President Donald Trump cheers Texas lawsuit against battleground states
President Donald Trump on Twitter Wednesday cheered Texas’ lawsuit against four battleground states that helped former Vice President Joe Biden secure the presidency.
“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case,” Trump tweeted. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”
He followed through on that intervention Wednesday, court records show. More than a dozen states also filed a brief in support of the litigation that challenging Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the U.S. Supreme Court over the 2020 election.
The lawsuit announced by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Wednesday argues the states made unconstitutional changes to election laws during the coronavirus pandemic. It was met with criticism from attorney generals in the states, who maintained the claims in the suit are meritless.
Court documents supporting Trump’s intervention argue “a large percentage of the American people know that something is deeply amiss” in the 2020 election. It also contends that without legislative approval and “under the guise of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic,” election officials “made a systematic effort to weaken measures” that ensure fair and impartial elections.
“These new rules were aimed at weakening, ignoring, or overriding provisions of state law that are aimed at ensuring the integrity of the voting process,” a bill of complaint in intervention reads.
Trump on Twitter, in a post that followed his initial pledge to intervene in the case, argued there’s been widespread voter fraud in the states, though experts have said there’s been no evidence, and that the November election was the most secure in U.S. history.
“There is massive evidence of widespread fraud in the four states (plus) mentioned in the Texas suit,” Trump said. “Just look at all of the tapes and affidavits!”
Seventeen states — Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia — filed a brief supporting Texas’ lawsuit.
“(The allegations in Texas’ lawsuit) raise serious concerns relating to election integrity and public confidence in elections,” the court document reads. “These are questions of great public importance that warrant this Court’s attention.”
Another brief, brought by Carter Phillips, a former assistant to the Solicitor General, Former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, R-Missouri, and former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, among others, expresses opposition to the lawsuit. The brief argues “the courts of each of the four defendant states have diligently adjudicated each of the presidential election controversies and contests brought before them.”
Responses from the states on Texas’ lawsuit are due to the court Thursday. The Supreme Court has not yet said whether it will accept the case.
If the case is heard before the Supreme Court, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he’d make the oral arguments, according to the New York Times. But U.S. Sen. John Cornyn told CNN he struggles “to understand the legal theory” of the lawsuit.
“Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say so on how other states administer their elections,” Cornyn told a congressional correspondent. “We have a diffused and dispersed system and even though we might not like it, they may think it’s unfair those are decided at the state and local level and not at the national level. So it’s an interesting theory, but I’m not convinced.”
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 9:36 AM.
