By Dave Boyer and Alex Swoyer | The Washington Times
Hundreds gathered for a Defend Our President rally held at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Conroe, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2020. Photo by: Gustavo Huerta
President Trump and 17 Republican-led states gave their support Wednesday to a Supreme Court lawsuit brought by Texas that seeks to overturn Democrat Joseph R. Biden‘s wins in four swing states, while the president also urged congressional Republicans to join in the last-ditch complaint against election fraud.
Map by Henri
“This is the big one,” Mr. Trump said
in a tweet as his legal team filed a motion to join the case. “Our Country
needs a victory! How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the
election was RIGGED?”
Congressional Republicans also were being urged to sign
on to the Texas case in a “friend of the court” brief.
The president called Rep. Mike Johnson,
Louisiana Republican, to thank him for recruiting GOP colleagues
to support what Mr. Trump called
the “very strong” lawsuit.
“He specifically asked me to contact all Republican
members of the House and Senate today, and request that all join on to our
brief,” Mr. Johnson told
House GOP colleagues
in an email. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
Texas was joined in the case Wednesday by Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana,
Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah
and West Virginia.
They argued in a brief that the changes to voting
procedures by Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which were
won by Mr. Biden —
“undermined the liberty of all Americans,” including the voters in other
states.
Mr. Trump, in his
personal capacity as a candidate for reelection, also filed his motion to
intervene Wednesday. The petition said it’s “not necessary” for him to prove
election fraud, only that states “materially deviated” from the method of
choosing electors established by their legislatures.
“Election officials in each of the defendant states
altered or otherwise failed to enforce state election laws in the conduct of
the 2020 election,” his filing read.
The brief argues that Mr. Trump was
successful by historical markers, noting that no presidential candidate has
ever lost the election when winning Florida and Ohio, as he did. It also notes
that Mr. Trump won
18 of the country’s 19 bellwether counties.
“The fact that nearly half
of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise,”
the president’s court filing read.
The lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is
co-chairman of the Lawyers for Trump campaign
coalition, argues that the election in the four swing states was illegal due to
expansion of mail-in voting that wasn’t approved by elected officials.
Mr. Paxton is asking the high court to
invalidate Mr. Biden‘s wins
in those states and to order the selection of presidential electors by their
legislatures, all of which are controlled by Republicans.
“We can’t go back and fix it, but we can say, OK, let’s
transfer this to the legislature … and let them to decide the outcome of the
election. That would be a valid constitutional situation,” Mr. Paxton said
Wednesday on “Fox & Friends.”
The justices told the four battleground states to respond
to Texas’ complaint by Thursday afternoon. Legal analysts in both parties have
said the case has little chance of success.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, called
the lawsuit an “attack on our democracy.”
“I feel sorry for Texans that their tax dollars are being
wasted on such a genuinely embarrassing lawsuit,” he said.
He and the Democratic attorneys general of Michigan and
Pennsylvania said in a joint statement that it’s “well past time for the president
and our fellow states and elected officials to stop misleading the public about
this year’s election and to acknowledge that the results certified in our
states reflect the decisions made by the voters in a free, fair, and secure
election.”
The office of Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a
Republican, also has criticized Texas’ complaint.
The Supreme Court on
Tuesday rejected without comment the first challenge it received over alleged
fraud in the November election. The justices turned away a case brought by Rep.
Mike Kelly, Pennsylvania Republican and a Trump ally.
But the president said he wasn’t involved in that case,
calling the Texas lawsuit “the case that everyone has been waiting for.”
“I received hundreds of thousands of legal votes more, in
all of the Swing States, than did my opponent,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
“ALL Data taken after the vote says that it was impossible for me to lose,
unless FIXED!”
Georgia’s Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David
Perdue, also voiced support for the Texas lawsuit against their state even as
they face runoff elections Jan. 5 against two Democratic candidates.
“This isn’t hard and it isn’t partisan. It’s American,”
they said in a statement. “No one should ever have to question the integrity of
our elections system and the credibility of its outcomes.”
Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah was one of the few Republicans
in Congress to voice opposition to the action.
“It’s just simply madness,” he told reporters. “The idea
of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators is so
completely out of our national character that it’s simply mad. Of course, the
president has the right to challenge results in court, to have recounts. But
this effort to subvert the vote of the people is dangerous and destructive of
the cause of democracy.”
Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, also said he’s “not
convinced” about his state’s lawsuit.
“I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of
it,” he told CNN. “Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as
Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections?”
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a Republican, thanked Mr. Cornyn
for his comments, tweeting, “there is no legal theory and the conservative
majority Supreme
Court will reject it out of hand.”
The lawsuit is something of a “Hail Mary” effort, since
courts have been dismissing election contests across the country, refusing to
invalidate tens of thousands of ballots.
The Nevada Supreme Court and Arizona’s Supreme Court both
dismissed challenges earlier this week concerning mail-in ballots. Mr. Trump lost
Arizona by 10,457 votes and Nevada by 33,596 votes.
But a case brought by Republican legislatures in
Pennsylvania is still pending before the Supreme Court,
alleging that the secretary of state of Pennsylvania violated state law by
extending the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots beyond Election Day.
Officials in Pennsylvania said the late-arriving ballots wouldn’t be enough to
make up the roughly 81,000-vote deficit between Mr. Biden and
the president.
Pressure is building on the courts and state legislatures
to get involved.
After seeing judges buck Mr. Trump‘s
lawsuits, his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has presented evidence of
election irregularities before state lawmakers in Michigan, Georgia and
Arizona, asking them to probe the issue and not award their electors to
Mr. Biden.
Members of he Electoral College are set to meet Dec. 14
in their respective state capitals to officially cast their votes for
president.
Advocacy groups are also adding pressure to their
representatives.
Citizens for Free Elections launched a 30-second
television ad in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada urging their state
lawmakers to “audit the vote.”
So far, none of the GOP-majority
state legislatures that Mr. Trump‘s team
has appealed to have suggested they’re willing to overturn the state results.
More than two-dozen lawmakers in Pennsylvania have asked
the governor to call a special session to weigh election integrity, and a
handful of Georgia Republicans have sought to collect enough signatures to
force Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, to call a special session in the Peach
State.
Thus far, no governor has obliged.
Mr. Trump lost
Georgia by 11,779 votes.
There is also a move by some congressional Republicans to
object to Mr. Biden‘s
electoral votes when Congress meets on Jan. 6, to accept officially the various
states’ electoral votes, usually a pro forma move.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, announced Wednesday that
he will hold a hearing next week on the 2020 election results and election
security.
He also told reporters that he wouldn’t rule out joining
the effort to challenge a state’s results when Congress meets in a joint
session early next month.
“It depends on what we find out,” Mr. Johnson said.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/9/17-states-back-texas-ask-supreme-court-hear-electi/