Toon: Schmitt Republicans Say

In case you didn't catch it on C-Span or just about every news organization besides Fox Noisemax yesterday, Senate Republicans hauled former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith before the Judiciary Committee to castigate him for having the temerity to investigate Donald Berzelius Trump for his role in his January 6, 2021 attempted overthrow of the United States government.

Senator Eric Schmitt thought he had Smith in a perjury trap. Flashing a poster board of some on-line messages so quickly nobody could read them, Schmidt pressed Smith to repeat his testimony that he had not gone to Georgia in February, 2024, presumably to coordinate witness testimony there. Schmitt had his "Gotcha! moment" all set up: the text messages proved that Smith was at a Atlanta Hawks basketball game on February 3, 2024.

Schmitt concluded his presentation in highest dudgeon, scolding Smith, "You will go down as a total dirtbag!"

It turns out that Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Baltimore that day.

Senator Amy Klobuchar helped clear that up, and suggested that Schmitt owed Smith an apology for calling him a dirtbag on the basis of a mistaken text message.

Instead, Schmitt fumed, "I stand by my statement."

Q Toon: All Up In Her Business

Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian elected to the United States Senate, has had Republican opponents point out her sexual orientation in each of her four election campaigns. And I'm sure the guys have all just been trying to be helpful.

They don’t make it a campaign issue, but they never fail to mention it, in case there's some housewife up in Ashwaubenon who needed that nugget of information to make up her mind whom to vote for. I can't imagine why other Republican candidates don't bring up their heterosexual opponents’ sexuality unbidden, can you?

Senator Baldwin this year faces bank executive Eric Hovde, who has homes in both the Madison area and Laguna Beach, California; the latter described by the Los Angeles Times as "a mansion." Baldwin's TV and social media ads have played up his California residency, as well as statements Hovde made during his 2012 candidacy questioning allowing seniors who live in assisted living to vote, suggesting that farmers these days have it easy, proposing raising Social Security eligibility age to 72, and "completely" opposing abortion rights. Her tag line for these ads is "What's wrong with this guy?"

Hovde, since his last run, has grown a mustache that gives him the look of the guy in a 1980's movie plotting to steal away the girl, bulldoze the skateboard park, and buy out the rent-controlled apartment building where grandma lives. He has been trying to counter that California banker image with ads pointing out that Tammy Baldwin's girlfriend is a Wall Street financial manager whose investments might be affected by Senate legislation.

Some of his and his backers' ads call her "girlfriend," and some call her "partner." Hovde used the latter when he brought her up in the candidates' one and only debate appearance last Friday.

Baldwin and Maria Brisbane have been dating for about six years, and share an apartment in Washington D.C. They could get married if they wanted to, but for reasons that are none of our business, they haven't. Senate ethics rules have little to say about conflicts of interest covering the dating habits of unmarried members, and perhaps they should. Who wants the job of spelling out at what moment a relationship becomes reportable?

In the third panel of my cartoon this week, I quoted directly Baldwin's response to Hovde's demand that she report Ms. Brisbane's financial activities. I suspect it was a line Baldwin had ready and waiting to deliver, a handy pivot to Hovde's shared position with the Republican Party that women's health care decisions should be left up to statehouse politicians. 

She's hoping that it's a winning argument, and trends suggest it could be. Pro-choice advocates have done surprisingly well even in "red" states ever since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, revealing that Republicans' talk all this time about reducing the size of government meant making it small enough to fit inside a woman's vagina.

The couple in the fourth panel of my cartoon are fairly confident in Baldwin's prospects on November 5 — more confident than I am myself. The polls are reportedly running extremely close, within the margin of error. And you will recall that this state inexplicably tossed Senator Russ Feingold aside — twice — in favor of Ron Johnson, of all people.

Early voting in Wisconsin started on Tuesday, so I marched right on down to the village hall and did my part to send Ron Johnson Jr. back to Laguna Beach.

I'd keep my fingers crossed, but I still have some cartoons to draw.

Q Toons: Resolutions

I had been concerned that perhaps this news story, a kerfuffle picked up by a right-wing blog, might be too obscure. 

A gay staffer for U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) is no longer employed by the U.S. Senate, his office told the Washington Blade in a statement on Saturday morning, which followed reports that he had filmed amateur pornography in the workplace.

“We will have no further comment on this personnel matter,” Cardin’s office said.

The Daily Caller, a right-wing site founded by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, uploaded video and still images on Friday that purported to show leaked cell phone video of the staffer engaged in gay sex in a Senate hearing room of the Hart Senate Office Building, which is not in the U.S. Capitol building.

I needn't have worried. The story has already been lampooned by a few cartoonists who I suspect get plenty of topics from Daily Caller, but also by the late-night TV shows. After all, sex is always Breaking News!

Let this be a lesson to all you hunky dudes who turn to a little frisky business to supplement your day jobs.

The brand may be Only Fans, but nothing on the internet stays put in a lockbox in a private room of a secluded home behind a paywall for long. The internet is more like a Wuhan wet market: once something gets out, there's no getting it back.

I'm not making a judgment here. If you're okay with Tucker Carlson sharing your sexcapades to your boss, your priest, and your mother, fine, go ahead. More power to ya.

Clearly you've got the balls.

In Memory of Dianne Feinstein

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) passed away last weekend at the age of 90.

Hillary Rodham Clinton began her remembrance of Feinstein with this anecdote:

One day, on the floor of the Senate in 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig condescended to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic sponsor of a proposed ban on assault weapons. “The gentle lady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics,” he said. Craig, a board member of the National Rifle Association, had picked the wrong target.

“I am quite familiar with firearms,” Dianne responded, with fire in her eyes. “I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

Feinstein's bill would be passed by Congress and signed into law by Hillary's husband — unfortunately, with a sunset provision that allowed it to expire during the George W. Bush administration, facilitating horrible nationwide carnage in the decades since.

Feinstein was never quite as liberal as some people wanted her to be. Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On recounts early in her tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, she alienated many in the LGBTQ+ community (we only used half of that acronym back then) by not supporting municipal employee benefits for same-sex couples. In return, as AIDS began spreading like wildfire among gay men, that factored in the fierce resistance she faced against shutting down the city's bathhouses to address the crisis.

More recently, liberal Democrats excoriated her for not asking Brett Kavanaugh about allegations of  against him that she knew about when he appeared before the Senate confirmation panel to be elevated to the Supreme Court. So did Republicans, for completely different reasons, once those allegations were made public.

And of course, there were all the calls from her fellow Democrats for her to step down from her seat this year, given her health and perceptions of mental deterioration. Clearly, however, she had every intention of serving out the remaining months of her sixth term in the Senate. Well, old age ain't for sissies.

(On the topic of age: It would have been easier to have caricatured Feinstein as she appeared recently. I intentionally chose to make a caricature of her as she appeared decades ago.)

Whatever anyone thinks about her mayoral record, she has been an ally on LGBTQ+ and women's issues ever since being elected to the Senate in the "Year of the Woman" 31 years ago. On "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the "Defense of Marriage Act," women's reproductive health rights, and trans rights, her record has been virtually impeccable.

And now she has been succeeded by an out lesbian woman, Laphonza Butler, President of Emily's List and formerly an advisor to Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign.

Everything Old Is New Again

Italy appears poised to have fascists in their ruling coalition, almost exactly one century after the National Fascist Party came to power the first time.

"What's It All About in Italy" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Oct. 30, 1922

Mussolini's March on Rome came right at the end of October, 1922, when most U.S. editorial cartoonists were preoccupied with their local elections for Congress and/or governorships. Not John Knott, in spite of a senate race in Texas pitting a Ku Klux Klansman against a last-ditch candidate suing in court to get on the ballot.

Between a couple gaps in the on-line record of the Galveston Daily News in October and a few days when it doesn't appear to have run Knott's cartoons, I'll concede the possibility that Knott drew something about the candidates running for office in Texas. I just haven't found it.

"A Perfect Fit" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Nov. 4, 1922

I have come across a couple other early cartoons about the fascist victory in Italy, however. Dorman J. Smith was drawing for a national audience rather than a local one, so he wasn't as preoccupied as most cartoonists were with politics close to home. And unless I'm missing something here in an allusion that's older than Caligula, it seems to me that Smith actually approved of the fascists coming to power.

Conservatives today would never make such a mistake, would they? Would they?

"The Open Season for Politics" by John McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1922

To be fair, Americans of the 1920's had no experience with fascism yet. As far as our cartoonists a century ago were concerned, this was just another change of government in a land far away. 

Nowadays, you'd think people would know better.

"The Big Four" by Grover Page in Louisville Courier-Journal, Oct. 20, 1922

If Italian fascists didn't yet catch the interest of editorial cartoonists in the U.S., more of them took note of the break-up of Great Britain's coalition behind Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Grover Page depicts Lloyd George joining the former leaders of the other Entente powers, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau in involuntary retirement.

"A Dangerous Bookworm" by Harry Murphy for Star Publications, ca. Oct. 3, 1922

Joining Italian fascists in the repetition of history, we have this cartoon decrying wokeness in our schools. The newspaper empire of Anglophobe William Randolph Hearst was worried that impressionable schoolboys were being terrorized by textbooks infested with "propaganda belittling American Revolution."

"Still Teaching Treason" by Harry Murphy for Star Company, ca. Oct. 11, 1922

The textbooks weren't reminding them that many of our Founding Fathers were slave-owners, of course. Perhaps some textbook had the temerity to suggest that King George wasn't entirely wrong to expect the American colonists to help pay for the redcoats defending them from the French and Indians. 

Turn we now from America's leading Anglophobe to one of its leading Anglophiles.

"According to Ambassador Harvey" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Oct. 28, 1922

Faithful followers of these Saturday History Tours may remember John Cassel having caricatured U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, George Brinton McClellan Harvey with typographical symbols during a photoengravers' strike. Reported in the London Daily Telegraph, Ambassador Harvey gave an address to the Authors Club of London on the theme "Have Women Souls?"

At the start, Ambassador Harvey gave that "[O]ur preceptors in religion... would declare with concordant impatience, if pressed, that of course women have souls, and it is absurd, if not indeed positively sacrilegious, to suggest a doubt to the contrary."

Foolishly, he continued.

"And yet, they teach with like unanimity that woman is not the equal of man in the possession of inherent rights, but is and was designed by God to be his subordinate and subject."

Going on, Harvey observed that the Ten Commandments were written "exclusively for men": the fourth commandment lists who must not work in the home on the sabbath without mentioning wives; while the tenth forbids coveting one's neighbor's wife, but not one's neighbor's wife returning the coveting.

"Not a Woman Here" by John Cassel in New York Evening World, Oct. 26, 1922

"There is no recognition in the decalogue of the possession of souls or inherent rights by women. The fact of course is that women are not only not bound by but freed at last by inference of any obligation to observe the requirements of our fundamental religious law. ...

"[E]ither the commandments should be revised to meet the requirements of modern conditions, or a specific decalogue should be constructed exclusively for women." 

Harvey, it must be noted, was not being completely serious, and his audience received his talk in the light-hearted manner in which it was intended. Yet the ambassador had earned a reputation for shooting his mouth off, and his remarks rankled feminists and clergy on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Aren't They Going to Offer the Lady a Chair" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, Oct. 18,1922

Senate-appointee Rebecca Felton (D-GA, pictured here by John Knott) had a few words to say when reporters showed her Ambassador Harvey's remarks. 

"Ambassador Harvey is at home in politics — and he seems to be at a banquet table — but he is all wrong and away out of his element in commenting on the Ten Commandments and their application to women. ... That's the most amusing thing I've seen today. Isn't it funny how so many men try to change things that have been in existence for thousands and thousands of years.

"I'm glad I saw that dispatch, though. It does one so much good to be amused when suffering from a bad cold. I feel a great deal better already."

"She May Come" by Clifford Berryman in Washington (DC) Evening Star, Oct. 5, 1922

Rebecca Felton has the distinction of being the first woman to serve as United States Senator, although it was only for one day. Appointed by the governor in an effort to appeal to women voters (in a state that resisted women's suffrage) after the death of Sen. Thomas Watson, she was named with the understanding that she wouldn't stand in the way of the men running for the seat in November.

As these two cartoons suggest, there was the distinct possibility that the Senate would not be in session to seat the 87-year-old Felton at all. Senate leadership did, however, call the body into session on November 21 just so she could be sworn in and give a speech. 

In that speech, Felton, an advocate of both Prohibition and women's suffrage predicted, "When the women of the country come in and sit with you…you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness."

She might be a heroine to the feminist movement today if she weren't also an outspoken white supremacist and erstwhile slave owner.

You have to like Clifford Berryman's awkward attempt to address "Mrs. Senator Felton," though.

John Knott on the Horrible 1922 Run-off Race in Texas

This week's Graphical History Tour again focuses on one month, one issue, and one cartoonist: John Knott and the Texas's August 26, 1922 run-off election for the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Senator. The election would be won by the Ku Klux Klan's candidate, Earle Mayfield.

I have to start off by admitting that I probably don't have all the cartoons that Knott drew for the anti-Klan Dallas Morning News. My contemporary source for Knott's cartoons I posted in July had identified his work as having been originally published in the Galveston Daily News, which did indeed run Knott's cartoons on its front pages. But according to a Dallas Morning News article last October, Knott was their cartoonist from 1906 to 1957, save for his three semesters studying at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Germany (1910-11).  

"A Sad Case" by John F. Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 19, 1922

So it's a pity that, as Knott himself perhaps argues here, these cartoons all hail from the Galveston paper rather than the Dallas one. (I'm dating them according to when they appeared in the Galveston Daily News.) If the Dallas Morning News campaigned against the Klan, there doesn't appear to be any such advocacy on the cartoons by Knott in the Galveston Daily News. 

"A Sad Case" should, however, be appreciated by every editorial cartoonist who has had to deal with editors, publishers, and readers who think that editorial cartoons are supposed to be, first and foremost, funny. And fair and impartial. And appeal to everybody.

"Who's Going to Win" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 20, 1922

As far as I've been able to determine, Knott was the only editorial cartoonist in the employ of any newspaper in Texas at the time, and was printed exclusively in the Dallas and Galveston Newses. A few papers ran the syndicated cartoons of William C. Morris, Elmer Bushnell, Terry Gilkison, and the occasionally political Magnus Kettner; many newspapers around the state printed those of the NEA's Dorman H. Smith. Meanwhile, the Houston Post wasn't publishing editorial cartoons at all.

None of those syndicated cartoonists had anything to say that summer about Klan-supported candidates running for office in Texas or anywhere else, so Knott had the topic all to himself. By all accounts, the run-off contest between Mayfield and impeached former Gov. James "Pa" Ferguson was a lively one, with brawls breaking out in the crowds as the candidates accused each other of perjury, drunkenness, and sexual impropriety.

Now, to be fair, Dallas Morning News editor Will Pry assures us that John Knott's cartoons were not all as milquetoast as the ones on this page:

He also had considerable influence over his audience, a byproduct of being the illustrative voice of the paper of record in the era before TV, let alone Twitter. James Ferguson, former governor of Texas, once said that a Knott cartoon cost him an election. Another, drawn when the Ku Klux Klan was making headlines in Dallas, was said to have swung a school board election.

"Relief Promised for Today" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 26, 1922

Knott and his "Old Man Texas" (uncharacteristically hatless in this cartoon) could count themselves lucky that the Mayfield-Ferguson run-off wasn't conducted in an age of independent attack ads punctuating every television program. One had to go out of one's way to be subjected to the candidates' heated oratory; in the newspaper, one could easily turn the page and read the baseball scores.

"Thank Heaven, I'm Out of It" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 27, 1922

In an ordinary election campaign of those days, Mayfield's victory in the August 26 run-off election for the Democratic nomination would have meant Old Man Texas was effectively "out of it." The Texas Republican Party was not a factor to be reckoned with at this point in history.

But Republicans and anti-Klan "Independent Democrats" would make one last effort to stop Mayfield by mounting a write-in campaign for George Peddy, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, in November. Would John Knott have anything to say about it?

Stay tuned, but don't get your hopes up.

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.

 

QToon: In Fairness

Today's cartoon quotes from a tweet by Republican Senator Susan Collins over the weekend:

The danger in drawing about something because it didn't happen or wasn't said is that while you're waiting for your syndicate to send the cartoon out and newspapers to print it, that thing that didn't happen or wasn't said might just get itself happened or said.

But Senator Collins has racked up such a long history of raising the hopes of liberals and moderates only to dash them when time comes for her to act, I thought there was every likelihood that she would knuckle under to Republican Party Orthodoxy in the end.

So yesterday, Collins did say that she wouldn't vote for whomever Trump nominates.

The catch to what Collins said yesterday is that she hasn't — yet — said how she'd vote on a Trump nominee after November 3. She's merely against voting before the election. Voters in Maine may wish to know how she intends to vote, especially if Joe Biden were to beat Donald Trump, before they decide whether or not to vote for her.

The handful of Republican moderates in the Senate may recognize their ethical dilemma, but they are vastly outnumbered by doctrinaire Republicans who have been salivating at the prospect of a permanent Republican majority on the Supreme Court for over half a century.

Doctrinaire conservatives still have difficulty coming up with a coherent explanation why refusing to give any consideration to President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland nearly a year before the next presidential inauguration was a matter of constitutional principle, and so is confirming whomever Trump nominates with just a month and a half until the next election.

As recently as July, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee back in 2016, told reporters that if he were still the committee chair this year and a Supreme Court vacancy occurred, “I would not have a hearing on it because that’s what I promised the people in 2016.” Now that it's September and that vacancy is reality, he's content to let Mitch McConnell and current committee chair Lindsey Graham have hearings and a confirmation vote if they want.

Sen. Ron Johnson, whose position in 2016 was, "In the politicized atmosphere of an election year, you probably shouldn't even nominate someone. It's not fair to the nominee, it's not fair to the court," now claims that having a Senate majority of the same political party as the president has de-politicized the atmosphere this year. Or something like that.

Sen. Ted Cruz was on CBS This Morning yesterday morning and offered the idea that since the 2020 election might go to the courts, it's imperative that it not be possible for the Supremes to split 4-4. He didn't offer any explanation why that possibility was acceptable in 2016.

Here's what other Republican senators were saying in 2016:

“I don’t think we should be moving forward with a nominee in the last year of this president’s term. I would say that even if it was a Republican president.” — Sen. Marco Rubio.

“I think we’re too close to the election. The president who is elected in November should be the one who makes this decision... Our next election is too soon and the stakes are too high; the American people deserve a role in the process as the next Supreme Court justice will influence the direction of this country for years to come.” — Sen. Cory Gardner, interview on KNUS radio

“I believe the American people deserve to have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice, and the best way to ensure that happens is to have the Senate consider a nomination made by the next President.”—Sen. John Cornyn, official statement

“We will see what the people say this fall and our next president, regardless of party, will be making that nomination.”—Sen. Jodi Ernst

But the poster boy for principle whiplash is Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said four years ago:

“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.”

Turns out there's a simple explanation why you shouldn't use Lindsey's old words against him, though. Those nasty Democrats were mean to Brett Kavanaugh over some silly old sexual harassment allegations, so naturally, Lindsey's panties have been in a wad ever since. 

And after Republicans were so polite to Merrick Garland!

McConnell's Rules

We interrupt our continuing coverage of those Wacky Windsors to check in on how things are going with the impeachment trial of Donald Berzelius Trump.

Ah, yes. Pretty much as we had expected. And now back to "Up the Palace!"

Q Toon: Righteousness, But Heard A Cry

Donald Berzilius Trump likes to castigate the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives as "do-nothing"; but even with investigations and impeachment stuff, the House has in fact sent a lot of popular legislation to the Senate.

There the legislation languishes. The Senate, it seems, is too busy packing the courts with Trump-appointed right-wing ideologues whom the American Bar Association finds "not qualified."

The latest such appointee is Lawrence VanDyke, a former Solicitor General in Montana and Nevada, and Assistant Solicitor General in Texas. In those posts he has challenged against federal gun control laws, wrote a brief in support of anti-abortion legislation in Arizona, and fought federal environmental regulations. Trump has nominated VanDyke to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, just one level below the Supreme Court.

Colleagues interviewed by the ABA described VanDyke as "arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge of the day-to-day practice" of law. The ABA found that "There was a theme that the nominee lacks humility, has an 'entitlement temperament,' does not have an open mind, and does not always have a commitment to being candid and truthful."

At VanDyke's Senate confirmation hearing October 30, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) asked him about the concern that, in the ABA's words, "Mr. VanDyke would not say affirmatively that he would be fair to any litigant before him, notably members of the LGBTQ community."

After fifteen seconds of silence, during which he must have been picturing dead puppies, remembering being picked last for team sports, and playing Randy VanWarmer songs in his head, VanDyke tearfully sobbed, “No, I did not say that. I do not believe that. It is a fundamental belief of mine that all people are created in the image of God. They should all be treated with dignity and respect.”

VanDyke, 46, has been accused of attacking LGBTQ rights as far back as 2004, when in an op-ed for The Harvard Law Record he said that there was “ample reason for concern that same-sex marriage will hurt families, and consequentially children and society.” In 2010, he argued that college student groups had a First Amendment right to exclude LGBTQ students from membership. Two years later, while serving as Montana solicitor general, VanDyke argued against same-sex marriage in two cases, and in a third argued that photographers should be entitled to deny their services at wedding ceremonies of same-sex couples.

VanDyke has also represented and worked as a legal intern for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is described by the Human Rights Campaign as the “largest anti-LGBTQ legal group in the U.S.” and has been designated a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, views VanDyke’s connection to a group that has defended proposed laws to require sterilization of transgender people and criminalize same-sex relationships as evidence of “his acceptance of its radical agenda.”

As McConnell boasted at Trump's campaign rally in Kentucky on Monday, Republicans are “changing the federal courts forever” by rubber-stamping Trump's right-wing judges — 150 of them so far — to lifetime seats. “And Mr. President, we’re going to keep on doing it. My motto is: Leave no vacancy behind.”

This week, Senate Republicans are working to confirm several more right-wing judges, including White House lawyer Steven Menashi to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York and Halil Suleyman Ozerden to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

And the only threat to these nominations is that some Republicans worry that someone might sneak through who isn't quite doctrinaire enough.

Remembering Fritz Hollings

Retired Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings (D-SC) died Saturday at the age of 97.

To my generation at least, he will chiefly be remembered as the Democrat who signed onto the Republicans' Gramm-Rudman bill in 1986: an attempt to cut the federal deficit by blindly cutting all government expenditures by a uniform percentage.

Oh, and he tried running for president once. But that didn't last long, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody outside of his immediate family who remembers when that was.

Q Toon: Misguidance Counselor

I usually try to avoid addressing the same topic in two syndicated cartoons in a row; but keeping Transgender Awareness Day this coming Sunday in mind, I figured it was worthwhile to point out Senator Joe Manchin's (D-WV) reasoning for coming out as the lone Democrat in the Senate against the Equality Act.

Besides, he's got one of those faces (and haircuts) that just begs for caricature.

As far as Manchin is concerned, it's another case where we're not allowed to have nice things because, you know, public school bathrooms.

I strongly support equality for all people and do not tolerate discrimination of any kind. No one should be afraid of losing their job or losing their housing because of their sexual orientation. After speaking with local education officials in West Virginia, I am not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it, particularly with respect to students transitioning between genders in public schools.

Call me a skeptic, but I sincerely doubt that any "guidance to the local officials" that could be amended to the bill wouldn't provide Senator Manchin further reason to withhold his support.

As last week's cartoon illustrated, the Equality Act has virtually no chance of making it through the McConnell-controlled Senate anyway. Still, it does shine a light on who supports LGBTQ rights and who doesn't. Republicans across the nation have instead been pushing "religious liberty" laws to promote discrimination against LGBTQ people.

This is especially important as some states consider laws that would deliberately create a license for businesses, adoption and foster care agencies, health care providers and others to discriminate against LGBT people. Human Rights Watch has documented how these so-called “religious liberty” laws deny LGBT people goods and services, deter them from the marketplace for fear of facing discrimination, and send a signal that they are unwelcome in their state. By clarifying that religious protections cannot be used to discriminate, the Equality Act would better ensure that both religious believers and LGBT people are protected under federal law.
It would also make anti-discrimination laws clear and uniform, which is necessary if these laws are to be effective. LGBT people should not need a law degree to determine whether they are protected from discrimination when they apply for a job, rent an apartment, or eat at a restaurant in the places they happen to live, visit or travel through.

If, as I suspect, the only way to get Senator Manchin on board is to carve out a broad exception for public schools, that would inevitably be followed by a demand that private schools also be exempted. And if private schools, then also landlords, businesses, adoption and foster care agencies, health care providers and — perhaps you see where this is going.

Q Toon: I Hear You Knocking

Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced the 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 measure seems certain to pass in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.

Chief Senate sponsor Jeff Merkley (D-OR) has a tougher row to hoe. Among Republicans, only Maine's Susan Collins has signed on to the bill; and one of the Democrats' own, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has announced that he will vote against the bill. His problem with the bill seems to come from its inclusion of transgender students among those whose rights it would protect.

Manchin had not made his decision known as I was drawing this cartoon Sunday night. Had I chosen to make him the focus of the cartoon, I suppose I would have drawn the other Democrats calling down a coal mine shaft.

As far as Yertle McConnell is concerned, however, when he eventually comes out of his shell, we'll find out whether it is to attach some poison pill amendment (say, protecting the rights of Clockwork Orange "reparation therapists") or to kill the Equality Act outright.

Q Toon: If Chuck Could Chuck Brett

Meanwhile, back on the home front:

As you may recall, last week I didn't draw a cartoon about Trump's appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court because I had to send it off to my syndicate editors before the announcement was made.

So it kind of bugs me that I could easily have drawn this cartoon a week ago, but for the fact that the dialogue in panel two is a direct quotation of Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). I could easily have predicted that he would say something very much like it, and sent my editors five versions of this cartoon with only the name in that panel changed.

(That would have actually meant sending them fifteen versions of the cartoon, because I always send a grayscale version and a CMYK version for print and an RGB version for the web. But that's technical stuff and beside the point.)

Democrats have a minority in the Senate and no tie-breaker in the Vice President's chair. Furthermore, they have Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, and Doug Jones who are perfectly comfortable crossing party lines to vote with Republicans. "I am not a member of any organized political party," as Will Rogers famously said; "I am a Democrat."

Some pundits have floated the idea that Democrats might be able to peel Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins away from the Republican monolith on the basis of Kavanaugh's hostility to Roe v. Wade, or Sen. Rand Paul on the basis of the nominee's deference to an imperial presidency. To which I say, "Dream on." The occasional Republican may express reservations about Trumpism from time to time, but none ever do so with their votes. Just their retirements.

But soldier on, Senator Schumer. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Q Toon: Trump Comes a-Courting

With the announced retirement of Anthony Kennedy, Donald Joffrey Trump gets to name a second Supreme Court Justice in as many years. If anyone thought that America's foray into reactionary totalitarianism would be but a four-year fluke of history, anyone is about to be proven sadly mistaken.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, having bottled up President Obama's appointment of Merrick Garland for nearly a year, promises to grease the skids for whomever Trump names. I'm sure Mr. Kim will continue in his current job; Trump's nominee will probably be someone from that list of ideologues vetted by the Heritage Foundation.

But Mr. McConnell's record suggests that Trump could nominate Beelzebub himself and Mitch would shrug and go along with it.

Remembering Ed Garvey

Ed Garvey died this week at the age of 76. Garvey was a labor lawyer from Burlington, Wisconsin, perhaps best known for having been executive director of the National Football League Players Association during their strikes in 1974 and 1982.

After leaving the NFL Players Association post, he entered Wisconsin politics, serving as Wisconsin's Deputy Attorney General, then winning the Democratic nomination for the 1986 Senate race against Republican Robert Kasten. His campaign against Kasten, an unremarkable freshman senator elected in the Reagan wave of 1980, has to be included among the Wisconsin Democratic Party's many lost opportunities.

Garvey's TV and radio ads hammered Kasten, highlighting — among other things — the Senator's refusal to release his tax returns, and his having been arrested in 1985 for driving drunk on the wrong side of the road and running a red light (the charges were dropped). Consumer advocate Ralph Nader came to Wisconsin to campaign for Garvey, calling Kasten a "chronic drunk" who needs "rehabilitation rather than re-election." Kasten's campaign manager countered Nader's attack by accusing Garvey of "mov[ing] his campaign from the gutter to the sewer."

Nationally, 1986 was a good year for Democrats, but not in Wisconsin. With Kasten vastly outspending Garvey, there wasn't much doubt that he would win re-election. The race ended up being a bit closer than some pre-election polls had predicted; so if Garvey had somehow managed to pull an upset win, there would still have been readers who would have found this post-election cartoon (drawn before the returns were in) appropriate.

Garvey made a quixotic run for governor against Tommy Thompson in 1998, at the height of Governor Thompson's popularity. At the time I was drawing separate cartoons for two University of Wisconsin student newspapers, the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, In Step Magazine and Q Syndicate; yet somehow, I did not draw a single cartoon about the gubernatorial race all year. The Business Journal editorialized on the Feingold-Neumann senate race a few times, requiring cartoons to match; the LGBT press was more interested in Tammy Baldwin's election to Congress.

Madison blogger Gregory Humphrey summed up Garvey's legacy in a more positive light than my cartoons have, so I'll let his words be the ones to leave you with:

"His optimism about the future needs of our political institutions was always strong as he continued to speak out and strongly support those who had a message that often echoed his own. He proved that politics it is not only about winning or losing but keeping the spirit of the fight alive even when the odds are against you."

Q Toon: Candidate of Change

She may be behind in the polls by double digits, but I thought this might be a good time to take note of Misty Snow, the Democratic nominee for Utah's Senate seat, currently held by Tea Partisan Mike Lee. Snow is the first transgender candidate to win a major party nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Democrats don't stand much of a chance to win statewide elections in Utah, and it probably doesn't help Snow that she has what sounds like a porn name. Being transgender, she can't blame her parents for that. Officially, she is running as Misty K. Snow, which at least upgrades her name to sounding like the stage name of a satellite radio DJ.

Watson A. Name

"Misty" isn't even short for another name, as Cassie, Cindy, Betsy or Sandy are. Unless there's some female equivalent of Mstislav.

I was trying to think whether any male names presented the same sort of handicap as "Misty," Take-Me-Serious-wise. We've had a Vice President Hubert and a President Jimmy; a candidate could probably get away with a moniker like Chip or Butch. Walter Mondale was well advised not to campaign as Wally; but nobody addresses Bernie Sanders as "Bernard."

The worst male name for public office I've been able to think of is "Scooter," although that's not too far removed from "Scoop," the name of a long-time Senator from Washington. Scoop Jackson was even taken seriously as a presidential candidate in 1976 (just not by actual voters).

Lindsey Graham, perhaps, could only have gotten elected in South Carolina.

Q Toons: There's Something About Liz

Longtime Virginia resident Liz Cheney, conservative talking head and elder daughter of Dubya's Vice President, has returned to her childhood home of Wyoming to run for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate race in 2014 (that nomination being the de facto general election, it being Wyoming.)

She's taking on sitting Republican Senator Mike Enzi by running to the right of the solidly conservative Senator -- he garnered a 96% voting rating from the American Conservative Union in 2012. She's doing her best to appeal to the teahadist, theocratic dittoheads who have been agitating to return the U.S. to frontier values, just like in Deadwood and The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Enzi's supporters have tried to undercut Cheney's appeal to theocrats by suggesting that she might support marriage equality, insofar as Cheney's sister, Mary, married her longtime partner, Heather Poe, last year, and the two are the parents of Liz's two nieces, aged 2 and 6. Liz responded by telling the world that she doesn't believe in Mary and Heather's marriage.

“I am strongly pro-life and I am not pro-gay marriage,” Cheney said in a statement released by her campaign. “I believe the issue of marriage must be decided by the states, and by the people in the states, not by judges and not even by legislators, but by the people themselves.”

We are told that the Cheney's are a close-knit family, but they have had such a difficult time accepting Mary's family publicly that she must be used to it by now. When Mary and Heather were expecting their first child, Vice President Dick got testy with reporters asking him about it. My cartoon about that made it into the Los Angeles Times:

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q SyndicateϪJan 31, 2007 EditorialCartoonists.com

Dick Cheney -- and his different-sex wife, Lynne -- had also gotten testy when Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards attempted to goad him into supporting or rejecting Mary in a 2004 televised debate...

Now that Dick Cheney is safely out of the Vice Presidency, he has been more publicly supportive of Mary and her family. But, presumably, he is no longer interested in running for elective office, and doesn't have to pander to that influential Republican constituency that has been devoted to devaluing, demeaning and destroying families such as the Poe-Cheneys for more than a generation.

I'd like to think that the Focus on the Family Tea Party Birther nativist English-only God-Guns-and-GOP folks are not all as nasty, mean and vile as the ones that dominate Fox News, AM radio, TP rallies, and internet comment sections -- that among them are some who are not completely heartless misanthropes.

But perhaps Liz Cheney knows them better than I do.