The state leads an unprecedented demand for totality by directly meddling in the competition of other states
The extraordinary lawsuit filed this week by the state of Texas for the Supreme Court to overturn the victory of Joe Biden in the four most contested states of the presidential elections – Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania – has ended up becoming this Friday in a legal order to which the outgoing president, Donald Trump, and 17 other states, represented in 108 Republican congressmen, have subscribed, pending an unlikely, according to experts, decision by the Supreme Court to accept the petition.
Within the avalanche of lawsuits launched over the last month by Trump’s legal advisers to rescind Biden’s victory, the one presented by the state of Texas hides its own peculiarity because it directly accuses the states involved of incompetence in the recount. In other words, it opens an intra-state conflict that refers to a concept called “original jurisdiction” and that is a kind of “shortcut” to speed up the presentation before the Supreme Court, as time runs against the aspirations of the outgoing president.
Trump and his team ask the Supreme Court to invalidate the votes by mail of millions of voters in the four states, understanding that “the restriction measures against COVID-19” adopted by the state authorities, whether Democratic or Republican, have distorted the electoral process by promoting a remote voting system “without any type of chain of custody” to protect the ballots.
It is, therefore, a lawsuit that in reality seeks the direct annulment of the votes that all these states grant Biden in the Electoral College, a total challenge that, if victorious, would place Biden again below 270 votes. you need in this institution to get the White House.
Moreover, if this demand were to follow the paths desired by the Trump team, the Supreme Court could not only annul the votes of the Electoral College but also leave the decision to choose the winner of the elections in the hands of each of the four state legislatures.
The Supreme Court could even send the case to the House of Representatives, where the election would remain in the hands of the deputies of the affected states, mostly Republicans. Trump, if this case succeeds, could even win the elections.
WAITING FOR THE SUPREME
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, requires the Supreme Court to rule as soon as possible. To admit the case for processing, it is necessary to have the approval of five Supreme Court justices.
Right now there are six conservative judges, favorable in principle to Trump, but the big problem is that the highest court in the country has categorically refused from the beginning to favor the US president’s legal offensive in the least.
Voices such as Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro describe this lawsuit as “based on a surreal alternate reality,” allowing one state to tell another how to do its job. “Nothing in the text, history or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’ view that it can dictate the way four sister states conduct their elections,” he has denounced in comments collected by CNN.
What’s more, Republican Senator from Texas John Cornyn himself has acknowledged that he is “having a hard time even understanding the legal theory behind the lawsuit.” “Why would a state, even one as large as Texas, have an opinion on how other states manage their elections? We have a diffuse and dispersed system and even if we do not like it, they may think it is unfair, this is decided at the state and local level , not at the national level, “he said.
