This little ditty popped onto the Asheville Politics FB group on Monday (Associated Press):
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A group of North Carolina voters urged state officials Monday to disqualify U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn as a congressional candidate, citing his participation in a rally last January in Washington that questioned the presidential election outcome and preceded the Capitol riot.
Cawthorn’s office quickly condemned the candidacy challenge, filed on behalf of 11 voters before the State Board of Elections, which oversees the scrutiny of candidates’ qualifications. The voters contend that Cawthorn, a Republican who formally filed as a candidate for the 13th District seat last month, can’t run because he fails to comply with an amendment in the U.S. Constitution ratified shortly after the Civil War.
In addition to confirming that everyone born in this country is a citizen entitled to all the rights pertaining thereto, Section 3 of the 14th Amendment passed during Reconstruction states:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Those of us in the newly renamed and redrawn 14th Congressional District (including more than a few Republicans) don’t want Cawthorn back. It would be sweet irony if he is disqualified from running elsewhere by the 14th Amendment. That is just what Cawthorn’s challengers contend:
The written challenge says events on Jan. 6, 2021 “amounted to an insurrection” and that Cawthorn’s speech at the rally supporting then-President Donald Trump, his other comments and information in published reports provide a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that he helped facilitate the insurrection.
Their filing is here. In it, challengers state:
7. In 1869, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued the leading national precedent on the meaning of “engage” under Section Three. The Court held that a candidate “engages” in a rebellion or insurrection for the purposes of the Disqualification Clause by “[v]oluntarily aiding the rebellion, by personal service, or by contributions, other than charitable, of any thing that was useful or necessary.” Worthy v. Barrett, 63 N.C. 199, 203 (1869).
8. Planning or helping plan an insurrection or rebellion satisfies that definition. So does planning a demonstration or march upon a government building that the planner knows is substantially likely to (and does) result in insurrection or rebellion, as it constitutes taking voluntary steps to contribute, “by personal service,” a “thing that was useful or necessary” to the insurrection or rebellion. And knowing that insurrection or rebellion was likely makes that aid voluntary.
There is nothing I’ve seen to suggest Cawthorn planned or helped plan the rally. He was probably beside himself just to be asked to speak. Egging on the crowd to march on the Capitol is another matter. But it is not clear he did that.
AP continues:
The state board scheduled a meeting Wednesday to create a five-member panel or panels from counties within the proposed 13th District required to hear the challenge. The ruling by such a panel can be appealed to the state board and later to an appeals court. Three of the five state board members are Democrats.
Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama (R-Kevlar) is another matter. He is already being sued over helping inciting the riot. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass!” Brooks told the crowd on Jan. 6. “Now, our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives … Are you willing to do the same? My answer is yes. Louder! Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?”
And fight they did. Many, anyway. Not only at Brooks’ urging, but at Trump’s. Perhaps he’ll feel a cold, 14th breeze down his neck.
Gonna drop Charlie Pierce right here:
As the months go on, we may find reasons to drop Section 3 on the heads of a number of Cawthorn’s colleagues, so this action in North Carolina is more than welcome. After all, as Garrett Epps writes in his admirably lucid history of the 14th Amendment and its ratification, Democracy Reborn, nobody in that Congress had any doubt about what Section 3 was aimed at. The majority report from the joint congressional committee on the amendment stated quite clearly that, as Epps puts it:
Southerners had taken advantage of the president’s [Andrew Johnson] leniency to elect “notorious and unpardoned rebels” as prospective members of Congress, and the committee’s interviews with Southeners and federal officials produced “no evidence whatever” among white Southerners “of repentance for their crime” or any real regret “except that they had no longer the power to continue the desperate struggle.”
The entire brief public career of Rep. Madison Cawthorn makes the authors of that report look like Nostradamus. However, there has been a powerful undertow against the Reconstruction Amendments ever since their passage, and it’s become increasingly powerful as the prion disease spread within the conservative collective mind. Which is why I hope this action in North Carolina proceeds steadily upwards.
Speaking for Free Speech for People, the group supporting the Cawthorn challenge, legal director Ron Fein told AP its North Carolina filing will be the first of many qualification challenges it plans to file in states against members of Congress and Trump.
Does the 14th Amendment bite? Or is it simply empty rhetoric?