In a column for the Daily Beast on Saturday, commentator Jay Michaelson ripped into Republican lawmakers who signed an amicus brief supporting the doomed lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to overturn the results.
"While the court’s ruling was brief and terse, with seven justices flatly rejecting it since Texas had no standing to sue while Alito and Thomas said they would have accepted it but not granted any relief, UC Irvine Professor Rick Hasen had already summarized exactly why the lawsuit indeed went nowhere. In brief, because it is legally and otherwise 'utter garbage,'" wrote Michaelson. "Everything about it is improper: Texas has no standing to sue; it sued too late; it sued in the wrong place; and the issues that it’s raising (e.g., that mail-in ballots are intrinsically unconstitutional because they make fraud 'undetectable') have already been decided, including by the Supreme Court itself. It is an insult to the Supreme Court as an institution and a galling display of stupidity."
All of the Republican attorneys general and House members who signed onto it understood the lawsuit had no chance, wrote Michaelson. But, he wrote, that isn't even their worst offense — the biggest problem is that they are laying the groundwork for right-wing violence.
"The lawsuit was much worse than merely stupid," wrote Michaelson. "In the words of the reply brief filed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is 'seditious.' It incites rebellion and violence. It will almost inevitably lead to right-wing terrorism, whether 'merely' threatening, as we’ve seen in Michigan, Georgia, Idaho, and elsewhere, or resulting in the actual loss of life, as we saw in Kenosha and will surely see again quite soon. After the court rejected it, the Texas GOP put out a statement suggesting that 'law-abiding states' should 'form a union.'"
"I truly cannot, for the life of me, understand how self-styled conservatives can do this to our country," wrote Michaelson. "When I was growing up, conservatives loved America. They were patriotic. They put love of country above all else — to a fault, in my youthful liberal eyes. Back then, only my more radical friends wanted to see America degraded in the eyes of the world, its original sins and classist, racist fracture lines laid bare for all to see. Now, I feel like I’m living in the upside-down."
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