(John Ransom, Headline USA) Having tried everything else, Democrats have finally resorted to the old communist tactic of keeping opponents off an election ballot by declaring them to be criminals.
In a lawsuit that cites an archaic, Civil-War-era clause in the US Constitution, designed to keep former Confederates off the ballot, Democrats are trying to block the candidacies of three Wisconsin Republicans: Sen. Ron Johnson, Rep. Tom Tiffany and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, the Epoch Times reported.
Finally holding Wisconsin elected officials who allegedly aided and abetted the insurrection of January 6 accountable.
Federal lawsuit sponsored by our super PAC against Johnson, Tiffany, and Fitzgerald drops today for undermining the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. pic.twitter.com/Idc9KxLQCo
— MBCbrews (@MBCbrews) March 10, 2022
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States is ineligible for federal office if he “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
Leftist operatives allege that the role the three GOP lawmakers played in supporting former President Donald Trump’s challenges to the widely disputed outcome of the 2020 election—using the same congressional procedures Democrats themselves deployed in trying to block the certification of Trump and former President George W. Bush—was tantamount to secession from the Union.
“These guys broke the law and shouldn’t be on a ballot again,” said Kirk Bangstad, a former Democratic candidate for the state Assembly who owns Minocqua Brewing Company and runs the leftist super-PAC that funded the lawsuit according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Already, the scheme, first floated by Steele Dossier architect Marc Elias, has failed to ensnare pro-Trump Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-NC.
A federal judge ruled earlier this month that the provision in the 14th Amendment was subsequently nullified by Congress under the 1872 Amnesty Act.
The real end-game, of course, is yet another effort to gaslight the Democrats’ fringe base into thinking that the mostly peaceful Jan. 6 protest at the US Capitol was anything but a patriotic assertion of constitutionally protected free speech rights.
Johnson pointed to the hypocritical double-standard in a statement emailed to the Epoch Times.
“Democrats have ignored the Summer 2020 riots and relentlessly used January 6th as a political cudgel,” he wrote. “Now, they’ve used January 6th to file a frivolous lawsuit against me, similar to the one dismissed by a court last week.”
Forcing Republicans to expend time and resources on specious lawfare attacks also creates a useful distraction for the Left as it desperately tries to deflect from the ever-growing public malaise over the Biden administration’s failed policies.
Despite the obvious ruse, far-left “fact-checker” PolitiFact claimed legal experts were split about whether the clause could be used to keep somebody off the ballot if they were legally found to have engaged in rebellion or insurrection.
And indeed, the tactic has been deployed succesfully by other totalitarian regimes that appear to be the prototype for the Left’s new-world order.
In 2020, communists in Beijing disqualified a dozen pro-democracy Hong Kong legislators, citing national security law as the reason for keeping the democracy dissidents off the ballot, according to Reuters.
“The government is constructing a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] assembly in Legco [Hong Kong’s Legislative Council] to eliminate most of the opposition voices,” Nathan Law, a pro-democracy activist and former lawmaker who was kicked out of the legislature, said on Twitter.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
