President Donald Trump’s lawyers in a desperate plea to overturn the election results urged Pennsylvania lawmakers to change the way its presidential electors are chosen or consider calling a special election.
Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his legal adviser Jenna Ellis pushed those options at Wednesday’s Senate Republican Policy Committee hearing. But those pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears, according to the offices of Republican legislative leaders.
“We have been clear from the beginning: the General Assembly has no role to play in the selection of electors,” said Jason Gottesman, spokesman for the House Republican majority following the hearing.
- Trump campaign takes its complaints over Pa. election before GOP lawmakers, after string of court losses
- Trump refuses to accept Biden’s win as transition proceeds
He further noted that the House GOP leaders have no intention of calling House members back before the Nov. 30 end of the 2019-20 legislative session.
Senate GOP spokeswoman Jenn Kocher said Senate Republican leaders, who have the majority in that chamber, also don’t plan to call senators back to Harrisburg.
Sen. Doug Mastriano (R., Franklin), organized Wednesday’s committee hearing.
However, Sen. Doug Mastriano, R-Franklin County, a Trump supporter who requested the hearing to examine election issues, said it’s time for decisive action.
“There’s two things that need to happen,” Mastriano said as the three-and-a-half hour hearing drew to a close.
“First off, we need to make sure the real winner is sent forth for the presidential election,” he said, drawing rousing applause from a roomful of people gathered at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg. “And number two , we need to fix this so it never happens again.”
State and local election officials have repeatedly said there is no evidence of widespread fraud in Pennsylvania’s election.
On Tuesday, Gov. Tom Wolf certified the election results showing President-elect Joe Biden won the state by more than 81,000 votes. A Pennsylvania judge ordered state officials on Wednesday to halt any further steps toward certifying election results; the Wolf administration filed notice to appeal the decision. Trump’s repeated legal attempts to overturn the election have been swatted down by state and federal judges.
Throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers heard a litany of voter fraud and election rigging allegations from more than a dozen Trump poll watchers, voters and others who cast doubt on the general election’s legitimacy.
Among them was a Philadelphia poll watcher who claimed he was denied entry into a polling place. Trump observers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh complained of being kept too far away from ballot canvassing to ensure it was being done properly.
An 80-year-old voter said she cast a vote for Trump but it didn’t appear on the paper ballot that the voting machine produced. A computer expert who said the voting machines can be manipulated in how they allocate votes, claims which the voting machine manufacturer called unfounded and baseless.
One participant in the hearing appeared via telephone: the president. Trump ditched plans to attend in person but called in and spoke for 11 minutes. When Ellis interrupted saying she had a special guest and held her phone up to the microphone, Trump said, “Let them finish their testimony, it’s fantastic.” He said he had been listening.
Trump then repeated accusations that Democrats had cheated and declared, “This was an election that we won easily.”
The Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections, denounced Trump’s “falsehoods.”
“The tired conspiracy theories repeated today in Gettysburg have been debunked and dismissed by the courts. Continuing to repeat these falsehoods in front of the cameras only harms the democracy that so many Americans have died to protect,” said Pennsylvania Department of State spokeswoman Ellen Lyon. “The facts are clear: Pennsylvania had a free, fair, and secure election. Millions of Pennsylvanians followed the rules and voted.”
Democratic lawmakers criticized the nearly three dozen House and Senate Republican lawmakers who participated in the hearing, either in person or via Zoom, for using taxpayer dollars for what they considered to support a partisan event.
“If Senate Republicans want to entertain conspiracy theories from Rudy Giuliani and rally with defeated presidential candidate Donald Trump, they should do so on their own time and dime – not the taxpayers’,” said Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa of Allegheny County in a statement. “Our process was secure and our count is accurate: a count that was certified this week, making today’s hearing even more inappropriate.”
Sen. Maria Collett, D-Montgomery County, said all pretense that the Republican committee hearing was a “legislative hearing” evaporated when Trump’s lawyers suggested a special election “on behalf of our client.”
Giuliani also asked for the state to un-certify the election results and then not count “the votes that were not properly inspected. When I say properly inspected, they weren’t inspected at all,” he said. “You could almost consider them hidden votes counted in backroom where everybody was smoking cigars.”
“One option should not be to ignore it and to certify a corrupted irredeemably corrupt election,” Ellis said.
Ellis also suggested another option. She insisted the Legislature constitutionally has the power to change the manner in which presidential electors are chosen and that they are not required to appoint electors who support the winner of the state’s popular vote.
Pennsylvania’s Republican legislative leaders have shown no inclination of taking such steps.
Senate Majority Leader and incoming Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Centre County, said earlier this month, while the Legislature can provide oversight of the elections and call the process into question, lawmakers “certainly want to stay with the tradition of the popular vote winner getting the electors.”
Going forward, Ellis suggested lawmakers look at the issues that testifiers raised, the security of voting machines, and rein in the executive branch’s control over the elections.
House and Senate Republican lawmakers, mostly unmasked and not socially distant, participated in a Senate hearing on election issues that focused on President Trump's legal team's allegations about improprieties in the state's elections that courts have determined to be mostly unfounded. Nov. 25, 2020 Screenshot from Pa. Senate website
Senate Majority Committee Chairman Dave Argall, R-Schuylkill County, said, “There is no doubt in my mind we will pass legislation in the House and the Senate based on what we have learned today.”
The hotel where the hearing was held is about a mile from the scene of Pickett’s Charge, where Union troops repelled a desperate Confederate attack in July 1863. It helped turn the tide of the American Civil War against the slave-owning South.
Former Gov. Tom Ridge, a Republican who publicly pronounced his support for Biden, took note of Gettysburg’s historic significance when he criticized Trump for trying to overturn the election.
In a post on Twitter, Ridge wrote, “History will record the shameful irony that a president who lied to avoid military service staged a bogus event on the hallowed grounds of Gettysburg in a brazen attempt to undermine the Republic for which scores of real patriots had fought & died to preserve since its founding.”
Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.
More from PennLive
Pa. Sen. Toomey congratulates President-elect Joe Biden, calls on Trump to begin transition
"results" - Google News
November 26, 2020 at 08:06AM
https://ift.tt/366KsUA
Trump’s long-shot bid to overturn Pa. election results not likely to bear fruit - PennLive
"results" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2SvRPxx
https://ift.tt/2Wp5bNh
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Trump’s long-shot bid to overturn Pa. election results not likely to bear fruit - PennLive"
Post a Comment