In a recent Boston Globe piece, Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe and Constitutional Accountability Center President Elizabeth Wydra make the case that challenges to January 6 insurrectionists’ candidacy under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment must be allowed to proceed, rejecting any “absurd” attempts to evade accountability via the Confederate Amnesty Act.

They write:

“The 1872 Act was primarily a replacement for another in a long line of extraordinarily long bills listing individual Confederates. It was not the product of any considered judgment about the wisdom of letting potential future insurrectionists hold office but simply a practical solution to an administrative problem. Indeed, the campaign materials of Republicans and Democrats from that year’s presidential election indicate that both parties understood the 1872 Amnesty Act to be applicable only to former Confederates.”

This week, North Carolina voters challenging Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s eligibility to appear on the 2022 primary ballot filed an emergency appeal to reverse a ruling by a Trump-appointed judge who ordered the North Carolina State Board of Elections not to conduct a statutorily required hearing on the voters’ challenge under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Free Speech For People, a non-partisan legal advocacy organization representing the voters, is urging Secretaries of State to follow the constitutional mandate of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and bar insurrectionist lawmakers from any future ballot.  As Tribe and Wydra write:

“Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment remains an important mechanism for holding officeholders accountable when they violate their oaths of office and for ensuring that they be disabled from doing so ever again. Cawthorn and others like him who face congressional and potential Justice Department scrutiny for their roles relating to the Jan. 6 attack should not be able to evade its strictures by relying on the 1872 Amnesty Act.”

Read the full oped in the Boston Globe here.

Learn more about the 14point3 campaign here.