Thread by @bradheath

President Trump's campaign is moving to amend its Pennsylvania election case again, this time to "restore claims which were inadvertently" deleted the last time plus add some other new stuff.

Since the campaign has already amended its complaint once, it needs either consent from the defendants [which it won't get] or leave of court.

The Trump campaign's latest lawyers say things got pretty mixed up when its previous lawyers all quit, and "because of a lack of clear communication ... certain counts were improperly withdrawn."

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign seems to have missed its deadline for responding to various motions to dismiss. It was due 10 minutes ago.

The Trump campaign also says it's challenging a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that basically rejected its assertions that poll-watchers couldn't watch votes being counted. It says it will do this "under Bush v. Gore."

[It's not at all clear how that would work because the Pennsylvania court was deciding a question of state law; there wasn't a federal-law issue in the case on which a federal court could weigh in.]

Trump's lawyers say they will ask a federal court "will seek the remedy of Trump being declared the winner of the legal votes cast in the 2000 General Election and, thus, the recipient of Pennsylvania's electors."

And now these filings have been deleted.

Here's the amended complaint the campaign tried to file, helpfully redlined. They've updated it to make some arguments that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court didn't have the authority to decide whether poll-watchers were close enough to "observe" counting.

Link: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

Trump's proposed amended complaint asks a court to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its election results. If the court won't do that, the campaign wants it to rule that the results are "defective" and instruct the state legislature to choose who won.

(2020. They said 2020. I live in the past.)

The Trump campaign also filed a response asking the court not to dismiss its case. It's a doozy. It says the state and several counties engaged "under the cover of darkness in an illegal scheme to favor Joseph Biden over President Donald J. Trump."

(That scheme isn't currently in the case.)

Trump's campaign says officials treated voters differently based on their location and who they were likely to support.

But the county defendants appear to have treated all of the voters in their jurisdictions identically -- the claim is that voters in those counties got an opportunity voters in other counties didn't.

The Trump campaign invites a federal district court to overrule the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on a question of state law, which it says it can do because of Bush v. Gore.

President Trump's campaign says this case is a matter of grave national consequence, a stolen election and an illegal scheme to oust the president. But -- oops! -- it accidentally dropped all of that from its lawsuit the other day because it got confused.

Trump's lawyers say they hope to go through all the mail-in ballot envelopes, determine which of them were "illegally counted," then extrapolate how many votes to disqualify and then try to subtract a bunch from Biden's total.

The Trump campaign is explicit about its strategy: It wants to find a way to invalidate a large number of mail-in ballots over things like signatures. If it can, "the Court should set aside these votes and declare Trump the winner."

Or hey, maybe it won't be able to prove this vast and consequential conspiracy and will therefore withdraw its case. You never know.

The problem with a lot of the Trump campaign's argument against dismissal is -- as Judge Brann pointed out yesterday -- it dropped a lot of these allegations when it amended the complaint. They're no longer part of the case.

The campaign is trying to litigate dismissal on the basis of the initial complaint that it amended, or the amendment it hopes to get permission to file later, but not really on the basis of the case that's currently before the court.

Trump's lawyers say that when Republican-leaning counties decided not to permit voters to cure defective ballots, that deprived the president of "lawful votes." But when Democratic-leaning counties did let people cure, those were "unlawful votes."

Again the Trump campaign says defendants discriminated against Republican voters. But how? The counties treated all mail-in voters in their jurisdictions equally. It's *other* counties, not named as defendants, that didn't permit ballots to be cured.

The campaign says its voter-plaintiffs have standing because they were disadvantaged by other counties allowing other voters to cure ballots when they couldn't. But how were they disadvantaged by other people being allowed to vote?

If federal courts bite on the Trump campaign's arguments about standing and Equal Protection in this case, it'd likely open the doors to a *lot* of other election litigation of the type that conservatives have been fighting against for a very long time.

Trump's lawyers say the federal court shouldn't abstain because there are no issues of state law in the case. But it repeatedly alleges "Democrat" counties violated state law. Without that, they're alleging the counties acted unconstitutionally by following state law.

Here's the campaign's whole argument: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

One other thing: Trump's lawyers are making a lot of a 1994 case in which the 3d Cir. basically set aside the results of a Philadelphia election because of "massive absentee allot fraud." What they leave out: Even there, the court refused to say the other candidate wins.