Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to overturn the results of the November election in those states, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and offers "bogus" claims. This report produced by Chris Dignam with analysis from Jan Wolfe.
More than 100 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday officially signed on to a brief backing President Donald Trump's long-shot lawsuit filed by Texas at the Supreme Court seeking to undo President-elect Joe Biden's victory.
The Texas lawsuit, which asks that the voting results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin be thrown out, was slammed Thursday by the attorneys general from those states, each filing their own response to the lawsuit.
The attorney general from Michigan said the lawsuit was "without factual foundation or a valid legal basis." Wisconsin's AG said: "There has been no indication of any fraud." In Georgia's filing, Republican Attorney General Chris Carr said the claims in the case were "impossible to ground in legal principles and unmanageable." Pennsylvania's Democratic attorney general, Josh Shapiro, was perhaps most critical of the lawsuit, saying it was adding to a "cacophony of bogus claims," adding: "The cascading series of compounding defects in Texas’s filings is only underscored by the surreal alternate reality that those filings attempt to construct... 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." Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding at the Supreme Court, says Reuters Legal Correspondent Jan Wolfe.
WOLFE: "Every legal expert I've talked to about this case says that it is frivolous.
It has no chance of succeeding.
Texas has no legal standing to say that the results in four other states should be thrown out.
That's just how our constitutional system works.
It is, by all accounts, a political stunt.
This is part of a larger legal campaign to just cast a cloud of doubt over Biden's victory, keep the Republican base riled up and fundraise." The Texas lawsuit does not make specific fraud allegations.
Instead, it says changes to voting procedures removed protections against fraud and were unlawful.
Trump on Thursday met with the man who filed the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with other Republican state attorneys general who support his cause.
WOLFE: "President Trump has turned this lawsuit into a loyalty test, perhaps a final loyalty test.
And so you have 106 Republican members of the House signing on to this effort and endorsing what Trump is trying to do - more than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives." But one Republican state attorney general, Dave Yost of Ohio, filed a separate brief on Thursday disagreeing with the Texas lawsuit, saying that it "would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves."
