Rep. Tim Burchett intends to stop New York socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier from taking a House seat if she wins, calling her flag-as-napkin remark a disavowal of the Constitution.
The Tennessee Republican says he will force a parliamentary showdown in January if Chevalier wins her Nov. 3 general election race, using a simple majority to keep her from being seated before she can take the oath of office.
The Post reported Burchett’s plan after the Mamdani-backed Democrat upended Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers northern Manhattan and the western Bronx. She faces Republican Jomo M. Williams in November. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Burchett’s objection centers on a 2019 Twitter post Chevalier later deleted. In it, she wrote that she forgot napkins and wiped her hand on the American flag behind her.
Burchett keeps a 48-star flag in his Knoxville congressional office. It hung on the casket of his maternal uncle, Roy Hicks, who was wounded shortly after D-Day in the Normandy hedgerows and died fighting the Nazis. Burchett also keeps Hicks’s Purple Heart.
He framed Chevalier’s old post as more than a bad joke.
Burchett said, “I’m looking at a 48-star flag that hung on my uncle’s casket and [he] died fighting the Nazis, and then see somebody going to get elected to Congress in New York who said they use that flag for a napkin.”
“I thought, man, that same dadgum flag hung on my uncle’s casket. It’s the same flag that that men and women fought and died for to free the slaves, and that’s what they’re using as a napkin.”
He tied the remark directly to the oath members take.
“You take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and and you’re pretty much disavowing it right there. I just think we’ve lost our compass.”
Chevalier later said she regretted the comment. Burchett is not treating regret as enough.
The flag remark is not the only item in Chevalier’s public file. She took part in a 2024 campus takeover at Columbia University. She was a key player in an anti-Israel group that once said it was “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.” She attended an anti-Israel rally the day after the Hamas Oct. 7 attack.
During the 2020 election period, an online post of hers called the United States a “f, ing disgrace” and labeled President Joe Biden a “war criminal.”
Burchett said he will make the motion whether Republicans keep the House or sit in the minority. He also challenged Democrats to police their own side.
“If we vote to seat them, is one Democrat going to say no? I’m not going to vote to seat those people. Are they gonna say anything? Democrats died for this country as well as Republicans did.”
He added that the Democratic Party needs to “get some guts, and get their rudder back for the working people.”
Democrats are poised to make gains, and a cadre of left-wing lawmakers who won safe-seat primaries, including Chevalier, is set to pull the party further left. Burchett has warmer feelings for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, calling her “my buddy” and a “friendly neighborhood Marxist,” but he draws a hard line on seating Chevalier.
The Constitution states that “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own Members.” Burchett’s approach would use that authority through a simple-majority move before the oath, aimed at stopping a newly elected lawmaker from being seated when the new Congress convenes in January. The referenced seating date is Jan. 3, 2027.
History shows the risk. In 1967, the House excluded Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, a Democrat from a Harlem-based district. In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled the House had exceeded its authority by excluding him after he had been duly elected and met the constitutional qualifications for office.
A fight over seating could delay House business. Contested elections have happened more than 600 times in the nation’s history.
Dr. Jeffery Jenkins, a political scientist at the University of Southern California Price School of Public Policy, said contested elections “can muck up the legislative process and take time away from real governing.” He noted they have not been “truly meaningful” since the turn of the 20th century.
“That said, the last decade or so has made me wonder if we’re in a ‘new normal’ for what’s possible. And that might include turning back the clock to strategies the parties used a century ago.”
GOP operative and former senior House leadership aide John Feehery warned against expanding the standard to speech alone.
“If we refused to seat folks in Congress who said things that we strongly disagreed with, nobody in the House would be seated.”
Burchett recently flew with President Trump on Air Force One to Tennessee. He is still preparing the January move around Chevalier’s words and record, not around party control.
Members swear an oath to the Constitution under the same flag some still treat as disposable. If voters elevate that contempt, the House has every right to answer it in the open.
