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 Toon: The Overturners

Our ethically challenged Supreme Court is set to hand down their rulings for the year this month. Given the right-wingers' determination to overturn precedent wherever it suits them, we can anticipate some doozies.

Justices Thomas and Alito in particular have expressly condemned established case law involving privacy rights under the 14th Amendment that has granted citizens the right to contraception, extramarital sex within one's own home, and same-sex marriage. (Those 14th Amendment rulings include mixed-race marriage rights, too, but least one of them seems okay with leaving that precedent alone. Although overturning Loving v. Virginia could render Justice Thomas's ethical dilemma moot.)

The Justices in today's cartoon have already overturned half a century of precedent on abortion rights— which, frankly, shouldn't have surprised anybody as much as it did. The Court had been hacking away at the edges of Roe v. Wade for most of those fifty years, stocked as it has been by every Republican administration with committed anti-abortion activists.

Those Republican Justices are equally committed to bolstering the rights of corporations over individuals of lesser means. The monies, properties, vacations, and campers Justice Thomas has accepted from well-heeled amici curiae would have made Abe Fortas blush. But you really can't argue that such corporate largesse influenced his opinions. That stuff was not so much bribes as loyalty perks.

And then there's United States v. Trump. Handed the open-and-shut question in April of whether a Former President Named Donald Trump has absolute and permanent immunity against being charged with his crimes, the Supremes decided they needed more time to think about it. Perhaps our Constitutional Originalists and their ouija boards will have figured out by the end of June how the Founding Fathers meant to grant Trump immunity without extending the same to Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Carter.

Oyez, oyez, oyez.

Q Toon: America, We Hear You

Mass murders in the U.S. continue to outnumber the days on the calendar this year — a statistic made possible by the conjoined statistic that guns outnumber U.S. citizens.

The response by Republican lawmakers is epitomized by Tennessee Congresscretin Tim Burchett, who promised grieving parents after the massacre of six schoolchildren and staff in his state, "We're not going to fix it."

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it,” Burchett said. “Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the Second World War, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, ‘Buddy,’ he said, ‘if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”

And also by the yahoos in the Nebraska legislature, who are poised to allow concealed carry without permit or gun safety training, thus voiding ordinances in Omaha and Lincoln.

Amid the daily carnage this month, the National Rifle Association held its annual convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Guns and cash exchanged hands in the parking lot with nary a thought given to whether either party to the transaction were a criminal, mentally unstable, a terrorist, or Gov. Kristi Noem's two-year-old kid.

Because, you see, as far as the NRA and its ammosexual fetishists are concerned, guns are not the problem; guns are the solution. And they'll be more than happy to sell you as many and whatever arms you think you need to protect yourself against their other customers.

As a result, in just the past week, two cheerleaders were shot in Texas when one of them got into a car she mistakenly thought was hers in a supermarket parking lot. We also had a scared shitless gun owner in Kansas City firing his gun through his front door and shooting in the head a 16-year-old boy who was supposed to pick up his little brother and sister and had rung the wrong doorbell. And some other shoot-first-think-later homeowner in upstate New York shot dead a 20-year-old woman in a car that was backing out of his driveway when the women in the car realized they weren't at the house of their friend.

Now, I've never had a stranger open my car door by mistake, but there's nothing at all unusual about people using our driveway to turn around instead of driving around the block. It's usually delivery people or neighbors' guests. If unwanted salespersons, or kids looking to earn money mowing lawns come to the door, we tell them we aren't interested, or sometimes we just ignore them.

But then, we don't belong to the NRA.

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: Count On It

It's hard to tell what the Republican Party stands for any more.

Other than coming to power By Any Means Necessary, that is.

The party that impeached a president over a blow job wasn't in the least bothered by a president who attempted to overthrow the government by force. And they're just fine with a senate candidate who fathered and abandoned a bunch of children with various girlfriends, and paid for at least one abortion, which I used to think was the GOP's biggest no-no.

Paying for things, that is.

Every time there's a mass shooting somewhere, the GOP wails that it's too soon to talk about even the slightest, weakest gun control legislation. Turns out that the time to talk about crime is in the three months before a general election, during commercial breaks when you're trying to watch Jeopardy! or Dancing with the Stars.

There is a long list of things that Republicans are against, of course. They hate transgender children, gays, lesbians, admitting that centuries of oppression against peoples of color has any lasting effect, cities, public schools, protecting any corner of the environment that isn't a golf course, science, health care, other people's religion or lack thereof, and on and on.  

And now they are against counting the votes of people who manage to vote for Democrats in spite of Republicans' decades-long efforts to prevent them from voting in the first place.

Sure, there are still some Republicans who still believe in democracy. But their days are numbered thanks to all the RINO hunters in their ruby-red districts who don't.

Here in Wisconsin, the voting laws and the Elections Commission were created by the Republican legislature and signed into effect by Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2015. Republicans had no complaints when Donald Berzelius Trump won the state the next year, or in the off-year elections of 2017, 2018, and 2019. (Okay, they weren't happy with Democrat Tony Evers winning the governorship, but they used their majority in the legislature to strip the governorship of most of its powers before he could take office.)

When the majority of Wisconsin voters voted for Joe Biden, suddenly Republicans wanted to overrule the voice of the people and declare Trump the winner anyway. Governor Evers's vetoes have been the only thing stopping them from disbanding the bipartisan Elections Commission and replacing it with one that will have a Republican majority as long as Republicans remain in charge of the redistricting process. And being in charge of the redistricting process enables them to remain in charge of the redistricting process forever.

Republican billionaires are outspending Democrats and liberal interest groups in advertising aimed at replacing Governor Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul with conspiracy-mongering election deniers, and in achieving a veto-proof GOP majority in the legislature. (Judging from the disappearance of the TV ads against transgender Democrat Jessica Katzenmeyer running for State Senate, they may believe that their goal has been met; 2022 redistricting made the 15th district more heavily Republican anyway.)

Elsewhere in the country, the arsonists are already in charge of the fire department. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sent his Gestapo The Vote squad into the inner cities to arrest felons — almost all of them Black by some strange coincidence — who had served their time and mistakenly thought they had regained the voting rights of ordinary citizens. Whether he'll dump them back into prison or fly them to Martha's Vineyard remains to be seen.

Whether he'll get around to rounding up similar felons in Republican districts also remains to be seen. I'm sure there are plenty of right-wingers on the registered sexual offender list in the Florida panhandle, and some of them tried to vote in 2020, but don't hold your breath waiting for the DeSantis goons showing up at their mobile homes.

In all, 291 Republican candidates for Congress, governorships, secretaries of state, attorneys general, and other constitutional offices around the country continue to cast aspersions against the will of the people in the 2020 elections.

Some may even have been supported by idiot Democrats who thought they'd be easier to beat in the fall. But over half of them are expected to win election to office.

There are far too many win-at-any-cost right-wing stooges who would vote for Elagabalus if he ran as a Republican.

Toon: Tim Michels

During the primaries, Tim Michels, the Trumplican gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin, told right-wing radio audiences that the state's antebellum anti-abortion law is an "exact mirror of my position." The 1849 law, which went back into effect when the Alito-Thomas Court overturned Roe v. Wade this year, makes abortion a crime in practically all circumstances, including cases of rape, incest, or a danger to the woman's health.

Even after the August primary, he told a Dane County Republican audience that he would not soften his anti-abortion stance to allow for exceptions for rape and incest cases. 

Since then, he has allowed for the possibility that he would sign a bill that would allow rape and incest victims to terminate a resulting pregnancy, in the event that our legislature with its entrenched Republican majority were to send him such a bill.

Given, however, that our Republican state legislature summarily adjourned within seconds the special session Governor Evers had called on the abortion issue, only a fool would hold out hope that they would send a Governor Michels that bill.

Independent (of Whom?)

Remember a couple months back when I asked whether anyone remembered a publication called the Madison Independent somewhere around 1982?

Nobody has stepped up with information about it, but we did receive two issues of this in the mail this summer:

The "About Us" insert that came with one of them claims that the Wisconsin Independent is staffed by experienced journalists, and there's a QR code if you care to send in recipes or to unsubscribe. In spite of a bare-bones crossword and articles about such things as blackbirds and the Packers, the rest does read like campaign literature.

There's no masthead, nor any boilerplate identifying it as campaign literature; just a return address for the American Independent at a P.O. box in Washington D.C.

Also, no cartoons, so, meh. 

There is a definite liberal tilt to the articles about politics. Not the sort of liberal bias conservatives complain about when the mainstream media don't act as docile cheerleaders parroting right-wing talking points. This stuff is a left-wing counterbalance to Fox News and talk radio. Or that complimentary issue of Epoch Times my dad got in his mail this week.

I figured the proof of the pudding would be if the Wisconsin Independent stopped coming to our house as soon as this year's election is over.

But we haven't received a September issue, so I guess we'll never know.

Wis. Dems Running for Senate

The five candidates running for Wisconsin's Democratic nomination to unseat Senator Ron Johnson met in what, for lack of a better word, was a debate in Milwaukee on Sunday night. Just about all of the questions by Moderators Charles Benson and Shannon Sims were in the form of "How has issue X directly affected you, and what, specifically, are you going to do about it? You have 120 seconds."

With barely any difference between one candidate and the next on any issue, most of their time was spent attacking Senator Johnson. There were very few attacks on each other; the rules allowed any candidate mentioned by name by another candidate 60 seconds to respond, so they wisely refrained from thereby giving someone else the last word.

We've seen a lot of the candidates in the foreground of my sketch: from left to right, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Milwaukee Bucks executive Vice President Alex Lasry, and Wisconsin Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, both on TV and in social media. 

When Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson's ad touting his rural roots aired after the debate, it was the first time I'd seen anything from him. (So I added the hat he wore in the commercial to the drawing.) He was the only one to talk about the Green New Deal by name; his repeated talking point was that he got himself elected County Exec in a solidly Republican county.

For the fifth candidate, Steven Olikara, founder of "The Millennial Action Project," the debate was an opportunity for him to finally reach beyond his Tik Tok followers. Instead of talking about how Issue X had directly affected him and what specifically he wanted to do about it — even when Issue X was abortion rights — he quickly pivoted to getting money out of politics.

There is no daylight between the front-runners on the issue of a woman's right to bodily autonomy; the difference has been how quickly they responded to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Godlewski had a TV ad of her on the Supreme Court steps the very next day after the court's decision was announced. Lasry soon followed with an ad of him in a kitchen with his wife, who works at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and their toddler daughter. Barnes has recently begun airing an ad featuring his mother talking about her decision to end a pregnancy.

An aside here: I saw an ad on TV last week from a candidate for office touting her commitment to protect women's reproductive rights. I had never heard of her, and it turned out that she is running to succeed Godlewski as State Treasurer.

I'm kind of wondering what role our State Treasurer has in restoring abortion rights (an 1849 ban has supposedly gone back into effect here), but you can bet it will add one more reason why state Republicans want to get rid of the office.

The Republican candidates for Governor meet for one of these televised debates next week, and it promises to be a more lively affair. There will be fewer people on stage, for one thing. And the two leading candidates, former newscaster turned former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, and Trump-endorsed construction executive Tim Michels, have been brutally attacking each other in their television ads for weeks.

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.

Q Toon: Closing Time

The Party of Small Government is in charge in Idaho, where the statehouse passed a bill in March to criminalize medical care for transgender youth.

It is only one of over a dozen anti-transgender bills authored by Republicans this year:

In each of these states, the bills would either criminalize health care providers who provide gender-affirming care to minors or subject them to discipline from state licensing boards. Bills in ten states would also allow individuals to file civil suits for damages against medical providers who violate these laws. Bills in six states provide penalties for parents who facilitate minors’ access to gender-affirming medical care.

About half of these bills would further limit access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth by barring certain insurance providers from offering coverage for gender-affirming care, by placing restrictions on the use of state funds or state facilities to provide this care, or by excluding gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense. Bills in seven states would prohibit certain health insurance plans from offering coverage for gender-affirming care. In eight states, bills would prohibit the use of state funds for gender-affirming care or more broadly prohibit distribution of state funds to any organization or individual that provides gender-affirming care to minors, seemingly regardless of what the funding is used for. In five states, bills would prohibit gender-affirming care by or in government-owned or operated facilities, and by individual providers employed by government entities. In four states, bills would exclude gender-affirming care as a tax-deductible health care expense.

Finally, a bill proposed in Missouri would attempt to limit access to gender-affirming care by classifying it as child abuse similar to the order recently issued in Texas.

Republicans are simultaneously charging full speed ahead with their assault on reproductive rights. 22 states are set to criminalize abortion providers and/or patients, often with no exception for rape, incest, or any consideration of the health of the mother.

An Alabama OB-GYN writing in Slate last week warned that her experience, seeing doctors refuse to treat women suffering a miscarriage for fear of being charged with a crime, will go nationwide as soon as Samuel Alito's draft ruling becomes the Law Of The Land.

...I saw a patient in active miscarriage (bleeding, passing clots, cramping) who had just had an office visit with her primary physician. She was forced to wait more than 48 hours in order to get the results of her bloodwork. Doctors will sometimes check a patient’s levels of HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin, to help distinguish miscarriages from ongoing pregnancies or ectopic pregnancies. I could not understand why someone with all of the clinical signs of a miscarriage in progress was required to wait for much-needed intervention, all the while bleeding and cramping and suffering.

I was angry that the patient’s doctor did not just provide the standard medical treatment for a miscarriage: surgically removing the contents of her uterus, which would stop her pain and bleeding. Then I saw a different patient who was actively miscarrying, and a light bulb clicked on: The doctors were afraid of being attacked by the state of Alabama.

Suffice it to say that Red State women who can afford plane fare to Illinois or Ireland, or perhaps a zealous malpractice attorney, won't be faced with this grim scenario. But for the woman barely making ends within shouting distance of each other at a minimum wage job, or the girl still living under the roof of her rapist... well, we know which lives matter to the GOP, and it isn't yours.

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.

That Was the Monday That Was

 Illustrating a minor point in tomorrow's Graphical History Tour. 

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?

Q Toon: Sitting Ducks

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

 

Toon: The Littlest Angels

Whenever I see anti-abortion editorial cartoons depicting aborted fetuses in heaven, they're always drawn as full-term toddlers. In fact, extremely few abortions involve fetuses anywhere near that stage of development. But those cartoons wouldn't be half as effective if they depicted the fetuses during the first trimester of development.

So now Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Ohio (states, coincidentally, with some of the highest infant mortality rates in the nation) have passed laws that, for all practical purposes, criminalize abortions performed any time after pregnancy is detected — so early on that, if a cartoonist was being honest about it, he/she would have to label the fetus as human so that the reader wouldn't mistake it for a fetal camel or kinkajou.

Of course, I have no first-hand knowledge of what conditions are like in heaven. The Apostles' Creed posits that we believe in carnis resurrectionem, placing that tenet well after the section that is all about Jesus Christ and meaning that we all expect to come rising flesh and blood out of our graves, crypts, urns and wherever Donny Kerabatsos ended up.

Theologians with nothing better to do have spent centuries debating whether that means we come back to spend eternal life in a body in the same condition we left it in. If you ever had a limb amputated during your life, will you need to know where to find it if you want it back? Do you get to bring your dentures along? Will those who lived a good long life have reason to spend eternity envying those who died in their prime?

And what of the millions throughout history who never made it to the prime of life? Many of my generation will remember the story of The Littlest Angel, an eight-year-old who finds heaven to be an absolutely miserable place for little boys. If he couldn't sing in tune with the heavenly choir or keep his halo from rolling away down the Golden Streets, what hope does an eight-week fetal angel have?

Matters of Life and Death

ShowMeBack Saturday returns again to a handful of my cartoons from the momentous year of 1989 (and one from 1999).

Abortion was a hot topic in the spring of 1989. The arguments haven't changed much on either side since then, so I needn't rehash them here. While there were passionate single-issue voters for and against abortion rights, for most people, it was only one issue among many. In the words of the Hasting Center's Daniel Callahan, "The debate is dominated by the activists. I don't think the activists' views reflect those of the large, muddled middle."

"Lost in Translation," UW-Parkside Ranger, March 30, 1989

Thirty years ago this month, the United States Supreme Court revisited the issue of abortion rights in the case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. Only four of the justices who had voted in the 7-2 majority in Roe v. Wade remained on the court, and anti-abortion advocates believed they had a golden opportunity to overturn the 1973 decision.

"The Moral High Ground" in UW-Milwaukee Post, April 6, 1989

At issue in Webster was a Missouri law positing that "life begins at conception" and forbidding use of state money or facilities for abortion procedures. Missouri's law had been crafted by anti-abortion activists Lee and Andrew Puzder in hopes of taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The two dissenters in Roe, Justices William Rehnquist and Byron White, were still on the court, now joined by Reagan-nominated Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Although the general concern over a right to privacy had been part of Democratic opposition to Ronald Reagan's failed nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (more media attention was given to his role in Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre), believers that the right of privacy extended to a woman's right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to term registered hardly any protest against Reagan's other court picks.

"Uh...Charlene..." in UW-Milwaukee Post, April 27, 1989

If the pro-choice crowd and much of the Great American Middle had been lulled into thinking that Roe v. Wade was settled law, the anti-abortion movement had been hard at work to unsettle it. They protested in Washington every year, blockaded health clinics, waved bloody photos, and got their cause into the Republican party platform. And now they had the full force of the Bush Justice Department behind the Missouri law.

"Wishful Thinking" in UW-Milwaukee Post, May 4, 1989

In July, the two Justices who had dissented in Roe plus the three Reagan had placed on the court ruled that Missouri's anti-abortion law was entirely constitutional. Chief Justice Rehnquist's opinion for the majority pretended that the ruling in no way chipped away at Roe. It opened the door, however, for anti-abortion legislatures to regulate abortion rights out of existence, which they have pursued with a vengeance ever since.

Any believers in marriage equality who think that Obergefell v. Hodges is settled law just because it's the law and it got settled once, please take note.

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My "Charlene, Could I Have a Word With You" cartoon above referenced another divisive issue in 1989 (when is it not?), gun control.

The murder of five children in a Stockton, California schoolyard in January prompted passage of a series of gun control laws California and elsewhere, mostly trying to ban or limit the sale of semi-automatic weapons. This was followed in turn by a surge in "get 'em before you can't" gun sales fueled by NRA fear-mongering.

"I Think We've Located the Problem" in UW-Milwaukee Post, April 11, 1989

The gun used in the Stockton shooting had been purchased legally in Oregon. In response, Oregon bill HR 3470 lengthened the waiting period for the purchase of a gun from five days to fifteen. To win NRA support, the bill also provided for concealed carry statewide. The waiting period has since been replaced by instant on-line background checking; the concealed carry provision remains.

Today, of course, is the twentieth anniversary of the Columbine school shooting, which cannot pass without comment here — particularly in light of the attraction it holds for those sick individuals interested in not letting it pass without a sequel.

Apologies to Shortlen and Fagaly

A propos of nothing, this week's Snowback Saturday feature revisits a handful of my cartoons from the winter of 1989.

I was freelancing for the Racine Journal Times in those days, and editor Sean Devlin alerted me that the editorial page was going to invite readers to send in their ideas for a "There Oughta Be a Law" feature. The above cartoon appeared with the announcement of the invitation on January 29. The cartoon below illustrated a selection of the responses the Journal Times received, from serious proposals such as regulating congressional pay raises to pet peeves like prohibiting retail stores from "jumping the season."

"There oughta be a law against obscene bumper stickers." — Barbara Smith

I really goofed by drawing the above —and being paid for it— as a single cartoon instead of six separate ones. The Journal Times broke it up and scattered the panels around the page, coupled with the responses each one illustrated. They also printed each panel larger than I drew them; I prefer to draw my cartoons larger than they will appear in print.

At least they reprinted my signature in each of the panels.

My cartoons for the Journal Times focused primarily on local issues, but I continued drawing about national and world issues for a couple of University of Wisconsin student newspapers in the area.

If activists defending and attacking abortion rights are dismayed that they don't get widespread press coverage these days, it's partly because the protests have been covering the same ground for nearly half a century. If the only news is that a bunch of white teenage boys smirked at some Native American protesters who wouldn't have otherwise gotten any press coverage either, well, that's all that's going to get any media exposure beyond Fox News, CBN, and the Sun Myung Moon press.

With authoritarian dictatorship on the resurgence around the world today, let's take a moment to recall how 1989 seemed to herald a global rise of democracy. The fall of the Iron Curtain would be more memorable, but the year started with the overthrow of Paraguay's President Alfredo Stroessner on la Noche de la Candelaria, almost 35 years after the then-Army General had overthrown the country's democracy.

Unlike the Eastern European revolutions to come, Stroessner's ouster was not due to a popular uprising, however, but a military coup led by one of his own most trusted confidantes. It is alleged that the coup plotters detested the prospect of Stroessner installing either of his sons as his successor: Alfredo Jr. was a coke head, and Gustavo was gay. Nevertheless, the new regime liberalized the Paraguayan constitution and willingly turned the government over to a popularly elected President in 1993.

Other issues, however, remain evergreen, constant, same as it ever was. In spite of being older than Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

And older still than the latest asshole who fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a senseless mass murderer.

You'd think that there oughta be a law by now.