U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns for Republican U.S. senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, ahead of their January runoff elections to determine control of the U.S. Senate, during a campaign rally in Valdosta, Georgia, U.S., December 5, 2020. REUT
Donald Trump said his campaign would seek to join a bid by Texas to challenge the president’s election defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court, as 17 other states filed in support of a case that has been called a publicity stunt.
"This is the big one,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. Trump must petition the Supreme Court to be allowed to intervene.
Seventeen other states filed a brief in support of the Texas suit, brought by the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton. Texas is seeking to prevent electors from Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania from participating in the Electoral College on Dec. 14. The Supreme Court on Tuesday evening gave the states until 3 p.m. Thursday to file responses.
Paxton’s case repeats allegations about mail-in voting that have already been roundly rejected in dozens of courts across the nation, and legal experts say it has no chance of being heard by the Supreme Court.
Top officials in the states he seeks to sue questioned the purpose of the suit on Tuesday.
"The erosion of confidence in our democratic system isn’t attributable to the good people of Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania but rather to partisan officials, like Mr. Paxton, who place loyalty to a person over loyalty to their country,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement.
The Texas suit was filed on the same day as the Dec. 8 "safe harbor” date for states to certify their slates of electors to send to the Electoral College. The passing of that deadline means time is almost certainly up on Trump’s increasingly desperate effort to overturn his re-election defeat, in which he’s sought to pressure state legislatures to override voters and appoint alternative electors who would back him instead of President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump also said that his campaign hadn’t been part of a separate case, brought by a Pennsylvania congressman, that the Supreme Court rebuffed on Tuesday -- the first time the high court has weighed in on Republican litigation to try to overturn the election outcome.
"This was not my case as has been so incorrectly reported,” Trump wrote in a second tweet on Wednesday, without citing examples of inaccurate news reports. In a one-sentence order, the court said Tuesday that it would not grant a request from plaintiffs including Representative Mike Kelly to void Pennsylvania’s election results.
