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Texas Attorney General Demands SCOTUS Protect The Constitution By Canceling Election In Swing States

Just as the Founding Fathers intended.

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And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said HOLD MY BEER.

Not to be outdone by Sidney Powell and her many-tentacled Kraken suit debacle, AG Paxton has entered the election litigation arena this morning with a Supreme Court complaint against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin for bad voting.

“Our Country stands at an important crossroads,” he begins somberly. “Either the Constitution matters and must be followed, even when some officials consider it inconvenient or out of date, or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives. We ask the Court to choose the former.”

Sadly, this grandiose beginning is the best it gets — the complaint is all downhill from there. According to Paxton, “using the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification” those states “usurped their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their state’s election statutes” via “executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity.” Worse still they “flooded the Defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote—signature verification and witness requirements.”

Leave aside for the moment that the Republican legislatures in every one of those states passed laws allowing for no-excuse absentee voting — wouldn’t want to let a little thing like objective reality intrude upon this very serious complaint filed 35 days after the election when eleventy-seven other garbage suits alleging the exact same thing were tossed out at both the federal and state level.

Although the “statistical analysis” premised on the idea that the partisan make-up of the absentee ballots must be exactly the same as in-person votes is a nice touch.

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000).

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Here on Planet Earth, Trump spent months railing against mail-in voting, while Democrats raced to collect every absentee ballot. In Pennsylvania, Joe Biden racked up 2 million absentee ballots, to Trump’s 600,000. And Republican legislatures in those states refused to allow absentee ballots to be counted until election night, virtually guaranteeing the “Red Mirage” that would cause those states to “flip” when big, Democratic cities tabulated large batches of absentee ballots on November 4.

But from a legal perspective, Paxton’s argument is even more craven. As indefatigable election suit observer Akiva Cohen notes, the Texas AG wants SCOTUS to find that state officials have unconstitutionally usurped the legislature’s exclusive power to regulate elections. And the solution he proposes is for the court to usurp congress’s exclusive power to “determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States” by postponing the December 14 deadline for presidential electors to record their votes.

Onto which he’s grafted a bizarre theory of standing for Texas based on vote dilution because, see, if other states don’t scrutinize voter ID the way Ken Paxton likes, then their crummy electoral votes devalue those of good, honest, Texans.

The brief quotes Bush v. Gore seven times as proof that “the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.” Close observers will recall that in 2000 the Supreme Court was (in theory) protecting the right of citizens of Florida to have their ballots counted on equal terms — not supporting universal voting standards across all the states. There’s also the small matter that the court stopped the counting in Florida because (in theory) it couldn’t be accomplished before the immutable, congressionally dictated electoral college deadline. But these are minor quibbles!

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The entire case is an offensive recitation of debunked theories about excluded poll watchers and nefarious Democrats sneaking in thumb drives of votes. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that there are four votes to hear this stinker, even after Justice Barrett’s confirmation.

But if Mr. Paxton insists on intruding on our timeline, then we feel it is incumbent upon us to point out that the Texas Attorney General is currently under FBI investigation for bribery and abuse of office; that eight of his own employees turned him in to investigators, after which four were fired, three resigned, and one was placed on leave; that he’s currently the subject of a whistleblower lawsuit; and that the most recent salacious allegations involve him leaning on a donor to give a job to a woman Paxton was having an affair with.

But other than that, Ken Paxton is an excellent lawyer and a selfless public servant who can be trusted to carry out his duties honestly and without partisanship or favor.

STATE OF TEXAS v. COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA, STATE OF GEORGIA, STATE OF MICHIGAN, AND STATE OF WISCONSIN

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

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