Last Updated on November 25, 2020
During the Pennsylvania Senate’s hearing on election integrity, Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis argued that the legislature can take back the power of assigning electors.
The hearing on election integrity in Pennsylvania took place on Wednesday, with a number of witnesses giving evidence of severe and widespread voter fraud in favour of Joe Biden.
One posited solution to a potentially corrupt voting system, proposed by Ellis and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is for the Pennsylvania legislature to select the electors for the Electoral College. This was first mentioned by Republican State Rep. Dawn Keefer, who noted that the Constitution gave the legislature that ability, but added that the legislature ceded the power to the Secretary of State by a statute, and they were advised by attorneys that it was therefore out of their control.
In response, Trump attorney Jenna Ellis explained that the Pennsylvania legislature can “take that power back at any time”:
When you have the delegation of authority, the legislature can take that back. You also have an instance here that the law was completely ignored, so even though you have a manner in which your electors are generally selected in Pennsylvania, and that’s worked for the past presidential elections since the statutes were authorised and gone through the legislature, this is an election that has been corrupted, so you can’t go through that method. Those laws were violated. The general assembly here, the legislature, is the authorised entity in the constitution that selects the manner. You can take that power back at any time.
Ellis argued that as the laws were ignored, and election officials “violated the manner in which you as the general assembly has proscribed in the law how you select your electors,” then state legislatures “have the constitutional authority to craft a remedy.”
“You can take that power back at any time, you don’t need a court to tell you that,” Ellis concluded. “This is your constitutional prerogrative. State legislature, in the context of Article II Section 1.2, means state legislature, period.”
https://twitter.com/JennaEllisEsq/status/1331727394005274626
Rudy Giuliani, the head of the Trump legal team investigating the election integrity, pointed out that the power was delegated “to the very people whose conduct is in question,” such as the Pennsylvania Secretary of State, who illegally changed the ballot identification deadline at short notice:
You’re asking them to investigate themselves. Given the fact that this is your sole constitutional right and authority, you can always assume constitutional authority that you delegated back. You also have a rational basis for doing it… This was done, one might argue… deliberately by the governor, the elections commissioner, who issued absurd opinions telling people to violate the law, and then you’re going to ask them to make a decision on the election that allegedly they corrupted? It seems to me you have a perfect right to take that back and make that decision.
National File reported on Wednesday that the campaign account of Senator Doug Mastriano was banned from Twitter following the election integrity hearing.
VIDEO: Crowd Gasps at PA Hearing After Learning of 600K Vote Dump for Biden, Just 3K for Trump
GOP observer Justin Kweder: Hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia mail-in ballots were processed with ZERO civilian oversight pic.twitter.com/Op2UrGKDld
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) November 25, 2020
During the hearing, Sen. Mastriano, who organized the hearing, slammed the election chaos, which he said was completely by design. “We move heaven and earth with American dollars to secure elections in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. We can’t do it in our own state?” Mastriano said. “There’s people in Pennsylvania not interested in safe, secure elections.”
