Four Battleground States Reject Texas’s Supreme Court Lawsuit, Denying Fraud
Dec. 10, 2020 (EIRNS)—This afternoon, the four battleground states against which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had filed suit at the Supreme Court—Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—responded by rejecting Texas’s claim that it had been harmed by certification of Joe Biden’s “victory” in those states, and that certification should stand. Now the Supreme Court, which placed Paxton’s case on the docket Dec. 7, will have to determine the next step—whether it will ask Texas to respond to those four states, or whether it will hear Paxton’s case. It does not necessarily have to respond immediately. President Trump has asked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to argue the case, should the Court agree to hear it.
Among the more rabid responses was that of Pennsylvania Attorney General, Democrat Josh Shapiro, who called Texas’s suit a “seditious abuse of judicial process,” urging the High Court to send a “clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.” Texas’s case is “without factual foundation,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, warning that any Supreme Court intervention would be “an intrusion” into the state’s sovereignty. “The election is over,” she concluded. Twenty-two other states plus the District of Columbia today filed a brief backing the four states named by Paxton.
The battle lines are thus sharply drawn—indicating, as Trump warned yesterday, that the country is as deeply divided as it was in 1860, and that some resolution is urgently required. After 18 states filed amici in support of Texas yesterday, today six of those states—Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Mississippi and Utah—also filed a motion to intervene, indicating additional strong support for Texas’s initiative, Forbes reported this afternoon. Also today, 106 Republican Congressmen signed onto a brief to file a motion of amicus curiae “in support of Plaintiff Texas’s Motion for Leave to File a Bill of Complaint and Motion for Preliminary Injunction.”
The brief warns that “unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential elections”—in the four named states— “cast doubt on its outcome and on the integrity of the American System of elections,” thus necessitating a “careful and timely review by the Court.”
During a Hanukkah party yesterday at the White House, Trump said he was confident he could win “with the help of some very important people, if they have wisdom and if they have courage ... we are going to win this election in a landslide. ... You can’t have a country where somebody loses an election and he becomes President of the United States,” referring to Joe Biden. As for the motion to file at the Supreme Court and 18 other states’ involvement, Newsmax reported him as saying that the other states “joined out of respect and out of love after they read the papers, but they read the papers and the papers were so compelling that everybody’s just joining.” Ken Paxton also told Newsmax yesterday that “I am encouraged that these other states have joined, and think there is a recognition that this is our last chance and that we are running out of time.”
