Madison Cawthorn facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Madison Cawthorn
Official portrait, 2020
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from North Carolina's 11th district
In office January 3, 2021 – January 3, 2023
Preceded by	Mark Meadows
Succeeded by	Chuck Edwards
Personal details
Born	David Madison Cawthorn (1995-08-01) August 1, 1995 (age 29) Asheville, North Carolina, U.S.
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Cristina Bayardelle ​ ​ (m. 2020; sep. 2021)​
Signature

David Madison Cawthorn (born August 1, 1995) is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina's 11th congressional district from 2021 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party, Cawthorn describes himself as a Christian and a constitutional conservative.

In 2014, Cawthorn was in a car accident that resulted in his being permanently paralyzed, leaving him wheelchair-bound. After working as a staffer for U.S. Representative Mark Meadows, Cawthorn was elected to succeed Meadows in 2020 and became the first member of Congress born in the 1990s. Cawthorn lost renomination in the 2022 Republican primary to Chuck Edwards, who won the general election.

Early life and education

Cawthorn was born on August 1, 1995, in Asheville, North Carolina, to Priscilla and Roger Cawthorn. He was home-schooled in Hendersonville, North Carolina, through 12th grade, and played football with the Asheville Saints, a league that includes home-schooled high school students. As a teenager, he worked at a Chick-fil-A restaurant.

In 2014, at age 18, Cawthorn was seriously injured while returning from a spring break trip to Florida. He was riding as a passenger in a BMW X3 SUV near Daytona Beach, Florida, when his friend Bradley Ledford fell asleep at the wheel. The vehicle crashed into a concrete barrier while Cawthorn's feet were on the dashboard. In a 2017 speech, Cawthorn said that Ledford left him "to die in a fiery tomb", which Ledford has disputed. Ledford said in a sworn deposition for insurance litigation that he pulled an unconscious Cawthorn from the wrecked vehicle immediately after getting out himself; in Cawthorn's deposition, he stated that he had "no memory from the accident". In the same 2017 speech, Cawthorn stated that he was "declared dead on the scene" of the accident, but the official accident report listed him as "incapacitated". The injuries from the accident left Cawthorn partially paralyzed, requiring the use of a wheelchair. He said he accrued $3 million in medical debt during his recovery; he received that amount as settlement from an insurance company, as well as other payments, and as of February 2021 was seeking $30 million more.

Rep. Meadows had nominated Cawthorn to the United States Naval Academy in December 2013, but his application was rejected. Although this happened before his injury, he claimed in advertisements for his 2020 congressional campaign that the accident "derailed" his plans to attend the academy. Cawthorn had acknowledged in 2017 under oath that he had been turned down before the accident. When asked in 2020 about the discrepancy, he said, "I never said I was appointed or accepted to the academy, I knew that I'd only been nominated at that point. I fully expected to be accepted and to be appointed, but at that point I hadn't received it."

During the fall 2016 semester, Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College, studying political science, but earned mostly D grades and dropped out. He said his grades were low primarily because his injuries had interfered with his ability to learn. Cawthorn said in a deposition, "You know, suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely I think it slowed my brain down a little bit. Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult." He also said he withdrew due to "heartbreak" after his fiancée broke up with him.

Early career

From January 2015 to August 2016, Cawthorn worked as a staff assistant in U.S. Representative Mark Meadows's district office. He told the Asheville Citizen-Times he worked there "full-time", but it was a part-time position.

Cawthorn is the owner and CEO of SPQR Holdings, LLC, a real estate investment firm in Hendersonville. The firm was started in August 2019 and reported no income; Cawthorn is its sole employee. As of August 2020, the company had been involved in only one real estate transaction, purchasing a 6-acre (2.4 ha) property for $20,000, in a foreclosure auction.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

2020

Cawthorn speaking at a Turning Point USA event in 2020

In the March 2020 Republican primary for North Carolina's 11th congressional district, Cawthorn finished second behind Lynda Bennett, who had been endorsed both by President Donald Trump and Meadows, who had become White House Chief of Staff. But Bennett did not receive the required 30% of the vote to avoid a runoff and Cawthorn won the June runoff overwhelmingly. He was supported by many local leaders and endorsed by Mark Walker, the vice chairman of the House Republican Conference. His victory has been called an upset. Cawthorn benefited from false and misleading claims that Bennett was a "Never-Trumper".

During the 2020 general campaign, his Democratic opponent drew attention to a 2017 Cawthorn Instagram post with a picture of his visit to Adolf Hitler's vacation residence Eagle's Nest, which he said had been on his "bucket list for a while", generating allegations of far-right sympathies. He had referred to Hitler as "the Führer", which had been Hitler's official title, and called Hitler "a supreme evil". In response, Cawthorn called the allegations that he was a white supremacist ridiculous, saying that he "completely and wholeheartedly denounce[s] any kind of white nationalism, any kind of Nazism". The Anti-Defamation League's analyst Mark Pitcavage said he did not see much merit in the accusations against Cawthorn. Some Jewish residents of his congressional district expressed concern about the incident, including Esther Manheimer, mayor of Asheville, the district's largest city. Cawthorn deleted the Instagram post on August 10.

Cawthorn spoke on the third day of the 2020 Republican National Convention. During his election bid, Cawthorn's campaign created a website to criticize journalist Tom Fiedler, who had produced investigative pieces on Cawthorn and had written favorably about his opponent. The website accused Fiedler of leaving academia "to work for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office." The sentence on the website was later modified to claim Fiedler is "an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics". Cawthorn released a statement saying he had intended "to condemn" such political opinion as being "dangerous and divisive" and said that he "condemned racism and identity politics throughout [his] campaign." Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate, said that Cawthorn's apology was not an apology for attacking the journalist in question, Tom Fiedler, as a traitor to his race."

In the November general election, Cawthorn defeated Democratic nominee Moe Davis. He took office on January 3, 2021. Upon hearing he had won, he tweeted, "cry more, lib".

Cawthorn was the youngest Republican to serve in the 117th Congress, and, at 25, was one of the youngest members ever elected to the House of Representatives. He is also the first member of Congress born in the 1990s.

2022

In November 2021, Cawthorn announced that instead of running for re-election in North Carolina's 11th district he would instead run in the new 13th congressional district, which includes Cleveland County and other counties west of Charlotte. Most of Cawthorn's former territory, including his home in Hendersonville, had become the 14th district, but members of Congress are not required to live in the district they represent but merely in the same state. He wrote on Twitter that he was running in the 13th district because otherwise "another establishment, go-along-to-get-along Republican would prevail there." Describing some of Cawthorn's political missteps and disputes in his home district, the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote: "The emerging opposition to Cawthorn in his current district appears to provide a political rationale for skipping into the new 13th Congressional District." Cawthorn later filed to run again in the 11th district, after new maps were approved in February.

On May 17, 2022, Cawthorn was defeated by Republican primary challenger Chuck Edwards, a state senator and fellow Henderson County resident, by a margin of 33.4–31.9%. Cawthorn conceded the race later that day. Edwards had been supported by Senator Thom Tillis and most of the North Carolina General Assembly. Railing against "the cowardly and weak members of our own party", Cawthorn wrote: "It's time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command." "Dark MAGA" references a fringe movement advocating a vengeful return of Trumpism.

14th Amendment challenge

In January 2022, a group of North Carolina voters formally challenged Cawthorn's qualifications to run again, "citing his participation in a rally last January in Washington that questioned the presidential election outcome and preceded the Capitol riot." The challenge is based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S. government from holding public office. Under North Carolina law, the burden is on Cawthorn to show through a preponderance of the evidence that he is not an insurrectionist. The challenge was on hold while redistricting litigation continued.

Cawthorn filed suit in the Eastern North Carolina U.S. District Court to dismiss the challenge before the state elections board could hear it. The North Carolina Attorney General's office, citing a 1919 application of the amendment to a congressman who had violated the Espionage Act, argued that the 14th Amendment could apply to Cawthorn "if a state board determines he aided or encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol." In March 2022, Chief Judge Richard Myers ruled in Cawthorn's favor based on the Amnesty Act that gave amnesty to ex-Confederates following the American Civil War, but on May 24, 2022, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court ruling and instead ruled that the Amnesty Act applied only to people who committed "constitutionally wrongful acts" before 1872. The appeals court did not determine whether Cawthorn is eligible for office; it only determined that the Amnesty Act does not shield him from disqualification.

Tenure

The Washington Post reported that during his candidacy and time in Congress, Cawthorn became known for incendiary rhetoric and for promulgating conspiracy theories. He had said he intended to use his position to be a messenger rather than a legislator, writing to his colleagues, "I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation." Cawthorn subsequently closed all but one district office.

2020

In December 2020, at a Turning Point USA conference in Florida, Cawthorn said that he would try to contest the 2020 presidential election results when Congress counted the Electoral College votes in January, citing fraud, though there was no evidence that fraud affected the election results. He subsequently used conspiracy theories about fraud to run advertisements and raise money for himself. He called on the TPUSA event's attendees to "lightly threaten" their representatives.

2021

Cawthorn took his seat as a member of Congress at the start of the 117th Congress on January 3, 2021.

On January 20, the day of Joe Biden's inauguration, Cawthorn was one of 17 newly elected House Republicans to sign a letter congratulating him and expressing hope of bipartisan cooperation.

2022

On November 16, 2022, Joel Burgess of the Asheville Citizen-Times wrote Cawthorn had vacated and shut down his offices two months before the end of his term. He subsequently purchased a $1.1 million dollar home in Florida. Responding to the news that constituent services calls were not being handled, Rep.-elect Chuck Edwards—who had defeated Cawthorn in the Republican congressional primary, and won the general election—invited people to contact his state senate office instead.

Political positions

During his 2020 campaign, Cawthorn said that he would "like to be the face of the Republican Party when it comes to health care."

Cawthorn supports removing Confederate statues because they commemorate secession from the United States, though in June 2021 he voted against a bill that would remove statues of white supremacists and Confederates from the United States Capitol.

Cawthorn has said that climate change is "pretty minimal".

Cawthorn falsely asserted that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, though he backtracked on the claim during a January 2021 CNN interview with Pamela Brown.

Cawthorn sponsored H.R. 6206, the American Tech Workforce Act of 2021, introduced by Representative Jim Banks. The legislation would establish a wage floor for the high-skill H-1B visa program, thereby significantly reducing employer dependence on the program. The bill would also eliminate the Optional Practical Training program that allows foreign graduates to stay and work in the United States.

Committee assignments

• House Committee on Education and Labor
• House Committee on Veterans' Affairs

Caucus memberships

• Republican Study Committee
• Freedom Caucus

Personal life

Cawthorn in 2020

Cawthorn describes himself as a Christian. He has an older brother named Zachary.

Cawthorn married Cristina Bayardelle, a college student and competitive CrossFit athlete, in a December 2020 civil ceremony, followed by an April 2021 outdoor ceremony. In December 2021, Cawthorn announced they were getting divorced.

Cawthorn said that he trained in wheelchair racing for the 2020 Summer Paralympics, but never competed at a qualifying level and was not involved in a team.

Electoral history

2020

2022

See also

In Spanish: Madison Cawthorn para niños