Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro on Thursday denounced a Texas challenge to its election procedure as a “cacophony of bogus claims.”
In a brief filed to the Supreme Court, Shapiro wrote that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s suit, which disputes President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan, was the latest in a series of “frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.”
“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,” Shapiro wrote, adding that the court should throw out the case as soon as possible.
Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan also filed responses that similarly attacked Paxton’s claims. Washington, D.C., along with 21 other states and U.S. territories, filed an amicus brief supporting the four states.
Paxton filed the case late Monday night, alleging that the four swing states had “tainted the integrity” of the presidential election with mail-in ballots. The charge electrified President Trump’s allies after the president on Wednesday called the dispute “the big one” on Twitter. Seventeen states, led by Missouri, that day filed an amicus brief supporting Paxton. Two more, Arizona and Ohio, added their names to the list Thursday.
Trump himself motioned to intervene in the case, claiming through attorneys on Wednesday that the case was a federal issue. The four accused states, members of the Trump legal team wrote, “under the guise of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic” tampered with the system of mail-in voting to skew the election and give Democrats an advantage, creating a constitutional crisis.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Trump called him on Tuesday about presenting oral arguments in the case. Cruz, who had offered to do the same in a similar, and soon rejected, dispute raised by Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, agreed to do so here, too, if the court accepted the case, a spokesperson said.
The court refused Kelly an injunction against the election results on the same day as the so-called “safe harbor deadline,” the date after which the Supreme Court has previously indicated that it will not consider election disputes.
