Pennsylvania blasts Texas' bid in Supreme Court to overturn Biden's election

HARRISBURG — Lawyers for Pennsylvania responded in the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to Texas’ effort to overturn the election result in four states for President-elect Joe Biden, calling it a “seditious abuse” of the courts that rests on conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

Texas lacks standing to bring the challenge, and its claims are not only barred by time limits, but are meritless and dangerous, lawyers for Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, wrote in the 43-page court brief.

Texas is using bogus and false claims in a legally indefensible effort to disenfranchise huge numbers of voters and anoint its preferred candidate for president, Donald Trump, Pennsylvania’s lawyers said.

“Texas’s effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact,” they wrote. “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.”

Pennsylvania has filed its response in #SCOTUS to Texas's overturn-the-election suit.

It does not mince words:https://t.co/Vws4IVnKXY pic.twitter.com/u4njHs9w9k

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) December 10, 2020

The lawsuit from the Texas attorney general, Republican Ken Paxton, demands that the 62 total Electoral College votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin be invalidated. That’s enough, if switched, to swing the election to Trump.

Paxton’s suit repeats a litany of false, disproven and unsupported allegations about mail-in ballots and voting in the four battleground states, including arguments already dismissed by courts.

Republican officials in Ohio and more than a dozen other GOP-led states signed on to support Texas’ brief. Election law experts dismissed Paxton’s filing as the latest and perhaps longest legal shot since Election Day.

“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,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, wrote in the state’s brief. The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro added, rested on a “surreal alternate reality.”

Republicans lawmakers in the state Senate and House also filed friend-of-the-court briefs, criticizing decisions by the state Supreme Court in voting-related cases and guidance by Gov. Tom Wolf’s top election official, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.

In the U.S. House of Representatives, 106 Republican members signed a friend-of-the-brief to support Texas. Seven members from Pennsylvania were among them: U.S. Reps. John Joyce, Fred Keller, Mike Kelly, Scott Perry, Dan Meuser, Guy Reschenthaler and Glenn Thompson.

Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, Speaker of the House Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster, paired with House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-Centre, to support the Texas lawsuit.

While the state Senate’s brief did not urge the court to rule in favor of Texas, the filing by top House Republicans asked the court to “carefully consider the procedural issues and questions” raised by Texas.