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.

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.

Q Toon: Qui Tollis Crimina Mundi

 

Pope Francis has been preaching lately against the criminalization of homosexuality, most recently along with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Rt. Rev. Iain Greenshields, the Presbyterian moderator of the Church of Scotland as the three were returning from an ecumenical pilgrimage to South Sudan.

The Pope isn't backing down from Catholic dogma that homosexual acts are a sin, mind you, but in light of antigay laws in 57 countries around the world — 11 of which make it punishable by death — and moves in some of those nations to make being gay or lesbian even more illegal than it already is, I for one appreciate the Pope for speaking out.

For the record, the Anglican Communion worldwide is deeply divided over issues surrounding LGBTQ+ persons, while the Presbyterian Church is officially welcoming.

Now, as for whether wearing white after Labor Day or putting pineapple on pizza is the greater crime, I defer to the experts. Or at least to my Italian-American husband if I know what's good for me. 

Some people consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral. And some people come to the State of the Union in February wearing this:

I suppose it could be worse.

But we were discussing men's fashion today, and — not having seen whether Senator Fetterman was wearing his hoodie Tuesday night — in the halls of the Holy See, not those of Congress.

They don't observe Labor Day in Rome, of course. At least, not in September. Like the rest of the civilized world, they celebrate May Day. If there are fashionistas at the Vatican, the proscription against wearing white would come after the Feast Day of St. Ultan of Ardbraccan this year. 

Although I'm pretty sure that the Pope gets a dispensation either way.

Q Toon: At the Independents' Table

Democrats did not even get 24 hours to savor their 51-vote majority in the U.S. Senate before Senator Kyrsten Sinema decided to upstage Rev. Raphael Warnock and announce that she was bolting the party.

She joins Socialist Bernie Sanders (a Democrat in Presidential Politics Only) of Vermont and true Independent Angus King of Maine as the kids at the table in the corner. Both of them came to the Senate without pretending to be Democrats, and their voters elected them with full knowledge of where they stand on the key issues.

Sinema, on the other hand, an erstwhile Green Party activist from Arizona, has been a difficult member of the Democratic caucus, especially in the last two years. She stubbornly defended the chamber's filibuster rules that allow Republicans to block much of President Biden's agenda. Liberal activists have been suspicious that she has allowed herself to become beholden to big-money right-wing donors. 

Given how radically the Republican Party has lurched to the extreme right, I don't expect Sinema to stray far from Democratic Party stands on personal liberties. Fiscal and border issues seem likely to be another story. If the Republican House starts impeaching Biden administration officials willy-nilly, who the hell knows what Sinema would do?

She's up for reelection in 2024, and had been facing a strong challenger in the Democratic primary. By declaring herself an Independent, she sets up a three-way general election; and since Arizona does not have Georgia-style run-offs, even a Requblican who would make Kari Lake look reasonable could take the seat with a measly 34% of the vote.

Hold onto your tater tots.

Q Toon: Sinema Defends the Filibuster

So Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote Wednesday on whether to end debate on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and thus bring the bills themselves to a vote. This, even though the vote was doomed to fail, given that all fifty Republican Senators were guaranteed to vote to extend debate, and Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema had announced that they would vote with the Republicans.

(Do we really need those Republican senators to show up for votes in the first place? They're going to vote No, everybody knows they're going to vote No, it's safe to predict that they will always vote No. Just score fifty No votes for every piece of legislation for the rest of the year and have done with it. Heck, since 60 votes are required to get legislation to a vote in the first place, all 100 Senators can go home and spend the rest of the year fellating their donors.)

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. LGBTQ+ voters were elated to see Kyrsten Sinema, an out bisexual, narrowly elected to the Senate from Arizona in 2018. She had the support of EMILY's List and progressives around the country, so a whole lot of people have been disappointed in her insistence in today's 50-50 Senate that Filibusters Are Good For Democracy.

Sen. Sinema, who has seven years experience serving in the minority party in Arizona legislature before coming to the U.S. Senate, gave her reasons why she learned to stop worrying and love the filibuster last week, citing how Democrats' efforts to get around Republican tactics have come around to bite them in the keyster:

"The 2013 decision by Senate Democrats to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for most judicial and presidential nominations led directly to a response in 2017 by Senate Republicans, who eliminated the threshold for Supreme Court nominees.

"These short-sighted actions by both parties have led to our current American Judiciary and Supreme Court, which, as I stand here today, is considering questions regarding fundamental rights Americans have enjoyed for decades."

She's not entirely wrong. If Democratic senators make an exception to the filibuster for voter rights, voting restriction bills are not the only agenda items Republicans would act on if they attain the majority. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) ticked off a list for Washington Times:

"More pro-life bills, more bills promoting, let's see, universal carry under the Second Amendment, say, more border security ... those are just a few of the areas."

So what are the Democrats to do in this Catch-2022 situation? Eliminate the filibuster now, and regret it as soon as there's a 51st Republican in the Senate? Or sit by and watch Republicans in statehouses around the country systematically disenfranchise Democratic voters?

 

That includes the Arizona statehouse, where the legislature and governor been working overtime to make sure Sinema becomes a one-term-and-done senator in 2024.

✍

 

P.S.: Somebody at DailyKos apparently liked this cartoon so much they posted it straight from the Q Syndicate feed on Tuesday, before any of its subscribers (or this, your humble scribe) had printed or posted it. I suppose I'm flattered; I don't think I've ever appeared on that particular site before — certainly not as a post's featured graphic.

 

This Week's Sneak Peek

I wasn't going to, but then I decided I had better label her. Some reader or editor might have wondered what religious figure this cartoon was about.