Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently under indictment for securities fraud among other crimes, has filed a lawsuit, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block Joe Biden's victory in four battleground states - Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia.
Let's think about this. The corrupt attorney general of Texas (Paxton) is asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise millions of voters who are not from his state. But if that wasn't bad enough, 17 other Republican state attorney generals have signed on to this absurd stunt. I'm not a legal scholar, but this seems doomed to fail, but unfortunately the lawsuit itself furthers the idea that there was something wrong with the election when in fact there wasn't.
Paxton's lawsuit claims that because the election was tainted by mail-in ballots in his view, that the will of the voters in the aforementioned states should be disregarded and instead the Republican state legislatures in those 4 states should be allowed to appoint Trump-friendly electors to the electoral college.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of the few profiles in courage in the Republican Party during the monarchy of Trump, explained just how corrupt this would be and what kind of grotesque precedent it would set for future elections. In fact, why have future elections. Let's just have the partisan and corrupt state legislatures pick the President.
"The idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators is so completely out of the national character that it's simply mad," Romney said. "This effort to subvert the vote of the people is dangerous and destructive to the cause of democracy."
Paxton was indicted in 2015 for securities fraud and now finds himself in trouble again for allegedly taking a bribe from a campaign donor according to several whistle blowers in his own office, and now Paxton is under investigation by the FBI. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that Paxton initiated this stunt to see if he can snag a pardon from the outgoing lame-duck President.
"It looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit - as all of its assertions have already been rejected by the federal courts and Texas' own solicitor general isn't signing on," said Nebraska's Republican Senator Ben Sasse in a tweet.
Leaving Romney, Sasse and a few other principled Republicans aside, this is what the Republican Party has become - a collection of corrupt grifters, conmen and power-hungry politicians who will stop at nothing to maintain said power, even if it means destroying all of our democratic institutions in the process. It's shameful and needs to stop if American is to remain a beacon of democracy around the world.
Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founding member of the Lincoln Project, explains just how dangerous the last month has been for American democracy. Because of the failure of the Republican elected officials to accept the results of the 2020 Presidential election, millions of people will lose faith in the most important part of a democracy - elections. There are people who will, for the remainder of the lives, never believe that any election is on the up and up and that is because Trump declares every single day that the election is rigged, but more importantly, nearly the entire Republican party has followed his lead down this dangerous rabbit hole.
I don't know how all of this is going to play out over the next 40 days or so, but I believe the damage that these cowardly Republican politicians, for the most part, are doing by not accepting the results of this election can not be undone easily. They are tainting the most basic institution in a democracy, and the faith that is being lost by the citizenry can not be turned back on like a light switch. This could forever alter the state of our democracy and that's not hyperbole, but fact.
I started this blog for a variety of reasons and one of those was that I wanted to be on the record of where I stood before, and during America's potential downfall to a dictator.
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