U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn is having a bad week and it’s only Tuesday.
Today news broke that the North Carolina State Board of Elections filed a motion Monday declaring it indeed does have the legal authority to determine if candidates should be disqualified for violations of the Fourteenth Amendment (more on that in a moment). About the same time that news broke, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell broke with Donald Trump and almost the entire Republican Party, declaring January 6 was a “violent insurrection” – yes, he used those very words.
The 14th Amendment in part states that no one who has taken the oath of office can be a U.S. Congressman or Senator if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States.
With McConnell, one of the top elected Republicans in the country, declaring Jan. 6 was an “insurrection,” that gives Cawthorn little to hold on to in making a case it was not.
“The board says it can disqualify Madison Cawthorn if he ‘engaged in insurrection,'” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reports.
Calling the filing “a big deal,” Stern adds that the “North Carolina State Board of Elections is prepared to investigate Madison Cawthorn and remove him from the 2022 ballot if it concludes that he facilitated the Jan. 6 attack.”
If all that wasn’t bad enough, the Associated Press adds that Cawthorn’s legal claim that an 1872 law that granted amnesty to Confederates also exonerates him isn’t going to fly.
“The State Board of Elections, which is already a named defendant, wrote Monday that Cawthorn lacks legal standing to pursue his claims and that his alleged injuries are speculative for now.”
Now, take all that, and read what Huffpost’s White House correspondent S.V. Dáte just wrote:
He calls the NC Board of Elections motion that it can “police” who gets on the ballot in relation to the 14th Amendment “Potentially a really big deal.”
And adds: “If it can disqualify Cawthorn from the ballot for insurrection, it can disqualify Trump.”