The Attorneys General of 18 states and 106 Republican House members seek to overturn November’s Presidential election, in filings for the US Supreme Court.

The lawsuit was launched by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday, as the Supreme Court was issuing a brusque, one-sentence rejection of a Trump camp appeal to toss out mail-in ballots from Pennsylvania — and as all 50 states and the District of Columbia completed the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Paxton’s motion has nothing to do with Texas, which voted for Trump. Instead, it tries to nullify Biden’s wins in the key states of Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Paxton, who is under indictment in a securities fraud case and accused by former employees of abusing his office to aid a political donor, is not producing any evidence of fraud. Instead, he is challenging voting procedures in the four states.

Attorneys General for the four states, including Republican-led Georgia, shredded the lawsuit over its lack of legal argument and its “bogus” assertions.

“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 of Pennsylvania wrote in his filing.

He continued, “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr summarized the state’s initial count, full audit of Biden’s victory by 11,779 votes, and complete recount:

Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again.

Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.

Michigan’s Dana Nessel said Paxton and the Trump camp were running “a disinformation campaign baselessly attacking the integrity of our election system”. Wisconsin’s Josh Kaul wrote:

Texas proposes an extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin’s and the other defendant states’ elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each state. Wisconsin has conducted its election and its voters have chosen a winning candidate for their state. Texas’s bid to nullify that choice is devoid of a legal foundation or a factual basis…

There has been no indication of any fraud, or anything else that would call into question the reliability of the election results.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed a brief supporting the four targeted by Paxton. Among them was Republican Attorney General Dave Yost of Idaho: “[The lawsuit] would undermine a foundational premise of our federalist system: the idea that the States are sovereigns, free to govern themselves”.

The Electoral College convenes on Monday to confirm Biden’s triumph by 306-232.

“Unprecedented Intrusion Into State Sovereignty”

As the US daily toll from Coronavirus passed 3,000 for the first time, Donald Trump said nothing about the pandemic. Instead, he summoned Paxton and other state Attorneys General backing the lawsuit.

Trump, who signalled his intention in September for the Supreme Court to back his rejection of an election loss, tweeted: “The Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States.”

The Republican legislators, in their Friend of the Court statement, declared:

This brief presents [our] concern as Members of Congress, shared by untold millions of their constituents, that the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections.

They offered no substantive evidence for their claim.

Legal experts took apart the basis of the lawsuit, including its lack of standing.

Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, explained, “For Texas to try to complain about what Georgia, Pennsylvania and these other states have done would be a lot like Massachusetts complaining about how Texas elects its senators….It would be an unprecedented intrusion into state sovereignty.”

Wisconsin’s filing illustrated the intrusion:

If Texas’s theory of injury were accepted, it would be too easy to reframe virtually any election or voting rights dispute as implicating injuries to a states and thereby invoke this court’s original jurisdiction.

New York or California could sue Texas or Alabama in this court over their felon-disenfranchisement policies. Garden-variety election disputes would soon come to the court in droves.

Prominent former Republicans, including former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, said in a filing that the Texas Attorney General’s argument “makes a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.

And Paxton’s filing was derided for its citation of economist Charles Cicchetti, a donor to Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, that Biden’s chances of winning Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania were “less than one in a quadrillion”.

Cicchetti based his “analysis” on the assumption that Biden received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In fact, there were more than 80 million votes for Biden, compared to more than 65 million for Clinton.

“The model is silly,” said Philip Stark, a professor of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. “This is not science or statistics. It’s not even a good cartoon of elections.”