Conservative senator calls partisan lawsuit ‘total nonsense’
Democratic Party activists in Wisconsin have filed a suit in federal court arguing that a pro-Trump senator and two pro-Trump congressmen should be barred from office for speaking out on 2020 election irregularities and allegedly attempting to manipulate the congressional certification of the presidential election results.
The Wisconsin Republican lawmakers targeted by the suit are two-term Sen. Ron Johnson, two-term Rep. Tom Tiffany, and freshman Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. All are seeking reelection in November.
The suit claims the lawmakers cannot serve in Congress because the disqualification clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment forbids it. That rarely invoked constitutional provision was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of Congress.
Johnson dismissed the lawsuit, telling The Epoch Times it is “total nonsense.”
“Democrats have ignored the Summer 2020 riots and relentlessly used January 6th [2021] as a political cudgel,” Johnson said in an emailed statement. “Now, they’ve used January 6th to file a frivolous lawsuit against me, similar to the one dismissed by a court last week.”
The lawsuit claims the lawmakers “used their public positions of authority to illegally foment an atmosphere meant to intimidate and pressure Vice President [Mike] Pence and Congress to take actions inconsistent with the facts and with their duties under the Electoral Count Act and the U.S. Constitution.”
The lawmakers used “their powers as public officials and their respective bully pulpits to undermine public trust in the outcome of the election and to enable a criminal scheme to institute fraudulent electors (in Wisconsin and elsewhere) to manufacture a constitutional crisis on January 6, 2021, over how to count the electoral ballots.”
The legal action claims the lawmakers illegally pressured Pence, in his role as presiding officer at the joint session of Congress certifying the 2020 electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to “unilaterally reject the legitimate electoral votes of Wisconsin and six other states for the Biden–Harris ticket.”
