Tim Burchett says he will try to stop New York DSA socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier from taking the oath if she is elected, the New York Post reported. She faces Republican Jomo M. Williams on November 3 in New York’s 13th District, northern Manhattan and the western Bronx.
If she wins, he told the Post he will move in January to block her from being seated, whether Republicans hold the House or not. The tool is Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, the clause that makes each house the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members. A majority can vote, before the oath, not to seat her.
The reason is a deleted tweet from December 2019. It is hers. “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” The post is gone. Burchett is not treating it as a joke. A 48-star flag hangs in his Knoxville office. It covered the casket of an uncle who was wounded in the hedgerows past the Normandy beaches and later died. Burchett’s line is that the same flag buried that man, and that a member-elect who used it as a napkin has already walked away from the oath.
Chevalier is a democratic socialist, a member of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which put her up for the seat. In an interview with the DSA’s own magazine, she said those principles are central to her politics, not something she took on for the campaign. Asked what the word means, she has said socialism is the idea that working people should benefit from the wealth they produce, and that workers should have control over their work and their lives through democratic means.
She points to Social Security and Medicare as socialist policies already in place, and says the system is broken in a district where a large share of children live in poverty. She has denied being a communist and called the question a distraction. Older posts favorable to communist leaders and Marxism are still on record.
That is the politics next to the napkin, not a separate file.
She was in the 2024 Columbia takeover. She beat Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the primary, with Zohran Mamdani’s backing. She showed up at an anti-Israel rally the day after the October 7 attack, and posted in 2020 that the country was a disgrace and that Joe Biden was a war criminal. The Post also ties her to an anti-Israel group that once said it was fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. Her campaign did not answer the Post.
Congress has tried this before, and the courts shut it down. In 1967 the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell, a New York Democrat, over a scandal. In 1969 the Supreme Court said the House had gone too far. If voters elect someone and that person meets the rules written in the Constitution, age, citizenship, and residency, the chamber cannot add a new rule and keep them out. More than 600 election fights sit in the old record. A USC political scientist told the Post those fights stopped mattering about a century ago, and that the last decade is what makes the old move imaginable again.
John Feehery, a former senior House leadership aide, described the practical limit. “If we refused to seat folks in Congress who said things that we strongly disagreed with, nobody in the House would be seated,” he told the Post. He is not defending the tweet. His point is that the House cannot throw out every member it dislikes, or the room would be empty. The rule still stands.
The Supreme Court settled this in 1969, after the House refused to seat Adam Clayton Powell. A member-elect who meets the qualifications written in the Constitution is seated.
Burchett is talking to Democrats, and asking whether one of them will vote no. He noted that Democrats died for the country too. The line he is drawing in public is the flag. On the other side of it is a socialist who says the word is the point, and whose record treats the country as a disgrace.
