Greene a Target Even as Election Challenges Based on 14th Amendment Stall

After months of litigation, it increasingly looks as if the effort to block candidates from the ballot based on the Disqualification Clause of the 14th Amendment is facing legal headwinds, even as a challenge to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene will give groups fighting for disqualification another target. While Mrs. Greene’s fate has not yet been decided, courts and election boards alike have been hesitant to bring the 19th century provision to bear on the 2022 election cycle, even as proponents of disqualification insist that the events of January 6, 2021, demand barring those involved from standing for office again. The main site in this constitutional clash is situated in North Carolina. That’s where Congressman Madison Cawthorn, embattled in controversy on other fronts, has convinced a federal judge to block efforts to disqualify him from competing in next month’s Republican primary. It now appears as if two of those lightning rods — Mr. Cawthorn and Mrs. Greene — will face the stiffest legal challenges to re-election. A district court jurist, Richard Myers II, found that the Amnesty Act, passed in 1872, four years after the 14th Amendment, effectively neutralized the former law’s bite by issuing a prospective pardon for those officeholders who had affiliated with the Confederacy. Judge Myers’s reading of the law as extending clemency to both Confederates and Mr. Cawthorn pre-empted efforts to convince the Tar Heel State’s Board of Elections to strike him from the ballot. Free Speech for People, the group leading the effort to disqualify Mr. Cawthorn, called Judge Myers’s holding “narrow and bizarre” in an appeal filed to the riders of the Fourth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, which has yet to rule.However, time is running out to bar Mr. Cawthorn. Ballots for the Republican primary with Mr. Cawthorn’s name on them are already printed, according to North Carolina election officials. The primary will be held May 17. As the Sun has reported, efforts to use the same constitutional machinery to keep Representative James Banks off the ballot in Indiana were rejected by a bipartisan election commission in the Hoosier State. Mr. Banks, unlike Mr. Cawthorn, was not at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol. Undeterred by the foundering of these efforts in Indiana and North Carolina, Free Speech for People has filed a similar challenge to Mrs. Greene in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. While that document is directed to Georgia’s secretary of state, Bradley Raffenberger, Mrs. Greene’s fate will next be heard by an administrative law judge, who will rule on her eligibility for office. As in North Carolina, the burden of proof will be on Mrs. Greene to demonstrate the validity of her candidacy. Free Speech for People insists that as part of this process it intends “to issue subpoenas to Mrs. Greene and to take her deposition under oath.” Free Speech for People places particular emphasis on Mrs. Greene’s rhetoric in seeking to tar her as an insurrectionist, pointing to comments Mrs. Greene made in a video shortly before the storming of the Capitol where she accused President Biden of “treason” and went on to note that “it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.” In a statement responding to the effort to disqualify her, Mrs. Greene lambasted “the same evil playbook the dishonest Communist Democrats use against President Trump and his family.” The Peachtree State Republican primary is May 24. Polling has shown that while Mrs. Greene is still a favorite, she is facing a stiffer than anticipated battle with challenger Jennifer Strahan.

Greene a Target Even as Election Challenges Based on 14th Amendment Stall

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