Q Toon: Not in Kansas Any More

Overriding their governor's veto, Kansas Republicans passed a law abruptly voiding the drivers' licenses of any and all transgender citizens of the Sunflower State. The Kansas law further invalidates birth certificates in which the gender marker has been changed.

AIRWAY, Kan. (KCTV) - Kansans are now required to list their sex at birth on their driver’s license under a new state law that has already rendered hundreds of IDs invalid.

Letters were sent to impacted drivers this week notifying them their licenses are no longer valid. ...

The law also prohibits transgender people from using public restrooms on government property consistent with their gender identity. It allows someone suspected of being transgender and violating the law to be sued for up to $1,000.

Trans Kansans are required to surrender invalidated driver’s license to the state before they can receive a replacement that misidentifies their present gender (and I wouldn't be surprised if the new license were to deadname them as well).

There was no grace period, taking effect immediately upon passage. Transgender drivers had no time to comply with the law before losing their driving privileges. 

"People who have changed the gender marker are worried about being pulled over on the way to getting their new driver's license. They're stressed. Matthew Neumann is a transgender man in central Kansas. He leads a statewide LGBTQ mutual aid organization. You know, he's got a long beard, a bald head, and now, whenever he applies for a job or gets pulled over by police, his ID is going to out him as transgender, whether he likes it or not."

The new law, besides imposing penalties for driving without one's birth genitalia, effectively disenfranchises transgender voters; state law requires that voters present a state-issued, unexpired, photo ID to cast a ballot. 

Meanwhile, Texas has not gone so far as to revoke transgender citizens' driving licenses, but does prevent trans Texans from updating the gender marker on their driver's license or state ID; nor is there an "X" option for non-binary persons. Trans activists worried that the state's 2024 law would deter people from voting in Tuesday's primary. 

“Trans voters are left vulnerable to being outed, questioned, or turned away, which creates very real barriers to casting a ballot,” [Caleb Armstrong, a transmasculine Texan and co-founder of Local Queer Foundation] wrote in an email. “It is difficult to find accurate information about voting as a trans person, and for many, the fear of navigating the process is enough to keep folks from voting at all. This fear and confusion has a purpose in trying to silence our voices and keep trans people from participating fully in our democracy.”

As it turned out, more voters may have been deterred from voting simply by a change of the rules on where Dallas voters were supposed to go. Polls had to be kept open for two hours past the usual closing time, just to accommodate voters who went to their usual polling place only to be told they had to go somewhere else.

Even then, Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s campaign is considering a lawsuit over the confusion.

All of which is an argument against constantly changing election rules.

Returning to the topic of this week's cartoon, two trans men from Lawrence, Kansas, have filed a lawsuit in Douglas County District Court to challenge the state's new law. The anonymous pair are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and a Philadelphia-based law firm. A hearing is scheduled tomorrow.

Q Toon: Off Limits

Never satisfied that there happen to be Democratic and Independent voters out there whose right to vote they haven't taken away, Republicans are pushing yet another plot to throw voters off the rolls.

Calling their scheme the "SAVE Act," the bill as passed by the House "requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections," according to www.congress.gov. And by "documentary proof," Republicans mean your birth certificate.

The Senate version of the bill requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship not only when registering to vote, but also every time they come to cast their vote. Every time.

What could possibly be the problem?

But one in 10 voting-age American citizens, or an estimated 21.3 million people, either don't have a proof-of-citizenship document like a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate, or don't have easy access to one, according to a 2023 survey commissioned by voting rights groups. The survey found people of color are more likely not to have a document proving citizenship.

Obtaining these documents takes time and money. Only about 43% of Americans have passports, according to an analysis by the Voting Rights Lab. The bill says voters can show an ID that indicates citizenship, but currently only five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer IDs that meet that criteria.

One rather significant group that faces disenfranchisement should the SAVE Act pass the Senate is married women who have taken their husband's surname — whose legal name therefore does not match the name on their birth certificate. A smaller group, but one well-represented in my LGBTQ+ readership, are transgender citizens who have changed their name to match their gender identity.

An even smaller group consists of the Vice President of the United States, Mr. James David Vance, né James Donald Bowman.

SAVE's defenders say that all that married women, transgender persons, and J.D. Vance need is to provide certified documentation of their name change. But there again, those documents cost time and money — and for transgender people in "red" states, dealing with a hostile government bureaucracy.

Side note: As my little form of protest, I've been bringing my passport to the village polling place for identification ever since state Republicans passed photo ID voting into law several years ago. Some poll workers have been taken aback by my showing a passport instead of my driver's license like everybody else. 

Passports do nothing to prove that one resides in the polling district (and I suspect that there are a few owners of summer homes and winter get-aways — a more or less Republican demographic — who have used a driver's license to vote in one location and a passport to vote in another, especially to keep those property taxes down and school levies defeated).

The South American vacation from which I've just returned was within three months of my passport expiring, which meant that I had to apply for a new one before we left. That automatically voided my existing passport, but poll workers here in the village would have had no way of knowing it was invalid had I used it as voter ID in elections last fall or this week's spring primary.

(Lest some Trumpster at DOJ launch any voter fraud investigations against me, my village had no elections in November and no primary races on Tuesday.)

Returning to the topic at hand: The SAVE Act also voids independent voter registration drives. It federalizes elections, demanding that states turn over their voter registration records to the Department of Homeland Security. Mailed ballots from military service members that arrive after Election Day won't count; universal mail-in voting will be outlawed. 

If this SAVE Act slips through the Senate to be signed into law by the Felon In Chief, you can bet your bottom dollar that Republicans won't be satisfied for long. They're sure to pass a SUPERSAVER Act requiring voters to come to their polling place DNA samples from all four grandparents, the deed to their house, and an automobile-dealership-sized American flag.

After all, if Barack Obama's birth certificate wasn't good enough for them, why would they accept yours?

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?

The Republican Response

In statehouses across the nation, Republicans respond to Senator Joe Manchin's insistence that federal voting rights legislation be bipartisan.

Toon: Taking the Seat Back, Revisited

It's possible that only we editorial cartooning nerds will get the reference made in my cartoon today.

Most of you are aware of the full-bore assault on voting rights underway in Republican state legislatures all across the country. Iowa has shortened in-person voting hours by a full hour in the evening because, I don't know, voting fraud between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.

Republicans said the rules are needed to guard against voting fraud, though they noted Iowa has no history of election irregularities and that November’s election saw record turnout with no hint of problems in the state.

In Georgia, Republicans are making it a criminal offense to offer water to voters forced to stand in line for hours on end in order to exercise their constitutional rights. They are well aware that rural and suburban voters never have to wait anywhere near that long at their polling places; this measure has nothing to do with making sure voters aren't being bribed with bottles of Evian.

Just about everywhere the Republicans are making it tough for city folk to vote, by cutting the availability of early voting, absentee voting, and voting by mail. This on top of earlier voting restrictions such as requiring photo ID but not allowing student or municipal IDs. (Oh, sure, if you don't have a car, you can get a state-approved ID; but you still have to schlep way the fork out to the exurbs to the DMV office for it.)

Even Republican election officials readily admit that the 2020 general election was the most secure and fraud-free election in history. Republican elected officials, however, say that their voting restrictions are necessary to address allegations of voting irregularities — allegations which they themselves have fabricated.

Now, for some of you, I may need to explain that this cartoon references one by the great Bill Mauldin upon the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963. 

"I've Decided I Want My Seat Back" by Bill Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times, September 6, 1963

It's not as famous as the Weeping Lincoln he would draw less than three months later. Still, I think it found its way into enough high school and college textbooks that you don't necessarily have to be an editorial cartoonist yourself to recognize it.

Q Toon: Truth Will Out

A peculiar little detail in the case of Jared and Ivanka Kushner using private e-mail for government business (gosh, where have I heard about that before, I wonder) is the revelation that Jared Kushner was somehow registered as a female voter in the state of New York.

It has since been revealed that the mistake was due to a clerical error rather than some subconscious desire on the part Kushner himself. It does lead one to wonder, however, whether any other such clerical errors will be cited by the Kris Kobach Kommission as proof of widespread voter fraud.

Q Toon: Voter ID-OC

Yeah, yeah, I know the argument. You need a photo ID to board an airplane, open a bank account, buy a house or join a country club -- all sorts of things that some of the poor, elderly, students, blind, minorities and whatnot try to get along without. The fact is that these laws have been crafted to include Republican-leaning groups (gun licenses are okay) and inconvenience Democratic-leaning groups (student IDs are not).

But it's only a photo ID, they say. And if cataracts keep your great-grandmother from schlepping out to spend a day at wherever the heck they moved the DMV these days, that's a small cost to prevent the .0000003% of voters who have no business exercising their civic responsibility.

Wisconsin voters have just been through a nasty series of recall elections, and with Democrats having eked out a narrow victory in just one election in my own State Senate District (enough to cost Republicans their senate majority), local Republicans have been literally digging through garbage dumpsters in a desperate effort to rustle up something to allege voter fraud. Our Republican dumpster diver found -- stop the presses! -- "some ripped up voter registration forms which he [placed] in a garbage bag along with a prescription bottle, a couple of bills and - get this - a MacDonald's food bag," which he duly turned over to sheriff's deputies.

After a thorough investigation, the Racine County Sheriff's report concluded:

"In summary, none of the items brought to the Sheriff's Office removed from the dumpster by Ottelien prove or even suggest voter fraud had occurred at the Cesar Chavez Center. The items discarded in the trash are just that, trash."

Aside from that, some poll workers around the state -- those nice ladies who sit in that voting room all day from before the polls open until the last vote is counted -- made occasional mistakes about which parts of the Voter ID law had and had not been stopped by judicial injunction. Republican provocateurs have highlighted a few isolated cases in which a voter did not sign a registration sheet (the only part of the law currently in effect in Wisconsin). Yet elsewhere, voters were turned away for not having the photo ID the injunction expressly said they wouldn't need.

Clearly, Republicans have their work cut out for them as they seek to level the playing field between their multimillionaire campaign contributors and the hoi polloi whose free speech under Citizens United is barely audible, but make up the other 99.99999% of voters.

There are other groups whose influence in elections Republicans would like to cut down. In the future, we can look forward to Republicans whittling down workers' ability to vote by shortening voting time to between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and require that you fill out and seal absentee ballots at the state capitol in the presence of your Congressman and FedEx them to your local elections office. In a hermetically sealed box the size of a grand piano.

Wisconsin toon: Voter fraud & the GOP

After state Attorney General (and chair of John McCain's Wisconsin campaign in 2008) J.B. van Hollen searched tirelessly for examples of the voter fraud his fellow Republicans keep assuring us is running rampant in Wisconsin, he managed to unearth scores of cases. Well, not scores, exactly. More like exactly one score.

From Rick Ungar's The Policy Page for Forbes.com:

"A study of the 2008 election conducted by the Wisconsin Justice Department has turned up just two instances of people 'double' voting, six people who engaged in voter registration shenanigans and 11 ex-cons who violated the prohibition on felons voting.

"In fact, there has been a sum total of 20 people charged with some form of voter fraud out of the millions of Wisconsin residents who voted in the 2008 election. And over half of them are already on voter denial lists as they are convicted felons."

Since the 2010 election produced a Republican monopoly on power in all branches of state government, Republicans had no problem cranking out a Voter ID bill this year requiring voters to produce a photo ID: a driver's license, a passport, a military ID, a tribal identification or a student ID, provided that the student ID shows an expiration date -- meaning that the University of Wisconsin (for one large example) would have to redo all their student IDs, at a cost of $1.1 million. And if Grandma doesn't have any of the above, she can schlep on down to the Department of Motor Vehicles to spend the day getting a $28 voter ID card.

And you thought that Poll Taxes were a thing of the past.

As Rep. Kelda Helen Roys (D-Madison) pointed out,

"Republicans know that their days of complete control over Wisconsin’s government are numbered, so they are rushing frantically to game the system to keep power,” Roys said. “They know that according to a 2005 study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about 180,000 Wisconsinites (23 percent) aged 65 and older do not have a state-issued ID, and about half of African-Americans and Latinos/Latinas lack a valid driver’s license – compared with 17 percent of white Wisconsinites."

The voter suppression law was originally set to go into effect in time for the 2012 elections, but with six Republican state senators threatened with recall elections this summer, the timetable was moved up to Right Away. Meanwhile, since those same Republicans were busy trying to jam the Republican agenda down our throats, they couldn't devote their full attention to defending themselves in the recall elections.

So the party recruited Republican volunteers to run against the Democratic challengers in Democratic primaries.

"Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state party, issued a statement justifying the practice because Republican senators have been too busy in Madison to prepare for the recall elections. 'The Republican Party of Wisconsin has advocated that protest candidates run in Democratic primaries to ensure that Republican legislators have ample time to communicate with voters throughout their districts after the state budget is approved.'"

Naturally, since those Democratic primaries will be the only races on the July 12 ballot, nobody seriously expects that only Democratic voters will be deciding who the Democratic nominees will be. And since the Republican party has disenfranchised so many members of the Democratic base, it shouldn't require quite as many Republican crossover voters to make the recall elections moot before they happen.

If only there were some Republican party primary which Democrats could cross over and mess up next year...