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.
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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. — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
The quotation (the first and last paragraphs of the preliminary statement) is from Pennsylvania’s response to the suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that asks the Supreme Court to prohibit four battleground states where Biden beat Trump – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin – from appointing electors to the Electoral College based on the results of the election. Instead, Texas proposes a do-over, asking the court to order each of the four states to call a special election, which would determine the selection of electors.
Seventeen Eighteen states have joined Texas’s appeal.
One hundred and six House Republicans (over half the caucus) filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit. [Update: the number has reached 126.]
Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks is seeking allies in the House (and Senate) to cast votes against official certification of the Electoral College results.
“In my judgment, based on what I know to be true, Joe Biden was the largest beneficiary of illegally cast votes in the history of the United States,” Brooks said in a phone interview with AL.com today. “And I can either ratify that illegal vote system, or I can object to it, in hopes that our election system will become more secure in future elections.”
Almost all Republicans in both the Senate and the House, including leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, continue to play along with Trump’s defiance of the election results, refusing to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect.
A whining, blustering Donald Trump is throwing a tantrum over his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden. The President of the United States is determined to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is acting openly, persistently, in plain sight.
Governors, legislators, attorneys general, party leaders, and others have heard from a desperate Trump, who has sought to have Republican-controlled state legislatures nullify the decision their voters made.
Though his efforts, in the courts and among state officials, to throw out votes have met with consistent failure, Trump’s rampage represents a frightening erosion of democratic principles and practices. Yes, state election officials have stood firm. (This time.) But this threat to democratic governance is far more consequential for having found such broad support across the Republican Party at the national, state, and local level.
The voices we are hearing are not marginal figures in the Republican Party. Nor are the elected Republicans who have chosen to give tacit backing to Trump’s fever dreams. This is the primary message of the party right now — weeks after the results of the election have become clear. What we are witnessing is not a fringe movement within the party. This fierce fight against democracy — against the sanctity of elections and accepting the possibility of victory by ones opponents — has been embraced by the Republican Party.
The GOP’s party line is beyond the pale — beyond reason, facts and evidence, and democratic principles. The Arizona Republican Party asks whether its followers are ready to give their lives for the fight against the Trump loss in a democratic election.
Georgia Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are the last candidates standing in the way of Democratic control of the Senate. While Perdue is in hiding, Loeffler’s campaign consists of repeating, like incantations, scary names for her opponent and an insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The campaign message in Georgia (an increasingly diverse state with enough Democratic constituencies to appear more like the nation, and less like the solid South that Republican pols have become used to) is the message of the national Republican Party.
And, unsurprisingly, the Republican majority of the Georgia state senate has responded to Trump’s loss with promises of investigations of “fraudulent activities,” “misconduct,” “criminals” (purported out-of- staters who may have infiltrated into the state to cast votes), and — of course — additional proposals to suppress the vote and reduce turnout in future elections:
The Republican Party, trafficking in “discredited allegations and conspiracy theories,” is furiously pushing back against the results of the 2020 presidential election.
That the grounds for overturning the election are flimsy, that the efforts are meeting with failure after failure, that it is tempting to regard the whole spectacle as pathetic and ridiculous — none of this diminishes the indecency of the GOP’s refusal to acknowledge the outcome of the election.
These are the actions of a political party that has become authoritarian. That transformation constitutes a grave threat to our democracy, to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”