Then There’s Madison Cawthorn

Published: April 15, 2022

By Jim Lichtman
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On one side, we have Liz Cheney, a thoughtful conservative who believes and practices the values of honesty, respect and accountability. Then there’s Madison Cawthorn, the 17-year-old, excuse me, 26-year-old who acts like he’s 17.

Cawthorn, who, along with his far-right of far-right Republican colleagues—Lauren Boebert (R-CO), a devout QAnon believer, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who embraces the white genocide conspiracy theory, QAnon, and Pizzagate—looks for any chance to increase his 6 hours of fame (inflation moved it up from 15 minutes).

Like Boebert and Greene, Cawthorn, the novice representative from North Carolina, never met a far-right platform he couldn’t use to spout election lies and increase his presence. As reported by NPR, Cawthorn said “there would be ‘bloodshed’ if the next election was stolen, and he called those arrested during the Jan. 6 attack ‘political hostages.’”

Last month, speaking of Ukraine’s hero-president, Cawthorn said, “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

At a rally of Macon County Republican supporters, Cawthorn, in a deeply disturbing suggestion to violence, holds a camo-painted shotgun and tells the crowd, “The Second Amendment was not written so that we can go hunting or sport shooting. The Second Amendment was written so that we can fight tyranny.”

Fourteen months into his term, NPR describes, Cawthorn describes the inside club of his Washington colleagues. “Then all of the sudden you get invited to, ‘Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come.’ Or the fact that you know, some of the people that are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do, you know, a key bump of cocaine right in front of you and it’s like, wow, this is wild,” he said.

In an interview with John Lovel on his podcast show, “Warrior Poet Society,” Cawthorn, without a shred of proof, said he had experienced “sexual perversion” in our nation’s Capital.

It’s a safe bet Madison won’t be invited to the House Republican Christmas shindig this year. And House Leader Kevin McCarthy is sick of Cawthorn, too.

“I just told him he’s lost my trust, he’s gonna have to earn it back, and I laid out everything I find is unbecoming. And, you can’t just say, ‘You can’t do this again.’ I mean, he’s, he’s got a lot of members very upset.”

McCarthy told reporters, “He claims he watched people do cocaine. Then when he comes in, he tells me, he says he thinks he saw maybe a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away. It’s just frustrating. There’s no evidence behind his statements. And when I sit down with him … I told him you can’t make statements like that, as a member of Congress, that affects everybody else and the country as a whole.”

Just when you think Republicans have scrapped the bottom of the barrel of utterly unqualified Republican to serve in the people’s House, they find another. Madison Cawthorn is that Republican.

But change may be in the wind this November as voters in the states that elected Boebert, Greene and Cawthorn are rethinking their choice of representatives.

Bri Buentello an educator and former Democratic state legislator who owns several guns and counts members of both parties as friends advocates replacing Boebert.

“As far as I can tell, we are paying her $180,000 a year for her to tweet and go on Fox News. The job she’s doing is fundamentally disconnected from [the district] and our needs.”

A group of Georgia voters is challenging U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s eligibility to run for reelection,” the A/P writes, “saying she helped facilitate the riot that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

The filing with the secretary of state’s office “alleges that Green, a Republican, is ineligible under the 14th Amendment, saying that ‘before, on, and after January 6, 2021, Greene voluntarily aided and engaged in an insurrection to obstruct the peaceful transfer of presidential power, disqualifying her from serving as a Member of Congress.’”

And North Carolina voters may be taking a cue from Georgia voters.

In the same story, “a federal appeals court last week opened up the possibility for voters challenging Cawthorn’s candidacy to participate in a lawsuit the Republican congressman filed against state election officials and make their own legal arguments about why his Jan. 6 activities should be scrutinized.”

Liz Cheney is a leader in the truest sense of the word.

Then there’s Madison Cawthorn.

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