With reply briefs now submitted in the Texas lawsuit charging four states affected the outcome of the 2020 election by illegally changing their laws, the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing whether or not to take the case and act as a trial court, according to an attorney for President Trump.
John Eastman, a constitutional scholar at the Claremont Institute and a former Supreme Court clerk, said on Newsmax TV on Thursday the pressure on the court to take the case is growing.
“With 18 states now and the president of the United States himself, the press to exercise whatever discretion they have to take the case, and hear it, is extremely strong,” he told “Greg Kelly Reports.”
Eastman said he suspects the Supreme Court is meeting Friday in conference.
He explained that with original jurisdiction — the case went directly to the highest court because it’s a dispute between states — the Supreme Court would take the unique role as trial court.
“It’s not their normal role,” he said. “Normally they’ll end of appointing a trial judge to serve as a special master to try and sort through the evidentiary issues.”
He said both the Biden and the Trump campaigns should “want to have this resolved.”
“Half the country thinks this election was stolen, including, according to Rasmussen, 30% of Democrats,” Eastman said. “If that’s true, why would even the Biden camp not want to actually have a court look at the data, look at the violations of state law that occurred to loosen the fraud risk protections on absentee ballots?
“What would they not want to get this cleared up? So if they do win the election after a fair review, they could come in as a more legitimate president.”
Eastman said the key issue is whether or not the states violated or ignored their own state election laws.
“The legislature of the states has the sole authority under the federal Constitution,” he argued. “Those actions by state elections officials were just patently unconstitutional.”
Texas alleges Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania “exploited” the coronavirus pandemic to “justify unlawfully enacting last-minute changes and ignoring both federal and state election laws, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.”
President Trump, in a brief filed by Eastman, has asked to join the case, as have Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah.
Missouri filed a friend-of-the-court brief Wednesday afternoon that was joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia. The District of Columbia filed a brief on Thursday on behalf of the defendant states that was joined by 20 states and the territories of Guam and the Virgin Islands.
In addition, 106 House Republicans have signed a brief presenting their “concern as Members of Congress, shared by untold millions of their constituents, that the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections.”
Eastman said the brief filed by the Democratic-run states in opposition to Texas only underscores the importance of the case.
“It does highlight to the Supreme Court how important this case is and how important and necessary it is that it be resolved in a way that the country can think it was fairly decided,” he concluded. “Right now the country doesn’t think that.”
‘Far-fetched’
The editors of National Review, the conservative publication founded by William F. Buckley that has been a notable opponent of President Trump, called the Texas case “far-fetched” and “frivolous.”
They insisted Texas “has no standing to challenge the election procedures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia.”
Paxton, in the Texas complaint, argues that what happened in those four states affects Texas voters.
He writes that 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.”
“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,” he writes.
Pennsylvania’s reply, by the attorney general who declared before any votes had been counted that President Trump already had lost, accuses Texas of “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
Attorney General Josh Shapiro asserts that since Election Day, state and federal courts “throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election.”
Shapiro says Texas “has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims,” seeking “to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees.”
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