It’s hard to find a more ridiculous representation of a lawyer than those on President Donald Trump’s legal team. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has given press conferences in parking lots and with hair dye dripping down his face. Sidney Powell blamed a conspiracy involving Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president who died in 2013, for Trump’s loss. Jenna Ellis, a Trump lawyer who once referred to him as an idiot and who has written books about how Christianity should shape the law, displayed even more of her ignorance on the Constitution in a tweet after a Pennsylvania court dismissed another GOP lawsuit.
This has become a ridiculous political game. If Kelly had challenged the statute BEFORE the election, the court would have thrown out the suit saying there was no injury in fact.
This is a fight for the very integrity of our entire system. Article II!!https://t.co/mZoFgd0yvO
— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) November 29, 2020
In that ruling, it was determined that Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) had brought a lawsuit to court far after the deadline to challenge the new law allowing for no-excuse mail-in voting in the state. Ellis complained that there hadn’t been an opportunity to bring it to court before – the state did have a primary after that law was passed – and that Article II says that the state is allowed to send Trump electors to cast their state’s electoral college votes because election fraud that has not been proven surely exists.
In Chiafalo vs. Washington, a unanimous vote by the Supreme Court found that electors have no right to cast their vote for a candidate that the people of the state they represent did not choose by a majority vote. Justice Elena Kagan wrote that:
‘Electors are not free agents. They are to vote for the candidate whom the state’s voters have chosen.” [Article II] “give states broad power over electors, and give electors themselves no rights.’
States are also allowed under the Constitution to determine the “time, place, and manner” of their elections, making mail-in voting constitutional since the state of Pennsylvania determined in their state congress that no excuse mail-in voting was the manner in which they chose to collect ballots. Making Kelly’s argument even more absurd, his own party introduced and signed off on the new law in Congress.
Twitter expressed their frustration, as well as their amusement, at the many attempts by Trump and the GOP to thwart a democratic election. Read some of their comments below:
