Reports of His Death Are Greatly Appreciated

Graphical History Tour looks forward to remembering Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), reported to be serving out the remainder of his congressional term in a vegetative state.

McConnell was elected to the Senate in 1984, ousting a Democratic incumbent in the Reagan landslide that year. I drew no cartoons about McConnell that early in his career; perhaps Joel Pett can put a retrospective of his Lexington Herald Leader cartoons of the McConnell record. I'll leave it to him.

McConnell has been no stranger to purposeful inactivity.

March, 2019

McConnell's facial features, especially with his eyeglasses, suited him to caricature as an owl or a tortoise; influenced by Jon Stewart's characterization of him on The Daily Show, I drew McConnell as a turtle again and again. 

This cartoon dealt with Democrats' "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 legislation passed the House, but McConnell kept it off the Senate's agenda.

February, 2016

McConnell's longest lasting legacy is likely to be the Republican supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The GOP had enjoyed a 5-to-4 majority on the Court when Justice Antonin Scalia died in February of 2016, leaving an evenly split Court and one empty seat for President Barack Obama to fill. McConnell declared that the Senate would refuse to consider Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, supposedly because there would be a new president eleven months later.

"The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice," McConnell wrote, discounting the voice of the American people in 2008 and 2012. "Therefore this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president."

September, 2020

Four years later, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, a mere seven weeks before another presidential election. Rather than let the American people weigh in on the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice, McConnell rammed Donald Trump's choice, Amy Coney Barrett, through the Senate faster than any SCOTUS nominee since President Martin Van Buren's nomination of Peter Vivian Daniel one week before leaving office in 1841.

July, 2018

Having declared during President Obama's first term that McConnell's primary goal was to make sure that Obama wouldn't serve a second one, McConnell's primary goal in Trump's first term was to make sure that Trump got everything he wanted.

Trump would name Brett Kavanaugh, not the Dictator of North Korea, to this particular Supreme Court vacancy. McConnell couldn't keep Democrats from asking Kavanaugh about sexual assault allegations; but as long as McConnell kept Republicans in line, Democrats couldn't keep Kavanaugh off the Court.

November, 2018

On the other hand, McConnell and his Republicans had blockaded several of President Obama's lower court nominations from getting through the Senate. While in the minority, Senate Republicans repeatedly filibustered Obama's nominations, and denied cloture votes to end debate; Senate Majority Harry Reid responded by limiting debate on district and circuit court nominations to 30 hours, and lowering the needed vote to confirm to 50% — the so-called "nuclear option."

When Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, McConnell changed Senate rules so that even a single GOP Senator could block a judicial appointment.

"A large number of vacancies were from states with two Republican senators or one Republican and one Democrat," [Sheldon Goldman, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst] explained. "Until McConnell and the Republicans upended the practice of senatorial courtesy, both senators had to sign off on the recommended judicial nominees. Republican senators did their best to delay the process. As we now know, that tactic of obstruct and delay was successful."

"That Obama left office with so many unfilled vacancies was largely by design — by Mitch McConnell," said the University of Vermont’s Lisa Holmes.

December, 2019

McConnell's ploy left 105 judicial vacancies — not counting that seat on the Supreme Court —waiting for Donald Trump to fill on his first inauguration day. He proceeded to nominate the most right-wing, reactionary ideologues the Heritage Foundation could dredge up, one after another. They included ten nominees in his first term rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association, seven of whom were confirmed by the Senate anyway.

January, 2022

McConnell (and now John Thune) had the advantage of having Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and John Fetterman willing, even eager, to reach across the aisle to make deals and pass legislation. For their part, Republicans have been content to let Democrats reach toward them; but the only Republicans who dare to reach across the aisle are the ones who are going home soon because they lost a primary race against someone even more opposed to bipartisan cooperation.

January, 2020

No assessment of McConnell's legacy would be complete without bringing up his role in the two impeachment trials (so far) of Donald Commodus Trump.

When the House voted to impeach Donald Trump in 2019, McConnell denied House managers' request to call four witnesses for the Senate trial, explaining, "The Senate is meant to act as judge and jury. To hear a trial. Not to re-run the entire fact-finding investigation because angry partisans rushed sloppily through it."

McConnell reportedly supported the second impeachment of Trump for inciting the January 3, 2021 storming of the Capitol. The Senate calendar prevented the trial from starting until after Trump was out of office, which McConnell used as his excuse for voting with 42 other Republican Senators for acquittal. 

He told the nation, however, "There is no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day."

Thus, Mitch McConnell, and the 42 other Republicans Senators who put party above country and acquitted on a technicality a scoundrel they knew to be guilty, deserve their share of the blame for returning that fascist tyrant to the White House four years later.

Quel Hommage

Today's Graphical History Tour dives into the archives in my basement and comes up with a quartet of cartoons from Januaries from decades ago.

I mentioned earlier this week that some of my fellow editorial cartoonists mimicked Ann Telnaes's drawing style in their #StandWithAnn cartoons, while I and others had not. I've drawn a number of cartoons over the years in the style of other artists, particularly when appropriating their ideas. Other times, I have simplified the drawing, as in this one:

in UW-P Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Jan. 31, 1985

I was referencing a nearly 75-year-old cartoon drawn by Puck cartoonist Johannes Keppler when then-President William Howard Taft was having similar problems getting his legislative agenda through Congress and the courts.

"I Must Have Been Dozing" by Johannes Keppler in Puck, June 22, 1910

I didn't include anywhere near as much shading, the window, the doorway, or anything outside the room, but I kept the Capitol sewing basket, the table it rested on, and two of the cats.

Now, there was a problem with my cartoon in that hardly any of the Ranger's readers would have had any reason to be familiar with the original Keppler version. Not even the professors would have had a subscription to Puck magazine in 1910; only someone else with The American Presidency in Political Cartoons 1776-1976 (Peregrine Smith Inc., 1976) could possibly have caught the reference.

The message of the cartoon still applied, and should have been understood by anyone paying any attention to current events; but as a tribute, the cartoon was, frankly, just stealing an old idea.

Reusing someone else's old cartoon works best if the original cartoon is (or ought to be) well known: Thomas Nast's "Who Stole the People's Money," or Charles Schulz's cartoons of Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown. I am reminded, however, of a recent cartoon by a fellow editorial cartoonist that referenced a specific episode of The Simpsons. According to the reader comments, I wasn't the only person who had missed that particular episode and therefore the reference.

Then there was the time that I drew a cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal relying on a reference to "Calvin and Hobbes," a very popular comic strip running in many newspapers at the time. The NCJ editor and publisher, however, had never seen "Calvin and Hobbes," so I had to explain it to her and assure her that her readers would get the cartoon.

By the way, the credit line under my signature in my Ranger cartoon says "again," because I had drawn a cartoon the previous November about Ronald Reagan's reelection, based on a Keppler cartoon celebrating Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 inauguration. I don't suppose many Parkside students or faculty were familiar with that cartoon, either.

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in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Jan. 30, 1995

I include this cartoon in part to set up a subsequent homage cartoon. Dick Armey (R-TX) was the new House Majority Leader in the 104th Congress, and one of the architects of the 1994 Republican Revolution.

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview, Armey referred to fellow Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), the only out gay man in Congress, as "Barney Fag." The quote, verbatim, as Armey was discussing a possible book deal, was: “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, and Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

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in Business Journal, Milwaukee, Jan. 21, 2005

A propos the Washington Post editor's excuse for spiking an Ann Telnaes cartoon on the grounds that it reiterated past and future opinion columns, here's one of the many cartoons I drew for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee reiterating the editorial it ran alongside.

That was, in fact, the role I was expected to fill at the Business Journal from 1996 to 2005. I was brought in to replace conservative cartoonist Craig DuMez, who had often drawn whatever was on his mind. The editors at the Business Journal were interested in having editorial cartoons that reflected the week's editorial — which weren't always as far to the right as DuMez was.

Or, in this case, political at all.

I've never met the guy, but DuMez might have chafed at having to draw as many cartoons about hospital expansions, mergers, and construction as I had to do in my nine years with the Business Journal. This editorial had something to do with an addition to Froedtert Hospital, which the Beej hoped wouldn't be tarted up with a bunch of fancy frills — the sort of things one assumes architects dream about and hospital planners hope will make patients feel they're in a five-star hotel.

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for Q Syndicate, Jan., 2015

Finally, 2015 was going to be the year that the Supreme Court discovered that criminalizing same-sex marriage discriminated against same-sex couples, so Republican legislatures around the country were desperately preparing mechanisms to keep unconstitutional discrimination legal.

This is one of my cartoons in which the characters are not based on real people, even if their actions or opinions are based on those of actual persons. My clue to the reader that I've made up the person in the cartoon is if their name is somehow a pun.

You might find Lauryl's name in the list of ingredients on your shampoo bottle. Senator Beautron can be found overlooking a sports arena and displaying scores, stats, and replays.

I was considering last names for my latest recurring characters, MAGA Max and Liberal Leo, whom I named purely for the alliteration. "Headroom" has already been taken, so perhaps Max's surname should be K. Passidy. Or something less obvious, like Carpone. How about O'Delay, Leo?

I'll have to get back to you on that.

Q Toon: Prattville Prattle

Or, The Pastors' Prorogue.

In the interest of drawing about anything that has nothing to do with the impending Even More Corrupt Trump Administration, or the Republican campaign of persecution against transgender Americans, I present to you my annual Christmas Holiday Cartoon.

Prattville, Alabama, population just under 38,000, celebrated its annual Christmas Parade down East Fourth, Wetumpka, Northington, and Main Streets last Friday, with "lights, marching bands, dancers, candy, beads and trinkets" per the town's web page, but not without a bit of litigious drama.

The town's LGBTQ+ group, Prattville Pride, paid their $30 entry fee to have a float in the parade, only to have their application rejected by Mayor Bill Gillespie, Jr. Prattville Pride took the city to court to be allowed to march in the parade. With mere hours before the parade was to start, they won their case.

In his order, U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker of the Middle District of Alabama wrote: “While there are areas of unprotected speech, such as incitement of violence, the City makes no argument and provides no evidence that Prattville Pride has engaged in any speech or behavior that would remotely fall into an unprotected speech category. It is undisputed that Prattville Pride has complied with the City’s regulations.”

“The City removed Prattville Pride from the parade based on its belief that certain members of the public who oppose Prattville Pride, and what it stands for, would react in a disruptive way. But discrimination based on a message’s content “cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment,” the order continued.

Toleration, as it turned out, was in somewhat short supply.

Two participants pulled out of the parade after Huffaker’s order: St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which initially backed out after Prattville Pride was included only to reverse course after the city’s ban, and Drive-In Park, the headquarters of “mobile movie evangelists” Drive-In Ministries.

“Unfortunately we are back to our original stance of having to forgo the parade since the pride float with their drag queen is back in it,” said Father Den Irwin, pastor at St. Joseph’s. “I am sincerely sorry for any inconvenience. We were trying to support the City after they boldly removed the float. However Prattville pride challenged the ruling in court and won.”

Drive-In Park said in a social media post it was “disappointed” that it had to pull out of the event.

“Our convictions at Drive-In have guided us to decide that we should not participate this year due to the inclusion of the Prattville Pride float,” the post read.

Congregants of St. Joseph and Drive-In Park who had put in so much work putting their floats together were no doubt crestfallen, although I'm pretty sure at least one of them has a parking lot they could parade around and around in.

As for the town's official parade, I have not been able to find any reports of any further disruption thereto. Neither fire nor brimstone has rained down upon beautiful downtown Prattville, according to the latest from the Weather Channel.

Just beads and trinkets.

Coping With Loss

I've made as a regular feature of these Graphical History Tours digging up cartoons that I had drawn 40, 30, 20, and 10 years earlier, give or take a week or two. That will be the theme for today, and the good news is that means there will be no cartoons about the lying sack of shite about to infest the Oval Office next January.

The bad news is that starting in 1984, elections in years ending in a four somehow seem to have all favored Republicans, and that is what each of these cartoons will be about.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Nov. 29, 1984

That's a completely unrecognizable Newt Gingrich (R-GA) in the center of this cartoon from November of 1984. Gingrich's suburban Atlanta district had just reelected him to a fourth term in Congress, where he was founder of the "Conservative Opportunity Society." Ronald Reagan embraced the ideas of these previously obscure House members in his reelection campaign. 

It was easier to find pictures of former football star Jack Kemp (R-NY) and thus easier to come up with a good caricature. I'm not sure whether the third shoe salesman was intended to be any specific congressman.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee, Nov. 10, 1994

Ten years later, Gingrich’s hair had gone completely white, and I was having plenty of practice honing my caricature of the chief architect of Republicans’ “Contract With America.” The GOP had successfully campaigned on its promise to cut taxes now and to pass a constitutional amendment requiring balanced budgets in the future— the failure of Supply Side economics to date notwithstanding.

Q Syndicate, Nov. 2004

George Dubya Bush's reelection campaign in 2004 rested heavily on post-9/11 jingoism, but also on Republican Party promises to fight back against the homosexual menace. 

If any significant fraction of the liberals, LGBTQ+s, and feminists who have vowed to move to Canada because of an incoming Republican administration had ever carried through with it, Justin Trudeau would be cruising to another term in office with a solid parliamentary majority to back him up.

Instead, we have for the most part stayed here on our side of the line, fought for our right to marry, and left Mr. Trudeau desperately trying to salvage his rickety coalition government in a gale force blizzard.

Q Syndicate, Nov., 2014

Equal marriage rights were still tantalizingly beyond the reach for many of us in November of 2014. In Michigan, where Q Syndicate is based, adoptive parents April DeBoer and Jayne Rouse had sued as a couple for the right to adopt each other's children. The Sixth Circuit Court overturned lower court rulings that had favored DeBoer and Rouse, ruling instead that marriage was reserved for couples who might bear children unintentionally.

The ruling was a setback for same-sex couples with children in Michigan and other states covered by the Sixth Circuit (Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee).

The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage the following year in Obergefell v. Hodges. 

For now. The Court now doesn’t think highly of marriage equality. Or Obergefell. Or stare decisis.

With Apologies to Garry Trudeau

 

Q Toon: Tragedy at an Alabama Fertility Clinic

Unless you've been living under a rock (or perhaps in a petri dish), you have heard by now that the Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos have all the legal rights of living, breathing children. Fertility clinics in the state abruptly halted services to patients who have been using in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in their desire to become parents.

Several of my colleagues, and multiple memesters, have flooded the internet with jokes about Alabamans no longer being able to distinguish breakfast eggs from chickens... which was worth a chuckle the first time I saw it, but glosses over the fact that your breakfast eggs are unfertilized. They do not contain any chickens, real or theoretical. I wager that most people upon finding cracking open an egg to find a half-formed chick inside would be a little grossed out. (Unless they live on a farm. Or actually ordered the balut.)

Meanwhile, it's just as illegal to poach (in either sense of the verb) a bald eagle egg as it is to shoot an adult bald eagle. 

I don't think one can reasonably dispute that the prospective parents whose frozen embryonic cells were accidentally destroyed by some bozo who had no business messing with them in the first place suffered some degree of damage, although I couldn’t put a dollar figure on it. If one set of parents can no longer produce eggs or sperm together for whatever reason, perhaps the figure should be high. Where same-sex couples may be barred from adopting children, IVF could be a valuable option.

But if parents of a frozen embryo split up, would that make that embryo worthless — at least to one of them?

The Alabama Supremes have nevertheless opened up a Pandora's icebox of embryonic dilemmas. Clinics don't save one embryo per couple, so what of all those embryos who are destined never to gestate into what Genesis 2:7 considers a living baby? 

By the way, one should be careful about using Genesis 2:7 as an argument here. The verse refers specifically to Adam — who is a unique case, since he never spent nine months in somebody's womb but was instead molded out of clay. 

Which technically makes him not a human being, but a golem.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, all those surplus frozen embryos.

In Georgia, Missouri, and fourteen other states which have laws or pending legislation granting full legal personhood to single-cell protohumans, those zygotes are destined to live forever. 

In eighteen years, they'll even be eligible to vote.

Although in most of those states, officials will want to see proof of gender. Registering as something other than their future birth gender, an embryo could end up tried as an adult and sentenced to prison.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 Sometimes, edits are necessary.

Toon: The Heels of Justice Grind Slowly

In two and two-thirds years, I have still not drawn the sore loser of the last presidential election since the day he scuttled out of office with his planeload of purloined papers.

Not that I'm making any promises, mind you.

Q Toon: Hard Time

A new law in the southeast Asian country of Malaysia criminalizes not just the import and sale of a certain rainbow-themed sportswatch, but the wearing of one as well. The penalty, for resident citizens and tourists alike, is up to three years in prison and a fine of 20,000 ringgit (about $4,375, £3,425 ).

Malaysia, a Ron DesAntis wet dream of a country, just held national elections last Saturday in which a coalition of Malay-Muslim political parties accused Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of not being draconian enough in his persecution of LGBTQ+ communities and friends.

“The Malaysian government is committed to preventing the spread of elements that are harmful or may be harmful to morals,” the [Interior] ministry said in a statement.

It said the watches “may harm … the interests of the nation by promoting, supporting and normalising the LGBTQ+ movement that is not accepted by the general public”.

A ministry official told Agence France-Presse in May that 172 watches worth $14,000 (£10,960) were seized in raids because they bore the “LGBTQ” acronym and had six colours instead of the seven in a rainbow.

Swatch is suing Malaysia over the confiscated timepieces; in a statement, CEO Nick Hayek wrote:

“We strongly contest that our collection of watches using rainbow colors and having a message of peace and love could be harmful for whomever. On the contrary, Swatch always promotes a positive message of joy in life. This is nothing political. We wonder how the Malaysian government will confiscate the many beautiful natural rainbows that show up in the skies above Malaysia.”

In the pictures I've seen of these watches, they are available in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple; there is a small rainbow flag on the strap loop. You'd have to have all six on your arm before it was obvious to passers-by that you were making a pro-LGBTQ+ rights statement. 

On a scale of 0 to The 1975, wearing one such watch has to rank no higher than the mid double digits.

They Bought and Paid for It

 And you can't have it back.

Wisconsin voters have to winnow down four Supreme Court judicial candidates to two on Tuesday, February 21. The candidates are running for the seat of retiring Justice Patience Roggensack, one of the four conservatives on the State Supreme Court.

Milwaukee County Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz was first on the airwaves with commercials relying heavily on the message that she is biased in favor of abortion rights. She doesn't use euphemisms like "choice" or "reproductive rights." She comes right out and says "abortion," and so do the women in her We-Support-Protasiewicz ads.

A shadowy third-party group quickly followed suit with this "Madison Liberals Want OUR SUPREME COURT" ad. After showing rioters in the background, it then accuses her of letting rapists out onto Wisconsin streets — well, just one case, but you're supposed to conclude that she does it all the time.* The ad concludes by endorsing former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, appointed to the Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2016, but who lost the seat in 2020.

Right-wing groups have consistently accused judicial candidates who don't hew the conservative, pro-business, pro-Republican line of being soft on crime. Their attacks date back to 2008, with unfair soft-on-crime accusations against Gov. Doyle appointee Justice Leroy Butler, who lost to Mike Gableman (who has since gone on to peddle Trumpist lies about the 2020 election).

These groups don’t necessarily care about stocking the Court with judges who sentence every criminal defendant to life behind bars, but they have seen that it wins them elections.

Kelly's own ads this year tout his decision with the conservative majority to strike down Governor Evers's "stay-at-home" directives in the early weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Kelly is one of the two right-wingers on the ballot this year, and interestingly, now a liberal group is running an attack ad using the same tactics against the other conservative, Waukesha County Court Judge Jennifer Dorow. "Better Wisconsin" found some case in which she allowed a defendant convicted in a domestic abuse case two days to report to prison, “time he used to violently assault his own family members.”

Dorow became familiar to Wisconsinites this year as the judge in the trial of the asshole who drove his pick-up through the Waukesha Christmas Parade, killing six people. She justifiably sentenced him to life in prison, and her ads play up that case.

Although he has a few endorsements from some prominent Democrats in Wisconsin, we haven't heard much yet from the fourth candidate, Dane County Court Judge Everett Mitchell, who presides over the Juvenile Division in Branch 4. 

If he should happen to be one of the final two after February 21, I'm sure we'll be hearing about any kid in his courtroom who grew up to murder, rape, pillage, shoplift, or jaywalk.

_______________

* Update: The Protaseiwicz campaign this evening his fired back with a TV ad charging that as lawyers before they became judges, Dorow and Kelly defended criminals, including in Kelly's case, youth pastors (plural) who molested children.

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.

Q Toon: Auld Lang v. Syne

Extending 2020? Doesn't everybody think it was more than long enough?

Well, not a certain occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue desperate to find some way to keep January 20, 2021 from happening.

Adding more months onto everyone's least favorite year might not win him any new fans, but you can bet his legions of Trumpster cultists would suddenly be agitating to observe Undecember, Duodecember, Tredecember, ad infinitemcember all the way to 2025 and beyond. 

And it isn't any more ludicrous than any of the other frivolous lawsuits filed on the Donald's behalf.

When L. Lin Wood, Jr. filed one of those suits with the attestation that:

...it was surely a Freudian slip of epic propecia. Proportions!

I only hope that nobody on the Team That Couldn't Sue Straight sees this cartoon in time to take this argument to court.

Q Toon: Many Crappy Returns

While the House was busy debating impeaching Donald Trump, the Senate was pretty busy itself.

The Senate confirmed 13 district court nominees this week, including former ACS chapter leader Stephanie Dawkins Davis to the Eastern District of Michigan. This brings the total number of confirmed lifetime judges during this administration to 187.
With 2019 ending, it is important to take stock of the historic overhaul of the federal judiciary. In 2019, the Senate confirmed 102 lifetime judges, 20 of whom were to the circuit courts. This is an incredibly rapid pace and means that 1 lifetime judge was confirmed every 4 days.

Just about every one of these judges are hard-core, doctrinaire right-wingers: hostile to marriage equality, reproductive choice, unions, public services, gun control, health care reform, regulation of campaign financing, and just about any other priority of any of the Democratic candidates for president.

Nine — so far — have been rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association. George W. Bush nominated eight "not qualified" justices during his entire eight years in office, and Barack Obama never nominated a single one.

Trump's "Not Qualified" judges include Lawrence VanDyke, whom I featured in a cartoon last month, and Jonathan Kobes, whose confirmation last year to the U.S. Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit required a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump's unprecedented opportunity for packing the courts comes thanks to the Republican Senate majority under Mitch McConnell. Merrick Garland was not the only Obama judicial nominee McConnell's Republicans refused even to consider. McConnell blocked at least ten others to lower courts.

In 2007 and 2008, a Senate controlled by Democrats helped confirm 68 Bush judicial nominees, including 10 to appeals courts, Tobias said. The last 10 district judges were confirmed Sept. 26, 2008.
By comparison, a Republican-dominated Senate confirmed 20 of Obama’s judicial nominees in the final two years of his term, including two to appeals courts. That’s the fewest since Harry Truman’s presidency, Tobias said....

“The Trump Administration and Senate Republicans have continuously dismantled Senate rules and traditions — including the blue slip process for circuit court nominees — so that they can put highly ideological, corporate jurists on the federal bench,” [Pennsylvania Sen. Bob] Casey said.“It’s a shame that Majority Leader McConnell set the precedent for this breakdown of Senate norms by playing partisan politics and arbitrarily shutting down the judicial nomination process during the final years of the Obama Administration.” 

Should any of the Democratic candidates for president overcome the Republican advantage in the electoral college next November, expect this flurry of Republican jurisimprudence to become a blizzard.

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.

Q Toon: Yes, We Have No Jurisdiction

This week's cartoon concerns Sylvia Driskell, a 66-year-old woman in Nebraska who filed a lawsuit in federal court against all homosexuals. According to her court filing, she brought the suit acting as the ambassador for Jesus Christ, although one assumes she was unable to provide paperwork to prove her bona fides.

Her seven-page petition, handwritten at a seventh-grade level of legal expertise, was eventually thrown out of court. Judge John Gerrard declared that "This court is not the place to seek opinions regarding theological matters; this particular forum is closed and the case will be dismissed."

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒May 14, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

The panel (above right) that I used for this week's Sneak Peek is what is known in the Comedy Biz as a "beat." Comic actors and stand-ups use the same technique to create a moment of tension before delivering a punch line.

It's a common technique in printed comics as well. Charles Schulz, for example, used it fairly often in Peanuts, and not just because he stuck rigidly to a format of four equally sized panels in his daily strip, even if the kids in a particular day's comic had only three things to say. In my cartoon today, the characters have four dialogue balloons, and I could have easily put the second to last one in the third panel instead of the fourth. Or omitted the third panel altogether, since I don't slavishly adhere to a four-panel format.

The reason for the silent panel is to convey pacing. The woman who isn't Sylvia is perhaps momentarily at a loss for something to say. Meanwhile you, the reader, are supposed to take a moment to scan the panel just in case there is something significant in it that will help set up the punch line. In this case, there isn't, but you never know. That discarded cigarette might have set the flamingo on fire or something.