The fact that the Trump campaign or other plaintiffs have raised many of the same factual claims in lower courts — which the various responses go into in great detail — is actually irrelevant as to Texas because those outcomes have no bearing on Texas’s entitlement to defend its own interests by raising the same or similar claims. There is always the potential that Texas will present the claims in a different manner, or that Texas has accumulated evidence that the earlier litigants lacked.

Further, many of the outcomes in the lower courts that the Defendant states place so much value in were not decisions on the merits, the were jurisdictional decisions or decisions based on a lack of standing on the part of the plaintiffs who brought them. //

The oppositions assure the Supreme Court that they conducted the elections and counted the votes in accordance with the statutes in each state. But simple denials of a plaintiff’s claims are not a basis to short-circuit a lawsuit. Plaintiffs are entitled to offer to the fact finder — the nine Justices in cases of “original jurisdiction” — evidence that contradicts the denials made by the defendant states and to contest the defendant states’ denials through cross-examination.

Many of the explanations offered by the defendant states are plausible and reasonable. If they are true they should hold up to scrutiny. If they do hold up to scrutiny, and the Supreme Court finds that Texas has not sustained its burden to prove the allegations it has made, that would act to reassure the country that Joe Biden’s election is not the product of fraud or corruption by partisan state and local actors. In that respect, the prospect of having the 2020 election forensically scrutinized by the Supreme Court should be welcomed by all.