With a key deadline set to pass in his desperate bid to reverse the US presidential election, US President Donald Trump and his supporters rallied around a lawsuit that Texas filed with the US Supreme Court, which urges the justices to overturn the vote in four states that went for US president-elect Joe Biden.
Trump wrote praise on Twitter for the “COURAGE & BRILLIANCE” of Texas, hours after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday said that he was suing Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and asking that they be blocked from participating in the US Electoral College.
In a hearing in an election challenge in Arizona later on Tuesday, a lawyer working with former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell urged the judge to rule quickly so that the case could be joined to Paxton’s before the Supreme Court.
Legal experts have said that the Texas case, which repeats allegations about mail-in voting that have been roundly rejected in courts across the nation, has no chance of being heard by the court.
Paxton’s suit was also filed on the same day as Tuesday’s “safe harbor” deadline for states to certify their slates of electors to send to the Electoral College, meaning that time is almost certainly up on Trump’s gambit of pressing state legislatures to override voters and appoint alternative electors who would back him instead of Biden.
“The motion filed by the Texas attorney general is a publicity stunt, not a serious legal pleading,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement. “The erosion of confidence in our democratic system isn’t attributable to the good people of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania, but rather to partisan officials, like Mr Paxton, who place loyalty to a person over loyalty to their country.”
However, Trump supporters on Twitter hailed the state’s lawsuit as “the one.”
Former Kansas secretary of state and anti-immigration advocate Kris Kobach wrote in Breitbart that Paxton’s suit was “far more important than all of the others surrounding the presidential election.”
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany hailed the case as “HUGE.”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday evening gave Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania until today at 3pm to file responses to the Texas effort.
Trump has not been shy about his belief that the Supreme Court and its newly minted six to three conservative majority should grant him a second term, but the court generally does not hear disputes that are not pivotal.
Biden leads in enough states that even a Trump win in one would not alter the election’s outcome.
Because it targets four states, the Texas case arguably stands the best chance of any of the remaining legal challenges of being heard by the justices.
However, Paxton is still likely to have an uphill climb to get serious consideration from the court on claims that have been soundly rejected by judges across the country.
He would need five justices to agree even to let him file the suit.
“It’s worse than nonsensical,” said Harvard University law professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent Trump critic. “It’s outrageous, outlandish and outside any imaginable constitutional box.”
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