More than four weeks after losing the 2020 election, Donald Trump, the most pathetic president in modern history, is still insisting the whole thing was stolen from him and that he will serve a second term, despite being laughed out of court more than 50 times in one month. Obviously, the odds of him actually remaining in the White House past January 20, 2021 are somewhere around those of the public finding out he only eats food that he’s foraged himself, or that he’s fluent in Mandarin and has been keeping it from everyone this entire time. Ultimately, he will go away, even if the Secret Service has to drag him from the Oval Office kicking and screaming, his nails dragging along the carpet, leaving orange bronzer streaks from the Resolute Desk to the door. So we don’t actually have to worry about him successfully overthrowing the results of the election, but what we should probably be concerned with are the dozens of Republicans happily, publicly trying to help him execute his coup.
On Thursday, a whopping 106 House Republicans signed their names to an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton. Paxton, who is reportedly under investigation by the FBI for bribery and abuse of office—allegations he of course denies—falsely claims in his suit that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin violated the Constitution by counting invalid votes, and has asked the court to force all four states to throw out every vote cast and, while they’re at it, appoint electors who support Trump.
This followed Wednesday’s equally insane decision by 17 Republican attorneys general to file their own brief in support of Paxton’s suit. While the Supreme Court is not going to actually grant these people their wish, if it did it would, as Slate put it yesterday, “commit the single biggest act of vote nullification in American history, voiding millions of ballots to hand Trump an unearned second term.”
Or as the office of Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro put it in response to the Supreme Court on Thursday, Texas’s suit rests on a “surreal alternate reality.” It added: “Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide by this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”
The three other states named in Paxton’s suit, whose election results he is, again, asking the Supreme Court to straight up throw out, had similar responses, which could effectively be summed up as: STFU and GTFO. Respectfully. Per CNN: