President Donald Trump has asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to argue Texas’ election lawsuit in front of the United States Supreme Court if the nation’s highest court decides to take up the case.
The lawsuit, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeks to invalidate the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because, as Paxton alleges, those states exploited “the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.”
Trump asked Cruz “if he would be willing to make oral arguments in the case should it reach the Supreme Court,” and Cruz agreed to do so, The New York Times reports. “Before he joined the Senate in 2013, Mr. Cruz argued before the Supreme Court nine times, representing Texas in most of those cases in his role as the state’s solicitor general.”
The news comes as more states now back Texas’ lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The latest state to back the lawsuit was Arizona on Wednesday night, which brings the total to 18 states. The other 17 states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Missouri.
“Trust in the integrity of our election processes is sacrosanct and binds our citizenry and the States in this Union together,” Paxton said in a statement earlier this week. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin destroyed that trust and compromised the security and integrity of the 2020 election. The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution.”
“By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections,” Paxton continued. “Their failure to abide by the rule of law casts a dark shadow of doubt over the outcome of the entire election. We now ask that the Supreme Court step in to correct this egregious error.”
The lawsuit alleges that “certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting.” The lawsuit says that the election results were “less secure” in the Defendant States. Top U.S. election officials have disputed this claim, saying that last month’s elections were “the most secure in American history.”
The lawsuit states:
This case presents a question of law: Did the Defendant States violate the Electors Clause by taking non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors? These non-legislative changes to the Defendant States’ election laws facilitated the casting and counting of ballots in violation of state law, which, in turn, violated the Electors Clause of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. By these unlawful acts, the Defendant States have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but their actions have also debased the votes of citizens in Plaintiff State and other States that remained loyal to the Constitution.
Trump tweeted yesterday morning that he would be intervening in Texas’ election lawsuit. It’s unclear if the “we” that Trump was referring to was his campaign’s legal team or his presidential administration.
“We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”
We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020