If North Carolina GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina actually has seen fellow members of Congress doing cocaine, he needs to name them and report them to authorities.
Cawthorn, now 26 years old and in a wheelchair, rode false claims of a Naval Academy career cut short by a car accident to his upset win for Congress in 2020. In the 15 months since then, he has generated an almost unending river of controversy through outlandish statements and actions, most recently calling the besieged Ukrainian government “incredibly corrupt and incredibly evil.”
Seemingly addicted to the spotlight, Cawthorn in an interview aired last week made two shocking new claims. First, he seemed to say that older congressmen had invited him to “an orgy.” Second, he claimed that “some of the people who are leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our county” have done “a key bump of cocaine right in front” of him. The context made it sound as if it was congressmen themselves having the orgies and snorting the cocaine, although he technically could be interpreted to have been referring to staffers.
If Cawthorn is going to make such claims, he needs to back them up. Granted, most of us would rather not picture members of Congress in orgies, so keeping their names secret might do our imaginations a favor. The cocaine allegation, though, is a different subject.
Possession of cocaine is a federal crime and a felony in almost every state. If someone offers and shares the drug with anyone else, that distribution of cocaine is a federal felony. Cawthorn and every other congressman is formally sworn to uphold the Constitution. If a staffer uses cocaine in Cawthorn’s presence, he must act. At the very least, he should tell the user to stop and urge him to get help — on pain of being reported to the police if he refuses.
And if the user is a congressman, Cawthorn should do more. He should inform the voters of his colleague’s flagrant law-breaking, and he should immediately report what he saw to federal law enforcement. Cawthorn’s own duty to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States definitely extends to a duty to report others who commit a felony after swearing the same oath. The public has a right to not be represented by people committing crimes.
Granted, Cawthorn’s history of stretching the truth means that these wild claims might need to be taken with a few grains of salt. If he isn’t, um, exaggerating, though, then he has opened what onetime Arkansas Gov. Frank White called “a whole box of Pandoras.” Once opened, the box cannot be shut again nor in this case should it be closed. In most cases, especially involving elected officials, the failure to report a crime is itself a crime called misprision of felony. At the very least, it is an ethical duty — a duty that Cawthorn must fulfill or else admit that he was not telling the truth.
And if that admission brings him a whole orgy of recriminations, so be it.
