Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton expressed regret on Sunday regarding the Supreme Court’s decision to toss his lawsuit against four battleground states in a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
During an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, Paxton said the “genie is out of the bottle,” claiming the same problems he saw with the general election will affect the January Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
Paxton, who is being investigated by the FBI regarding allegations that he improperly used his office to shield a campaign donor from legal scrutiny and fired three whistleblowers who made the report to law enforcement, criticized the high court’s ruling that he failed to “demonstrate a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”
“Our only place to go is the U.S. Supreme Court to be heard,” Paxton said. “If my people are harmed, which I view them as having been harmed by the fact that other states didn’t follow their election laws and didn’t follow the Constitution, how do I address the fact that my voters are affected by a national election that potentially was not done correctly, where there was fraud and that state law and federal law was not followed?”
Paxton filed the case early last week, alleging four swing states “tainted the integrity” of the presidential election with mail-in ballots. Seventeen other states filed an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit, as did more than 120 Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Though Paxton said there were “certainly lots of examples of fraud,” his suit didn’t turn on the issue of proving fraud in the four states he sued. Rather, Paxton argued that because states failed to verify signatures properly, “we don’t know if any of those ballots were fraudulent, and we can’t go back and check.”
“The genie is out of the bottle,” Paxton said. “So now, going forward, how do we know in Georgia whether we can trust those results either? And those also affect us, because the U.S. Senate, obviously, if it flips, it affects my state in having an ability to get things done.”
