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Kansas AG who joined a bogus lawsuit to overturn the election is part of the circus

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt Wichita Eagle file photo

This is getting ridiculous.

It isn’t enough that Kansas-congressman-turned-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” — an absurd suggestion that he chuckled about even as he said the words.

Now Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, so intent on ginning up pro-Trump Kansas voters for a possible run for governor, has signed our state’s name to an embarrassing and baseless lawsuit aimed at overturning the presidential election.

Both Schmidt and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — a Midwestern Schmidt-show, you might say — joined a Texas-led lawsuit seeking to throw out the election results in four swing states that went for President-elect Joe Biden.

Do we need to say that again?

The certified, recertified and even thrice-certified vote counts in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan went to President-elect Joe Biden.

Texas’ lawsuit is based on voter fraud allegations that lower court judges have repeatedly and soundly rejected. Outlandish stories of ballots being smuggled inside vans, thrown into rivers, hidden under rocks or altered by voting software at the behest of late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez are the stuff of Saturday Night Live sketches, not legitimate legal challenges.

“This election is over,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote on Twitter. “We must continue to stop this circus of ‘lawsuits’ and move forward.”

But here comes Schmidt, along with 16 other red-state AGs, piling out of the clown car.

The amicus brief takes aim at expanded voting rules in the four targeted states, even though Kansas employs many of the same procedures.

According to the brief, extended deadlines by which mail-in ballots may be received provide “a post-election window of time during which nefarious actors could wait and see whether the Presidential election would be close, and whether perpetrating fraud . . . would be worthwhile.”

Kansas accepted mail ballots for three days following the Nov. 3 election. Does Schmidt think our election was nefarious and fraudulent as well?

No, he does not — because the majority of votes here went to President Trump.

The lawsuit is a worthless political stunt with virtually no chance of success. Worse than that, though, it’s a clear threat to democracy, and now Schmidt is using Kansas taxpayers’ money to help fund the circus.

It’s time to move on. Time to recognize Biden as president-elect. Time for the GOP elephants to stomp out of the ring.

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This story was originally published December 10, 2020 at 5:38 PM.

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