So reads the headline over at the News & Observer. The basis, as early reports have it, is that Congress’s decision to enact the Amnesty Act of 1872 effectively prevents application of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment until Congress chooses to lift it. That is, the statute applies prospectively and retrospectively.

There’s a question of whether this conclusion is legally right or wrong, but there’s a separate threshold issue: should a federal court even be adjudicating a candidate’s qualifications for federal office?

The basis of my op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and my blogging here has been to say that states have no role in adjudicating qualifications of congressional candidates (or adding to them, as I argue an adjudicating today of someone’s future status as someone disqualified under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment). That’s because the role is reserved to Congress. Opponents of Cawthorn’s candidacy have been unhappy about this argument.

But here a federal court has done something else that it ought not have done: a federal court has weighed in to adjudicated a congressional candidate’s qualifications. Regardless of what the Amnesty Act of 1872 provides, it is emphatically the role of Congress to decide its application, not a court.

Consider, for instance, Congress’s own internal debate about whether it could exclude Victor Berger from Congress in 1919 based on an act in 1898:

While under the provisions of section 3 of the fourteenth amendment Congress was given the power, by a two-thirds vote of each House, to remove disabilities incurred under this section, manifestly it could only remove disabilities incurred previously to the passage of the act, and Congress in the very nature of things would not have the power to remove any future disabilities.

This is classically the kind of judgment that Congress must make in adjudicating the qualifications of its members. It is not for courts, or for states, to determine.

If the case heads up on appeal, the North Carolina State Board of Elections likely have difficulty raising this argument. And how could it? If it begins to argue that federal courts lack the power to adjudicate the qualifications of candidates, it opens the door to the argument that it lacks the power to adjudicate the qualifications of candidates. Instead, any appeal will likely be on the merits.

Neither approach is correct. States and federal courts should get out of the business of determining qualifications and leave the matter squarely with Congress, where it belongs.

In one sense, the decision is narrow: it doesn’t address the harder questions about the Board of Elections’ jurisdiction in federal elections more generally or how it goes about burdens of proof. But it is also broad, in terms of the precedent it sets of federal courts adjudicating qualifications disputes and in terms of its influence on other related Section 3 disputes (although it formally only applies to Cawthorn’s case, of course).