14th Amendment challenge to ban Cawthorn from Congress delayed

Questions of whether Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn should be allowed to run for re-election Congress — due to his support for overturning the 2020 election, plus accusations that he helped plan the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol — are being put on hold.

The reasons for the delay are slightly complicated. So are the legal arguments, which boil down to a part of the U.S. Constitution that hasn’t been used much in the 150 years since it was written.

Cawthorn, for his part, says he stands by his actions and doesn’t think he will be banned from Congress when it’s all said and done.

“It’s just a political tactic,” he said in a recent interview with Fox News. “I don’t believe it has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually accomplishing its task.”

The case has grabbed national media attention, and some national legal experts agree that Cawthorn is probably right and will be allowed to run again.

However, some say that even if it fails, the challenge might still succeed in a different way — by forcing the 26-year-old lawmaker from Hendersonville to testify about just how involved he was in planning the attack on Congress.

Several months ago Rolling Stone wrote that multiple Jan. 6 organizers who are now helping Congress investigate the violence that day say they worked closely with several far-right members of Congress or their staff — Cawthorn, Texas Rep. Paul Gosar, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back,” one of the organizers told Rolling Stone.

Will the challenge work?

No state has the power to block people from running for Congress, University of Iowa law professor Derek Muller wrote for the Election Law Blog. No matter how unqualified someone might seem, he said, only Congress itself has the authority to decide who is eligible to serve in Congress.

State elections officials shouldn’t even be allowed to keep a child off the ballot, he added — let alone a sitting member of Congress — and if that child went on the win the election, it would be up to the rest of Congress to vote on whether he or she should be sworn in.

“It’s left for the people to choose their candidates, and for Congress to judge whether those candidates are qualified,” Muller wrote.

He also noted that the Democratic-majority House of Representatives could have attempted to expel Republicans like Cawthorn who tried to overturn the election, but hasn’t. It takes a two-thirds majority to kick out a member of the U.S. House, and in all of American history it has only happened five times — three for fighting for the Confederacy and two for bribery scandals.

Other analysts were less dismissive. Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern wrote that the legal case “is a long shot” but might work. And, he added, there are other ways for Cawthorn’s opponents to measure success.

“Even if the challenge fails to keep Cawthorn out of Congress, it could still succeed in forcing him to reveal new details about his involvement in the Jan. 6 assault,” Stern wrote.

That’s because unlike…