Update 4:
In a continuing, obscene twist of “Please sir, I want some more,” Trump’s co-conspirators are planning a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election by staging a challenge of the certified election results on the floor of the House on Jan. 6.
The New York Times explains, “Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.”
But what the hell, why not regress 200 years to save the autocrat’s skin.
Update 3:
The man presently in the White House continues to be slapped down by courts, judges, attorney generals, legislative bodies, yet keeps saying, “Please sir, I want some more.”
Today a federal judge in Milwaukee, appointed by Trump only three months ago, threw out Trump’s latest effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin, dismissing the case with prejudice.
“This court has allowed the plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits,” Ludwig wrote.
Mr. Trump and his Republican supporters have now lost more than 50 legal challenges to the election, many because judges have found that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the cases or because their claims were moot after states had certified their vote counts.
Update 2:
After urging the Supreme Court to show “great courage and wisdom,” Trump is now chastising the same judges for showing “No Wisdom, No Courage!” What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours…
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrumpThe Supreme Court really let us down. No Wisdom, No Courage!
10:50 PM · Dec 11, 2020
Breaking Update:
Once again, the men and women at the nation’s highest court showed, in Trump’s own words, “great courage and wisdom” and denied the latest and hopefully the last desperate attempt by a wannabe dictator to overturn the will of the people.
In a brief, unsigned order the Court said – according to the New York Times — Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
The Times adds, “as a practical matter the Supreme Court’s action puts an end to any prospect that Mr. Trump will win in court what he lost at the polls.”
Original Post:
I love the Lone Star State, but sometimes I am stumped by its politics.
Here is a state that has as its slogan, “Don’t mess with Texas” and yet has taken the lead role in a lawsuit that seeks to mess with the election results of other states. A state that has decided to play the protagonist role in a harebrained, constitutionally and legally asinine plot to invalidate millions of votes across four states in our Union – in effect, to overturn the results of the November 3 presidential election.
All four states have denounced such efforts by Texas and by other co-conspirators in no uncertain terms.
A brief for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania said in part:
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…Let us be clear, Texas invites this court to overthrow the votes of the American people and choose the next president of the United States. That Faustian invitation must be firmly rejected.
In addition, several legal experts have derided the crackpot scheme “which makes the audacious claim, at odds with ordinary principles of federalism, that the Supreme Court should investigate and override the election systems of four states at the behest of a fifth.”
Even a Republican state not included in the Paxton legal charade filed a contrarian brief in which its Republican attorney general, Dave Yost, accuses Texas of “inconsistency” and reminds Paxton that the “Constitution means today what it meant a month ago.”
While Yost was referring to Constitutional inconsistencies, there are other glaring inconsistencies (and acts of hypocrisy) surrounding this lawsuit that come to mind.
Here we have a Republican Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, who ferociously (and rightly so) attacked Trump’s morals and credibility four years ago and was himself – and his family – eviscerated by Trump, but who now is one of Trump’s most staunch defenders and apologists and who will represent the Trump-Paxton clown car before the Supreme Court.
Then, there is the other Republican Texas Senator, Trump’s sycophant John Cornyn, who in what may be a pang of conscience is now questioning why “…even such a great state as Texas, [should] have a say-so on how other states administer their elections.”
Finally, the third major actor in the most recent rendering of “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark Texas,” is none other than its Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, a man who according to the New York Times “is under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations of abusing his office to aid a political donor by several former employees.” Paxton has denied the allegations.
A man who will be infamous, as the New York Times writes, for having instigated “the most coordinated, politicized attempt to overturn the will of the voters in recent American history.”
A man whom an “angry,” conservative Jonah Goldberg accuses of having the “galling hypocrisy” to support “an act of cynical, unpatriotic, undemocratic hypocrisy unrivaled in American history, a pure power play on behalf of a president whose disregard for the very Constitution these people have long claimed to adore is total. It is shameful. Infuriatingly shameful.”
A man who may be looking for a presidential pardon.
