States assail 'bogus' Texas bid to overturn U.S. election at Supreme Court https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...n-u-s-election-at-supreme-court-idUSKBN28K2NU Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and offers “bogus” claims. “What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices. Texas filed the long-shot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday directly with the Supreme Court. It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic. Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states. Biden, a Democrat, defeated Trump in the four states in the Nov. 3 election. The Republican president won them in the 2016 election. The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro wrote, was adding to a “cacophony of bogus false claims” about the election. Trump has falsely claimed he won re-election and has made baseless allegations of widespread voting fraud. State election officials have said they have found no evidence of such fraud. Dana Nessel, Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, listed the many cases filed in that state that Trump and his backers have lost. “The challenge here is an unprecedented one, without factual foundation or a valid legal basis,” Nessel wrote in Michigan’s filing. Chris Carr, Georgia’s Republican attorney general, said Texas cannot show it has been harmed by the election results in other states. “The novel and far-reaching claims that Texas asserts, and the breathtaking remedies it seeks, are impossible to ground in legal principles and unmanageable,” Carr wrote in Georgia’s filing. Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general, noted that Trump already had obtained recounts in the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state, showing no problems with the results. “There has been no indication of any fraud, or anything else that would call into question the reliability of the election results,” Kaul wrote in Wisconsin’s filing. TRUMP MEETS TEXAS OFFICIAL Trump filed a motion with the court on Wednesday asking the justices to let him intervene and become a plaintiff in the suit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and an ally of the president. Trump met on Thursday with Paxton and other state attorneys general who support the suit. Twenty states joined the District of Columbia in filing a brief lodged by Democratic officials on Thursday backing the four states targeted by Texas. Seventeen other states on Wednesday filed a brief urging the justices to hear the case in filings by Republican officials. Arizona filed its own brief signaling an interest in the case without explicitly taking sides. More than 100 U.S. House of Representatives Republicans led by Mike Johnson of Louisiana also filed a brief backing Trump. “The Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday, repeating his unfounded allegations that the election was rigged against him. The Texas lawsuit does not make specific fraud allegations. Instead, Texas said changes to voting procedures removed protections against fraud and were unlawful when the reforms were made by officials in the four states or courts without the approval of the states’ legislatures. Democrats and other critics have accused Trump of aiming to reduce public confidence in U.S. election integrity and undermine democracy by trying to subvert the will of the voters. One Republican state attorney general, Dave Yost of Ohio, filed a separate brief on Thursday disagreeing with the Texas proposal that votes be tossed out, saying that it “would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves.” Texas asked the Supreme Court to immediately block the four states from using the voting results to appoint presidential electors to the Electoral College and allow their state legislatures to name the electors rather than having the electors reflect the will of the voters. All four of the targeted states have Republican-led legislatures. Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes - exceeding the necessary 270 - compared to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College that determines the election’s outcome. The four states contribute 62 electoral votes to Biden’s total.
https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/about-the-texas-lawsuit About the Texas Lawsuit Erick-Woods Erickson Dec 10 16 Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, is under a federal investigation and would love a presidential pardon. His lawsuit is just more performative leg humping by someone desperate to curry favor with President Trump. The various attorneys general who have joined his lawsuit all want to either get re-elected or seek higher office. Joining the lawsuit gives them some measure of ring kissing or protection from any rabid Trump supporters who wanted a “just fight” moment. I personally think my company should pay me workers compensation for brain damage for having to read that lawsuit and related filings. It really is one of the stupidest bits of performative leg humping we have seen in the last five years. These attorneys general are willing to beclown themselves and their states all to get in good with the losing presidential candidate. The suit is absurd on its face. These states seek to interfere in the internal affairs of other states when those states are not actually electing the President, but allowing their voters to chose members of the Electoral College. Were this to succeed, which it will not, the states will start suing each other at every election as a bit of theater. Let me explain just how absurd this case is: Texas can cite no cases at all in its claim that it has standing to sue the states for the administration of their own internal elections. Texas alleges the other states changed election laws due to the pandemic without the legislature’s blessing. You know one state not being sued that did that? Texas. The states allege it is illegal to count ballots received after election day. Several of the states making that claim also do that. Their expert argues a sign of voter fraud is that it is not likely Trump 2016 voters would vote for Biden in 2020. The expert also uses dubious statistical modeling comparing Clinton to Biden. The Missouri amicus all but says they don’t necessarily agree with Texas’s legal statements, but the case is so important the Supreme Court should hear it. Texas could not even get its Solicitor General — the man who argues on behalf of the state before the Supreme Court — to sign onto the lawsuit. That’s how frivolous it is. This will persuade the fool and the gullible, but these are not meritorious arguments, particularly when many of the states on the plaintiff’s side of the lawsuit have done similar things and thus have unclean hands. The level of debasement these people have been willing to engage in makes them seem more the ball-gagged gimp from Pulp Fiction, humiliating themselves for their master. They should be ashamed and embarrassed. The bottom line is this — the voters of states must act within their own states and be responsible for their own elections. Texas does not get to dictate the internal affairs of other states particularly when Texas is not directly impacted by a fellow semi-sovereign nation within these united States of America choosing its own members of the Electoral College. The remedy is not the Supreme Court’s intervention on behalf of some sore losers, but challenging the electors in the House of Representatives, which these people know is a fight they will lose. But they already know that is the remedy too. If Texas were to win this, it would dissolve the horizontal federalism of our union and only expand the powers of the federal government. It would also lead to a Civil War as a handful of states overturn the rules and laws of other states and dictate those states’ internal affairs. Wait for Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo to give this precedent a whirl. Wait for progressive states to start suing conservative states over religious liberty, transgender rights, police brutality, tax policies that “steal” residents of progressive states, etc. If voters in Georgia are outraged with the outcome in Georgia, their remedy is not for Texas to save them from themselves, but for them to save themselves by moving to Texas or voting differently in the next election. Even the voters of Georgia do not constitutionally have the right to sue their own state for the general enforcement of election laws. Other states surely stand in even a worse position. Empowering Texas in this case just empowers progressive states to do the same later. The mere filing of this case sets a dangerous precedent. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court is unlikely to give Texas what is wishes and Ken Paxton perhaps will not get his pardon. I’m really tired of the Republican Party beclowning itself for a losing candidate out of fear for that candidate’s voters. That is all this is and delusions of fools notwithstanding, despite all sorts of stupid arguments being wrapped in pomp and “equal protection” phraseology, the election is over and Joe Biden will be President-Elect officially next week. Guys, come on — you’re just going to spark crazy to violence at this point. The election wasn’t stolen and most of you know it and those of you who don’t know it need to, at some point, realize you’ve been lied to. And frankly, Ken Paxton needs to work on repentance for a whole lot of stuff.
"Montana Governor to Supreme Court: Hey guys, my state did many of the things Texas said make an election illegal but Texas didn't sue us, because this isn't about election integrity, it's about overturning a result they didn't like" https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163482/20201210234950524_22O155 Bullock.pdf