On Monday, Republican-controlled state governments began throwing their weight behind President Donald Trump’s legal drive to challenge the results of last week’s presidential election.
The state of Ohio filed an amicus brief at the U.S. Supreme Court urging the justices to formally take up and resolve a dispute from Pennsylvania over a ruling that the state’s Supreme Court issued in September granting three extra days for ballots in last Tuesday’s election to be received by officials.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s friend-of-the-court brief aligned his state with arguments from Trump’s presidential campaign, the Pennsylvania Republican Party and a pair of GOP state legislative leaders that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision usurped powers that the Constitution reserves for state legislatures.
Meanwhile, a coalition of other GOP-controlled states led by Missouri, was preparing to file its own amicus brief making similar arguments, according to Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow. Sekulow suggested that many of the states will argue that their interests are affected by the outcome of the Pennsylvania fight and other election-related litigation because malfeasance in any state dilutes the votes of electors in other states.
“These other states are impacted by what happens in Pennsylvania if there is in fact things that have happened in Pennsylvania that are not appropriate, that are illegal, violate the law, the electors of these other states, end up basically having their votes depressed,” Sekulow said on his daily webcast and radio show.
Sekulow did not predict victory in the legal battle over the election, but he did say he expects the Supreme Court to wind up being the arbiter of whether Trump is reelected or defeated.
“This is the very beginning of this, way in the beginning,” the Trump attorney said. “The ultimate determination of this I do not believe is going to be made by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court of New Mexico, or Arizona, actually, or the Supreme Court of Wisconsin or Michigan. I think the ultimate determinations are going to be here, at the Supreme Court of the United States. I think that’s the end result of where this goes.”
