UPDATED: 8 Red States Support Texas Supreme Court Suit, But Not Tennessee?

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington on April 30, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Tennessee Republican voters are certain to remember this cowardice among some of their leadership.

As of Dec. 8, 2020, eight other red states—Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and South Dakota, but not Tennessee—have expressed public support for the Texas lawsuit against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for exploiting the pandemic to change election laws to allow the permeable mail-in voting with almost no safeguards.

What the four swing states did, Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton asserts, was illegal because, according to the U.S. Constitution, election laws can only be changed by state legislatures. The four states altered the rules by various forms of executive fiat.

When one state sues another, or, in this case, four others, the suit automatically goes straight to the Supreme Court.

The Court has given these states until Thursday the 10th to respond and explain why they were able to supersede the Constitution.

As Trump lawyer Jordan Sekulow stated on Newsmax’s “Stinchfield” Tuesday night, this is the “be all and end all case” of election 2020, more important than the failed Pennsylvania suit, because it encompasses all four states at once.

It also contains the possibility for “relief” in which SCOTUS decides legislatures can choose new electors—or starts a process that throws the election to the House of Representatives, where the GOP has an advantage.

MIA (missing in action) in all this is Tennessee—ironic because Sekulow is himself a resident of the state that, in recent years, has been one of the most reliably conservative with some 61 percent of voters choosing Trump in 2020.

Who is to blame here? Certainly not Senator Marsha Blackburn, one of the most staunch of the president’s supporters in Congress, or newly-elected Senator Bill Hagerty, until recently Trump’s ambassador to Japan.

No, the equivocators are obviously Republican Governor Bill Lee and Attorney General Herbert Slatery, both of whom have been laggards on multiple occasions when it comes to sticking up for their citizens and delivering—in Governor Lee’s case—on their campaign promises. Tennessee is unique in that their attorney general is appointed by their Supreme Court.

These two represent a kind of old school Republican that is, whether they know it or not, going the way of the dinosaur no matter whether Trump wins or loses (in Lee’s case again, likely via primary). Theirs is a wishy-washy Republicanism that prefers a form of presumed decorum to victory.

Like political Willy Lomans from Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” they only want to be “well liked” (by their cronies).

This is especially dangerous—not only to their party, but to the republic—given the current militant “take no prisoners” style of the increasingly leftward Democratic Party and their media allies.

All this is taking place in an atmosphere of false deadlines. Everything is supposed to be decided in a week, but the Constitution itself only gives one specific date, Jan. 20, when a new president must be inaugurated. The rest are either arbitrary or by traditions that can be easily adjusted if necessary.

With so many accusations of electoral malfeasance, big and small, domestic and foreign, being looked at—or, in many cases, deliberately ignored, much like the three Japanese monkeys who see, hear, and speak no evil—it behooves our country to slow down and examine what actually happened in presidential election 2020 and whether the results are what they should be.

If we find out afterwards that those results, whether Trump or Biden wins, turn out to be the opposite of what was initially assumed and acted upon, we will have a national disaster on our hands.

Not to pick on Messrs. Lee and Slattery because they are simply exemplars of a common phenomenon, that they are not interested in pursuing the answers to these questions in open court—or have made premature conclusions—is disgraceful and cowardly.

They still have a chance to change their minds and we can hope that they will do so.

As many states as possible should join this suit. Kansas, where are you? Idaho? Wyoming? Montana? West Virginia? Oklahoma? Iowa?

This lawsuit, when it plays out in front of the Supreme Court in the coming days, must be conducted with the utmost thoroughness and transparency.

Get it wrong and the United States of America may not have a second chance.

Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III on the afternoon of the 8th released the following statement after joining Missouri’s amicus brief in support of Texas’s action in the Supreme Court.

“The Tennessee Attorney General’s Office has consistently taken the position that only a State’s legislature has the authority to make and change election laws.  This Office pressed that argument in cases defending Tennessee’s election laws against pandemic-related challenges and in amicus briefs in cases involving similar challenges in other courts.  This is not something new.  Texas’s action in the Supreme Court seeks to vindicate the same important separation-of-powers principles, and that is why we joined Missouri’s amicus brief in support of that action.”

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). Find him on Parler @rogerlsimon.

CORRECTION: At 10:09 ET on Dec. 9 the article was revised to say that as of Dec. 8 eight states had expressed support for Texas’s lawsuit. They have not joined it, as was previously said. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.