According to The Associated Press, 11 voters in North Carolina are asking the State Board of Elections to disqualify Rep. Madison Cawthorn (pictured) from the ballot on the basis he participated in an “insurrection” against the United States. The voters are citing the 14th Amendment, which bans lawmakers who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against their country.
Cawthorn, 26, is the youngest lawmaker on Capitol Hill and is serving his first term in Congress. He has filed paperwork to seek re-election in a newly-created congressional district in North Carolina that was redrawn after the U.S. Census.
James Bopp, Jr., an attorney who has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Cawthorn, says Democrats are desperate to avert an Election Day disaster and maintain power.
"Mark Elias, the Democrat lawyer who was behind the Trump-Russia hoax, announced several months ago that he had come up with this scheme to try to disqualify up to 24 members of Congress from running for re-election,” Bopp says. “On the bogus charge that they engaged in insurrection and rebellion against the United States at the January 6th rally."
Elias, a prominent attorney and Democrat strategist, was described as Democrats’ “last best hope” to keep them in power in a story by The Hill from December. That story described his plan to defeat Republicans across the country after Elias founded a politics-driven law firm last summer with a goal of helping Democrats.
Just as Bopp says, a Twitter post by Elias, which can be read here, states a “serious discussion” is coming about using the 14th Amendment to disqualify GOP lawmakers from re-election.
“We may even see litigation,” Elias wrote just two months ago.
Elias, ironically, was eventually outed as a key figure behind the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion allegations. When he worked at prominent law firm Perkins Coie, Elias was involved in the early plans to create a "Russian dossier" against Trump.
The AP story states North Carolina “voters” are challenging Cawthorn but the same story says, farther down, a Washington-based group named Free Speech for People filed the challenge against the lawmaker. A second group, Our Revolution, is also filing challenges, the AP reported.
Bopp tells American Family News the ballot challenges, if successful, could keep a Republican candidate off the ballot in a Republican-leaning district. That would allow a Democrat candidate to run unopposed if state election boards side with the left-wing groups.
“So this is really an anti-Democratic effort to steal Congress,” he insists, “by the actions of state bureaucrats, or maybe judges, disqualifying these members of Congress on these bogus grounds.”
