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.

2022 in Review

My Saturday History Tour and year-end retrospective collide today (often a risk you take when looking behind you). So here's a collage of a few of my favorite cartoons from 2022:

(I would have liked to include this week's cartoon, too. But I felt I needed to limit myself to six cartoons.)

Here also is my annual snapshot of the year's biggest headlines.

I've been taking these front-page headline photos for 50 years now, and I don't know how much longer this habit will be possible. Many newspapers have surrendered blaring headlines about national and international news to the immediacy of the internet. The local newspaper here is still likely to give prominent placement to news of the end of U.S. involvement in a long war, or a vice presidential resignation; but for the most part, front page coverage is reserved for local features.

Even the regional papers (e.g.: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Chicago Tribune) tend to highlight features of local and state interest over, say, a congressional hearing, or a coup in South America. National papers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reserve huge bold headlines for singularly monumental events — but on the other hand, I have a much better camera now. No way would you have been able to read the Boris Johnson headline if I were still taking pictures with my Kodak Instamatic.

__________

P.S.: Had I waited until tomorrow to post this, I might have been able to add a newspaper headline about Pope Benedict's death this morning. Well, perhaps. Tomorrow's local newspapers had probably been put to bed Friday night.

Q Toon: Clarence Concurs

 

You may have heard that the U.S. Supreme Court completely overturned Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood last week, thereby turning nearly half a century of women's rights of bodily autonomy over to the politicians in their state capitols.

The majority opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito promised pinky swear on a stack of Bibles that the Court's decision had no impact on other rulings resting on a constitutional right of privacy earlier Courts had found in the 14th Amendment. 

Justice Clarence Thomas, however, wrote a separate concurring opinion declaring that all bets are off.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote on Page 119 of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, also referring to the rulings that legalized [access to contraception,] same-sex relationships and marriage equality, respectively. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Thomas added, “After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated.”

As has been pointed out many, many times this week, Loving v. Virginia was conspicuously absent from Justice Thomas's list of demonstrable errors in need of correction. As cavalier as Thomas is in advocating wholesale annulment of same-sex marriages like mine, he is suspiciously circumspect in regard to resurrecting the anti-miscegenation laws that would break up his own. Anti-miscegenation laws that remained on the books in a majority of states well after ratification of the 14th Amendment — for nearly a century in the case of Thomas's home state, Loving's appellee.

Point made, counselor. Move on.

So, what further constitutional provision errors might Thomas have in mind to correct?

Perhaps cases such as Cruzan v. Director Missouri Dept. of Health (1990), which limits the state's right to force you to undergo a medical procedure against your will. Republicans have been all too eager to pass laws forbidding certain medical procedures (e.g., abortion, gender therapy); we'll see how long it takes for them to pass laws requiring certain medical procedures.

Given that they purport that America's gun violence problem is solely a matter of mental illness, my prediction is: sooner than you think.

Thomas, currently the Court's longest-serving Justice, has been itching from Day One to roll back Americans' rights to 1868 in areas ranging from affirmative action to gun regulation to union rights. And very high on his little list is marriage equality.

Back in 2020, Thomas wrote a dissent in the Court's decision not to hear a case brought by Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

"[T]his petition provides a stark reminder of the consequences of Obergefell. By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the court has created a problem that only it can fix," Thomas wrote. "Until then, Obergefell will continue to have 'ruinous consequences for religious liberty.'"

Joining in and concurring with Justice Thomas? Samuel Anthony Alito.

This Week's Sneak Peek

If you've been following my cartoons, you probably knew where I was headed with this week's cartoon already.

So here are a couple of leftover thoughts from this past weekend.

When the Supreme Court decision was announced on Friday, I was some 8½ miles away from my drawing board; but I changed my Facebook cover photo to the cartoon I drew back in May when the draft of Justice Alito's decision was leaked.

Friends and strangers quickly shared the cartoon — it will be a while before I find our how extensively — while all the other editorial cartoonists were still at their drawing boards coming up with new responses. And friend of the blog Mike Peterson included it in the next morning's Comic Strip of the Day column at Daily Cartoonist.

All appreciated, and many thanks for the support.

And this janitorial note:

I included a cartoon in Saturday's post that had appeared in the Quayle Quarterly. I haven't been able to find out which issue it was in; I know where I used to have the actual magazine in my old apartment, but in 17 years, it is one of many things that has never found a proper home in our current house.

I'll probably find it someday when looking for something else, assuming it wasn't in the box of stuff that got soaked when our basement flooded 16 years ago.

How We Got Here

With the Supreme Court poised to eviscerate Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks, this week's Graphical History Tour dredges up a few of my cartoons on the topic over the years.

Just a teenager in 1973, I didn't draw any cartoons about the 7-2 Supreme Court ruling at the time. I don't recall it being a topic of conversation in my home, school, or church back then.

Nor do I have any examples of cartoons the professional editorial cartoonists drew about the ruling. I can't rule out the possibility that some of them drew their reactions to it, particularly conservatives such as Tom Curtis, Don Hesse, or Charles Brooks. The ruling was big news, and was the lead story in afternoon papers; but for most inkslingers, it was quickly overshadowed by the Paris Peace Accord ending U.S. participation in the War in Vietnam, and the death of former President Lyndon Johnson, both of which happened that same week (in LBJ's case, the same day — see yesterday's post).

I have a number of editorial cartooning books published in the mid 1970's, and Jerry Robinson's The 1970s: Best Political Cartoons of the Decade, and none of their editors included any cartoons about Roe v. Wade from 1973. Perhaps Charles Brooks approved one or two submitted for his Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year volume for 1973, but that book isn't in my collection.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April, 1989

One reason that the Court's ruling failed to settle the matter is that the two sides address the issue in mutually exclusive terms. If you believe that a zygote is a living human being, then abortion is murder. If you believe that a woman should have control of her own body, then the DNA of those cells is moot.

At first, the principal actors in the national debate were the women's rights movement (and this may or may not have been my earliest cartoon on the topic of abortion rights)...

in Manitou Messenger, Northfield Minn., April 30, 1981

...and on the other side, fundamentalist Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church.

in UW Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 24, 1982

As far as we cartoonists have been concerned, the pro-Roe side has relied on images of wire coat hangers, pregnant women considerably further along than the typical abortion patient, and the back-alley abortionists from back before the Court decriminalized the procedure.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 19, 1991

A favorite theme among anti-abortion cartoonists has been the swarm of toddler-sized angels in heaven to represent the zillions of innocents who somehow evaded that pesky baptism requirement to get in. I haven't drawn any such cartoon, but I have considered what a heaven teeming with the unborn might actually be like.

Q Syndicate, June, 2019

But seriously, folks. 

Over the years, the abortion divide has cleaved along party lines. Anti-abortion Democrats stuck with the party just long enough to thwart Bill Clinton's health care reform. Meanwhile, pro-choice Republicans quickly found themselves reduced to being, well, Susan Collins.

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., May, 1990

The "pro-life" movement had become a significant force in the Republican party by 1990, but Republican politicians, such as Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, could still find it advantageous to maintain some slight distance from the movement's more absolutist positions. The captain of the ship in my cartoon is Randall Terry, the most prominent anti-abortion spokesman of the day, who opposes not only abortion in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother, but also all forms of birth control.

Now, those absolutist positions are in the mainstream of anti-abortion movement. From the Washington Post today:

“What we are calling for is a total ban, no exceptions,” Matt Sande, legislative director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, said in an interview. “We don’t think abortion is ever necessary to save the life of the mother.”

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Sept. 19, 1991

The grand plan for the anti-abortion movement has always been to take over the Supreme Court; but while the Republican Party platform has consistently called for stocking the courts with anti-abortion judges, their appointees have repeatedly taken the position that they must not address the reason they were nominated. Clarence Thomas told the Senate Judiciary Committee during the hearings on his nomination to the Court that he couldn't possibly express his opinions on a woman's right to choose because “I think it would undermine my ability to sit in an impartial way on an important case like that."

Oct., 2005

She's a footnote to history now, but it's instructive to remember George W. Bush's nomination of White House Counsel and longtime friend Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court following the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor and death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. With GOP Senators in the majority, she was forced to withdraw herself from consideration, not so much because of the appearance of cronyism or her lack of judicial experience, but because Republicans couldn't be sure whether her evasive answers on abortion rights were meant to hide anti-abortion intent or that she genuinely hadn't prejudged the issue.

So she was replaced by Samuel Alito, whose belief in overturning Roe v. Wade was well-known. He nevertheless dismissed his earlier writings, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee: “Today if the issue were to come before me, if I am fortunate enough to be confirmed and the issue were to come before me, the first question would be the question that we’ve been discussing, and that’s the issue of stare decisis. And if the analysis were to get beyond that point, then I would approach the question with an open mind, and I would listen to the arguments that were made."

Each of Donald Joffrey Trump's nominees to the Court also expressed deference to stare decisis that promptly vanished when an opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade landed on their docket.

Neil Gorsuch: “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

Brett Kavanaugh: “As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By ‘it,’ I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor to remember."

Q Syndicate, Sept. 2018

Amy Coney Barrett, as her nomination was rushed through the Senate, more closely followed Clarence Thomas's lead: “Senator, what I will commit is that I will obey all the rules of stare decisis."

✍

If Justice Alito's draft opinion is to be believed, the Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has no bearing on other starry decided cases involving personal liberties. "Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion," Alito wrote.

Ahem. If the clerk would please read the record...

Q Syndicate, Nov. 2020

Nothing in this opinion, perhaps. But just wait till you see the next one.

Toon: Condemned to Repeat It

After 49 years of promising their voters to appoint justices to the Supreme Court for the express purpose of overturning Roe v. Wade — and the kabuki theater of those appointees testifying to Senate Judiciary Commitees that honest pinky-swear cross-my-heart they carried no such agenda —Republicans are finally getting their wish.

Unless you've just recovered from a coma, you already know about that Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion eviscerating Roe v. Wade was leaked to Politico, and you probably know that one of the main points of his opinion is that abortion rights (or the prohibition of them) is a matter to be decided between a woman and her statehouse, governor, Congress, President... anyone "from the government and I'm here to help."

Effective abortion bans are set to snap into place in 26 states the instant the Court's ruling is handed down. Some have been passed recently or will be soon; in other states, old laws voided by the Court's 1973 ruling (such as Wisconsin's 1849 law) will arise from their graves.

Just about all of these abortion bans, old and new, presuppose that women who seek abortions are unprincipled whores likely to wait right up until moments before going into labor to abort their unwanted fetus instead. That they deserve for each and every sexual act to result in nine months of hard labor.

I know from the experience of someone close to me that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is never easy, and sometimes the baby was very much wanted. If I had been in her place and had been told to go home and wait to miscarry, I would have reached the same decision she did.

If you're a woman or girl living in a state where Republicans do not exercise a stranglehold on your legislature, chances are you will get to keep the right to determine your own child-bearing decisions — at least as long as there's a Democrat in the White House. But anywhere else, your chances are awfully remote, and largely thanks to Court decisions made along the way with this day in mind.

Republicans took advantage of their state legislative wins in 2010 to cement their momentary majorities into permanent ones through the redistricting process and erecting barriers against voters apt to vote for Democrats — and Republican judges have backed them up. Right-wing activists regularly flood the airwaves in election years to promote anti-abortion candidates — and again, Republican judges (many of them having been themselves beneficiaries of those floods) have backed them up.

Federally, Republicans use the free and easy filibuster rules in the Senate to block any and all Democratic legislation — and you can bet that if there are 51 of them in the Senate next year, Mitch McConnell will get rid of the filibuster to pass a total nation-wide ban on abortion. Even if the Roman Catholic in the Oval Office today vetoes it, the GOP retains its numerical advantage in the electoral college in 2024 that we saw in 2000 and 2016.

If the immediate future for women's reproductive rights looks bleak now, so too did the prospects of the anti-abortion movement in 1973. But they kept working toward Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization with unrelenting, calculated determination, and here we are.

Can the other side match that effort — even if it takes another half-century?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Here's a pencil sketch from one of the pencil roughs for this week's cartoon, and I just want to note that I'm taking Joan Crawford's advice to heart.

No wire hangers.

Q Toon: Sitting Ducks

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

 

Q Toon: Article of Faith

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in a wide-ranging speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, lambasted LGBTQ rights activists for insisting upon infringing upon conservative Christians' right to discriminate against them,

... even suggesting that the pressure Christians face surrounding their religious beliefs is akin to the strictures the U.S. placed on Germany and Japan after World War II.

“Is our country going to follow that course?” Alito asked. “For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It’s often just an excuse for bigotry and can’t be tolerated, even when there is no evidence that anybody has been harmed. ... The question we face is whether our society will be inclusive enough to tolerate people with unpopular religious beliefs.”

Alito offered as a case in point marriage equality, which he believes victimizes people who believe in opposite-sex marriage supremacy. 

The Gays aren't the only ones assaulting religious liberty, he said. Governmental attempts to stem the spread of COVID-19 also have Alito fuming: “Think of worship services! Churches closed on Easter Sunday, synagogues closed for Passover in Yom Kippur!”

As the present "third wave" of the disease dwarfs the first and second waves in this country, he's not going to like the looks of Christmas this year, either.

But it's not as if the coronavirus is ignoring secular holidays such as Black Friday, New Year's Eve, or Superbowl Sunday, either.

Some legal scholars seemed surprised by Alito's brazenly political speech. In one lawyer's tweet,

“This speech is like I woke up from a vampire dream,” University of Baltimore law professor and former federal prosecutor Kim Wehle wrote. “Unscrupulously biased, political, and even angry. I can’t imagine why Alito did this publicly. Totally inappropriate and damaging to the Supreme Court.”

I'm not sure why this should come as a shock to anyone. After all, Alito is the Supreme Court Justice caught shaking his head and clearly mouthing "Not true!" at Barack Obama during the then-President's 2010 State of the Union address. (Obama was criticizing the Court's Citizens United ruling.) While that's not quite in the same league as shouting "You lie!" or tearing up one's copy of the speech, the people who did those things were members of Congress — politicians — and I guess we've come to expect that behavior from the House and Senate. The other Justices present during Obama's address sat dispassionately throughout.

In another speech to the Federalist Society four years ago, Alito bemoaned the liberal "campus culture" at some colleges and universities that supposedly stifles conservatives' free speech. Maybe so. Alito might be afraid to speak on liberal campuses of higher learning, but he is right at home bravely speaking to right-wing and libertarian septic think tanks.

None of the views Alito expressed are likely to shock those who have read his legal opinions or other public statements, [University of Massachusetts School of Law professor John T.] Rice said, but their public airing flies in the face of Chief Justice John Roberts’s efforts to keep the court above the political fray.

“Is there a rule that Justice Alito violated? Is there any recourse against him? No,” Rice said. “But was it wise? No.”

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: Mutare Decisis

Amy Coney Barrett has been spending this week telling a Senate panel that as a nominee to the highest court in the land, she can't imagine how she might rule in cases involving abortion rights, gun control, the Affordable Care Act, or marriage equality,  or any of the other hot-button issues she has written about — not even whether Donald Trump can unilaterally postpone a federal election fergawdsake! — because the role of a Supreme Court Justice is not to prejudge cases before they come before the Court.

Meanwhile, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who no longer have any Senate confirmation hearings to worry about, just told the nation last week how eager they are to get a case before them that would allow them to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that established marriage equality under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Now that two of the five Justices who ruled in the majority are no longer on the Court, Thomas and Alito are not only telegraphing how they would rule in a case challenging Obergefell, they are openly inviting such a case to come their way.

If it seems peculiar that I should ignore the newest nominee to the Court to draw a cartoon about the Justice who has been around the longest, it's partly because opposition to the Coney Barrett nomination is already a lost cause, and always has been. So was opposition to the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and support of the nomination of Merrick Garland.

Since the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, Republicans have been committed to packing the courts of this country, at every level, with right-wing activist judges come hell or high water. They have had a few disappointments along the way: Nixon named Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court to advocate aggressively for business interests, only to have Powell write the decision in Roe v. Wade. Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign pledge by putting Sandra Day O'Connor on the Court, only to have her earn a reputation as the swing vote there. Gerald Ford nominated John Paul Stevens, and George H.W. Bush named David Souter to the Court, only for them to side with the Court's liberals.

Right-wingers came together and vowed "No More Souters," and for thirty years — a full generation — there hasn't been. Republican senators scuttled George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers not over the issue of cronyism, but because she had not previously demonstrated a commitment to toeing the party line from the bench. So we got Thomas's fellow home-wrecker Samuel Alito instead.

If the present Coney Barrett nomination is a lost cause, the resistance to right-wing activism must look to the future. As the longest-serving Justice on the Court, Clarence Thomas may very well be the next to retire. But don't count on it; Justice Steven Breyer is ten years older than he.

What you can count on is that there will be at least one other Supreme Court appointment in the next four to eight years, and I for one would prefer to see a Democratic president when that happens, and — given Republican Senators who promised four years ago not to let Hillary Clinton fill any vacancies on the Court even if she won the 2016 election — a Democratic-majority Senate.

In the meantime, you can count on the Supreme Court to gut the Affordable Care Act, women's reproductive rights, gun control legislation, and marriage equality. That's what the mission of Republican court-packing has always been, confirmation hearings testimony notwithstanding. Again, I would prefer to see a Democratic president and a Democratic-majority Congress in office to pick up the pieces when those rulings come down.

But that's a discussion for another day. Shall we make it Saturday?

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.

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: Gettin' Jiggery-Pokery With It

When I read Jen Sorensen's email about drawing a cartoon for Fusion about the Supreme Court's decision for marriage equality in Obergefell v. Hodges, I only had time to draw one cartoon before her deadline and Q Syndicate's. (My drawing LGBT-themed cartoons for anyone other than Q Syndicate is also something of a contractual issue.) Had my time and my relationship with my editors been freer, I could easily have made two separate cartoons out of this one:

The idea on the left side of the cartoon is essentially a follow-up to the cartoon I drew last October illustrating Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s quotation about the arc of history bending toward justice. In an early sketch of this week's cartoon, the dissenting justices on the right side of the drawing were sitting on a porch in rocking chairs, shaking their fists at nothing in particular; no rainbow, no pot of gold wedding bands.

Now, I could argue that the rainbow clarifies what the topic of the cartoon is. The Supremes issued major rulings one on top of another last week, and people could get confused. (Heck, some people are sure to get confused. Chip Bok drew a cartoon yesterday about Justice Roberts's Obamacare ruling, and no small number of the commenters at GoComics thought it was somehow about marriage equality instead.)

I did, after all, include Justice Scalia's "jiggery-pokery" epithet in my cartoon, even though it came not from his Obergefell dissent but from his fulmination against Chief Justice Roberts's King v. Burwell opinion. I did try to find some equally obscure contumely in Scalia's Obergefell dissent to use instead, but Scalia had apparently misplaced his English-to-Flobbadob dictionary when writing it and settled for "Go ask a hippie."

By the way, when researching what I wanted to say in this blog entry, I looked up the dissenting opinions in the court's 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which ruled unconstitutional state laws prohibiting interracial marriage. I couldn't find any, because there were none. That court's ruling was unanimous.

Judging from the four, count 'em, four dissenting opinions in Obergefell, I'd be willing to bet that there would have been a dissenting opinion in Loving had Roberts, Scalia, Thomas or Alito traveled back in time to sit on the high court in 1967.

Marriage Equality Flashback

In celebration of today's Supreme Court ruling extending marriage equality to all fifty states -- and the separate dissents by each and every one of the justices in the minority, here's a cartoon from last year. 

Chief Justice Roberts wasn't in this cartoon, but I have a sneaking feeling he'll join this hapless trio in next week's cartoon.

Phelps Retrospective

Mr. Fred Phelps died yesterday, and as I said in yesterday's post, there are some who believe his passing is best ignored. The question of how to react to Fred Phelps and his cult following is nothing new.

Phelps first came to public attention in the early 1990's pushing to criminalize homosexuality in Topeka public parks. No doubt, homosexual activity in Topeka public parks was already illegal, so that must have been an easy win for him. Flush with that victory, he began busing his Westboro Baptist family around the country to gay pride events to wave their God Hates Fags pickets and shout abuse through bullhorns.

This won the ire of LGBT groups wherever he went (and wherever it was rumored he might show up), but little attention outside of the LGBT community. Leaders in the LGBT community decided that the best way to deal with the Westboro gang was to ignore them.

So Phelps decided to escalate. In 1998 came the gay-bashing murder of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, which came to national attention. Phelps announced that he and his spawn were going to wave their hateful pickets at Shepard's funeral. Taking a cue from a series of Nixon cartoons by Herblock (but with only one photo of Phelps to work from), I drew this:

Counter-protesters with enormous crane puppets (a mainstay of peace protests) shielded Shepard's mourners from the Westboro picketers, but Phelps was close enough to the limelight for the mainstream media to take notice. So he continued showing up at funerals of anyone at all remarkable who died of gay-bashing, AIDS, or "a lingering illness."

The Phelps clan financed their travels, it seems, by filing lawsuits against anyone whose response to their picketing could be construed as assault or infringing on their religious liberty. In the first month of the Dubya Bush administration, the new president promised federal handouts to faith-based religious social service organizations. I imagined that the Westborans might take advantage of this new source of funding:

My favorite Phelps cartoon came one year later, when a story came out that the New York Aquarium at Coney Island had a pair of male penguins, Wendell and Cass, who had seemed to have developed a mating bond. (A more famous pair at Manhattan's Central Park Zoo, Roy and Silo, made news a couple years later.)

By this time, Phelps and his spawn were having more difficulty attracting media attention, even after adding "Thank God for 9/11" to their picket canon. The mainstream media had figured out that he was news only if they made him news, and there were plenty of other nutty religious zealots out there. Again feeling ignored, Phelps upped the ante and started picketing the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2006, the family of one such soldier sued Phelps and two of his daughters for "defamation, intrusion upon seclusion, publicity given to private life, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy," in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2011, in Snyder v. Phelps, The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of Phelps and his ghouls (Justice Samuel Alito dissenting).

I've drawn other cartoons featuring the Phelps brood, but the nine-year gap between the penguin cartoon and the Snyder v. Phelps cartoon represents my attempt to go along with the conventional wisdom that it were best to ignore them.

It's sort of a shame that I had to draw this week's cartoon on Sunday in such a way that it would work whether Fred Phelps died right away or lingered for months. I had a better cartoon idea (similar to Nate Beeler's cartoon today) showing the Phelps clan at his grave site, brandishing "God Hates Dad" and "Grandpa In Hell" picket signs as one of them explains, "He would have wanted it this way."