Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu

'The most insane thing yet'

 

Don’t mess with Texas.

 

The Lone Star State famously doesn’t take kindly to outsiders, whether they are other states (especially California), Washington leaders or business and environmental regulators. So its new role in the right’s desperate effort to invalidate millions of American votes and overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s election win is pretty rich, as Texas officials try to interfere with other states' electoral systems.

 

Texas has filed a ludicrous lawsuit with the Supreme Court to prevent Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from casting their Electoral College votes for Biden — who won all four battlegrounds. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a vehement Trump supporter, baselessly accuses those states -- where he has no authority -- of taking advantage of the pandemic to introduce illegal voting procedures, which he claims led to massive irregularities. Paxton concludes, falsely, that this means it’s impossible to know who actually won the election.

 

Most legal analysts say this claim is outlandish and that the Supreme Court will crush it, just as it did Tuesday with another fantastical Republican effort, to overturn Pennsylvania’s results.

 

“The notion that the Supreme Court is going to have a litigation where states are attacking each other’s rules for choosing electors is insane,” George Conway, a prominent conservative lawyer and Trump critic, told CNN. 

But just because a frivolous suit has zero evidence doesn’t mean it won’t prosper in the pro-Trump media bubble, where Texas v. Pennsylvania, et al, already being billed as the “Big One” that will hand Trump a second term. A bunch of other pro-Trump state attorneys general, keen to please the President’s supporters, joined an amicus brief in support of Texas, undeterred by the reality that Trump is a loser in the election and in multiple recounts and lawsuits.

 

Everyone’s outrage radar is on the blink after four years of Trump. But what is happening here is a blatant attempt to junk the results of a free democratic election — an extraordinary scenario in the world’s largest democracy.