Trump legal adviser sees pandemic restrictions on churches as political, not health related

Trump campaign senior legal advisor Jenna Ellis is one of the attorneys who recently filed suit against Gov. Newsom and other state and Los Angeles County officials as Pastor John MacArthur and Grace Community Church hold services in California despite government restrictions. 

"About six hours after we filed this lawsuit, LA County now through their health department has filed for a restraining order to try to shut down the services," Ellis, who serves as Thomas More Society Special Counsel, said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

Ellis identifies as both a conservative and a Christian and urged people to vote both for President Trump as well as other Republicans down ballot. 

"Even if you don't go to church and you don't really care about religious liberty, you care about your family, you care about your business, everybody cares about freedom and the opportunity for prosperity in this country. And so we need to vote for president Trump because he will preserve and protect that," Ellis said.

"But we also need to vote all the way down ticket" she added, asserting that Democrat leaders have utilized the coronavirus crisis "to just harness illegitimate power, widespread power to now tell churches, tell businesses, tell, you know, you and I how we can live our lives when they don't have a compelling interest, when they don't have a health reason."

"This isn't about health. This is about partisan politics. And we need to start taking our country back," Ellis said.

She also discussed the integrity of the upcoming general election. One of the issues Ellis highlighted was recent activity in Nevada, a state "where the general assembly with less than 90 days to go before the presidential election passed AB 4, this Assembly Bill 4 where they're basically trying to remove every single precaution and security from the election in November. So they're trying to push out universal vote-by-mail, which is just the state seeing out millions and millions of ballots to unverified individuals and unverified addresses," she said.

"And then they also want to remove the protections from the backend and allow ballots to be counted well after the deadline. So this is just setting us up for absolute chaos," she warned.

Ellis during the interview discussed the significant blowback she recently faced for describing Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological male who identifies as female, as a "guy." Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf characterized Ellis's behavior as "hate speech."

"Well I think actually John it is more respectful to a person to acknowledge reality and the truth of how God made them, rather than allowing them to perpetuate a lie to themselves and to their communities," Ellis said. "But this is what the Democrats and the extreme leftists want. They want to compel us to have to participate in their lies."

She explained that she does not have any personal animosity against the Pennsylvania health secretary or others with whom she disagrees ideologically.

"Do you hate the Pennsylvania secretary?" Solomon asked.

"Not at all. And you know I pray for him and I hope that he comes into saving knowledge of Jesus Christ as his own personal Lord and Savior," Ellis said.

"And you know for any of these people who even though obviously we're fighting against the evil ideas and the evil agenda of the left, the individual people that are caught up in this, I genuinely feel sorry for them, and I genuinely hope that you know they end up coming into an understanding of the empirical truth and that you know the only meaning and joy and answer to life's most basic questions for any of us—who we are, why we're here, where we're going, who is God—the only truthful answer to that is found in the Christian worldview contained in the Bible," she said.