Jordan Wilkie for Carolina Public Press:

The challenge, brought by a left-leaning nonprofit called Free Speech for People, seeks to make Cawthorn ineligible for public office by arguing that his conduct on and around Jan. 6, 2021, violated a section of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that was originally meant to keep Confederates from regaining political power after the Civil War. 

The section says people who have sworn oaths to the Constitution can be barred from holding public office if they “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” 

Should the challenge go forward — it is on hold while the state Supreme Court figures out the redistricting lawsuit — a multicounty panel made of up local board of elections members will be asked to decide whether the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building was an insurrection under the federal constitutional meaning and whether Cawthorn engaged in it or gave aid or comfort to those who did. 

This means that a quasi-judicial panel of appointed, partisan, county-level election administrators could decide questions of federal constitutional significance, potentially blocking a sitting congressman from running for reelection by way of a state law enforcing a federal constitutional standard. 

Those dynamics raise a host of separate constitutional questions besides the one directly considered in the challenge and yet may be brought up in the process of deciding Cawthorn’s political fate.