Will Chuck Edwards condemn attempt to steal election?
Chuck Edwards defeated Rep. Madison Cawthorn in the District 11 Republican congressional primary because of the incumbent’s bizarre and immature personal behavior.
The more important question, though, is whether Edwards’ voting record would be better for the nation when it comes to protecting the Constitution.
After the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Edwards, not yet a candidate, criticized Cawthorn for inflammatory comments. But if he objected to Cawthorn’s votes at a historic moment, it isn’t on the record.
The worst of Cawthorn’s votes were to reject Joe Biden electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. That was as much an act of insurrection as the mob attack on the Capitol that he had helped to incite. He voted to overturn a fair election to keep an incipient tyrant in the office he had lost.
But it wasn’t among the issues that the GOP establishment raised against Cawthorn in order to help Edwards defeat him. Most congressional Republicans — eight senators and 138 other House members — were guilty of voting the same way, in defiance of truth and in disloyalty to constitutional government. They were accomplices to an attempted coup, the first in this nation’s history.
Among them: Rep. Ted Budd, the GOP nominee to succeed Sen. Richard Burr, who voted like Cawthorn did — to steal an election and inaugurate the dictatorship of Donald Trump.
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Wondering how Edwards would have voted in Cawthorn’s place, I asked three times — by fax, by a phone message, and by snail mail — whether he would have voted against the Biden electors, as Cawthorn had, or to reject the challenges, as Sens. Thom Tillis and Burr and Rep. Patrick McHenry did. I received no answer.
After the primary, I asked the same question of Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, who won the Democratic nomination in Congressional District 11.
Through a spokesperson, this was her answer: “The 2020 election was legitimate and was fairly decided at the ballot box. As a member of Congress, I would have voted to certify the election without hesitation or equivocation.”
Maybe Edwards would say that too. But it would be useful for voters to hear it before they decide whether to send him or Beach-Ferrara to Congress.
(Dyckman is a free-lance journalist living in Asheville. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
