[ad_1]
(CNN) – President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to block millions of votes from four states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump’s request came in a court docket asking to intervene in a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, which seeks to invalidate millions of votes cast in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The president is represented by a new attorney, John Eastman, known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory that questions whether Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was eligible for the job because her parents were immigrants.
Trump’s move comes just a day after the high court rejected a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to block certification of the commonwealth election results. The one-line warrant was issued without disagreement or comment from any of the nine magistrates.
The president, for weeks, has pushed increasingly desperate calls and unfounded conspiracy theories about the theft of his second term.
“Our country is deeply divided in a way that arguably has not been seen since the election of 1860,” the petition says. “There is a high level of mistrust between opposing sides, compounded by the fact that, in the elections just held, election officials in key states, apparently for partisan advantage, did not conduct their state elections in accordance with the state electoral law ”.
Echoing Texas’ arguments, Trump says states used the pandemic “as an excuse” and “ignored or suspended the operation of numerous state laws designed to protect the integrity of the ballot.”
He asks the court to prevent states from using “constitutionally weak 2020 election results” unless state legislatures “review the 2020 election results.”
He stressed that if any of the states “has already appointed voters to the electoral college using the results of the 2020 elections,” the legislatures have the authority to appoint “a new group of voters.”
Or the election could go to the House of Representatives, where presumably Trump would win.
“The electors of the accused states will determine the outcome of the election,” declares the president. “Alternatively, if the respondent states are unable to certify 38 or more voters, none of the candidates will have a majority of the total number of voters in the Electoral College, in which case the election would fall to the House of Representatives under the Twelfth Amendment.”
Paxton is expected to attend the White House on Thursday, a day after Trump’s application was filed in court, CNN learned.
Paxton will be in Washington for a luncheon with other attorneys general that a White House official said had been previously scheduled. Lunch with the attorneys general is on Trump’s public program. An official separately confirmed that Paxton is expected to attend.
Paxton was indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015, and seven senior advisers in October charged him with bribery and abuse of office.
Republicans divided on the lawsuit
Trump has been gathering the support of his fellow Republicans in Washington, with mixed results.
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a close ally of Trump, sent an email from a personal email account to each Republican in the House of Representatives requesting signatures for an amicus brief in the Texas lawsuit. The email says Trump is “anxiously awaiting the final list” to see who signs the amicus brief.
A House Republican told CNN that Johnson’s email put him off. “Are we the list-making party now?” Asked the member.
Attorney George Conway, who was once a candidate for attorney general in the Trump administration before becoming a prominent critic, said Tuesday there was no merit in the Texas-led lawsuit, describing the effort as “the craziest thing yet. now”.
“For a member of the Supreme Court Bar to do this in the United States Supreme Court is absolutely outrageous,” Conway said on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” referring to Paxton’s attempt to block the election results. .
«It is absurd and shameful. And that a public official, much less any lawyer, much less any member of the Supreme Court Bar Association, files this lawsuit is atrocious.
Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told CNN that “I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even a state as large as Texas, have a say in how states manage their elections? We have a diffuse and dispersed system and although we do not like it, they may think it is unfair, these are decided at the state and local level and not at the national level.
Sen. Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, called the Texas lawsuit “simply insane” and “dangerous and destructive to the cause of democracy.”
It’s just crazy. The idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators is so completely outside our national character that it is simply insane.
The demands of the Trump campaign and Republican allies have been dismissed or abandoned at a dizzying rate.
Nonetheless, the president’s staunchest defenders on Capitol Hill urge him not to back down even after Biden wins the Electoral College vote next week, as he fights even in the full House of Representatives in January.
All four states have until 3 p.m. ET Thursday to respond to the lawsuit.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
