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.

Q Toon: All He Wants for Christmas

The Respect for Marriage Act passed the U.S. Senate on Tuesday by a vote of  61 to 36. The Act, protecting same-sex and interracial marriages from being nullified by today's activist Supreme Court, won the support of twelve Republicans and all 49 of the Democrats present. (Sen. Rafael Warnock was home in Georgia campaigning in next week's run-off election. Two Republicans also did not vote.)

The bill now returns to the House, which passed it months ago but will need to reconcile with some differences between their version of the bill and the Senate's.

You may have thought that marriage equality was a settled issue. But you're not Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Thomas’s opinion set off alarm bells among proponents of marriage equality, who pointed out that if the Supreme Court were to overturn Obergefell, as it did Roe, then the right to same-sex marriage would similarly fall to the states. Currently 35 states have statutes or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage that would go into effect if Obergefell were overturned, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that advocates for LGBTQ equality.

So Senator Tammy Baldwin put together a bill that will require that even if the Supremes reverse Obergefell, if a same-sex or interracial couple were legally married in one state, their marriage doesn't magically disappear any time they happen to be in one of those 35 states.

In order to garner bipartisan support, the Senate version of the bill already had religious liberty guarantees. Baptist homeless shelters can still put lesbian couples back out on the street. Islamic food pantries can still refuse to admit gay couples. Ku Klux Kathedrals can still preach against miscegenation. Heck, if they want to, Catholic adoption agencies can still discriminate against legally married couples when one of them has been divorced.

But that wasn't enough for the 38 Senate Republicans who voted against the bill. Utah's Mike Lee was one of several Republicans arguing that antigay laypersons ought to be able to discriminate against same-sex and interracial couples, too, even in a completely secular capacity.

Who else is going to stand up for the rights of the Kim Davises of the world who think God is telling them to treat someone else's marriage as if it doesn't exist?

Requiring the state to recognize your marriage doesn't mean much if the people in charge can just make a cross with their fingers at you and now pronounce you single and stranger.

Fortunately, Lee's amendment, and the other poison pills were voted down. Yet I suspect they signal to Clarence Thomas and the others of his ilk how to argue that the Respect for Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

Stay tuned.

Q Toon: As I Have Foreseen

Long ago, in a polity far away, having the Senate evenly split between fifty Republicans and fifty Democrats would have forced the two parties to work together to keep the government running. These days, however, we have one party interested in good government, and the other, led by Mitch McConnell (R-Byss), happy to see no government at all.

Barack Obama came into office in 2008 with a filibuster-proof 60-40 Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and the the U.S. economy four months into the most serious collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s. McConnell had vowed that thwarting Obama at every turn would be the Number One priority of the Republican Party, over and above national interest, leaving Democrats to rescue the economy on their own.

From there, Obama and Senate Democrats tried a bipartisan approach to crafting the Affordable Care Act, trimming the bill a little here and gutting it a little there in a vain attempt to persuade even one Republican to sign onto it. But the GOP had their orders to stick together in intransigent opposition no matter what. Democrats might just as well have passed a Swedish-style single-payer system instead.

Then Ted Kennedy up and died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, handing McConnell effective veto power over all legislation and dozens upon dozens of judicial appointments.

Today, McConnell is still in charge of Senate Republicans, who continue to show remarkable unity when opportunities to do nothing arise. Ten Senate Republicans do not exist who will put the national interest above party politics.

None of the issues that Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats ran on in 2020 can be dealt with as long as Mitch McConnell retains his veto power, so many Democrats are eager to scrap the filibuster— possible now if they have their 50 votes plus that of Vice President Kamala Harris.

But not so fast! Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) like the filibuster! Manchin cited the "Byrd Rule," named for the 1970's-80's leader of Senate Democrats and 1940's Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd. Byrd personally filibustered four fourteen hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with other Dixiecrats.

Sinema, this cartoon's link to being of interest to LGBTQ+ readers, avoided citing the filibuster's history of anti-civil rights, but told Politico, “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work.” (Emphasis mine.) Considering her experience as one of the very few Democratic members of the Arizona legislature, her love for the filibuster may be understandable — but self-defeating.

“I have long said that I oppose eliminating the filibuster for votes on legislation,” Sinema’s office went on to explain. “Retaining the legislative filibuster is not meant to impede the things we want to get done. Rather, it’s meant to protect what the Senate was designed to be. I believe the Senate has a responsibility to put politics aside and fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans.”

From this explanation, a voter might conclude that the Framers created the Senate to be some sort of debating society that occasionally passes bills, rather than an active and functional legislative chamber.

The Framers of the Constitution actually got rid of a forerunner of the filibuster, a requirement that "important resolutions" be approved by two-thirds of the states — a practice that had hobbled government under the Articles of Confederation. As Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #22, observed:

To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. ... The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good.

It was catchier when Lin Manuel-Miranda rapped it, but perhaps you get the point.

Q Toon: Riding Into the Sunset

Utah's newest Senator has captured attention with his op-ed swipe at Donald Joffrey Trump, but let us take a moment here to commend Utah's newly retired Senator Orrin Hatch. In his farewell address to the Senate, Hatch, who earned a Zero on the Human Rights Campaign's most recent scorecard on LGBTQ issues and once claimed that homosexuals have a "psychological deficiency," urged his colleagues to find common ground with the LGBTQ community:

“Nowhere is the pluralist approach more needed than in the fraught relationship between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights. . . . Religious liberty is a fundamental freedom. It deserves the very highest protection our country can provide. At the same time, it’s also important to [take] account of other interests as well – especially those of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters. Pluralism shows us a better way. It shows us that protecting religious liberty and preserving the rights of LGBTQ individuals are not mutually exclusive. I believe we can find substantial common ground on these issues that will enable us to both safeguard the ability of religious individuals to live their faith and protect LGBTQ individuals from invidious discrimination.”

That moment of commendation now being dispensed with, let us turn to Utah's now Senior Senator, Mike Lee, who is single-handedly holding up the nomination of three Employment Equal Opportunity Commissioners, and thus denying the EEOC a quorum to take any action, because one of them is a lesbian.

The religious right has had their knickers in a wad over Chai Feldblum ever since President Barack Obama named her to the five-member EEOC in 2010, because she supports marriage equality. They have fabricated inflammatory remarks she never made and twisted others to portray her as hostile to the faithful.

Conservative activists have condemned Feldblum in the American Conservative (“an enemy of religious liberty”), the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal (a “radical nominee”), the Daily Wire (“Trump’s worst federal nomination”), the Blaze (“radical activist against religious freedom”), and elsewhere. Led by the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, right-wing advocacy groups have condemned Trump’s re-nomination of Feldblum. (The FRC previously maligned Feldblum by crediting her with the statement “Gays win; Christians lose,” which she never said.) In a statement, Lee echoed these criticisms, alleging that Feldblum has “radical views on marriage and the appropriate use of government power” that would lead her “to use the might of government to stamp out traditional marriage supporters.”

Feldblum, the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, has responded that she was raised “in a home in which religion and God were the defining aspects of our daily lives.” Her 2006 essay on finding an accommodation between non-discrimination policies and "religious liberty," Moral Conflict and Liberty: Gay Rights and Religion, leans toward favoring non-discrimination...

If I am denied a job, an apartment, a room at a hotel, a table at a restaurant or a procedure by a doctor because I am a lesbian, that is a deep, intense and tangible hurt. That hurt is not alleviated because I might be able to go down the street and get a job, an apartment, a hotel room, a restaurant table or a medical procedure from someone else. The assault to my dignity and my sense of safety in the world occurs when the initial denial happens. That assault is not mitigated by the fact that others might not treat me in the same way.

...but insists that religious beliefs are owed respect and a place in public policy.

My argument in this article is that intellectual coherence and ethical integrity demand that we acknowledge that civil rights laws can burden an individual's belief liberty interest when the conduct demanded by these laws burdens an individual's core beliefs, whether these beliefs are religiously based or secularly based. Acknowledging such a liberty interest will not necessarily result in the invalidation of the law or the granting of an exemption for the religious individual. 

Which sounds to me like she and Senator Hatch could have had some meaningful conversation, had he not waited until he was on his way out the door to float the idea of reason, rationality, and compromise.

Q Toon: Hello Muddah, Hello FADA

If you thought a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court would be the final word in the fight for marriage equality, I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.

The resistance is not limited to one Kentucky county clerk on her fourth marriage, of course. Christian theocrats are not going to be dragged into the 21st Century without a fight.

This month, the Republican National Committee voted to support what its sponsors call a "First Amendment Defense Act" (FADA), guaranteeing a right to discriminate against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and whatever other group about whom you can find a disapproving verse in the Bible. So look out, Amorites, shellfish-eaters and rich fools: they're coming for you again.

Paul Berge
Q Syndicate✎Aug 27, 2015

Sponsored by U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the legislation would prohibit a federal government entity from taking action against a person who objects to same-sex marriage or homosexuality. Such actions include denying tax credits, contracts, grants, certification, accreditation or employment to a person who opposes homosexuality due to strong religious beliefs or moral convictions.

The First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) would also allow anybody who felt they were retaliated against by government actors to sue for damages. It also outlines how the sponsors expect courts to interpret the act, including a clause that reads, “This Act shall be construed in favor of a broad protection of free exercise of religious beliefs and moral convictions, to the maximum extent permitted by the terms of this Act and the Constitution.” ...

 The Human Rights Campaign noted that “if passed, this legislation would create a breakdown of government services and runaway litigation…. It would permit a federal employee, for example, to refuse to process tax returns, visa applications or Social Security checks whenever a same-sex couple’s paperwork appears on his or her desk.”

Oh, by the way, just kidding about the Christian right coming after you rich fools. Everyone knows that Jesus didn't mean.any of that stuff.