Pennsylvania Slams Texas Election Lawsuit as 'Seditious'

The battle lines are drawn for an epic legal fight pitting most of the nation's states against each other—unless the Supreme Court does what it's widely expected to do, and rejects a Texas-led lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in four battleground states. The four states—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—filed their objections Thursday, and they were joined by 20 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, the Austin American-Statesman reports. New York Attorney General Letitia James called it a "faithless attempt to undermine the will of the people and have the courts choose the next president." Some 17 attorneys general from GOP-led states filed a motion supporting the Texas lawsuit Wednesday. More:

• "Seditious abuse of the judicial process." The states targeted by the Texas lawsuit slammed the attempt to use the Supreme Court to invalidate their Electoral College votes, the New York Times reports. "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 wrote in its filing.

• Republican AG speaks out. Georgia Attorney General Christopher M. Carr, the only Republican AG from the four states, seemed "particularly taken aback," the Times notes. Georgia "implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results—again and again and again," he wrote in the state's filing. "Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway."
• The allegations. In the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton repeats many of President Trump's baseless allegations of election fraud, claiming that the expansion of mail-in voting "created a massive opportunity for fraud," the AP reports. Some of the GOP attorneys general supporting the case, including North Dakota's Wayne Stenehjem, say they are not alleging fraud, but they want the "Supreme Court to weigh in and settle it once and for all.
• SCOTUS could be "nauseated." Legal experts believe the suit will be swiftly rejected by the top court, for its content if not for Texas' lack of standing to bring it. "It’s all of the Hail Mary pass lawsuits strung together, in the erroneous hope that somehow lining them all up will make them look more impressive," Loyola Law School professor Jennifer Levinson tells the Washington Post . “It’s procedurally defective. It’s substantially defective. And I think the Supreme Court will have not only no appetite for it, but it will actively nauseate them."
• GOP lawmakers are divided. More than 100 House Republicans are supporting the lawsuit, but some high-profile GOP lawmakers are skeptical, the Hill reports. Texas Sen. John Cornyn warned that it could lead to many future lawsuits in which states challenge other states' election processes. "If people do have constitutional challenges, the place to make those are in their respective states," he said. "Obviously the ones that have been made have not proven effective, leading to this novel approach."

(More Election 2020 stories.)