Montana shows why lawsuit to throw out the election is ridiculous

Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock on Friday filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, in which he slammed Texas’ lawsuit against four states President-elect Joe Biden won as a hypocritical and anti-democratic attempt to overturn the results of an election simply because Texas’ attorney general wanted Donald Trump to win.

Bullock said Montana implemented many of the same voting policies that Texas sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for, but Texas didn’t sue Montana because Trump won the state.

Bullock wrote:

Texas chose not to include the State of Montana, where President Trump and other Republicans were successful in a mail ballot election conducted to reduce the impact of COVID — underscoring, of course, that this action is less about election integrity than it is about attempting to overturn the will of the electorate. But if Texas is successful in its suit, it would destabilize the results of elections in Montana and any other state that took valid state-law actions to minimize the impact of the virus on voting, including states that delivered victories to Republican candidates using mail ballots.

Bullock’s brief is the latest smackdown of Texas’ lawsuit.

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro — the chief law enforcement officer of one of the states Texas is suing — tore apart Texas’ suit point by point in a response brief to the Supreme Court.

“Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact,” Shapiro wrote in the brief. “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.”

Still, few Republicans have spoken out about the anti-democratic lawsuit that seeks to toss the results of the 2020 election over baseless allegations of fraud.

The Republicans who have spoken out have been unequivocal in their belief that the lawsuit is baseless.

“I’m no lawyer, but I suspect the Supreme Court swats this away,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) said Thursday. “From the brief, it looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit — as all of its assertions have already been rejected by federal courts and Texas’ own solicitor general isn’t signing on.”

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who filed the lawsuit, is currently under indictment for securities fraud and faces a separate federal investigation over alleged bribery and misusing the office of the attorney general to benefit his campaign donors.

However, a number of Republicans do support Texas’ effort to prop up Trump’s attempt at coup.

On Thursday, 106 House Republicans announced they signed on to their own brief with the Supreme Court to signal their support of the Texas lawsuit. Those GOP lawmakers join 17 other Republican attorneys general in backing the effort to get the Supreme Court to hand the election to Trump.

Trump promised during the 2020 campaign that he would go to the Supreme Court to get them to hand him a victory should he lose to Biden.

Now that Trump did lose to Biden — in a landslide by Trump’s own definition — Trump is making good on that promise.

Legal experts, however, do not expect this effort to prevail.

“The Texas #SCOTUS lawsuit trying to overthrow the election results in four battleground states is little more than a stunt — and that’s *exactly* why it’s so offensive,” University of Texas School of Law professor Steve Vladeck tweeted on Wednesday.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.