U.S. Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R) from Nebraska, who represents the host district of the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant, signed an amicus brief on Thursday in the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against battleground states where President-elect Joe Biden beat President Donald Trump.
Fortenberry is one of over 100 Republican members of Congress to indicate support of the lawsuit, which makes unsubstantiated claims about allegedly fraudulent voting in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the suit, Paxton asks the Supreme Court to invalidate the four states’ Electoral College votes, 62 in total. Attorneys general in the states have called the suit nothing more than a publicity stunt full of falsehoods.
“Texas proposes an extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin’s and the other defendant States’ elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each State,” Wisconsin’s brief begins. “Wisconsin has conducted its election and its voters have chosen a winning candidate for their State. Texas’s bid to nullify that choice is devoid of a legal foundation or a factual basis.”
Paxton’s suit claims the four battleground states used the Covid-19 pandemic as justification to override the authority of their legislatures and revise state election statutes.
“They accomplished these statutory revisions through executive fiat or friendly lawsuits, thereby weakening ballot integrity,” the suit said. “Finally, these same government officials flooded the Defendant States with millions of ballots to be sent through the mails, or placed in drop boxes, with little or no chain of custody and, at the same time, weakened the strongest security measures protecting the integrity of the vote—signature verification and witness requirements.”
Fortenberry, the Republican incumbent in Nebraska’s first congressional district, defeated Democratic challenger Kate Bolz with 60% of the vote in November.
