A federal appeals court has overturned a lower court opinion, allowing a lawsuit against Rep. Madison Cawthorn that declares him an insurrectionist and seeks to remove him from the ballot to proceed.
In March, District Judge Richard Myers II ruled against the lawsuit from leftist activist group Free Speech for People, who argued that Cawthorn, the youngest member of Congress and a strident supporter of 45th President Donald Trump and his policies, should be removed from the ballot given his alleged support for the protests on Capitol Hill on January 6.
Free Speech for People argued that Cawthorn violated the 14th Amendment, which states that Americans cannot serve in Congress if you have previously taken a Congressional oath and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution, with petitioners stating that Cawthorn and others “voluntarily aided and engaged in an insurrection to obstruct the peaceful transfer of presidential power.” The 14th Amendment was ratified after the American Civil War, in which 620,000 lives were lost to end slavery and preserve the United States.
However, Judge Myers agreed with Cawthorn’s attorney, James Bopp Jr, who argued that because the 1872 Amnesty Act declared that “all political disabilities imposed” by the 14th Amendment were “hereby removed from all persons whomever,” it further applied to anyone in future who was accused of being an insurrectionist, including Cawthorn himself.
Myers’s decision was overturned on Tuesday by a three judge panel on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We hold only that the 1872 Amnesty Act does not categorically exempt all future rebels and insurrectionists from the political disabilities that otherwise would be created by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” wrote Judge Toby Heytens, who was appointed by Joe Biden:
“The issue currently before us is whether that same 1872 legislation also prospectively lifted the constitutional disqualification for all future rebels or insurrectionists, no matter their conduct. To ask such a question is nearly to answer it. Consistent with the statutory text and context, we hold that the 1872 Amnesty Act removed the Fourteenth Amendment’s eligibility bar only for those whose constitutionally wrongful acts occurred before its enactment. … Having specifically decided to withhold amnesty from the actual Jefferson Davis, the notion that the 1872 Congress simultaneously deemed any future Davis worthy of categorical advance forgiveness seems quite a stretch.”
The two other judges, James Wynn, an Obama appointee, and Trump apointee Julius Richardson, both concurred.
This came despite the fact that Cawthorn lost his bid for the Republican primary in his North Carolina district last week, with the panel ruling that because his loss was not yet certified, the decision was not moot.
Madison Cawthorn at America Fest (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
The panel made sure to emphasise that they were not ruling on whether Cawthorn was an insurrectionist or not, only that the federal legislation could still apply in this case.
Free Speech for People had also launched similar campaigns against Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, although the lawsuit failed in the Representative from Georgia’s case.
Greene blamed a “Soros-style dark money group” for launching the attack on “free speech, on our elections” and the voters themselves.
“Democrats know they can’t beat me at the ballot box, so left-wing Communist activists tried to RIP my name off the ballot,” she added, “and they failed.”
Following his defeat in the primary last week, Valiant News reported that Cawthorn went on the attack against the establishment uni-party who had “turned their guns” on him. Veteran GOP operatives admitted that there was a “full-court, state-based, establishment pushback” against him, involving a push of various supposed “scandals.”
“It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command,” Cawthorn said in a post on social media. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.”
