Washington Pennsylvania officials on Thursday filed a blistering brief at the Supreme Court rebuking the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn President Donald Trump’s defeat in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, casting the move as using a “cacophony of bogus claims” to support a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
“Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy,” wrote Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.
The lawsuit, the court filing said, rested on a “surreal alternate reality.”
“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.”
Whatever the legal standard, Shapiro argued, “Texas cannot meet it.”
“Nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four sister States run their elections, and Texas suffered no harm because it dislikes the results in those elections,” the filing adds.
The brief comes one day after Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to invalidate millions of votes cast in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The President for weeks has pushed increasingly desperate appeals and baseless conspiracy theories about his second term being stolen.
“Our Country is deeply divided in ways that it arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860,” Trump said in a court filing. “There is a high level of distrust between the opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the election just held, election officials in key swing states, for apparently partisan advantage, failed to conduct their state elections in compliance with state election law.”
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
