Hey everyone, welcome to court side, where we're discussing the post-election day litigation brought by Donald Trump.

We are one week after the election, seven days. Donald Trump has filed 10 lawsuits. He's lost all 10 of them.

We got no new court decisions today, but we did get a whopper. We got Secretary of State Michael Pompeo promising a, quote,

smooth transition to a second Trump administration. This is the modern-day birther movement. It

lacks the racism, to be sure, but it has the same flat-earth quality of the birthers. There's

no chance any of this talk is going anywhere.

The big development today is talk by some Republicans that state legislatures can just pick

the electors to the electoral college and throw out last week's vote. So deep dive alert,

this is what we're going to talk about today, just this. That's totally wrong.

So you all know about the electoral college thing, the idea that we don't vote directly for the president,

we vote for electors, and then the electors pick the president.

Now, the parts of the Republican Party that can't read, which is sadly looking like more

and more of them these days, are saying,

okay, well, let's have our state legislatures throw out the vote, and let's have the legislatures

pick pro-Trump electors to the electoral college.

And in a legislature like Pennsylvania that is controlled by Republicans, that could, in

theory, swing the state.

So here's what the Constitution says about this.

It says two things.

First, it says the state, quote, shall appoint its slate of electors in such a manner as the legislature thereof may direct.

So a state legislature could, in theory, not hold a popular election, though everyone for many, many years has, but they could do it some other way.

But here's the thing. Constitution also has a separate clause. It says Congress shall have the power quote to determine the time of choosing electors, the time of choosing electors.

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