This afternoon, the four battleground states against which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had filed suit at the Supreme Court—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—responded by rejecting Texas’s claim that it had been harmed by certification of Joe Biden’s “victory” in those states, and that certification should stand. Now the Supreme Court, which placed Paxton’s case on the docket Dec. 7, will have to determine the next step—whether it will ask Texas to respond to those four states, or whether it will hear Paxton’s case. It does not necessarily have to respond immediately. President Donald Trump has asked Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to argue the case, should the Court agree to hear it.
Among the more rabid responses was that of Pennsylvania Attorney General, Democrat Josh Shapiro, who called the Texas suit a “seditious abuse of judicial process,” urging the high court to send a “clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.” Texas’s case is “without factual foundation,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, warning that any Supreme Court intervention would be “an intrusion” into the state’s sovereignty. “The election is over,” she concluded. Twenty-two other states plus the District of Columbia today filed a brief backing the four defendant states named by Paxton.
