Government

Texas AG's SCOTUS Suit To Cancel The Election Manages To Get Even Stupider Somehow

Don't mess with Texas, 'cause they're already knee-deep in bullshit.

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Texas’s own Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins won’t put his name on the Lone Star Attorney General’s recent SCOTUS complaint attempting to overturn the election in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan, but that hasn’t stopped other states from jumping right on in.

Yesterday, sixteen state attorneys general filed an amicus brief urging the Court to at least consider the Texas’s assertion that it has standing to contest other states’ voting practices, and today Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah, and “Lousiana” [sic, and lol] sought to intervene as parties. Donald Trump is also looking to get in on the action, which would, as Constitutional Law Professor Steve Vladeck pointed out, destroy the court’s original jurisdiction in a case where one state sues another.

But perhaps we shouldn’t get waylaid in Constitutional and procedural niceties, lest we distract ourselves from the point that THIS IS BATSHIT. The state of Texas has filed a facially nonsensical suit purporting to vindicate the rights of the Defendant states’ legislatures from unconstitutional usurpation by overweening governors and state courts, a usurpation which supposedly violates the Elections Clause. And the proposed solution is for the Supreme Court itself to violate the Elections Clause by postponing the electoral college vote, thus usurping Congress’s power to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

And instead of saying, “Slow your roll, Ken Paxton! We’ve been banging the drum about states’ rights for two hundred years now. It’s kind of our thing, you know?” the intervenor states are all in on this Frankenstein hybrid of vote dilution and anti-federalism. Rather than acknowledging the reality of Trump’s loss, these attorneys general would rather attach their names to a complaint which claims that it’s just mathematically impossible for Biden to have won those four Defendant states because, ummm, Clinton lost them. Don’t ask how Trump was able to flip Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan after Obama won them in 2012 and 2008 — that formula is still being calculated.

Never mind that Texas’s governor Greg Abbott extended early voting by a week, the same dastardly usurpation of legislative prerogative which supposedly voids the election in the Defendant states. Pay no attention to the fact that Mississippi also allows votes to be counted if they arrive within three days of the election, which Paxton argues is patently illegal. Or that Utah conducted this election entirely by mail, which is, according to the complaint anyway, prima facie evidence of intent to allow vote fraud. IOKYAR.

The Trump motion to intervene is little more than a cleaned up version of the president’s Twitter feed, drafted by John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University who is nonetheless confused about birthright citizenship and recently penned a racist Newsweek editorial wondering if Kamala Harris was eligible to run for president.

“President Trump prevailed on nearly every historical indicia of success in presidential elections. For example, he won both Florida and Ohio; no candidate in history—Republican or Democrat—has ever lost the election after winning both States,” Eastman argues.

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It was nonsense when the president tweeted it yesterday, and it’s downright embarrassing in a filing to the Supreme Court. Eastman goes on to cite Trump’s popular vote total compared to Obama’s.

This, despite the fact that the nearly 75 million votes he received—a record for any incumbent President—was nearly 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election, also a record (in contrast to the 2012 election, in which the incumbent received 3 million fewer votes than he had four years earlier but nevertheless prevailed).

What Eastman and his client leave out is that a record-breaking 156 million Americans voted this year, and 81 million of them cast their ballots for Joe Biden.

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Or perhaps this omission was thanks to someone else.

As Arieh Kovler points out, Lawrence Joseph signed Paxton’s complaint as “Special Counsel to the Attorney General of Texas” and appears to have also had a hand in drafting the president’s motion to intervene. And they say men can’t multitask!

Even conservative commentator Erick Erickson finds himself agreeing with Rachel Maddow that this entire exercise was probably just a bid for a pardon by Paxton, and then the whole thing got out of hand.

“Ken Paxton, the Attorney General of Texas, is under a federal investigation and would love a presidential pardon. His lawsuit is just more performative leg humping by someone desperate to curry favor with President Trump” he writes, accusing the various AGs of “ring kissing.”

“The level of debasement these people have been willing to engage in makes them seem more the ball-gagged gimp from Pulp Fiction, humiliating themselves for their master,” Erickson rages.

And far be it from us to agree with Erick Erickson but … he ain’t wrong.

Elizabeth Dye (@5DollarFeminist) lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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