Burchett Vows to Block Chevalier From Congress Over Flag-Napkin Post, Citing His Uncle’s Casket Flag

Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee says he will try to keep Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th Congressional District, from being seated in Congress if she wins in November. His reason fits in a single deleted tweet from 2019: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

Burchett told the New York Post in an interview published Oct. 3 that he intends to make the motion when the new Congress convenes in January, using a simple majority vote to block a member-elect before the oath of office. He says he will do it whether Republicans hold the House or not.

A flag that covered a casket

For Burchett, this is not an abstraction. His father was a World War II Marine, and his father’s brother served on a Navy destroyer. But the connection he talks about most is his maternal uncle, identified in the Post’s story as Roy Hicks and in its photo captions as Thomas R. Hicks, who was wounded shortly after D-Day fighting German forces in the hedgerows of Normandy. Burchett still has his uncle’s Purple Heart, and he keeps the flag that covered Hicks’ coffin in his Knoxville congressional office.

“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,” Burchett told the Post.

He went on: “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.”

Then he turned the question on the other party. “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.”

Who is Darializa Avila Chevalier?

Avila Chevalier, 32, is a community organizer and doctoral student at the City University of New York. In the June 23 Democratic primary she unseated five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in a district that covers upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx. She ran with the endorsement of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and her win was read as a test of his clout with the party’s left wing. In November she faces Republican Jomo M. Williams in what is considered a safe Democratic seat.

The flag tweet is not her only problem. According to the Post, she took part in the 2024 campus takeover at Columbia University, was a key player in an anti-Israel group that once said it was “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and attended an anti-Israel rally the day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel. During the 2020 election, she called the United States a profanity-laced “disgrace” and called President Joe Biden a “war criminal.”

The flag post went up on her Twitter account in 2019 and has since been deleted. The Post reports that she later said she regretted the comment. Her campaign did not respond to the Post’s request for comment on Burchett’s plan.

The Powell precedent

Burchett’s move rests on Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, which says “Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own Members.” But the Supreme Court has already drawn a line around that power.

In 1967, the House voted to exclude Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem Democrat, from the 90th Congress. The resolution passed 307 to 116 on March 1, 1967. Two years later, in Powell v. McCormack, decided June 16, 1969, the Court ruled that the House had no power to exclude a member-elect who was duly elected and met the Constitution’s age, citizenship and residency requirements. The Court said the House “was without power to exclude him from its membership.” Removing a sitting member is a different matter. That is expulsion, and it takes a two-thirds vote.

The Post itself calls Burchett’s effort an uphill battle, since there are no election irregularities or qualification questions to point to. Former House GOP leadership aide John Feehery put it bluntly: “If we refused to seat folks in Congress who said things that we strongly disagreed with, nobody in the House would be seated.”

Why it still matters

Burchett is not a hardliner by temperament. He calls Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “my buddy” and has referred to her as a “friendly neighborhood Marxist.” That is what makes this different. He is not objecting to Avila Chevalier’s politics. He is objecting to a public mockery of the symbol that draped his uncle’s coffin.

The legal odds are long, and Burchett knows it. But a floor vote would force every Democrat in the House to say, on the record, whether they have any problem with a colleague who joked about using the flag as a napkin. Avila Chevalier’s district will almost certainly send her to Washington. Whether her party is willing to defend what she wrote is a question worth asking out loud.

Burchett’s uncle bled in the hedgerows for that flag, and his nephew is right to refuse to look away when someone treats it like a paper towel.

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