U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn is fighting back against left-wing attempts to de-legitimize his re-election campaign.
The North Carolina Republican claims in his lawsuit that it’s preposterous to use the 14th Amendment to claim he is an insurrectionist because he spoke at former President Donald Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election at the moment some Trump supporters rioted at the Capitol.
As The Free Press reported last month, liberals, led by former Clinton attorney Marc Elias, believe they can convince courts to exclude numerous GOP lawmakers from re-election bids by citing the Constitution’s post-Civil War provision that bars from service anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” That was aimed at former members of the Confederacy.
According to The Washington Times, Cawthorn maintained that does not apply to him and that he has “never engaged in, or would ever engage in, an insurrection against the United States.”
Rather, he added, the 14th Amendment is “being used as a weapon by liberal Democrats to attempt to defeat our democracy by having state bureaucrats, rather than the people, choose who will represent North Carolina in Congress.”
Cawthorn added, “I’m defending not only my rights, but the right of the people to democratically elect their representatives.”
Cawthorn’s lawyer said his client is being forced “to produce countervailing evidence to prove a negative,” when the burden falls on those challenging his re-election to prove that he did something wrong.
Moreover, his lawsuit says that the U.S. House “is the exclusive judge of the qualifications of its members.,”
According to the Times, the anti-Cawthorn case is weakened by the 1872 Amnesty Act, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.
The law removed all the disqualification provisions applied to most former Confederates. Grant also directed federal prosecutors to drop charges against former Confederates and pardoned almost all former rebels.
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