To be sure, the Constitution includes a provision that allows the U.S. Supreme Court to hear complaints in the first instance in lawsuits between two or more states. But that provision is rarely invoked, and is aimed at instances where there is no other means of resolving a fight between states some other way. Here, there are plenty of lower courts (as we’ve seen ad nauseam) that Paxton can bother with his baseless claims.

But there’s more. Paxton is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to extend the December 14 deadline on which each state’s electors will cast their slates of Electoral College votes according to the laws of the respective states. He asks the Supreme Court to: “Declare that any electoral college votes cast by such presidential electors appointed in Defendant States Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin are in violation of the Electors Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and cannot be counted.” Paxton would have the Court instead “direct such States’ legislatures . . . to appoint a new set of presidential electors.”

Hear that again: Paxton is asking five unelected justices with jobs for life to cancel the millions of votes legitimately cast in four states, and tell the legislatures in those states to give the electors to Trump. (Even Ted Cruz only wants to wipe out all the votes from just one state.)

This is a wholesale assault on “We the People”—citizens of a country founded on principles of self-government. And it’s an assault on the sovereignty of fellow states. Truly breathtaking.