“Who Can Throw Madison Cawthorn Out?”

I have this piece over at the Wall Street Journal today. It begins:

The U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow states to invent qualifications for serving in Congress and exclude candidates from the ballot for failing to meet them. Yet that is precisely what the North Carolina State Board of Elections is trying to do to Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

It tracks the narrower version of my argument raised here at ELB earlier: namely, even if challengers’ legal and factual claims are true today, the state can’t disqualify someone when it’s possible that in the future the candidate becomes qualified.

I refer to a challenge to whether Mary Landrieu was an inhabitant of Louisiana back in 2014. I wrote an op-ed on similar grounds at the time, here.

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