Cawthorn sues to stop NC challenge against his 2022 campaign
North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, whose eligibility to run for re-election to Congress is officially contested, has now begun her legal fight against that effort.
Aside from a general one-sentence denial, Cawthorn does not respond to the allegations against him — namely that he supported and possibly even helped plan the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress by supporters of the Republican President Donald Trump attempting to overturn the results. of the 2020 election.
On the contrary, his lawsuit indicates that the North Carolina State Board of Elections does not have the power to prevent him from voting in the first place, and therefore the challenge against him should be dropped and the law of the State permitting such challenges should be declared unconstitutional.
“Running for office is quintessential First Amendment activity and offers great protection,” her lawsuit states.
Cawthorn, a Republican who represents western North Carolina, has built a national following among the party’s far right.
In an interview with the conservative Daily Caller website on Monday, the same day he filed a lawsuit in federal court, Cawthorn advanced the conspiracy theory that the Jan. 6 attack was carried out by the FBI or other parts of the Trump administration to discredit Trump.
“There were people in the federal government who were deeply involved in this,” he said.
Those who disputed his eligibility said that if any government officials were involved in the attack, it was in fact Cawthorn and potentially other GOP politicians helping far-right militias and other groups plan the attack. attack.
Specifically, they say there is reason to suspect that “Cawthorn was involved in planning efforts to intimidate Congress and the Vice President into throwing out valid electoral votes and subverting the essential constitutional function of ‘an orderly and peaceful transition of power’.
He would have to undergo a deposition to answer questions about his role in the attack if he wants to be able to run for office again, the challenge says – something Cawthorn’s lawsuit says Monday violates his constitutional rights.
What happened on January 6?
Shortly after the 2020 election, the same day Congress convened for its usually superficial duties to certify the election results, hundreds of Trump supporters stormed into the Capitol building. They wanted to pressure members of Congress to vote to ignore the state election results that Democratic nominee Joe Biden had won and keep Trump in power.
Trump said in a written statement on Sunday that his goal was to void the election, but failed because Vice President Mike Pence would not go along with the plan.
“Unfortunately he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the election!” Trump wrote.
Many Republican politicians, including Cawthorn and most other North Carolina Republican lawmakers, voted to do what the crowd wanted. But the challenge against Cawthorn singles him out for going the extra mile. He says he at least encouraged the crowd that day to turn violent, and potentially also worked directly with the organizers of the attack beforehand to help plan it.
Trump, Cawthorn and others on the right say there has been widespread fraud in the states Trump lost.
However, they were never able to prove it despite huge amounts of attention and money – including more than half a billion taxpayer dollars – spent in fruitless efforts to find the fraud.
Confederates and Civil Rights
Cawthorn’s challenge to eligibility is based on the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and specifically a section of it that sought to bar former members of Congress who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War from return to Congress after the war.
But the amendment is most famous for different sections, guaranteeing civil rights protections as due process to all Americans, regardless of skin color, and Cawthorn cites those protections as the reason the other section – banning to those who have engaged in an insurrection against the incumbent government — should not apply to him.
Specifically, he says it’s because of the way state law is written. When candidates are accused of being ineligible, the state places the burden of proof on the accused rather than the accuser. It’s the opposite of how it works in criminal trials.
“Here, Rep. Cawthorn is required to produce compensatory evidence to prove a negative (i.e., he did not engage in an insurrection), based on nothing more than ‘suspicion’. reasonable “of the Challenger,” the lawsuit says. “Such a charge transfer requirement, as applied to Representative Cawthorn here, violates his constitutional due process clause rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The challengers against Cawthorn, led by two former North Carolina Supreme Court justices, hoped to use the state’s process to determine a candidate’s eligibility to force Cawthorn to testify under oath about his role in the January 6 attack – since the onus is on him to prove he is eligible.
In his lawsuit filed in federal court Monday, Cawthorn does not go into detail about that day or his actions leading up to it. He says his lawsuit is not intended to defend himself against these charges, but rather seeks to stop the process before it even gets to that point.
“Rep. Cawthorn strenuously denies that he engaged in ‘insurrection or rebellion’ against the United States, but this litigation is not based on Rep. Cawthorn’s factual defenses,” the lawsuit states. Instead, this matter is before the court based on various constitutional and legal challenges to the North Carolina Dispute Act itself and its application here.”
The formal process to deal with the challenge against him was supposed to have already begun, but it has been delayed while a related lawsuit, on the shape of North Carolina’s political districts, unfolds. The case is scheduled for oral argument in the North Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday.
In addition to the constitutional rights violations he alleges, Cawthorn also says the anti-Confederate 14th Amendment play cannot be used against him or anyone else still alive.
He cites a law passed in 1872, the Amnesty Act, in which Congress decided to allow certain former Confederate rebels to serve in Congress. He says he barred former members of Congress who had served between 1859 and 1863 and later fought in the Confederacy, but he allowed all others who had participated in the insurrection against the U.S. government to serve in Congress. despite their actions. He therefore concluded that the prohibition should not apply to him or anyone else.
Cawthorn rose to the challenge in his interview with The Daily Caller. “It seems so stupid on the face of it,” he said, “to think that something created for the Civil War is going to be used for what happened on January 6, when I did my constitutional duty to certify an election.”
Cawthorn voted against certification of the election results.
For more on North Carolina government and politics, listen to the Under the Dome political podcast from The News & Observer and NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published February 1, 2022 8:10 a.m.