The four states challenged by a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn their election results, which each awarded victories to former Vice President Joe Biden, unleashed a barrage of attacks against the suit in briefs made to the Supreme Court on Thursday.
“Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” wrote Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
The filings from Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin came the day after President Donald Trump requested, in his personal capacity as a candidate, the Supreme Court to intervene in the lawsuit brought forth by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton effectively is requesting that thousands of mail-in ballots in those four states become null and that they are prevented from participating in the Electoral College, which convenes on Monday. The suit is predicated on the baseless notion that widespread voter fraud caused a “rigged election,” though there is no evidence that this occurred or that it would’ve had any substantial impact on the results, as Attorney General William Barr noted.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel denounced the attempted legal battle as lacking a “factual foundation or valid legal basis.
“The election in Michigan is over,” Nessel said. “Texas comes as a stranger to this matter and should not be heard here.”
The attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, similarly rejected the suit, but opted to focus his criticism on Texas’ disregard toward federalism, rather than the idea of election fraud.
“Texas presses a generalized grievance that does not involve the sort of direct state-against-state controversy required for original jurisdiction,” Carr wrote. “And in any case, there is another forum in which parties who (unlike Texas) have standing can challenge Georgia’s compliance with its own election laws: Georgia’s own courts.”
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul echoed the other battleground states, writing in a brief that Texas made an “extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin’s and the other defendant States’ elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each State.”
The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the four states in questioning, dismissing the case on the grounds that Texas had “not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
