Group Targeting America First Republicans Makes Headway Against MTG
James Duncan, MPA
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A coalition of leftist nonprofits and lawyers are taking aim at Republican voters by attempting to stop certain conservatives from appearing on election ballots. Their aim is to disallow America First Republicans from holding office through the perverse use of an obscure section in the U.S. Constitution that was written in the context of the Civil War.
And a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia gave strong signs on Friday that she will open Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) up to this vector of attack.
“Free Speech For People,” an ironically named nonprofit seeking to punish members of Congress for exercising their First Amendment rights, appears to have made headway in their campaign against conservative voters.
The group’s “14Point3 Campaign”(editor’s note: Secretaries of State must abide by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment and ban insurrectionists from the ballot in 2024.) is aimed at keeping politicians that can be tied to the January 6 Capitol protests from getting on the ballot — with former President Donald Trump as their main target.
Prewritten letters can be found on their website, organized by state, that are addressed to the states’ respective election officials. The letters demand that Trump be “excluded from the ballot” in the recipients’ states.
The campaign revolves around a misinterpretation tied to a strawman, and is a clear attempt to remove strong conservatives from office before Americans have a chance to vote for them — which tells you something about what they know about who the American people really support.
The obvious misinterpretation is the application of Civil War era laws to an unarmed protest at the Capitol. And the strawman that this misinterpretation hinges on is the characterization of those protests as an “insurrection.”
I’ll leave the comparisons to Black Lives Matter riots and the politicians who supported them to the side here, as it’s too obvious to bother spending time on.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment states that, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” So, officials who’ve sworn an oath to the Constitution are barred from Congress if they’ve participated in an insurrection. Fair enough.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene obviously didn’t participate in an insurrection. And she didn’t give “aid or comfort” to “insurrectionists.”
Greene allegedly helped plan a protest. And, following the protests, Greene stated she was “very upset” that those who entered the Capitol may have hurt the Republican strategy to continue to fight the contested election results.
Now, after a failed attempt to take Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) off the ballot, this antidemocratic coalition has found what appears to be a judge sympathetic to their subversive case.
After “Free Speech For People” filed their lawsuit last month against Greene’s candidacy, Greene challenged the move, requesting it be dismissed.
Federal Judge Amy Totenberg, who is being asked by Greene’s lawyer, James Bopp Jr., to dismiss the case, stated, “I don’t think that the Amnesty Act likely was prospective,” directly challenging the defense Bopp applied when successfully defending Rep. Cawthorn against these attempts in a previous case.
No ruling has come down yet, with the Obama-appointed judge informing the court that she would issue her ruling next week. However, her statements imply an intention to allow the case to advance. This is the kind of political lawfare that can destroy democracy — something most leftists claim they are defending.
Bopp, Greene’s lawyer, explained the significance of these lawsuits, pointing out that, if allowed, they would be “stripping voters of their right to vote and upending democracy right before an election.”
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