Florida Senate Democrats blasted Attorney General Ashley Moody on Thursday for intervening in a lawsuit that seeks to delay the certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states that President Trump lost.

Moody is one of 17 Republican attorneys general who are backing the case that was filed earlier this week in Texas. It’s calling on the Supreme Court to back the president in his latest legal campaign to reverse the results of the presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than seven million votes and 74 electoral votes. She tweeted out her statement, announcing she had filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on Wednesday in which she wrote that the integrity and resolution of the 2020 election was of “paramount importance.” Moody said the court needed to weigh in on so that Americans could be assured that the election was “fairly reviewed and decided.”

“We were disappointed to see that the attorney general’s resources and staff time would be devoted to filing an amicus brief on a case which is entire specious and frivolous and without any evidence whatsoever,” said Democratic Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer. “Our courts have considered every challenge by the Trump administration to this election. There’s absolutely no evidence supporting the claims being made by Rudy Giuliani and others, and it was quite disappointing to see our state joining in that frivolous request to get the Supreme Court to take up the case or cases that were rightly dismissed, because they have no factual basis underlying them whatsoever.”

Trump and his allies have lost dozens of lawsuits filed in the weeks since the election was called for Biden. 

“Florida does not need to be spending our taxpayer money on such a lark,” said Orlando area state Senator Linda Stewart, who added that the country needed to prepare for Biden to be inaugurated next month and “quit this foolishness.”
In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all “exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election.”

He went on to say that these four battleground states – all won by Biden – “flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.”

Broward County state Senator Lori Berman noted the irony of Moody joining a lawsuit that questions the use of vote-by-mail ballots, which have gained popularity in Florida elections for more than a decade.

“For our attorney general to be attacking vote-by-mail when we use it so successfully here in the state is pretty hypocritical,” she said, adding, “I’m sorry to see our taxpayer dollars going towards this specious lawsuit.”

Some Texas Republican are also questioning the lawsuit. 

Texas U.S. Senator John Cornyn told CNN that "I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it. Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say-so on how other states administer their elections? We have a diffused and dispersed system and even though we might not like it, they may think it's unfair, those are decided at the state and local level and not at the national level."

President Trump has been holding out hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case and ultimately award him a second term. He’s downplaying the December 14 deadline for electors to cast their ballots, insisting that he has until the inauguration day of January 20 to contest the election results.

The intent of the Zoom press call was for Senate Democrats to criticize Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts in handling the coronavirus pandemic. The Democrats repeated their demand for a statewide mask policy and for the governor to empower local elected officials to do more if they want to combat the health care crisis.

“It is time this Governor recognized that and get his head out from under the President’s behind and lead and represent this state,” said Senator Perry Thurston Jr.