U.S. Constitution for Supreme Court Justices. We can be fairly sure that the Founding Fathers would have strongly disapproved of a foreign head of state sitting on the Court; but whereas the Constitution sets limits on who may or may not be a president, vice president, congressional representative or senator, the sole defining characteristic set for justices is that they "shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour."

"Nine Old Men," unsigned (William Gropper or Jacob Burck, perhaps?), in New Masses, New York, March 9, 1937

Even the size of the Supreme Court is unspecified. In the history of the United States, the sitting members of the Supreme Court as been as few as six; Franklin Roosevelt was rebuffed in his attempt to expand the Court in a scheme that would have allowed him to add as many as six new justices to the sitting nine. If and when the Republicans lose their grasp on the other two branches of government, I wouldn't be surprised if they were hastily to double the size of the Supreme Court while they could still fill the new seats.

Donald Joffrey Trump's executive order this week to ban affirmative action programs in college admissions recalls the Court's attempt to thread that needle in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. In the interest of meeting a set quota for minority enrollment, UC had admitted some minority students whose test scores were lower than white male Alan Bakke's. In a complicated set of four rulings, the Court ruled that UC should admit Bakke, and that the quotas violated the 1964 Equal Rights Act, but that the Equal Protection Clause allows race to be taken into consideration in college admission policies. Sort of.

Ronald Reagan's advanced age was an issue in the 1980 presidential campaign, but five of the justices on the Court were older than he. This cartoon from my sketchbook shows Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun, counted as the Court's liberal wing. (Conservatives Lewis Powell and Chief Justice Warren Burger were also older than Reagan.) Reagan came into office in 1981 determined to stack the court with reliable right-wing jurists hostile to minority rights, reproductive rights, unions, environmental protection, and a whole host of liberal causes.

Nevertheless, his first appointment, of Sandra Day O'Connor to replace Justice Potter Stewart, was received favorably, except by some right-wingers who suspected that a woman would be soft on Roe v. Wade. But when Burger retired, Reagan named Justice William Rehnquist, the most hardline conservative on the Court, to replace him as Chief Justice, and conservative firebrand Antonin Scalia as the Court's newest Justice.

In addition to Reagan's successful nominees in the center of the above cartoon, I imagined them being joined by Reagan administration officials Donald Regan, William Clark, Robert Bork, and Ed Meese, plus Clint Eastwood and Nancy Reagan. Reagan would indeed name Bork to the next vacancy, but the Democrat-led Senate voted Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre henchman down, 42 to 58.

The legacy of the Bork nomination was the creation of a verb ("Borking" has proved so much catchier than "Fortasing" or "Garlanding"), and the end of Republican nominees to the Court willing to admit to their prejudices against Roe v. Wade. It also led to Mr. Kennedy's nomination to the Court, for which, at least, LGBTQ Americans can be thankful. On the other hand, President Obama would likely have been the one to nominate the successor to Justice Bork, who died in December 2012 at age 85.

The last of the Warren Court liberals, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, retired during the George H.W. Bush administration, succeeded by David Souter and Clarence Thomas, respectively.

Liberals have had fewer opportunities to change the direction of the court. The most significant may have come with the retirement of Justice Byron White in 1993. Appointed by President Kennedy, he nevertheless tended to vote with conservatives: he and William Rehnquist were the only dissenters in Roe v. Wade, and he wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick giving the Court's blessing to laws criminalizing gay sex even between consenting adults in the privacy of one's home.

President Bill Clinton replaced White with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has since become the senior and possibly most vocal member of the Court's liberal wing.

More telling of the rightward drift of the Court, however, is the conventional wisdom that cast first Sandra Day O'Connor, then David Souter, then Anthony Kennedy in the role of casting "The Swing Vote." Never were they considered a "swing bloc" on the Court; only as one retired would the next sit in the supposed "swing" seat. (I suppose Kennedy's retirement makes Chief Justice John Roberts the Swing Vote now.)

Since America's bicentennial, Democrats have seated four justices on the Court; Republicans (assuming a swift confirmation of whomever Trump names next week) have seated nine.

That includes the most rigidly conservative examples of Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, about whom I've devoted blog posts in the past. Today, I'm trying to widen the focus to the entire Court, but there are a few cartoons here I'm repeating from those earlier posts anyway.

I've always liked this cartoon, largely because I enjoy breaking the boundaries of a cartoon panel this way and I don't have an excuse to do it very often.

The friendship between the ideologically opposed justices Ginsburg and Scalia was legendary, but we're told that this sort of comity across ideological boundaries is a thing of the past.

American right-wingers have been salivating at the chance to overturn Roe v. Wade, and we'll soon see what else: Obergefell v. Hodges? Bob Jones University v. U.S.? Miranda v. Arizona? Loving v. Virginia? Shelley v. Kraemer? West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette? Smith v. Allwright? Near v. Minnesota? U.S. v. Darby Lumber?

Enjoy our return to the Gilded Age of robber barons, white patriarchy and sweatshops, folks.

Q Toon: So Help Us God

I, Donald Berzilius Trump, don't need to solemnly swear anything, believe me. My presidency will be the most goodly, amazing, amazing presidency you have ever seen, I'm telling you. I have terrific ideas for upholding the Constitution, especially the part about my secret plan to replace Obamacare, which was a terrible disaster, everybody says so. But I can promise that I will, to the best of my ability, which is the best ability, I can assure you, preserve, protect and defend the most exclusive private school system you have ever seen and I'm gonna make the public school system pay for it. You're gonna be so tired of me bringing back jobs from those lying rapists in Mexico that you won't mind losing Medicare and Social Security, or clean air and water, or a free press, or whatever it is that I put Ben Carson in charge of.

First Week's Sneak Peek

This week's cartoon features up to 144 characters, none of whom are wearing pants.