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March 29, 2022 - Epoch Times
17:59
Federal Lawsuit Working to Get 3 GOP Congressmen Disqualified From 2022 Ballot, Allege Insurrection
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This is your Daily Facts Matter Update, and I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
And with the midterm elections coming up very, very soon, let's begin today's discussion over in the state of Wisconsin, where local Democratic Party activists have gotten, you can stay creative with how they're trying to win those midterm elections.
Because in Wisconsin, you have three Republican congressmen who are running for re-election come November.
And these particular congressmen are relatively popular.
For instance, you have House Member Scott Fitzgerald, who won his previous election by 20 points.
You have House member Tom Tiffany, who also won his previous election by about 20 points.
And then you also have Senator Ron Johnson, who won his previous election by about 4 points, which is fairly sizable in the context of a Senate race.
And so, if you are a Democrat activist, what do you do when you have these three strong Republican incumbents running for re-election come November?
Do you A, try to raise the best candidates to beat them based on the demographics of the constituency?
Do you B. Subscribe to the Facts Matter YouTube channel in order to get honest news injected directly into your newsfeed?
Or do you C. Try to get them disqualified from being able to serve in office altogether?
Well, the obvious answer is B. I mean, C. You try to get them disqualified.
And that is exactly what's happening over in Wisconsin.
Democratic Party activists have filed a lawsuit over in federal court arguing that these three congresspeople, they should actually be barred from being able to serve in office because, for one, they spoke out against the election irregularities in 2020, and then secondly, the lawsuit alleges that they attempted to manipulate the certification of the presidential election results.
And so you might be asking yourself, how would these two particular allegations actually bar them from serving in office?
Well, the lawsuit claims that these three lawmakers cannot serve in Congress because their actions amounted to an insurrection, and therefore they should be disqualified under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
And for reference, here's what that particular section of the 14th Amendment actually says.
No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any state who...
Having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States or as a member of any state legislature or as an executive or judicial officer of any state 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.
Now, as you likely guessed, this section of this particular amendment was enacted shortly after the U.S. Civil War in order to keep members of the Confederacy from joining the new Congress.
And when you scan the language of that particular law, you will notice how particular it is regarding the crimes which can get a person banned from being able to serve in office.
There are, in fact, two very specific crimes that were mentioned by name, insurrection as well as rebellion.
And those are not just words.
Insurrection and rebellion are actual legal crimes as defined in Section 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, subsection 2383.
However, this is exactly where the difficulty will be for the Democrat activists when they have to prove their case in court.
Because if you head on over to the Department of Justice website, Specifically, the page where they keep the list of cases related to January 6th, you'll notice that out of the several hundred cases there, well, no one has actually been charged for either insurrection or rebellion.
Now, there are a lot of trespassing charges, obstruction charges, disorderly conduct charges, conspiracy charges.
But no one has been charged with Section 18, subsection 2383 of the U.S. Criminal Code.
Now, to be fair, members of the Oath Keepers organization were recently charged with seditious conspiracy, which is not exactly treason, but it's pretty close.
And then last Wednesday, one of the members of the Oath Keepers, he actually pled guilty to the charge of seditious conspiracy as a part of a deal with U.S. prosecutors.
Regardless, though, the point here is that, at least legally speaking, it will be very difficult for these Democrat activists to prove their case in court against these three Republican incumbents.
Here's specifically part of what their lawsuit alleges.
Again, this lawsuit is in federal court.
Quote,
Now, we here at the Epoch Times, we did reach out to the lawmakers who are currently being sued, and one of them, specifically we did reach out to the lawmakers who are currently being sued, and one of them, specifically Senator Ron Johnson, he got back to us saying that this lawsuit was Democrats have ignored the summer 2020 riots and relentlessly used January 6, 2021 as a political cudgel.
Now, they've used January 6th to file a frivolous lawsuit against me, similar to the one dismissed by a court last week.
On the flip side, however, we also reached out to the plaintiffs in the case, and their lawyer got back to us, saying this in part.
Now, it is worth mentioning that besides the broad protections that these lawmakers have under the First Amendment, as well as the general difficulty of making the legal argument that what took place was actually an insurrection rather than a riot, well, there's another difficulty that these activists will face as well, and it's something that was alluded to in Senator Ron Johnson's statement.
And that is the fact that this is not the first time during this election cycle that Democrats have tried to use the disqualification clause of the 14th Amendment to bar sitting lawmakers for seeking re-election.
And up until today, all these efforts have failed.
And so, you had a case over in Indiana against Congressman Jim Banks, as well as another case over in North Carolina against Congressman Madison Cawthorn.
And in both of those two cases, the judges who were presiding over them, they made the determination that simply questioning election integrity, speaking publicly about election irregularities, as well as voting a certain way on the House floor, are all protective forms of speech that do not constitute being involved in an insurrection.
And so we'll just have to wait and see if this new case in Wisconsin will play out any differently.
If you'd like to read the full lawsuit for yourself, or if you'd like to read a bit more about the 14th Amendment and what the dictionaries of the time period actually refer to as being a rebellion as well as an insurrection, I will throw the links to several great resources into the description box below this video for you to check out.
And all I ask in return is that you take a quick moment to vote with your finger and smash, smash, smash that like button so that the YouTube algorithm will be forced to share this video out to ever more people.
Now, I want to switch gears just a little bit and discuss practical real-world solutions against the censorship that we're seeing pop up on college campuses.
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Now, Roman in the studio, back to you.
If you're following my coverage for a little while now, or just generally if you happen to live in this country, then you're probably aware that free speech on college campuses has gotten more and more restrictive with things like safe spaces and hate speech laws limiting what people are allowed to discuss on college campus.
However, I recently met a woman who is actually working to change that in a very practical way.
While I was down in Florida about two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Sharice Trump, the executive director of an organization called Speech First, and we discussed the practical legal steps that she's using to fight back against censorship on college campuses.
Take a listen.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Can you please introduce yourself as well as the organization?
Yeah, yeah, certainly.
So, Sharice Trump, Executive Director of Speech First.
And basically, we litigate against universities that violate the free speech rights of students.
And what I mean by this is we look at policies on campus that focus on issues with, like, harassment or bias response teams that specifically target speech, which is constitutionally protected.
And we look at public universities, and our members on those campuses are the ones who kind of tell us what's going on, and we sue on behalf of them, so we represent them in the court of law.
So before we dive into some of the cases, I'm sure our viewers are wondering your relationship to Donald Trump.
Yeah, I know.
I get the question often.
I'm used to it now.
You know, I always try to crack a few jokes, but no, there's no relation that I'm aware of, at least.
Well, have you done a genealogy test?
I have not.
It's actually my husband's name, so maybe.
There you go.
Maybe, yeah.
So can you give us some examples?
Because, of course, you know, the issue of free speech on campus has been blowing up recently.
Tons of examples on social media.
Can you give us an example, maybe one or two examples of concrete cases?
Yeah.
How they, you know, what happened and how the case progressed once you took it up?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So right now we have three open cases.
This week we just filed against the University of Houston.
Their harassment policy includes anything.
It's incredibly broad.
It includes anything from denigrating jokes, stereotypes, microaggressions.
So if students basically have any kind of mainstream opinion and someone thinks it's offensive, they could actually be accused of harassment and processed.
Through the Title IX office on their campus, which is a serious accusation.
And it's something that students, I think, are very, you know, it's not just a matter of fear, but they know that this will follow them, you know, in their career and online.
They'll be attached to harassment case on their campus, or they can even be kicked out of school.
So this is something that we, you know, our members came to us and said, look, we have mainstream conservative ideas on campus.
We just want to talk about the transgender issue, which is a big issue right now in Texas, whether transgenders compete on athletic teams on colleges, as well as the pro-life issue on college campuses as well with what's going on in Texas.
This is something they want to talk about with their fellow students and in their classrooms, but they feel like if they do, they're going to offend someone to the point where they actually get it reported.
So this is one really good example of what's going on.
We have a couple other open cases as well.
The University of Central Florida and Virginia Tech University.
University of Central Florida is up at the 11th Circuit, and Virginia Tech is up at the 4th Circuit.
And right now, both of those cases touch on a similar issue.
They are called bias response teams.
And these are anonymous reporting systems that are on campuses where students can actually report anything that's considered bias, unwanted speech, or offensive speech using these really, again, overbroad and very subjective terms that, you know, this type of speech is protected It's important that we continue to remind everyone that in this process.
But students can actually report on one another anonymously.
So there's no real due process attached to this.
If you're reported on at your campus for maybe an emoji that you put on social media or something that you said you made a joke at once and someone took offense of it, you could actually get processed through, like, the Dean of Students Office or even, you know, have to be going through mandated diversity training afterwards.
So these are all Especially at public universities, this is all fundamentally unconstitutional policies, and this is kind of what we focus our issues on.
So in the example that you gave in regards to the school in Texas, is it the case that even in a classroom setting, let's say there's a debate on an issue, and you're holding the debate that there's only two genders, that sports in schools should not have biological men competing against females, and that's your stance, and that's the position you're defending in a classroom debate.
Even that, it's to the point that even that can be termed as harassment?
Yeah, well, the way that the policy is written, pretty much anything can be considered harassment because they use very subjective terms.
They use terms of things like unwanted, denigrating, or offensive in their policies.
And so I would say that, first of all, a lot of times these debates aren't taking place.
And this is what the students want that we're representing in our cases.
They want to hold these debates.
They want to challenge their fellow students, and they also want to hear what their ideas are too.
But they fear that if they even like table or try to, you know, have any kind of event or bring it up in class, that they actually will be reported either by the professor or by the students.
And we have had students tell us that they have been reported on these issues.
So this is something that is always on their mind, and they feel like they can't actually speak up about it.
And it's not just a matter, again, of being like overly sensitive or afraid that if they speak up, someone might disagree with them.
That's one thing.
Having a debate is one thing.
But they are actually afraid that they're going to be reported and, again, processed through a Title IX office on their campus.
It's a very serious due process path that they'd have to go down on their campus.
And again, so there are serious tangible consequences.
It's not just a matter of being afraid to speak up because they're afraid someone will disagree with them.
And I think it's important that we clarify that up front.
So can you give us an example of a case that you actually took up and what happened once you went to court?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So we've had a number of really successful cases against University of Michigan, University of Texas Austin, and Iowa State University, and University of Illinois as well, and Urbana-Champaign.
And so these cases focused a lot on discriminatory harassment policies, as well as chalking restrictions where students weren't allowed to write certain messages and chalk, and as well as bias response teams, which I brought up before.
And so all of these policy issues, again, they attack free speech.
And when we took those cases to the district level, you know, the district would sometimes rule against us or rule in favor of us.
But then after that, we go up to the circuit level and appeal at that level on specific policies.
So in University of Texas, Austin, as well as University of Michigan, we actually won at the circuit levels in those.
And we were able to settle out of court with the schools and have them change their policies.
Because that's ultimately what our goal is.
Look, we're not suing for our You know, for a bunch of money or some harm or anything like that.
What we're suing for is for them to change their policies, to just have more constitutionally sound policies.
That's all we want at the end of the day, is to just don't have bad policies on your campus that fly in the face of free speech rights on campus.
So once you won those cases at the district level, was there an appeal?
Yeah, so the ones that we went up to the circuit levels, they ended up settling out of court, and we won those at the circuit levels, yeah.
And so the idea, the goal is essentially is to one day hopefully get a case to the Supreme Court so that we can just settle this issue once and for all with discriminatory harassment policies and bias response teams.
So what if, let's say, somebody's watching this at home and maybe they agree that there is a need for, let's say, a bias response team or, let's say, hate speech laws on campus because people go to university and they might feel unsafe otherwise.
What would you tell those people, you know, in regards to your position?
Yeah, I mean, who defines hate, right?
That's my first question, is like, how do you define what hate is?
This is why the Supreme Court has upheld that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, because it is a very subjective term, and it could mean anything at any time.
And one time it could mean, like, actual hate.
Other times it could just mean something that someone just found offensive and didn't really like to hear.
Again, we're looking at this is the four years the students are supposed to be challenging themselves the most.
They're supposed to be developing their convictions.
They should be challenged by others.
They should feel uncomfortable at times so that they can maybe look into what it is that their position is and do more research and advance their skill set, advance their thinking and be intellectually curious.
They should want to have these debates.
What we're worried about is if you have an entire campus where students are censoring themselves because FIRE just came out with a report at the end of last year saying 80% of students on college campuses that they spoke to Say that they self-censor at one time or another.
That is a huge percentage of students not expressing themselves, not speaking up, because they'd rather just avoid any confrontation at all.
And that's the type of generation of leaders that we're going to have to face the world with, face the nation with.
This is something that we actually should be really concerned about.
We don't want a bunch of folks who are just willing to keep their heads down and be complacent.
And then they're going to be entering leadership roles and corporations and stuff.
So I just tell students, you know, look, at the end of the day, you should want to participate in these debates.
This should be something that you want to do.
Speech is protected by the First Amendment and in a very unique way in the United States and that's something that's very special to the United States and we should really embrace it.
Now, that was now the full interview.
If you'd like to watch that interview in its entirety, as well as a plethora of other phenomenal content, you can do so over on Epic TV, which is our awesome no-censorship video platform.
I'll throw a link to the interview, as well as to Epic TV in general.
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And if you use that link and use promo code Roman, as I mentioned before, you will get a 14-day free trial.
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Until next time, I'm your host, Roman, from the Epoch Times.
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