I’ve grown increasingly tired of the fights over Supreme Court nominees. No matter who the current occupant of the White House names, you can be sure there will be strident objections from the opposing party. Too conservative, out of the mainstream, too liberal, a judicial activist, a sexist, a racist, etc., etc. Oh, sure, there are always unexpected nuances. Who ever thought that empathy would be regarded as such a negative trait. Do we really want our justices to feel nothing other than reverence for the text–bloodless automatons in service to nothing other than ferreting out the meaning of 200-plus year-old writing? But I digress. This is just a sideshow, the thing the opponents have glommed on to this go-round. It might have been anything, just whatever was necessary to drum up the proper level of contempt for the nominee. 

I ran this idea past my good friend Scott Stantis, the cartoonist for the Birmingham News, and he took exception to the portrayal of the GOP as firmly against the nomination. He claims that the conservative blogosphere is relatively mild in its criticism, and that I’m unfairly demonizing the opposition–exactly what I’ve criticized conservative cartoonists for doing in the past. This is always a tough call. What I’ve heard is Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a racist for an offhand comment made in a speech years ago, others claiming that she’s a radical leftist and a judicial activist, Republican members of the Senate saying they had a duty to prevent the nomination of such a radical from coming to a vote (wasn’t it just a few years ago that we heard Republicans demanding that every nominee deserves an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate?). Perhaps Scott is right and he reads and hears things more nuanced than I do, but I decided to go with the cartoon anyway.

Besides, it’s fun to draw torture chambers, and it’s only a matter of time before even I have to give up blasting the previous administration for its policies.