How to disqualify insurrectionists from public office
A new lawsuit paves the way for a 14th Amendment case to remove traitors from positions of power.
When I was a little kid playing in the woods I’d kick over a rock to find a bunch of roly polys squirming in the mud. One rock, five or six roly-polys. Another rock, seven or eight. Rock after rock, one squirming pile of roly-polys after another. That’s what my job is like now, except the roly-polys are my fellow Americans who took part in an insurrection, and instead of being harmless crustaceans, they’re people with substantial power who are trying to overturn democracy. So I keep kicking up rocks.
The amount of daily developments in what increasingly looks like a faltering democracy is hard to keep up with — acres of woods filled with rocks that need to be turned over. Republicans across the country are threatening democracy through a combination of restrictive voting laws and election subversion efforts like promoting conspiracy theories and the abject falsehood that Biden didn’t win the 2020 election. Every day is a deluge.
Since early July I’ve been working with the Center for Media and Democracy on its Insurrection Exposed project, part of the reason I’ve been so quiet here on this newsletter. The purpose of the campaign is to expose all the public figures involved in the Insurrection. There are many, hundreds and hundreds of them. And each time I write a profile on one of these insurrectionists I kick over a rock that inevitably leads to a few more. This goes on and on until I’m looking at a pile of rocks and roly polys running in every direction.
That’s because Trumpism spreads like a virus, infecting first a few people, then a whole group, then an entire state’s worth of Republicans and eventually the entire party. It isn’t just that there are a lot of bad people at the top willing to do anything to keep Trump in power, it’s that the virus has spread downward to every borough and ward in the country. The nearly 700 people charged with crimes for storming the Capitol on January 6 are simply the foot soldiers. Dangerous in their own right — these are the types of people who are going to riot in the streets and shoot liberals when Trump loses again in 2024 — most of them are far removed from the power structures that make up the Republican party. Like any major organization, the GOP is made up of many of these little kingdoms. At the top of each sits a wannabe Trump.
Many of the people we write about each day for Insurrection Exposed are far from the fringes of the GOP; they’re often revered in the political kingdoms in which they operate. That’s because election denierism is no longer a bug of the Republican party; it is its primary function. From your local city council on up to races for the U.S. Senate, Republicans across the country are running and profitably fundraising on election denier platforms. Their lies are borne of a belief that the country is being taken away from them, and they’re right. America is becoming less white and less conservative with each passing day. And the more educated Americans become, the more progressive they tend to be, which is why Republicans, conservatives and the far-right are aligned in fighting the threat of a properly educated populace.
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All of this has led me to a big dumb question: Why are all the public figures who directly and publicly attempted to overthrow the U.S. government not in prison right now? Tampering or interfering with an election is a felony in most states, and Republicans across the country have been guilty of just that.
Here in Georgia, at least three Republican officials in Coffee County coordinated with the Trump campaign and election conspiracy theory lawyer Sidney Powell to gain access to voting machine data,. They thought the data would prove votes were flipped from Trump to Biden. Of course it didn’t. The Trump campaign carried out the same scheme in Arizona and Nevada, with the help of an Atlanta IT firm called SullivanStrickler that insists it had no idea it would possibly be breaking the law when it teamed up with Powell and others to access voting machine data. (“The firm had no reason to believe that, as officers of the court, these attorneys would ask or direct SullivanStrickler to do anything either improper or illegal,” a spokesperson for the company told me. They might’ve taken two seconds to Google who Sidney Powell was but, whatever.)
The firm has also been implicated in a similar scheme in Michigan, where Powell was also likely coordinating with the Trump campaign to gain access to voting machines. There, these election deniers were joined by Trump’s current pick for Michigan Attorney General, Matthew DePerno, and a far-right sheriff named Dar Leaf. (DePerno has ties to far-right businessman and podcaster Joe Oltmann, who gained notoriety in election denier circles for saying he had obtained audio of a Dominion Voting Machines employee telling Antifa activists that he’d rigged some machines against Trump. Oltmann has never produced the audio. Disturbingly, DePerno and Oltmann met with State Department officials on Jan. 6, possibly even gaining an audience with Mike Pompeo’s staff.)
To recap: Republicans in Georgia and elsewhere tried to trick Congress into accepting electoral votes from self-described “fake electors,” refused to certify election results showing Biden won, attempted to prove through possibly illegal access to voting machines that Biden lost, have placed election deniers in — or are running election denier candidates for — positions of power over voting and elections, and have introduced restrictive laws that reduce access to polls for minorities who are less likely to vote for Republicans. Tampering and interfering with an election? Check. Threatening democracy? Check.
That more Republicans aren’t in jail or somehow barred from holding public office is a travesty, but there is hope. On Tuesday, a New Mexico judge ruled that Cowboys for Trump founder Couy Griffin — a far-right racist who once said anyone criticizing the United States should “go back to Africa” and who participated in the storming of the Capitol — can no longer serve as a county commissioner. The judge made his ruling based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has participated in an insurrection or rebellion against the United States from holding office. It’s the first time since 1869 that a court has disqualified an official from holding office under Section 3 — the Disqualification Clause. The group behind the lawsuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said Tuesday’s decision will hopefully encourage others to seek Disqualification Clause lawsuits and rulings.
The “ruling has now established a legal precedent that public officials who participated in the insurrection on January 6th, whether by engaging in violence or by encouraging and inciting it, are constitutionally disqualified,” Jenna Grande, a CREW spokesperson, told me. “This goes just beyond those who breached the Capitol or attacked law enforcement on January 6th — it can and should be applied to those who aided or were ‘leagued’ with insurrectionists.”
That’s a lot of roly-polys.
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P.S. The first photo in this post is mine from a road trip to cover the beginnings of Herschel Walker’s campaign. The second is from Savannah, where I’ve developed a sixth sense for spotting far-right and extremist markings on vehicles here. It’s not that hard because there’s so many! Swear to God I’m going to start posting more about my investigations into election deniers in Georgia and elsewhere, especially now that I’m finding so many of them through the Insurrection Exposed project. Please be patient and know those stories and others are coming down the pike. Speaking of, I finally have my hands on a glut of records from Spalding County, where an election denier and QAnon conspiracy theorist is in charge of the election board there. I’m going through them for a Rolling Stone story to be published in the coming months. Next weekend, the writing begins after eight months of reporting. As my former colleague at the Journal Star in Peoria used to say, “stay tuned…”