Q Toon: None Taken

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in a pair of cases over transgender student athletes' rights in Idaho and West Virginia. The two states are among several Republican-run states with blanket bans prohibiting transgender youth from participating in school athletics.

That the present Republican majority will rule against the two girls is sadly a foregone conclusion; the only suspense is whether their ruling will be so broad as to prevent transgender students from athletic activities anywhere, or so narrow as to apply only to Idaho and West Virginia.

The primary concern of the majority justices appears to be how the lawyers arguing on behalf of the two athletes want to define what a female is and whether laws prohibiting gender discrimination apply to that definition. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are predictably hostile to non-cisgender, non-heterosexual plaintiffs, but former girls’ basketball coach Brett Kavanaugh took a moment to offer sympathy to transgender student athletes. That sympathy, however, is countered by his sympathy for hypothetical cisgender student athletes who don't make the team:

“I hate–hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. I hate that,” Kavanaugh said. “But … it’s kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teams. And someone who tries out and makes it, who is a transgender girl, will bump from the starting lineup, from playing time, from the team, from the all league, and those things matter to people big time, will bump someone else.”

“We have to recognize on both sides the zero-sum. It’s not like, ‘Oh, just add another person to the team.’ That’s not how sports works. ... Someone else is going to get disadvantaged.”

It’s a shame that there isn’t enough room on a team’s bench for everybody who was promised a seat.

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: Getting Creative

The Supreme Court happily carved out a right in Creative LLC et al. v. Elenis et al. for Lorie Smith to discriminate against same-sex engaged couples, essentially nullifying a Colorado non-discrimination law.

Ignored by the right-wing justices in the majority were several factors that should have rendered the case moot. Creative LLC had not ever created any wedding announcement web pages. Furthermore, the client whose same-sex wedding announcement web page she had supposedly refused on religious grounds to design is 

• a straight, cisgender man
• in a different-sex marriage
• who never approached Creative LLC to design a web page
• who didn't know someone had done so in his name
• and besides, owns his own web design company in the first place.

Now as someone who considers himself a creative person myself, I can sympathize with not wanting to expend creative energy on a project one disagrees with. I'm not going to accept a commission to draw cartoons for nazis, racists, or antigay bigots.

I can also appreciate that the court's decision is not entirely without precedent. We've had a conservative majority court for decades now, after all. The Supremes have previously ruled that private groups such as the Boy Scouts are free to discriminate against LGBTQ+ children and parents, and so may religious groups. This case extends the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ persons to businesses offering a public service.

But this case, along with Biden v. Nebraska (in which no student loan lending firm had sued the administration), demonstrates how the current Court is not just conservative, but activist. There was no plaintiff with standing — that is, who had suffered actual damages of some kind. You can't take a case to the Supreme Court just because you don't like a law.

For example, the budget passed by Madison Republicans representing villages and rural communities around the rest of Wisconsin last month allowed the city of Milwaukee to raise sales taxes, but dictated how the tax money must and must not be spent. I might disagree with those restrictions, but I do not live in Milwaukee. I have no standing to challenge the budget law.

Our present activist Supreme Court went out of its way to find a trumped-up case, based entirely on a fiction, and ruled in favor of a plaintiff whose primary reason for starting up her business appears to have been not to operate a business, but to overturn a non-discrimination law she didn't like.

Q Toon: Sitting Ducks

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

 

Q Toon: Match Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q Toon: The Trumply Trio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I Remember Mama

When speculation was circulating that Donald Joffrey Trump would name Judge Neil Gorsuch to fill Judge Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court, my first thought was to wonder if he were any relation to Anne Gorsuch Burford, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in the first years of the Reagan administration.

As it turns out, he is her son.

A minion of Interior Secretary James Watt, Anne Gorsuch turned the mission of the EPA on its head, aiming to protect corporate profits at the expense of the environment. From her obituary in the Washington Post in 2004:

Her 22-month tenure was one of the most controversial of the early Reagan administration. A firm believer that the federal government, and specifically the EPA, was too big, too wasteful and too restrictive of business, Ms. Burford cut her agency's budget by 22 percent. She boasted that she reduced the thickness of the book of clean water regulations from six inches to a half-inch.

Republicans and Democrats alike accused Ms. Burford of dismantling her agency rather than directing it to aggressively protect the environment. They pointed to budget cuts for research and enforcement, to steep declines in the number of cases filed against polluters, to efforts to relax portions of the Clean Air Act, to an acceleration of federal approvals for the spraying of restricted pesticides and more. Her agency tried to set aside a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean due east of the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships would burn toxic wastes at 1,200 degrees centigrade.

We cartoonists were no kinder to her than we were to Watt. I drew these cartoons in February and March, 1983, as scandal exploded around Ms. Gorsuch and her agency.

Charged with mishandling of the agency's $1.6 billion "superfund" for handling toxic waste, Gorsuch refused to turn over records to Congress and was found in contempt of Congress. There was also a scandal over promising a small New Mexico oil refinery that it could ignore existing limits on lead in gasoline because loosening of the regulations was planned. The regulations weren't loosened after all, and the company ended up having to pay huge fines.

To explain a couple things in my cartoons: between the first and the second, Gorsuch married Robert Burford, whereupon she took his last name. (That's not him in the bed, by the way; it's a generic industrialist character.) The woman hanging outside the windows is newly resigned Superfund administrator Rita Lavelle, who would be convicted in 1984 of lying to Congress about the superfund scandal.

I wasn't the only cartoonist to reach for the prostitution metaphor to depict Gorsuch Burford's handling of the EPA, but there were other allusions made by better cartoonists than me. Pat Oliphant depicted her as Maleficent from Disney's Snow White. Riffing on Ghostbusters, Jim Borgman portrayed her as an ectoplasmic spectre. Herb Block drew her as a jackbooted prison guard. After her resignation, Herblock drew Reagan and an aide tossing her into a smoking volcano labeled "Administration Environmental Scandals", with a slip labeled "Lavelle" nearby, as the aide tells the President, "We've given it two of our finest maidens!"

On a less personal level, Jeff MacNelly's response to the scandal was to depict the EPA as a garbage truck with all its garbage in the driver's cabin.

Reagan later appointed Gorsuch Burford to be chair of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, a post she dismissed as a "nothing-burger." The House and the Senate passed resolutions urging on President Reagan to withdraw the appointment; in the end, Gorsuch Burford decided not to accept the position.

In her 1986 book, Are You Tough Enough, Gorsuch Burford complained: "When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only 'crime' was loyal service, following orders. I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work."

I brought Gorsuch Burford back one more time for a cartoon marking the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1989. She's behind Reagan in the supporting cast between Robert Bork and James Watt.