Reuters,
Washington
Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US Supreme Court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to undo President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and offers “bogus” claims.
“What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices.
Texas filed the long-shot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday directly with the Supreme Court. It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.
Biden, a Democrat, defeated Trump in the four states in the Nov. 3 election. The Republican president won them in the 2016 election.
The Texas lawsuit, Shapiro wrote, was adding to a “cacophony of bogus false claims” about the election.
Trump filed a motion with the court on Wednesday asking the justices to let him intervene and become a plaintiff in the suit filed by Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas and an ally of the president.
The Texas lawsuit does not make specific fraud allegations. Instead, Texas said changes to voting procedures removed protections against fraud and were unlawful when the reforms were made by officials in the four states or courts without the approval of the states’ legislatures.
Meanwhile, US President-elect Biden announced several administration picks Thursday, including Obama-era officials such as former national security advisor Susan Rice as White House Domestic Policy Council director and ex-chief of staff Denis McDonough as veterans affairs secretary.
Rice, who is Black, had been a contender for secretary of state. But she was expected to face intense opposition from Republicans in the Senate confirmation process over her role in the Benghazi crisis of 2012, and that prestigious cabinet position went to close Biden advisor Antony Blinken.