Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery is supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s attempt to overturn the election results in four states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden.
Texas’ Republican attorney general said Tuesday he was asking the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan. On Wednesday, Slatery’s office confirmed he was joining Missouri's amicus brief supporting the challenge.
Officials in the four states have criticized the move. A spokesperson for Republican Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said that Paxton was “constitutionally, legal and factually wrong about Georgia.”
Legal experts have largely dismissed Texas' effort. Rick Hasen, author at the Election Law Blog and a professor at University of California-Irvine, called it "utter garbage."
“This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit," Hasen wrote. "Texas doesn’t have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors."
Tennessee Republicans have almost uniformly rejected the results of the November presidential election, in which President Donald Trump easily won Tennessee but lost enough states to guarantee a loss in the Electoral College, which is scheduled to meet next week to formally cast votes.