In a move that found many slack-jawed from coast to coast, the Pennsylvania House Speaker and Majority Leader filed a brief in the United States Supreme Court in support of the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that calls foul on elections in four battleground states in the 2020 General Election.
An amici curiae brief (or friend of the court brief) filed by Republican Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, also a Republican, asks the US Supreme Court to “carefully consider the procedural issues and questions raised by the Plaintiff concerning the administration of the 2020 General Election in Pennsylvania.”
The Texas lawsuit charges that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin illegally introduced changes to election laws that bypassed the required legislative process, thus deeming them unconstitutional.
Paxton’s lawsuit also contends that in doing so, those states treated voters within their respective states unequally and created considerable voting irregularities by rescinding certain ballot-integrity measures.
The Texas Attorney General filed the state’s motion on Monday night. The lawsuit is asking the High Court to declare the four states carried out their respective elections in violation of the US Constitution.
“The unimpeachability of our elections requires clear procedures of administration so that everyone gets a fair shake,” Culter and Benninghoff wrote in the brief. “Unfortunately, outside actors have so markedly twisted and gerrymandered the Commonwealth’s Election Code to the point that amici find it unrecognizable from the laws that they enacted.”
The leaders of Pennsylvania's General Assembly have filed a brief supporting Texas' effort to have the Supreme Court throw out the results of the presidential election in their state. pic.twitter.com/GI0AAe1uiQ
— Brad Heath (@bradheath) December 10, 2020
They added that the State of Texas “raised important questions about how this procedural malfeasance affected the 2020 General Election.”
In further support of the Texas suit, Cutler and Benninghoff also stipulated that “under the pretextual guise of COVID-19, special interests began attempting to use Pennsylvania courts” to carry out “election procedures of their own choosing,” citing mail-in ballot extensions implemented by Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State, Kathy Boockvar.