Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to punish the more than 100 House Republicans who signed onto Texas’s lawsuit against four battleground states.
According to Pascrell, the Republican lawmakers who supported Texas’s effort to overturn the results of the presidential election in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan violated the Constitution.
Therefore, they should not be sanctioned by Congress or allowed to sit in the legislative body.
“The courageous Reconstruction Congress implanted into our governing document safeguards to cleanse from our government ranks any traitors and others who would seek to destroy the Union,” Pascrell wrote in a letter to Pelosi, citing the 14th Amendment. “Stated simply, men and women who would act to tear the United States government apart cannot serve as Members of the Congress.”
Texas’s lawsuit sought “to obliterate public confidence in our democratic system,” Pascrell argued, and attacked “the text and spirit of the constitution.”
In response, Pelosi should take steps “to address these constitutional violations” and “if possible, refuse to seat in the 117th Congress any Members-elect seeking to make Donald Trump an unelected dictator.”
Pascrell has made similar comments over the past month or so, calling Republicans “traitors” for continuing to support Trump.
In late November, he argued Trump’s “enablers” should be “tried for their crimes against our nation and Constitution.”
“Donald Trump and members of his administration have committed innumerable crimes against the United States,” he said at the time, calling on a thorough federal investigation into the Trump administration’s “treachery.”
He also attempted to disbar members of Trump’s legal team who challenged the outcome of the election.
Speaking specifically about Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, Pascrell said: “The egregious pattern of behavior by Mr. Giuliani to effectuate Mr. Trump’s sinister arson is a danger not just to our legal system but is also unprecedented in our national life. In carrying out that perversion, Mr. Giuliani has clearly violated the New York Rules of Professional Conduct he swore to uphold and should face the severest sanction your body can mete out: revocation of his law licensure.”
