Madison Cawthorn left his Capitol Hill office on a recent afternoon like a man with a purpose, though what that purpose is, exactly, has been something of an unknown since he lost his congressional primary five months ago.
“I have to get to a floor speech real quick,” the North Carolina Republican said. Cawthorn, 27, who was partially paralyzed in a car accident in 2014, pivoted in his wheelchair and rolled out to the sidewalk, crossing Independence Avenue and heading toward the Capitol.
Inside a nearly empty House chamber, Cawthorn read a one-minute speech in which he declared that “America cannot be saved through legislation.”
Cawthorn left the Capitol building, stopping at the corner of Independence and New Jersey avenues, a tin of Grizzly chewing tobacco on his lap. “I gotta grab my food real quick,” he told The Washington Post before heading to another nearby corner to await a delivery driver.
As he lingered, a solitary figure in a stream of lunchtime passersby, the congressman spat tobacco juice on the sidewalk.
At the Capitol, it seems, he has not made much of a mark. His standing among key Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, tanked after a series of missteps, perhaps the most consequential of which was his assertion in March that an unnamed colleague had invited him to an orgy and that he had seen another partake in a “key bump of cocaine.” Republicans who wanted to attack Democrats by talking about soaring gas prices and “Bidenflation” suddenly...
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