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AOC Slams House Republicans for Spending Their Time Trying to Overturn Trump Loss While ‘People Are Starving’

More than half of the House GOP caucus has endorsed a likely doomed-to-fail Texas lawsuit seeking to undo the results of the November presidential election.

By Jake Johnson

After 106 House Republicans on Thursday signed onto a brief supporting a last-ditch Supreme Court lawsuit attempting overturn the November election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called out her GOP colleagues for focusing their time and attention on trying to undo President Donald Trump’s decisive loss instead of working to provide relief to struggling Americans.

“House Republicans are spending critical time when people are starving and small businesses are shuttering trying to overturn the results of our election,” the New York Democrat tweeted, “but please tell us more about how ‘both sides are just as bad.'”

Led by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), more than half of the House GOP caucus on Thursday joined 18 Republican attorneys general in endorsing a likely doomed-to-fail lawsuit by Texas AG Ken Paxton, which seeks to stop the official certification electors in the key battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All four states have certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victories.

The Republicans’ move followed a pressure campaign by Trump, who has reportedly been calling GOP members of Congress and “imploring them to keep fighting and more loudly proclaim the election was stolen while pressing them on what they plan to do.”

As Common Dreams reported earlier Thursday, Paxton’s lawsuit has been dismissed as “garbage” by legal experts, and it is unclear whether the U.S. Supreme Court will even consider it.

While the suit is almost certain to fail, analysts and Democratic lawmakers have warned that the Republican legal challenge represents a dangerous threat to democracy—a threat that will not go away when Trump leaves office on January 20.

“They are attempting a coup in broad daylight and it should not be treated as anything less,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Thursday.

Growing Republican support for Trump’s flailing effort to overturn his election defeat comes amid worsening public health and economic crises that have left tens of millions of people across the U.S. desperate for relief. With an estimated 26 million Americans struggling to afford food in the absence of help from the deadlocked federal government, people are increasingly turning to shoplifting to obtain basic necessities.

“It wasn’t malicious,” said one young mother who has recently resorted to sneaking food into her child’s stroller while grocery shopping. “We were hungry.”

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Source: AOC Slams House Republicans for Spending Their Time Trying to Overturn Trump Loss While ‘People Are Starving’ | Common Dreams News

Seeking ‘Biggest Incident of Voter Nullification’ in US History, 18 Republican AGs Back Texas Effort to Overturn Biden Win

“Were the Supreme Court to agree to hear this meritless suit brought by Texas, we might as well toss the Constitution.”

By Jake Johnson

With the Trump operation’s legal effort to overturn the November election going nowhere, nearly 20 Republican attorneys general have decided to throw their support behind Texas AG Ken Paxton’s desperate—and, according to analysts, doomed-to-fail—Supreme Court lawsuit against four key battleground states that have certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victories.

Filed on Tuesday and enthusiastically celebrated in right-wing circles, Paxton’s lawsuit (pdf) baselessly alleges “significant and unconstitutional irregularities” in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and pleads with the high court to delay next week’s scheduled certification of presidential electors for those four states.

“The president will leave the White House on January 20. The conservative attorneys who have become radicalized under his influence, however, will remain in power across the country.”
—Mark Joseph Stern, Slate

That the lawsuit was mocked as “utter garbage” and “factually untethered” by legal experts did not dissuade 18 Republican attorneys general, led by Missouri AG Eric Schmitt, from expressing support for Paxton’s effort.

As of this writing, the Republican attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia have backed Schmitt’s amicus brief (pdf) in support of the Texas lawsuit. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has filed a separate brief (pdf) “respecting” the Texas suit.

The New York Times reported that Trump asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday to argue the case if the Supreme Court hears it, and Cruz has agreed.

Late Wednesday, Trump—who has openly pleaded with the Supreme Court to undo Biden’s decisive victory—filed a brief with the high court seeking to intervene in support of Paxton’s lawsuit. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the president’s filing “reads like a rally speech.”

“Were the Supreme Court to agree to hear this meritless suit brought by Texas,” Clarke added, “we might as well toss the Constitution.”

The Supreme Court—to which Trump successfully appointed three right-wing justices over his four years in office—has not yet decided whether to take up the case, despite viral right-wing social media posts to the contrary.

In a blog post, Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called Paxton’s complaint “a press release masquerading as a lawsuit.” He elaborated:

Texas doesn’t have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there’s no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it’s too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).

While Paxton’s lawsuit will almost certainly fail, observers warned that the willingness of so many top state law enforcement officials to back the effort to overturn the presidential election highlights the threat the right will continue to pose to democracy long after Trump leaves office.

“The president will leave the White House on January 20. The conservative attorneys who have become radicalized under his influence, however, will remain in power across the country,” Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern wrote Wednesday. “Paxton’s suit asks the Supreme Court to throw out every vote in four states won by Joe Biden—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—then direct each state’s legislature to declare Trump the winner.”

“This act would constitute the single biggest incident of voter nullification in American history,” Stern continued. “Paxton alleges that all four states illegally expanded mail voting, permitted egregious fraud, then concealed evidence that Democrats stole the election. There is no basis in truth for his factual claims and no basis in law for his legal theories.”

Clarke of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law added on Twitter, “This is what anti-democratic conduct looks like.”

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Source: Seeking ‘Biggest Incident of Voter Nullification’ in US History, 18 Republican AGs Back Texas Effort to Overturn Biden Win | Common Dreams News