Pa. says election suit adds to ‘bogus claims’
Lawyers: Texas made latest ‘frivolous’ move
In a filing in the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, lawyers for the state of Pennsylvania accused Texas of adding its voice “to the cacophony of bogus claims” by suing four battleground states to invalidate their Electoral College votes.
Pennsylvania’s legal team wrote Texas is the latest example of actors flooding the country’s courts with “frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.”
“Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an [affront] to principles of constitutional democracy,” Pennsylvania’s brief read.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is asking the nation’s highest court to nullify Electoral College votes in battleground states President Donald Trump lost — a challenge dismissed by legal experts as frivolous and rebuked by state officials in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The lawsuit repeats unsubstantiated accusations about the voting in four states that went for Mr. Trump’s Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden. The case demands the high court invalidate the states’ 62 total Electoral College votes.
A day after 17 Republican-led states threw their support behind Texas’ legal effort, members of Pennsylvania’s GOP congressional delegation and its state House leadership followed suit on Thursday, filing briefs in support.
Seven Republican congressmen — John Joyce, Fred Keller, Mike Kelly, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler and Glenn “GT” Thompson — signed onto a joint filing with 99 other federal lawmakers from across the country. Their brief argues the legislatures in the four states have rules on how the appointment of presidential electors should have been conducted, but in the lead up to the election, “those rules were deliberately changed by both state and non-state actors.”
“The clear authority of those state legislatures to determine the rules for appointing electors was usurped at various times by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, state courts, federal courts, and private parties,” the Congress members wrote, asking the court to “determine the constitutional validity of any ballots cast under rules and procedures established by actors or public bodies other than state legislatures.”
In their own brief in support, Bryan Cutler, R- Lancaster, speaker of the Pennsylvania House, and Kerry Benninghoff, RCentre, the House majority leader, said they are taking no position on the remedies requested by Texas. But as background offered to the court, accused actors of using COVID-19 as a “pretext to eviscerate the election integrity provisions” of the election code, even
though the Legislature included “preexisting safeguards” in its reforms last year.
Pennsylvania’s lawyers argue that Texas lacks standing to bring the claims, which are “moot, meritless and dangerous.”
Texas has not suffered harm simply because it dislikes the result of the election, and nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections,” they said.
Both Republican Senate candidates in a pair of highstakes Georgia runoff elections in January also are on board and Mr. Trump’s legal team — which has lost at every turn in an attempt to keep him in power — asked to intervene as well.
“This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted.
Suits brought by Mr. Trump and his allies have failed repeatedly across the country, and the Supreme Court this week rejected a Republican bid to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of Biden’s victory.
In that case, Republicans, including Mr. Kelly, R-Butler, had sought an emergency injunction from the court that would have voided the certification of Pennsylvania’s election results. In a one-line order, the court denied their request.
Mr. Trump looked straight past the high court loss, claiming it didn’t matter because his campaign wasn’t involved in the case, though it would have benefited if the case had continued. He has spent most of the week tweeting about the Texas case with the hashtag “overturn” and claiming, falsely, that he had won the election but was robbed.