Madison Cawthorn Is Out, But Not Because He Backed Stealing the 2020 Election

Madison Cawthorn got dumped out of Congress on Tuesday night, losing the Republican primary for North Carolina's 11th House District to State Senator Chuck Edwards. Was it that he does not, in any discernible way, do the job of a United States congressman, belonging instead to the Viral Brigade alongside such luminaries as Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene? Was it that he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a "thug"? Was it that super enthusiastic Instagram post about visiting Hitler's crib? Was it the allegations of sexual misconduct in college? Was it that he lied about getting into the Naval Academy, or that he said his friend left him to die "in a fiery tomb" after a car crash when his friend says he actually pulled him from the wreck? Was it that he expressed full-throated support for the most recent former president's campaign to throw out the results of an American election and stay in power in contravention of the will of the American people?

No. All that was cool, but things changed more recently. Cawthorn took on too much water following volley after volley of scandal cannonballs striking the U.S.S. TreePunch. There were lingerie photos, and police run-ins, and insider-trading allegations. And the most popular explanation for the scandal avalanche is that Cawthorn crossed Republican leaders with his wild claims he's been invited to cocaine orgy parties by various GOPers, making national enemies atop those he made in the state GOP. The problem's not that he is an irredeemable little shit who backed Trump's attempted autogolpe, it's that he pissed off the party by suggesting some members do cool stuff in their free time. This is evidence that 1) Republican leaders and operatives, if they so chose, could impose consequences on the worst members of their flock and clean up the caucus, and 2) they're not interested in doing so.

And there was more evidence of just how Not a Big Deal it is to be a fan of overturning elections within the Republican Party from the...wait for it...Republican primary election for Pennsylvania governor. State Senator Doug Mastriano won that one at a canter, and boy does this guy like the idea of throwing out the votes of American citizens to install his preferred candidate in power. This guy led efforts within Pennsylvania state government to toss the results showing Joe Biden won in 2020. He crossed police lines and breached barricades at the Capitol on January 6, though he says he didn't go inside the building. (He hasn't been charged with a crime, though he was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee.) And here's what he said about the state government's power following the presidential election contest in November 2020, when Trump's attempted election theft was in full swing:

There was no evidence, so the takeaway here is that if this guy is in power and declares there is mounting evidence, he will throw out results he doesn't like. The beauty of this is the victim-projection matrix at work: seeking to corrupt the election and disenfranchise the people, Mastriano simply says the election has already been corrupted and the people disenfranchised, thereby justifying his corrupting and his disenfranchising. This is a preview of the 2024 election if Mastriano is governor and gets to appoint the secretary of state, who oversees elections. If a Democrat wins, the election will be declared corrupt, the results thrown out, and a slate of Republican electors will be sent to Washington. The outcome of the popular vote, the sum will of Pennsylvanians, will not be relevant. Unless they elect a Republican, in which case the people will have spoken.

Mastriano particularly hates mail-in voting—he intends to nix no-excuse absentee voting if given the power to do so—which made it particularly lovely to see the candidates in Pennsylvania's Republican Senate primary talk about waiting for all the absentee ballots to come in as it emerged last night that the race was still undecided. Dave McCormick is waiting on those mail-in ballots. The preposterous Dr. Oz is waiting on those mail-in ballots. Though in fairness, Ol' Oz is not as submerged in the 2020 Stolen Election fantasies as some of these freakazoids. It helps that, unlike Mastriano, he's not a full-on Christian nationalist, a worldview that may be completely incompatible with the basic idea of America, but which may also soon seize control of it by force so long as its practitioners keep their orgy invites, real or imagined, to themselves.

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