Name: BUSTED: GOP's Madison Cawthorn Paralympic story is a lie -- according to athletes
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BUSTED: GOP's Madison Cawthorn Paralympic story is a lie -- according to athletes

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--Madison Cawthorn. (Instagram)Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has long used his disability as an inspiring story about overcoming adversity, but others who face similar challenges say his triumphant claims have become something of a running joke among some others who use wheelchairs.The newly elected North Carolina Republican was paralyzed from the waist down following a 2014 car crash, when he was 18 years old, and has falsely boasted about his business success, acceptance into the Naval Academy and training for the Paralympic Games, ."It's like a kid saying they want to play in the NBA when they're on their fourth-grade basketball team," said Paralympian athlete Amanda McGrory, who has earned seven medals in track and field.The 25-year-old Cawthorn told a Christian podcast that he "had an opportunity" for track and field events in the Paralympics, but The Nation's reporting found no evidence of such an opportunity or any meaningful steps he'd taken to get there."You have to be involved in a team, usually your college or a local club," McGrory said, "and then from there, you establish times at qualifying races, and then from there you get scouted." Cawthorn attended Patrick Henry College, a tiny Christian college in Virginia that doesn't offer a disabled sports program, and other wheelchair athletes don't recall ever seeing him at events."The community itself is small," said Robert Kozarek, a former elite wheelchair marathoner who never qualified for the Paralympic Games himself. "There's probably 50 [elite wheelchair racers] in the entire country, and we see each other four, five, six times a year, at least."Cawthorn about training for the Paralympics on social media, but other athletes aiming for the same goals say the lawmaker's claims about his intentions to break the world record for the 100-meter dash are ridiculous."Who is this guy?" McGrory recalls thinking when she saw Cawthorn's boast. "Why does he think he's going to break world records? This is really weird. I don't think he has any idea what he's talking about."Brian Siemann, a two-time Team USA track and field athlete in the Paralympic Games, sheepishly admitted that Cawthorn's Instagram account had been a running joke among other elite wheelchair athletes."[My teammates and I] would share whatever posts [Cawthorn] put up and be like, 'Look at what batsh*t thing he said about the Paralympics this week," Siemann said. "The claims he was making were just so absurd, you have to find some humor in it."Cawthorn has also claimed that he'd been accepted to the Naval Academy after then-U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) nominated him, but he had already been rejected before his life-altering injury, and his real-estate investment firm, SPQR Holdings LLC, has reported no income on its tax documents and listed only the lawmaker as an employee.The lawmaker's Instagram account kicked up one of the largest controversies in his fledgling career, after he celebrated a "bucket list" visit to Adolf Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" retreat, although he denounced the Nazi "Fuhrer" as "supreme evil."A guest columnist for his hometown Asheville Citizen Times called on the youngest lawmaker elected to Congress since 1797 to step down after helping to incite a violent insurrection Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol, three days after he was sworn in, aimed at overturning Donald Trump's election loss."It's time for Congressman Cawthorn to resign," . "If he does not resign, he should be removed from office because he has violated his oath of office and specifically section 3 of the 14th Amendment."Report typos and corrections to: .Former Vice President Mike Pence touches on his emotions during the Jan. 6 insurrection, when violent supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol .The former vice president, who refused to overturn Trump's election loss as part of an unconstitutional scheme under investigation by the House select committee and Department of Justice, is publishing a new memoir Nov. 15 that discusses what he was feeling during the siege, ."I was not afraid," Pence writes in So Help Me God, "but I was angry."Most of the book is devoted to Pence's faith, and also dwells on his behind-the-scenes pushes on abortion, regulations and national security, but he devotes some of the final chapters to the insurrection.READ MORE: "I was angry at what I saw, how it desecrated the seat of our democracy and dishonored the patriotism of millions of our supporters, who would never do such a thing here or anywhere else," Pence writes on the back cover, which was obtained by Axios.Judge Aileen Cannon stopped a criminal investigation by ordering a special master to review documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.This court-appointed official will probably be charged with reviewing the seized materials to see if they are protected by executive privilege.It’s unclear who that official will be, what criteria they will use or how long this process will take. The judge’s ruling is a gift to Trump.READ MORE: Faced with overwhelming evidence of their client’s guilt, his lawyers can only hope to drag the process out as long as possible.On Thursday, the feds to let them keep working with only the classified documents, because those couldn’t possibly be privileged.Asking for a subset of the documents was a savvy tactical choice by the feds. But it’s obvious that Donald Trump has no claim to executive privilege over any of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.The Supreme Court that Richard Nixon had to turn over the White House tapes to the special prosecutor who had indicted seven of Nixon’s closest aides in the Watergate investigation.READ MORE: Nixon’s lawyers argued that the president’s Oval Office conversations were off-limits. Advisors need privacy in order to give candid advice, they said.But Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion held that for privacy “[could not] prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law.” The tapes were handed over. Nixon resigned shortly thereafter, leaving behind millions of pages of presidential records and hundreds of hours of tape recordings.This case established not only that a president’s assertion of privilege could be tested in court, but also that the government’s need for evidence in a criminal case outweighs the president’s need for privacy.The parallels to Trump’s situation are obvious.If anything, Trump is in a weaker position than Nixon was in, because he’s the former president, and he’s the one facing indictment.After Watergate, Congress passed a law that made presidential records public property and tasked the General Services Administration (GSA) with archiving them for posterity.Nixon sued for control, again citing privilege. Justices rejected the claim by a vote of 7-2, noting that, since the doctrine of executive privilege is based on the separation of powers, Nixon couldn’t invoke it to thwart the GSA, which is also part of the executive branch.The Department of Justice cited this precedent in Trump’s case. Trump is trying to invoke executive privilege against the DOJ, which is, like the GSA, part of the executive branch. Evidently, Judge Aileen Cannon ignored this seemingly decisive objection in her ruling.It’s unclear whether a former president can ever claim executive privilege, let alone whether he can overrule a sitting president in a privilege fight.Executive privilege is supposed to further the public good through the smooth operation of government. Privilege exists to protect the executive branch’s ability to fulfill its core constitutional functions. It’s not a perk for the office-holder.A sitting president has core constitutional functions to uphold, like safeguarding national security and upholding the rule of law. A former president has no constitutional function whatsoever.In a privilege fight between a sitting president and a former guy merely defending himself, the former guy should lose every time.One of the bedrock principles of our democracy is that powers and privileges are vested in the office of the president, not in the person.That makes it difficult to see how a former president, who is (legally speaking) just some guy, could wield executive privilege, let alone privilege strong enough to overrule that of the sitting president.Proponents of executive privilege for former presidents have to resort to pretzel logic to explain why some guy should be able to overrule the sitting president of the United States: The former president has executive privilege, they say, because every current president is a future former president. The current president won’t be able to get good advice if his advisors are afraid that their deliberations could be made public by a future president.The Supreme Court recently dodged the question of former-guy privilege. A lower court ruled that Trump must hand over documents to the J6 committee. Trump tried to invoke executive privilege, even though actual President Biden waived his actual privilege.The lower court ruled that Congress’s claim was so strong that Trump wouldn’t have been able to invoke executive privilege even if he had been president. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Trump’s motion to block NARA from handing over the documents, which now reside with the J6 committee.Judge Cannon’s decision to freeze a criminal investigation to check for executive privilege is frivolous. It’s doubtful that former president Trump has executive privilege at all, but even if he did, the Supreme Court held unanimously that executive privilege must yield to the demands of an active federal criminal investigation.Moreover, executive privilege can’t be wielded by one part of the executive branch against another. So, executive privilege would not justify withholding information from the Department of Justice.READ MORE:September 11, the anniversary of the three terrorist attacks on the United States, this year passed almost unnoticed. Granted, it was the 21st anniversary, which is not a milestone. But more importantly, the news media was also oversaturated with coverage of a dead queen.Queen Elizabeth II began a long, winding passage to her final resting place as pundits wrestled with the meaning of monarchy, surely one of the more idle (although endlessly fascinating) topics if you are not an English taxpayer.Then, the Ukrainian Army crashed into Russian lines and splintered them, advancing to the border in some areas as panicked soldiers abandoned their equipment, stole bicycles and hot-footed it back to the Motherland. And football season began.READ MORE: Yet you would think that if Americans wanted to remember the day they promised to “never forget” — and if news corporations thought there was a market for September 11 memories — yesterday’s news coverage would have been different. laid a wreath, and there were memorials around the country, these events received little-to-no coverage. My social media feeds, usually full of elegant short essays about where people were, how they learned about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, and what they did, contained almost no posts on the topic, and the ones that did pass through my feed seemed … obligatory.I was not moved to write one either: I have said those things, felt those feelings and I no longer have anything else to say on the topic.The question is: why?READ MORE: I don’t know, but here are some theories.There has been so much to distract us, and those things have included a lot of death. First, in that 21 years, we have had two failed wars that in Iraq and Afghanistan, , and . In addition, tens of thousands more American lives have been ruined because of military service in these war zones.Second, after 9/11.Third, there were four years of Donald Trump, which felt like an ongoing national emergency, topped off by the first coup attempt broadcast live on TV.Finally, there were two years of the covid crisis, during which sometimes exceeded the casualties on 9/11.Since that day, more and more Americans have been forced to remember an event that is growing less and less distinct in their minds — or that they never saw in the first place. because they weren’t born yet; another 21 million were younger than four years old: that’s over 10 percent of the population.Students who complete college next spring will be the first graduating class to have been born after the terrorist attacks, and take it from a college teacher: 9/11 is about as meaningful to them as Pearl Harbor was to me.I don’t mean to diminish either event.I recall being darkly fascinated by World War II and even thrilled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s words on that day, but only because living history had passed into the realm of romance and fantasy.And I worry today that any of us writing about 9/11 will increasingly be writing in the realm of romance and fantasy.Another obvious point is that 20 years is a long time.The attacks are simply a less direct experience for anyone who was not on the spot or who did not lose a loved one on that day or from the aftereffects of the attack.Although September 11, 2001, felt deeply personal to many of us who did not lose someone or were not in New York, that feeling faded over time — and for most, it was only ever a mass-mediated event. But the vast majority of us who did experience 9/11, either in person or by watching those endless loops on television, have moved on.In 2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Reuters reporter Mark Egan of this happening in New York.“Don’t call it Ground Zero, don’t use the term 9/11 widow, and don’t read the names of the dead,” some — even Mayor Michael Bloomberg — told him, while survivors resisted being defined by the day’s events of that day.Describing the area around the recently completed memorial plaza as “trendy,” Egan reported that Americans had already accepted the more dangerous and surveillance-ridden world that 9/11 made.It seems that the promise to “never forget” might be more meaningful at the moment of a calamity than it is decades down the line when it is hard to know what, or who, we are not forgetting.And maybe forgetting is not such a terrible thing.READ MORE:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Copyright © 2022 Raw Story Media, Inc. 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--Madison Cawthorn. (Instagram)Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has long used his disability as an inspiring story about overcoming adversity, but others who face similar challenges say his triumphant claims have become something of a running joke among some others who use wheelchairs.The newly elected North Carolina Republican was paralyzed from the waist down following a 2014 car crash, when he was 18 years old, and has falsely boasted about his business success, acceptance into the Naval Academy and training for the Paralympic Games, ."It's like a kid saying they want to play in the NBA when...

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BUSTED: GOP's Madison Cawthorn Paralympic story is a lie -- according to athletes

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