Defending the Law of Democracy: Texas is Suing Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin over the 2020 Election

This is huge. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton: “Certain officials in the Defendant States presented the pandemic as the justification for ignoring state laws regarding absentee and mail-in voting. The Defendant States flooded their citizenry with tens of millions of ballot applications and ballots in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted. Whether well intentioned or not, these unconstitutional acts had the same uniform effect—they made the 2020 election less secure in the Defendant States. Those changes are inconsistent with relevant state laws and were made by non-legislative entities, without any consent by the state legislatures. The acts of these officials thus directly violated the Constitution.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block the battleground states from casting “unlawful and constitutionally tainted votes” in the Electoral College. In the suit, Paxton claims that pandemic-era changes to election procedures in those states violated federal law and allowed voter fraud. It is not a question of whether you believe there was fraud. There was fraud. It does not matter that election officials have rejected claims of fraud. They are the ones who rigged the election. Flooding a state with millions of ballot applications in derogation of statutory controls as to how they are lawfully received, evaluated, and counted is rigging an election.

Why are so many people around you denying what happened in this election? (We know why the media is dismissing downplaying, and lying about it.) Because they are obsessed with cancelling the Trump presidency. They are also—many of them—possessed by a deep desire to cancel the United States of American. The Constitution means nothing to them. Obviously. It’s as dead and wicked as the people who wrote it. The sad truth is that there are people in the United States who loathe Trump and his followers so much that they don’t care that the executives of Georgia and other states changed the election rules arbitrarily and unconstitutionally. Furthermore, many of them believe the United States was founded by racists (i.e. white men) and is therefore an illegitimate entity and on this basis elections may be rigged in favor of their preferred candidates. They care about neither process nor principle. They only care about outcome. This is their general stance, shown by their rhetoric of equity or equality of outcome rather than equality before the law and equality of opportunity. They are illiberal and antidemocratic.

The racism angle is particularly obnoxious. Progressives howl at the prospect of overturning state certifications of the elections. They scream “disenfranchisement!” In their telling, the United States is a racist country where blacks face systematic discrimination. They wield the specter of voter suppression as justification for rigging elections. However, changing the election process—evidenced, for example, in the consent degree negotiated between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and approved by Governor Brian Kemp—disenfranchises the voters of the state. If a lawful election requires chain of custody, signature verification, voter ID, and other measures, as determined by the constitutions and the state legislators of these states, and if a secretary of state changes these rules by fiat, even in a pandemic, then the election is unlawful. Either the election must be held again or the state legislator must elect a slate of electors representing the will of the people to be determined by a thorough audit of the votes and the process.

The United States Constitution is not advisory. It’s law. Foundational law. Our Constitution establishes a democratic republic. The Constitution guarantees each state a republican form of government. A republic is a form of government that represents the sovereign people. The sovereign people of the republic overthrew the sovereign authority of the monarch. Only vestiges of that old authority remains in the executive (for example, the power to pardon, which was the king’s privilege). The sovereign people of a democratic republic are instead represented by elected legislators who make and change law in a deliberative and rational process. To be sure, the executive has considerable authority in administering the law and possesses some degree, albeit sharply constrained, lawmaking capacity, but on the question of the laws of democracy, state legislators determine the law. We have (and progressivism is largely responsible for this) allowed the cancer of the administrative state to metastasize. Moreover, the rights of the sovereign people of America are enshrined in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The executive cannot bypass the legislative branch nor arbitrarily infringe upon the civil liberties and rights of persons. The executive has been for too long usurping the power of the other branches of government. Administrators are violating the spirit of our constitutional form of government.

What matters more than who is president (although that matters are a lot) is the right of the sovereign people of republican states to a lawful election. Elections must be lawful to count. AG Paxton is not pulling a stunt. Texas is stepping up to defend the Constitution—and our democracy.