Missouri attorney general thinks his job is to fight the ‘possibility’ of a Biden win

Apparently, there is not enough work to do in Missouri to keep Attorney General Eric Schmitt fully engaged.

On Monday afternoon, he and nine other Republican attorneys general announced what their news release called “a major legal action in the Pennsylvania mail-in ballot challenge case. The Republican AGs are already stepping up to the frontlines as ‘America’s insurance policy’ against the possibility of a Biden-Harris Administration and their liberal extremist agenda.”

Possibility? They are stepping up to make sure the clear winner of the presidential election does not take office?

Sure, because “people have to have confidence in their elections,” Schmitt said, while actively undermining confidence in our elections.

He and the others have filed an amicus brief siding with the Pennsylvania Republican Party lawsuit challenging that state’s mail-in ballots before the U.S. Supreme Court.

This partisan effort is exactly why, in our recent non-endorsement of Schmitt, we said that he has managed to turn what should be a professional, nonpartisan office into another political sinkhole in Jefferson City. Though to be fair, his predecessor, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, gave him a big head start on that front.

“Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our republic,” Schmitt said at a Monday news conference, and surely no one disagrees. “We have to ensure that every legal vote cast is counted, and that every illegal vote cast is not counted.” Again, yes.

Here’s what this amicus brief sees as violating federal law and the separation of powers guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that because of the pandemic, mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day could be counted.

This is not some startling departure: Twenty-three states accept ballots received after Election Day as long as they were cast on or before Election Day. Kansas allowed ballots postmarked by Tuesday to count, too, if they arrived by Friday. And Missouri counts military ballots that arrive by the Friday after the election.

But Republicans argue that that shouldn’t be up to the courts, which in extending the deadline in Pennsylvania was as they see it usurping the rightful authority of state legislatures over their elections.

Only, those ballots received after Election Day in Pennsylvania are already being segregated, according to the secretary of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and they are not being counted now.

The other odd thing about Republicans demanding they not be counted is that with Donald Trump 45,000 votes behind Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, his only chance of winning would be to count those late-arriving ballots. (Maybe this is what Trump meant when he said he needs some better lawyers on the case for him?)

Even if every such ballot were for Trump it wouldn’t be enough, because there were few late-arriving votes in most counties, officials have said. But then, the real point of these lawsuits from the president and his allies seems to be to weaken President-elect Joe Biden rather than to keep Trump in office.

Schmitt also warned that “mail-in balloting is the most likely form of fraud.” Fraud from mail-in ballots is in fact extremely rare, but over the last few months, President Trump has continued to insist otherwise, which is why so many of the mail-in ballots being counted last in many states were cast for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Schmitt added that there are “hundreds of examples across the country that the most likely way to commit fraud” is through mail-in ballots.

“There’s a case we cite in Missouri where a local official was in fact indicted for that,” he said.

Great case in point, actually: He’s talking about the 81-year-old mayor of a St. Louis suburb who was indicted last year for trying to submit absentee voter applications for several elderly voters who didn’t know what they were signing. The main takeaway, though, is that he was caught and arrested, as was the Republican operative in North Carolina who tried to do the same thing last year. Voter fraud is not as easy to pull off as Schmitt and others make it sound.

Our attorney general specializes in made-for-TV stunts like suing China over the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s also continuing the suit that would kill the Affordable Care Act. And if that’s the work he would rather do, maybe he should leave office and go to work full-time for his party.

This story was originally published November 9, 2020 at 4:58 PM.