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Saturday, October 5, 2024

Texas Lawsuit: Dec. 14 Electoral College Deadline Doesn’t Matter

'The Electoral College is a zero-sum game. If the Defendant States’ unconstitutionally appointed Electors vote ... that operates to defeat the Plaintiff State’s interests...'

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of his state appeared poised to succeed in wiping away many of the specious claims as to why President Donald Trump was doomed to lose the disputed Nov. 3 election.

Among them was the ubiquitous left-wing narrative that a meeting of the Electoral College next Monday would resolutely settle the constitutional crisis over who won.

The suit argued that the US Supreme Court—the only court with jurisdiction over lawsuits between the states—might instead allow four state legislatures to certify their electors prior to a Jan. 6 meeting in which the US House of Representatives would finalize the results.

“Regardless of the statutory deadlines for the Electoral College to vote, this Court could enjoin reliance on the results from the constitutionally tainted November 3 election,” said the lawsuit.

The court could “remand the appointment of Electors to the Defendant States, and order the Defendant States’ legislatures to certify their Electors in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” the suit said, “which could be accomplished well in advance of the statutory deadline of January 6 for the House to count the presidential electors’ votes.”

Texas sued the four other states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin—alleging that their last-minute executive actions to change voting laws not only ignored their state constitutions but violated the Electors Clause of the US Constitution, causing injury to other states that had followed the constitutionally prescribed process.

“The Electoral College is a zero-sum game,” said the lawsuit. “If the Defendant States’ unconstitutionally appointed Electors vote for a presidential candidate opposed by the Plaintiff State’s presidential electors, that operates to defeat the Plaintiff State’s interests.”

However, it noted that the suit was not asking the court to decide who won the election—only to send the decision back to the state legislatures—who should have had the sole authority for establishing the voting laws to begin with.

In all four of the states named as defendants, Republicans control the legislature. But in three of them (Pa., Mich. and Wisc.), radical Democrat operatives in the executive branch used the coronavirus as an excuse to implement their own emergency orders.

In Georgia, meanwhile, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger circumvented the legislature in settling a federal lawsuit brought by failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams with backing from national Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias.

That lawsuit in February sought to achieve the same outcome of undermining the legislature’s election laws—even before Democrats sought to use the pandemic as an opportunity to capitalize nationwide on their effort to undermine election integrity.

Despite past studies and general consensus that mail-in voting was more conducive to fraud, the defendant states’ actions permitted much broader acceptance of mail-in balloting in the key battlegrounds, all of which Trump won in 2016.

Texas’s lawsuit said that allowing the four states to dilute the voting process with illegal policies that enabled massive vote fraud was tantamount to depriving legal voters of their franchise, both in their own state and in others that were impacted.

“Indeed, even without an electoral college majority, presidential electors suffer the same voting-debasement injury as voters generally,” said the lawsuit, citing prior precedent from the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision and Reynolds v. Sims, a 1964 Civil Rights-era case brought against Alabama for violating black voting rights under the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause.

“It must be remembered that ‘the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise,’” said the suit.

But beyond equal-protection violations, the grievances caused by Democrat officials in ignoring their own voting laws struck at an even more fundamental issue of equality between the states themselves.

The Texas suit argued that it had standing for several reasons wherein ordinary voters may not, including the fact that states had a compelling interest of their own in the majority makeup of the Senate, which could hang in the balance.

Not only did the vote fraud pave the way for empty-vessel Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden, but it also would illegally install Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as the official leader of the Senate.

“While Americans likely care more about who is elected President, the States have a distinct interest in who is elected Vice President and thus who can cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate,” said the lawsuit.

“Through that interest, Plaintiff State suffers an Article III injury when another State violates federal law to affect the outcome of a presidential election,” it continued. “This injury is particularly acute in 2020, where a Senate majority often will hang on the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote because of the nearly equal—and, depending on the outcome of Georgia run-off elections in January, possibly equal—balance between political parties.”

The lawsuit hinted at some of the evidence it may present, including the sworn testimony of a New York truck driver who said he delivered a load of completed absentee ballots to Pennsylvania under suspicious circumstances.

It is unclear whether the case might also introduce any evidence regarding the vote fraud that allegedly occurred through the use of rigged software and voting systems supplied by the Left-friendly Dominion Voting Systems.

Although the decision states took to adopt Dominion appeared also to undermine vote integrity for the same reasons outlined in Texas’s case, the approval of those voting systems may not rise to the same constitutional standard unless officials specifically disregarded the will of the legislature.

As of Wednesday, several other states indicated that they would join the Texas suit against the other states, and President Donald Trump tweeted that his own legal team would also seek to “intervene”—meaning join the lawsuit as an outside party that also suffered grievances.

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