Q Toon: Pardon the Interruption

Poor guy with the orange frosting on his head. He misses everything.

I've seen a slew of conservative cartoons needling Nancy Pelosi for holding back on delivering the House's impeachment vote to the Senate. If Donald Trump is such a threat to the republic, the argument goes, why the delay?

The counterargument is that since Mitch McConnell plans to feed the impeachment message directly to his paper shredder, what's the rush?

A similar fate befell Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers' call for a special legislative session on gun control earlier this year. The Republicans in charge of the state Senate and Assembly opened and closed that special session in seconds. Literally.

Republicans in the U.S. Senate, if they take their responsibilities seriously at all, are apt to follow their House counterparts' lead and make Joe Biden the subject of any impeachment trial. Certainly the eagerness on the part of House Republicans to start impeachment proceedings against Biden this early should convince the former Veep that it would be sheer folly to name a Republican as his running mate and successor.

As of this writing, the show hasn't started yet.

You still have time to run out to the kitchen for chips.

2019 in Review

Many newspapers have given up trying to keep up-to-date with the internet and have gone hyper-local these days — which is a good thing, if corporate bean-counters in far-off headquarters have allowed them to keep a staff able to investigate city hall, the state assembly representatives, and area corporations. If, however, the newspaper can't afford to do more than chase ambulances and fire trucks and to serve as a stenographer for the powers that be, its value is greatly diminished.

But what I'm getting at is that my annual photo is forced to overlook world events that don't get banner headlines. The citizen protests in Hong Kong are one example this year; China's repression of its Uighurs is another. My local papers have covered the devastating fires in Australia, but on inside pages. The same with Israel's interminable elections, but at least I have a magazine cover for that.

And as far as those magazine covers are concerned, I apologize to anyone angry that I've overlooked Tom Steyer, Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Deval Patrick, John Delaney, or Michael Bennet. These are the candidates who made the magazine covers in my house.

Speaking of overlooking the obvious, it wasn't my intent, but the cartoons I selected for my year in review include the President of the United States by name only.

...except for that photograph of him from gut to knees.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We're experiencing the last gasp of the 'teens, so there are retrospectives of the decade aplenty.

But by the time this week's cartoon goes public, we should all be over our hangovers and ready to face the next disastrous decade.

Dashing Through to 1920, Part 2

Soloback Saturday devotes today's installment to a single cartoon from December, 1919.

"The Honorable Mentionables for President, Subject to Revision" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, December 21, 1919

John T. McCutcheon's tour de force on the 1920 presidential race uses nearly the entire alphabet to list all the potential candidates. (He couldn't come up with anything for the letter Q, and apparently overlooked I. The ninth letter of the alphabet is out of order, and I see no marcher holding it.) Some of the meter doesn't quite span well; but on the other hand, the cartoon is the earliest one I've come across to include the name of the eventual Democratic nominee.

But I'm still not going to tell you who he was yet.

The pages of broadsheet newspapers were much larger then than those of any U.S. newspaper today, allowing McCutcheon's cartoon approximately 6" x 8" of front page real estate. Yet I suspect that he might have wished to trade his spot that Sunday for Frank O. King's full page on the front of of the editorial section.

Since you may not have 6" x 8" of screen space to read the cartoon, and it has been nearly impossible to clean this image enough to be as legible as I'd like it to be, here's McCutcheon's poetry in full:
A is for Allen of Kansas, a man with considerable pep.
B is for Baker and Bryan, same party, but quite out of step.
C is for Cox and for Coolidge, Champ Clark, former Speaker, you know.
D is for Dawes, Daniels, Denby, Davis of Morgan and Co.
E is for Everyone mentioned whose name we've completely forgot.
F is Fair Field and No Favor, and all that sort of rot.
G is Goodrich and Gerard, both Jameses, W. and P.
I.
H is for Harding and Hoover; you've heard all about Herbert C.
J is for Senator Johnson; the covenant pleases him not.
K is for Kenyon and Kellogg; their chances are not very hot.
L is for Governor Louden; Illinois is loud in his praise;
He's willing to move to the White House; the job of President pays.
M is for William A. MacAdoo, Vice President Marshall as well.
N is for No One Yet Mentioned, but of course, you never can tell.
O is for Orators plenty; they'll talk till you're totally deaf.
P  is for Poindexter and Palmer, and Pershing of the grand A.E.F.
Q.
R. is for Root, Reds and Radicals, the opposite ends of the pole.
S is for one who is known as the Hon. Gov. Sproul.
T is for Taft, William Howard; he served in the White House before;
He liked it while he was the tenant, and would probably like it some more.
U is for Senator Underwood, not supposed to be out for the place.
V is for Votes that will settle which candidate wins in the race.
W is for Wood and for Woodrow; their figures loom big in the sky.
W is also for Watson, who is said to be willing to try.
X is for X-candidate Hughes; he used to run four years ago.
Y is for Yank, both doughboy and gob; he'll play a big part in the show.
Z is for Zero, the hour next June when all of the world will know.

🎉

Ah, well. I did say that there would be only one cartoon this week, but since you've been such a good boy and/or girl, I'll throw in a second one about the Democratic presidential hopefuls.

"The Snow Man" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, December 29, 1919

And yes, the eventual nominee is in here, too.

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.

Toon: The Three Impeach-os

So the House voted to impeach Donald Trump, and I was publishing a cartoon about TV commercials.

Now it's Christmas Eve, and I've got this bit of holiday cheer for you.

Yeah, the premise of Trump talking to one living ex-president and one dead one is kind of weird. For those of you who flunked American history, they are Andrew Johnson (impeached in 1868) and Bill Clinton (impeached 130 years later).

Johnson, a Democrat elected Vice President with Abraham Lincoln on a "Union Party" ticket, quickly ran afoul of Radical Republicans in Congress who passed laws to prevent him from replacing Lincoln's cabinet members. He fired the Secretary of War anyway, and Congress came up with over a dozen counts of impeachment against him.

The radical Republican majority in Congress in the 1990's launched an investigation into President Clinton's wife's real estate dealings in Arkansas, which somehow ended up being all about his sexual affairs. He lied to the Special Prosecutor about it and didn't have an Attorney General who would put out a disingenuous summary of the Prosecutor's report, so Republicans gleefully impeached him.

The Senate fell short of booting either one from office, and the Republican majority is extremely unlikely to oust their buddy Trump; so you might be wondering why we're even bothering with any of this.

The answer is that there is no other way for Congress to register a complaint against presidential misbehavior. The Supreme Court has opined that incumbent presidents can't be prosecuted in a court of law; Congress considered and rejected the option of "censure" against Clinton. A Republican Congressman tried shouting "Liar!" at Barack Obama during a State of the Union address once; but pretty well everyone else agreed it was such a bad idea, Trump spews out lies uncontrollably and nobody in Congress ever calls him on it.

Christmas Week's Sneak Peek

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Swell Solstice, and Spiffy Saturnalia where available.