Trump Lawyer Jenna Ellis Says She Opposes Use of 1807 Insurrection Act

[CaoLanh]

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By Jack Phillips
December 21, 2020 Updated: December 21, 2020


President Donald Trump’s attorney Jenna Ellis said she opposes the use of the more than 200-year-old Insurrection Act as the president continues to challenge the result of the Nov. 3 election.

The 1807 law allows a president to deploy the U.S. armed forces to deal with civil disorder, an insurrection, or rebellion. It also allows the president to address domestic violence or an unlawful conspiracy in any state that results in the deprivation of Constitutional rights that a state fails to protect.

“Certainly, I would not advise that the American people want that,” Ellis told Just The News on Monday, adding that it would set a bad precedent.

“We have a constitutional process for a reason, and we have the judicial branch that really does need to step in,” Ellis added. “I think that the Supreme Court absolutely let the American people down by refusing to take up the Texas case.”

Ellis was referring to the Texas lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, which argued that the states violated the Constitution by relaxing ballot-integrity laws. The court rejected the lawsuit on standing.

In the interview, she said that Trump implementing the Insurrection Act over allegations of fraud and irregularities isn’t how the Founding Fathers would have used it.

“The state legislatures, they can look at all of this corruption, they can look at how their laws and their states were totally ignored, and they can take back their delegates at any time,” she added. “And they can refuse to go along with the certifications that are absolutely false and fraudulent. So that’s the constitutional solution.”

The lawyer noted that Trump’s advisers have to “make sure that even though we see that our country has been undermined by corruption, our solution can’t be to undermine the Constitution ourselves.”

“At the end of the day, if we don’t get a correction, in this case, we have to fight to make sure that this never happens again,” she added.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992 to quell the Los Angeles riots. Before invoking the law, a president “must first issue a proclamation ordering the insurgents to disperse within a limited time, 10 U.S.C. § 334.4. If the situation does not resolve itself, the President may issue an executive order to send in troops,” according to the Congressional Research Service (pdf).

It came as Trump wrote over the weekend that a New York Times report suggesting that he was asking in a Dec. 18 meeting about whether martial law was an option is “fake news.”

Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who said he was at the meeting, said “Trump is lied to by his own advisers, who tell staff ‘get the president to concede’ while they stall Trump.”

The election “is 100% winnable. No martial law required … His staff just try to convince him to do nothing but accept it. As a CEO, my heart broke to see what he is going through. He is betrayed from within,” he said.