Freedom

Texas has gone to the Supreme Court to stop Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin from appointing presidential electors for presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden, saying those states held a “flawed” election.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s motion is seeking to have the high court order the legislatures of those four states to choose presidential electors, presumably for President Trump. He said election irregularities in the states “cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections.”

“Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome- determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes,” the motion said. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, on her personal Twitter account, called the move “huge.”

A state can go directly to the Supreme Court in a conflict with one or more states under Article III of the U.S. Constitution.

The Texas complaint argues that the other states violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution by making changes to voting rules and procedures through the courts or through executive actions, rather than through their state legislatures.

A Republican congressional ally of President Trump solicited more than 100 of his fellow GOP lawmakers to sign on to a brief with the Supreme Court in support of a long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas seeking to delay certification of presidential electors in four battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden.

Congressman Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, circulated an email, obtained by CBS News, from his personal account to GOP members Wednesday that asked them to join a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed in support of the effort spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Johnson was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump during impeachment proceedings.

“The simple objective of our brief is to affirm for the court (and our constituents back home) our serious concerns with the integrity of our election system,” Johnson wrote. “We are not seeking to independently litigate the particular allegations of fraud in our brief (this is not our place as amici). We will merely state our belief that the broad scope of the various allegations and irregularities in the subject states merits careful, timely review by the Supreme Court.”

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is joining a coalition of 23 attorneys general urging the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential results, saying the suit “lacks legal foundation” and “offers zero evidence of systemic voter fraud.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer along with 105 Republican House colleagues have signed on in support of the lawsuit, which seeks to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victories in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. All four states have certified their election results. This shows how divided our country is becoming.

“All the unconstitutional changes to election procedures identified in the Bill of Complaint have two common features: (1) They abrogated statutory safeguards against fraud that responsible observers have long recommended for voting by mail, and (2) they did so in a way that predictably conferred partisan advantage on one candidate in the presidential election,” the Missouri brief from Wednesday, which was joined by 16 other states, said.