Everything is bigger in Texas, including the lengths its top attorney will go to to do the anti-democratic bidding of President Trump.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court that it review a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Texas is suing those states on the extremely dubious theory that they somehow violated the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause in how they handled their elections. It floated allegations — some of them straight-up conspiracy theories — pertaining to the states’ changing their election practices in ways not explicitly authorized by the states’ legislatures.
Texas is asking the justices to block the use of the current results in those states — which Joe Biden won — and to give the legislatures, all Republican-controlled, the opportunity to appoint their own electors to the Electoral College instead.
The U.S. Supreme Court has the power to adjudicate lawsuits between states. But Texas will first need the court’s permission to even formally file the lawsuit, where it is also seeking expedited review.
Capping off several weeks of increasingly absurd lawsuits seeking to disrupt Biden’s win, the Texas lawsuit is especially bizarre.
For all the pre-election talk of the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately intervening to resolve any post-election disputes, very few of those cases have actually made it that far up the judicial ladder, and the justices have not appeared to be particularly eager to get involved.
In one Pennsylvania case, brought by Republican House candidates who are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election results in their state, Justice Samuel Alito initially didn’t even ask for a response to the GOP request until after Tuesday’s Safe Harbor date, a deadline for settling these kinds of disputes. He later bumped up that deadline to Tuesday morning, but the little time that gives the Court to act suggests that it has no real interest in disturbing the results.
