Supreme Court: Battleground states issue blistering rebukes to Texas' lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes - CNNPolitics
Category: News & Politics
Via: jbb • 4 years ago • 33 commentsBy: Ariane de Vogue and Paul LeBlanc (CNN)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Washington (CNN)Each of the four battleground states targeted by a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn President Donald Trump's election defeat issued blistering briefs at the Supreme Court on Thursday, with Pennsylvania officials going so far as to call the effort a "seditious abuse of the judicial process."
The court filings from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin come a 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 in their states. The lawsuit amounts to an unprecedented request for legal intervention in an election despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud. "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," wrote Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro said, rested on a "surreal alternate reality." It is unclear when the Supreme Court will act on the lawsuit. Read More Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel addressed the lawsuit with equally strong language, writing that "the election in Michigan is over. Texas comes as a stranger to this matter and should not be heard here." "The challenge here is an unprecedented one, without factual foundation or a valid legal basis," Michigan's brief said. Chris Carr, the attorney general of Georgia, put more emphasis on the federalism implications of Texas' lawsuit in his filing. "Texas presses a generalized grievance that does not involve the sort of direct state-against-state controversy required for original jurisdiction," he wrote. "And in any case, there is another forum in which parties who (unlike Texas) have standing can challenge Georgia's compliance with its own election laws: Georgia's own courts." Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul similarly cast the lawsuit as an "extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin's and the other defendant States' elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each State." The forceful responses -- paired with the Supreme Court's denial of a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block certification of the commonwealth's election results earlier this week -- mark just the latest repudiations of the increasingly baseless conspiracy theories from the President that his second term is being stolen. "In a nutshell the President is asking the Supreme Court to exercise its rarest form of jurisdiction to effectively overturn the entire presidential election," said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas Law School professor. In his filing Wednesday, Trump said the Supreme Court has to step in because the country is divided, although there has been no proof of widespread election fraud. "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."
House congressmen sign on
Despite the slate of inaccurate claims driving the lawsuit, more than 100 House Republicans signed on to an amicus brief in support of Paxton's motion. Notable Republican leadership names on this list include House Minority Whip Steve Scalise and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Gary Palmer. "The unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections," the brief said without evidence. "Amici respectfully aver that the broad scope and impact of the various irregularities in the Defendant states necessitate careful and timely review by this Court." Conservatives who oppose Texas election lawsuit point to states' rights Beyond the four states subject to the Texas lawsuit, more than 20 other states and Washington, DC,also submitted an amicus brief deriding the effort and urging the high court to deny Texas' motion. "The Amici States have a critical interest in allowing state courts and local actors to interpret and implement state election law, and in ensuring that states retain their sovereign ability to safely and securely accommodate voters in light of emergencies such as COVID-19," the brief said. The Texas attorney general taking Trump's voter fraud conspiracies to the Supreme Court Shapiro's particularly fiery brief assessed that the Texas lawsuit is "legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy." "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."
Read the court filings
Read the responses Thursday from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as amicus briefs from 106 House Republicans and 22 Democratic-led states and territories.
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Is it any wonder that the once Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln is now known merely as the gop?
omg that sounds serious.... LOL
by not following their own election laws those 4 states invalidated millions of legal votes.
That was last week, JBB. This is a new appeal.
I know it's hard... there are s-o-o-o many...
It's still fabulous and worthy of repetition.
True
Weird coincidence that it only happened in states that trump needed to win.
And weird that it is only brought forward by the one Attorney General who is in desperate need of a Presidential pardon.
Will the Supreme Court of the United States use very bad law to put American democracy to death?
I doubt it. I'm not certain.
just curious, are you okay with states ignoring their own election laws all the time? or only when they get a result you like?
those 4 states ignored their own election laws invalidating millions of legal votes in the process. this can not be allowed to stand.
if scotus allows states to just ignore election laws? the constitution is over and done on the spot.
Your perception of the world is kinda "flat-Earth".
The states did not ignore their laws, they saw them and attempted to make voting safer during a pandemic by adjusting them. These adjustments were adjudicated through the court system or they received no challenge from parties with standing.
My money is on Texas et.al. being told to go home and mind their own business, 9-0.
Remember, all of the states that Guilano, Powell and Eastman have attacked
are controlled by the GoP.
The conspiracy theory sinks link cinder blocks in the Great Lakes in summer.
PA has a Dem Governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
GA has a GOP governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
MI has a DEM Governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
AZ has a GOP governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
MN has a DEM Governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
WI has a GOP governor and both houses are controlled by the GOP.
What was it that Lincoln said about a house divided?
before you judge others look in the mirror bob.
you ignored a valid question and went for the personal attack....
the real question is... how did I not see that coming? LOL
Posted like a man who has donated way too much money to Trump's post-election PAC.
And over turning an election because trump claims fraud, (but has no proof at all), isn't violating the Constitution?
All of this shit is nothing more than trump's ego not allowing him to admit he fucking lost. That's ALL this is.
Remember..
Trump needs something to blame for his loss....so he imagined up a conspiracy called voter fraud. Now he thinks he can get the SCOTUS, (that's already ruled against him, unanimously), to literally over turn the EC in 5 states?
Impossible? No. Unlikely?
VERY. If the SCOTUS did that it would immediately invalidate any ruling they ever make in the future given they made a decision based on political views and not the constitution. I highly doubt that no matter how far to the right they lean, no justice is going to risk destroying the integrity of the SCOTUS.
Remember, Roe v. Wade has stood for over 40 years with a conservative SCOTUS and SSM was passed with a conservative SCOTUS.
No valid question. You're into "owning the libs", so you don't interest me.
Bye.
meme wars? LOL
nah,,,, we go to austin for that.
we hijacked the term "snipe hunt" it is good fun also.
we use a maga hat for bait... LOL
He's the one who predicted tRump would win by a landslide. Pay him no mind.
[deleted]
Trump is attempting to use fraud to overturn a free and fair election by claiming there was rampant voter fraud...with literally not even a shred of evidence.
Classic trump, always claim others are doing what he is attempting to do, or did.
I have serious doubts that the SCOTUS is going to over turn the will over 80 million voters just to appease trumps fragile ego, (and lets be honest, that's all this is really about).
PSA: This is what happens when you elect a president that worships himself and his ego over literally everything else. In the trump bubble, none of us even exist, it's all about him, just like it's always been.
Not just Trump. The whole right.
They have no ideas on their own, so they must always parasite the left, either doing the same thing, or the opposite.
Not the whole right. AZ, PA, GA, MI, NV & WN are all GOP states being attacked by other GOP states.
CMTSU
I had a dream, and with my wicked sense of humour, predicted one of two scenarios would happen, although I much prefer the first to the second.
1. The SCOTUS will decide 9-0 to dismiss the Texas appeal, and the decision of the court will be given by Amy Coney Barrett, with the other 8 concurring with her judgment. That should shove a pickle up Trump's ass and alleviate at least somewhat the fears of what her decisions might be in the future.
2. The SCOTUS will uphold the Texas appeal, and make a judical declaration that Trump has won the election, similar to what it did for Bush. This will cause all non-democratic nations to celebrate the fact that democracy is nothing more than a joke and wave that flag at all their citizens as evidence of why they are so much better off.
However, when I woke up I realized that both were unlikely outcomes.
I don't know which is the more unlikely...
Turns out the second one was the more unlikely, the first one was at least PARTLY achieved, but I don't know if Amy Coney Barrett cast her vote in favour of her benefactor.
BuzzFeed: The Supreme Court Rejected Texas’s Last-Ditch Legal Challenge To Biden’s Win
The justices found that Texas lacked standing to sue other states that President-elect Joe Biden won
A majority of the justices concluded that Texas lacked standing to bring the case at all, a threshold bar that the state had to clear before the case could go any further.
"Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections," the court wrote in the brief order .
No justice noted that they had dissented from the decision to stop Texas at the very start, although Justices Samuel Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas wrote that they believed the court should have allowed Texas to file the lawsuit, but they wouldn't have granted any other relief that the state requested.
It was a significant loss not only for Texas, but for President Donald Trump, who had asked to intervene in the case and spent the the past two days tweeting about why the justices should hand him the election. The court denied all of the other motions filed in the case as moot once the justices decided Texas couldn't bring the case at all, which ended Trump's bid to get before the justices.
On Dec. 7, Texas took the extraordinary step of attempting to sue Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin directly in the Supreme Court. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, has been a fierce supporter of the Trump administration and spearheaded conservative legal causes in court over the past four years; his office led the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court heard last month.
The Supreme Court normally only hears cases that have worked their way through the lower courts, but there are a few categories of legal disputes that the justices can have “original jurisdiction” over, including cases between states. Those cases typically involve disputes over land or water rights, not one state broadly objecting to the laws and practices of another.
In Texas’s court filings, Paxton lodged complaints about how the four states had decided to run their elections during the coronavirus pandemic and alluded to baseless conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud that federal and state judges across the country have rejected in the weeks since Election Day.
Paxton presented an extreme ask to the justices: He argued for an order that would give the state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin — all of which are controlled by Republicans — the power to decide which candidate received their state’s electoral votes, effectively invalidating the tens of millions of ballots cast by the voters. In the short term, Paxton also asked the justices for an immediate injunction stopping the four states from having electors participate when the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.
Two days after Texas petitioned the court, President Donald Trump jumped in, arguing he should be allowed to intervene in the case as a party. Although Trump had vowed to take the election to the Supreme Court the morning after Election Day, lawyers for his campaign haven’t tried to petition the justices to hear any of the campaign’s state and federal court losses to date.
Trump has boosted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud over the past month, and used his Supreme Court filing to promote the inflammatory and unfounded claim that the election was “stolen.” But he also created some distance from the fraud narrative. His lawyer, John Eastman, a professor at Chapman University Fowler School of Law, wrote that they didn’t have to prove fraud actually occurred, focusing instead on the argument that election officials in the swing states at issue ran the election in ways that “deviated” from what state legislatures had intended.
“The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable,” Eastman wrote.
Trump used Twitter to try to boost the Texas case, posting on Friday afternoon: “If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!”
Texas also got support from 126 Republican members of Congress who filed a friend-of-court brief, as did Republican attorneys general in 17 states, six of whom went even farther, separately asking to intervene as parties on their own. Not all Republican attorneys general joined that effort, however. A spokesperson for Georgia’s Republican attorney general Chris Carr — the current chair of the executive committee of the Republican Attorneys General Association — said that Paxton was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia,” according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Carr and the attorneys general of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin responded to Texas’s filings on Thursday afternoon, defending how they’d run the election and blasting Texas for trying to convince the justices to undermine their authority and the will of their citizens.
“The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees,” the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office wrote in its brief. “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 afront [sic] to principles of constitutional democracy.”
What exactly courts have the power to do once key federal election deadlines have passed is a largely untested area of the law. In 2000, when the presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush reached the Supreme Court, the justices ruled on Dec. 12, which was the “safe harbor” deadline for states to certify federal election results and receive special protection against Congress deciding which candidate received a state’s electoral votes.
Election law experts have said that judges are already wary of interfering with elections and injecting confusion and chaos, and would become even more cautious once critical dates set by Congress — like the safe harbor deadline and the date of the Electoral College meeting — have passed. The safe harbor deadline this year was Dec. 8.
Paxton may have filed a novel type of case in the Supreme Court, but he promoted many of the same conspiracy theories about voter fraud that campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, along with attorney Sidney Powell, have pushed in the weeks since the election. Judges who have examined these claims so far have either rejected them as not credible or unsupported , or they have concluded that even if there were problems with how voting was managed in some places, the appropriate legal solution was not for a court to invalidate millions of legally cast votes .
It was the second postelection case to reach the Supreme Court since Nov. 3. On Dec. 8, the court rejected a request from Rep. Mike Kelly and other Pennsylvania Republicans for an immediate injunction to nullify the state’s certification of Biden’s win. The Pennsylvania challengers had filed a lawsuit in late November arguing that a law passed by the state legislature in October 2019 expanding mail-in voting was unlawful. They tried to get the US Supreme Court to step in after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled the case was filed far too late to go forward now and potentially jeopardize millions of ballots that voters had cast relying on the new mail-in voting rules.
The Supreme Court denied Kelly’s application in a one-line order, and no justices publicly disclosed that they’d dissented. A lawyer for Kelly and the other Republican challengers announced on Dec. 11 that they were filing a petition for the Supreme Court to take the case up on the merits going forward. Two GOP challengers who unsuccessfully brought cases contesting Biden’s wins in Arizona and Georgia — Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward and conservative lawyer L. Lin Wood Jr., respectively — filed petitions on Dec. 11 asking the justices to hear their cases as well.
One election-related case filed before Nov. 3 is pending before the US Supreme Court, related to the validity of absentee ballots that arrived in Pennsylvania during a three-day window after Election Day. The state’s Supreme Court had ruled that the state could count those ballots, and the US Supreme Court has yet to weigh in. But the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office has said that case would affect approximately 10,000 ballots — not enough to flip the state, since Biden won by more than 80,000 votes.
The SCOTUS needs to tell Trump to quit wasting their time.
Trump probably thinks that since he nominated Justices that are on the court, they must owe him, and reversing the election results is their payback.