A few days after the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, a group of North Carolina voters decided enough was enough with Representative Madison Cawthorn.

The political neophyte to the U.S. House and vocal Republican ally to former President Donald Trump, they argued in a lawsuit filed Jan. 10, must be rendered ineligible for office given his ties to the deadly insurrection in Washington incited by Trump the year before.

With the backing of two former North Carolina Supreme Court justices, the lawsuit pointed specifically to a Civil War-era stipulation in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment barring Confederate leaders from serving in office.

Cawthorn, who voted against certifying the 2020 election, not only abetted efforts to “intimidate Congress and [then] Vice President [Mike Pence]” to disrupt the count on Jan. 6,  they said, but he was also expressly part of activities that led “directly, intentionally, and foreseeable to the insurrectionists’ violent assault on the Capitol.”

Cawthorn countersued Tuesday. He seized on the complaint in public, relegating it to little more than the byproduct of radical leftist attacks on him and his fellow Republicans.

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In court, his argument was more granular, but he steered completely clear of addressing his conduct leading up to and on Jan. 6. He spent that morning addressing Trump’s supporters at the Ellipse and telling the crowd that Democrats were responsible for election fraud and that the Constitution had been violated.

(Neither one of those statements was accurate. There was no widespread fraud found in the 2020 election; more than four dozen federal judges have agreed that this is the case.)

Cawthorn, instead, focused on the North Carolina statute that allows citizens to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. Arguing that its language was inherently flawed and unfairly prejudiced, his attorney Josh Howard wrote in a 79-page filing that, since a challenge could be made with little more than “reasonable suspicion” raised by voters, the burden of proof is shifted to Cawthorn to “prove a negative.”

“This provision violates Rep. Cawthorn’s First Amendment rights in the same way a peaceful protestor’s rights would be violated if arrested based upon only a reasonable suspicion,” Howard wrote, before adding that forcing Cawthorn to prove he did not engage in an insurrection would equally violate his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Despite his insistence he had nothing to do with the insurrection, the young lawmaker’s defense nonetheless cited the Amnesty Act of 1872, a 19th-century law that unwound penalties heaped on former Confederates as America emerged from a brutal and bloody war that nearly tore the nation asunder.

The law removed, at least on paper, the mark of secessionism from some of the former Confederates who wished to serve in Reconstruction Era Congress. Ultimately, the legislation did away with rules around disqualifications for former rebels, but exceptions were made. Roughly 500 military officers of the Confederacy would not be allowed to serve in Congress after the law went into effect.

Since Cawthorn has not been charged with any crimes related to the insurrection on Jan. 6, his attorney says that the basis of the challenge to his candidacy is defunct. Furthermore, he argues, the ban built into the 1872 Amnesty Act referred only to those members of Congress who had served from 1859 to 1863.

“Rep. Cawthorn is a member of the 117th Session of Congress, so the 1872 Act … does not apply to Rep. Cawthorn or any member holding office after the 37th Congress,” his attorney wrote.

The challengers’ lawsuit has also asked that Cawthorn be deposed about his role in the Capitol attack. The legislator said that too was a violation of his rights.

If successful, that deposition would likely draw much interest from the Jan. 6 Committee which has been tirelessly conducting its probe of the attack since its formation last summer.

In an interview with the Daily Caller on Monday, Cawthorn called the legal challenge to his candidacy “asinine.”

“To think that something that was created for the Civil War is going to be used for what happened on Jan. 6 when I did my constitutional duty to certify an election, I really think it’s pretty ridiculous,” he said.

Cawthorn did not vote to certify the election on Jan. 6. He voted against certification and did so well after blood was shed in the U.S. Capitol.

On Monday he said, in a reference to Jan. 6, that there were “members of the federal government who were deeply involved this.”

According to the News Observer, the process to begin the challenge to Cawthorn’s has been delayed as another legal matter involving North Carolina districting is resolved. That issue went before the North Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Cawthorn did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.