(Headline USA) The North Carolina State Board of Elections claimed in a court filing that it has authority to disqualify Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., from running for reelection over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol protest.
Leftist activists, led by election-stealing lawyer Marc Elias, filed a challenge to Cawthorn’s candidacy last month, claiming the U.S. Constitution’s little-used “disqualification clause” invalidates the candidacies of anyone who supported “insurrection.” The clause was ratified after the Civil War and was meant to prevent Confederate officers from running for office.
Cawthorn blasted the challenge as “Machiavellian” and “evil” and filed a lawsuit to shut it down.
“North Carolina’s law is unjust and unconstitutional as applied to Rep. Cawthorn,” said James Bopp, Jr., of The Bopp Law Firm, lead counsel for Cawthorn.
“The Challenge Statute violates fundamental principles of rights to free speech, due process, and federal law,” he said. “Requiring someone to prove he didn’t do something based upon the barest of ‘suspicions’ is patently unfair and unconstitutional.”
The election board, however, argued in a counter-claim that because it has the power to enforce “age and residency requirements,” it also as the authority to “police which candidates should or should not be disqualified.”
Cawthorn has denied any part in the Capitol riot, arguing that his attendance at former President Donald Trump’s rally that day was acceptable. He also vowed to fight attempts by radical leftists and their legal cabals to take away the people’s right to choose their representatives.
“Running for office is not only a great privilege, it is a right protected under the Constitution,” he said. “I love this country and have never engaged in, or would ever engage in, an insurrection against the United States.”
He said the challenge against his candidacy 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.”
“I’m defending not only my rights, but the right of the people to democratically elect their representatives,” Cawthorn said.
