Dec 10 2020

Hunting a Pardon

It’s pretty apparent  corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has managed to protect himself from all the allegations and indictments he is facing but the walls are closing in with the end of the Squatter-in-Chief’s reign. So, what’s the poor guy do to get the Squatter’s attention. What else, file a bogus lawsuit directly to the Supreme Court.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is in hot water again. In a letter obtained by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV, seven senior aides said they believe their boss is “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” The brief letter says the officials reported the violations to law enforcement but did not provide details about the alleged crimes.  [..]

Capping off several weeks of increasingly absurd lawsuits seeking to disrupt Biden’s win, the Texas lawsuit is especially bizarre.

For all the pre-election talk of the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately intervening to resolve any post-election disputes, very few of those cases have actually made it that far up the judicial ladder, and the justices have not appeared to be particularly eager to get involved.

Of course there is no evidence of voter fraud

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow  asks since this lawsuit, most likely won’t be heard by The Supremes, was Paxton’s point an attention grab to get one of the Squatter’s “Parting Pardons”?

“Could it be that maybe somebody has the FBI breathing down his neck, and he’s hoping for one of those many, many, many pardons the president is reportedly planning on handing out willy nilly in his final days?” Maddow asked. “If you want this president to pardon you, you’ve got to get his attention. This is the kind of viper’s nest of interests and conflicts that is driving, among other things, these dead-ender lawsuits at this point.”

Surprise, surprise. Seventeen read state attorney generals have signed onto Paxton’s lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election.

On Wednesday, the campaign, as well 17 red states, formally indicated their support of the lawsuit, which seeks to reverse President Trump’s defeat in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan. Texas claims that because those states adjusted their election practices for the pandemic without explicit approval from their legislatures, the legislatures — all Republican — should be allowed to appoint their own electors to the Electoral College. [..]

The state attorneys general supporting Texas are from Missouri, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

The Squatter signed on, too. Since Rudy isn’t available to drool in front of SCOTUS, he found a substitute.

The Trump campaign filed on Wednesday a request with the Supreme Court to intervene in the case. Among the pieces of evidence the campaign cites to suggest the election was suspect is the claim that no other candidate before Trump had won Florida and Ohio while still losing the election. (In fact, John Kennedy won the 1960 election despite Richard Nixon winning those two states.)

The lead attorney on the filing, Chapman University School of Law professor John Eastman, is a far-right lawyer who earlier this year argued that Kamala Harris, as the daughter of immigrants, may not be eligible to be vice president.

SCOTUS has requested the four battleground  states to respond by Thursday (today) but it doesn’t mean they will hear the case.

Texas’s motion for leave to file a lawsuit, which seeks to have the justices throw out the election results in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin (all of which Trump lost), landed on the high court’s docket on Tuesday. Election law experts dismissed the lawsuit as nothing more than a stunt, albeit a “dangerous” one. But President Trump’s supporters seized on the simple fact that the justices are requiring the states to respond by Thursday as evidence that the court will actually hear—or has actually agreed to hear—the case. It is unlikely that the court will decide to hear the case and the court has not agreed to hear it.

First, despite gaining widespread traction among Trump supporters on Twitter and other social media platforms, there is no truth to the notion that the justices already voted 6-3 to hear Texas’s case.

Second, the court instructing the states being sued to file a response does not mean the justices will hear arguments on the merits of the action.

“Requiring the states to respond is not an indication that the justices plan on hearing the case. It’s an entirely routine move on the part of the Court, one that reflects a simple courtesy that I would have been surprised to see the Court omit,” Harvard Law professor emeritus and constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe told Law&Crime.

IANL, however, I strongly suspect this nonsense will go the way of other lawsuits, dismissed, either for lack of standing (see the US Constitution) or lack of evidence. It remains to be seen if Paxton makes the Squatter’s “Pardon List.”

And there is this