Pennsylvania Responds To Texas

Pennsylvania has filed its opposition in the Texas case.https://t.co/NbCxYHgvEa

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) December 10, 2020

 Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. 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. 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 to principles of constitutional democracy.

What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this Court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this Court and other courts. It attempts to exploit this Court’s sparingly used original jurisdiction to relitigate those matters. But Texas obviously lacks standing to bring such claims, which, in any event, are barred by laches, and are moot, meritless, and dangerous. Texas has not suffered harm simply because it dislikes the result of the election, and nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections. Nor is that view grounded in any precedent from this Court. Texas does not seek to have the Court interpret the Constitution, so much as disregard it.

The cascading series of compounding defects in Texas’s filings is only underscored by the surreal alternate reality that those filings attempt to construct. That alternate reality includes an absurd statistical analysis positing that the probability of President-Elect Biden winning the election was “one in a quadrillion.” Bill of Complaint at 6. 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.

That's the Preliminary Statement. The entire brief runs to 32 pages.  The Table of Authorities consumes another  7 pages.  This is what Pennsylvania has to do.  But this entire farrago of a claim is baseless, meritless,  anti-Constitutional, and an obscene waste of resources for all involved.  The Court should sanction Paxton individually for bringing this crap and strike him from the rolls of lawyers authorized to argue before the Court.  This case is a turd in the nation's Christmas punchbowl and should be treated as such.  It bothers me even more because so many people have to spend so much energy taking seriously what doesn't deserve a first glance, much less a second.  It is, as Pennsylvania says, a "seditious abuse of the judicial process."  It should be treated as such.

Although Paxton isn't the only legal genius in this mess:

6 of the states that joined an amicus brief in support of Texas's overturn-the-election #SCOTUS suit are now seeking to intervene *as parties*:https://t.co/Ax9z5m6CWN

This intervention motion—like Trump's—underscores why *Texas* has no unique interest (and, thus, no standing).

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) December 10, 2020

Unless, of course, these new parties want the case to fail, so they can be spared the consequences of their actions while blaming the Court for preventing the...consequences of their actions. As usual, none of this bears very much examination; nor will it get any.