Supreme Court Flooded with Filings in Texas Challenge to Voting Procedures

The Supreme Court has been flooded with filings since Texas launched its case against Pennsylvania and three other states on Monday night, increasing the likelihood that the Court will finally hear a challenge to the 2020 presidential election results.

As Breitbart News was first to report, Texas sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, arguing that they had made changes to their voting process outside their respective state legislatures, which the Constitution says must control the selection of presidential electors. Texas also argued that there were differences in voting procedures within these states, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. And it also argued that there were irregularities that resulted from these violations.

In addition to the original filing by the State of Texas, there are other filings, including:

• A motion to intervene by President Donald Trump
• An amici curiae (“friends of the court”) brief by Missouri, on behalf of itself and “Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia” in support of Texas’s case
• An amici curiae brief filed by Carter Phillips and other “Never Trump” Republican opponents of the president, supporting Pennsylvania and the defendant states
• An amici curiae brief filed by Roy Moore and other “constitutional attorneys” in support of the Texas case.
• An amicus curiae brief filed by Arizona, urging the Court to act quickly
• Responses to the Texas filing by each of the defendant states
• An amici curiae brief filed by the District of Columbia and “States and territories of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington” in support of Pennsylvania and the defendant states
• A motion by Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah to intervene as plaintiffs
• Two amicus curiae motions by members of the Pennsylvania house and senate, respectively, urging the Court to take the Texas case
• An amicus curiae motion by the Christian Family Coalition in support of the Texas case
• An amici curiae brief by the speaker and majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in support of the Texas case
• A motion by “state legislators and voters” represented by the Justice Foundation and the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, seeking to intervene and join the case as plaintiffs; their complaint was also filed
• An amici curiae brief by 105 Republican members of the House of Representatives
• An amici curiae brief by elected officials from four states in support of the Texas case
• An amicus curiae brief by the City of Detroit in support of Pennsylvania and the defendants
• An amicus curiae brief by the Justice and Freedom Fund in support of the Texas case

The sheer scale of filings in just three days — including from Democrats and groups on the left — for a case that the Supreme Court has not yet said it will hear may increase the chance that it will do so.

The Pennsylvania filing calls the Texas lawsuit a “seditious abuse of the judicial process,” prompting a shocked response from constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley: “Filing with the Supreme Court is the very antithesis of sedition.”

Did John Adams write the Pennsylvania brief calling the Texas lawsuit a "seditious abuse of the judicial process?" Sedition seems the rage on both sides these days. https://t.co/i58EOc4WL6 Filing with the Supreme Court is the very antithesis of sedition. https://t.co/gZCTyYrTQ7

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) December 11, 2020

Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Josh Shapiro, whose name is on the filing, raised eyebrows and prompted calls for his resignation when he declared in advance of Election Day that Trump did not have the votes to win the state.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.