From the New York Times:

A day after President Trump’s stinging defeat in the Supreme Court, Republicans around the country seemed to be having trouble finding the right words.

….. Of 17 Republican attorneys general who had endorsed the case, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, none agreed to be interviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Paxton, who had issued a statement calling the decision “unfortunate,” did not respond to a request for comment.

The 17 included Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge. Good idea. Because she did allow a local interview with Talk Business and Politics where she again aired her nonsensical justification for her support of the Texas intervention. The less her words get spread around the better if she values preserving any belief in her legal competency.

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She is using the GOP Talking Point Factory assertion that the states were right to sue — without evidence or legal basis — because the four states she and others were seeking to disenfranchise had voted for Joe Biden and their election practices thus “diluted” Arkansas’s vote for Donald Trump. But wait. Didn’t Arkansas and other states in the case adopt pandemic-spurred voting rules, too? Some the same as those challenged elsewhere?

Rutledge said she didn’t have an issue with their modifications because those states voted like Arkansas did – for Trump.

 

“I think philosophically, those states are not necessarily diluting the vote of Arkansans. Arkansans voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump. And so if another state voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump, how would that possibly dilute our vote here in Arkansas?” she said.

Shorter Rutledge: Votes for Trump are legal no matter what election method is used. Votes for Biden are not.

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Governor Hutchinson DID talk with the New York Times and he got away with some historical revisionism (see my emphasis).

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican who had disagreed with the decision by his state’s attorney general to join the case, said there was no viable path forward for Mr. Trump.

“The electoral votes should be cast on Monday, and all indications are that Joe Biden will be the president-elect at that time,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a telephone interview, urging the country to move on. “It’s the tradition of our country and the history of our democracy that we do move on beyond that hard-fought election and we unite and we recognize the president-elect’s leadership.”

 

Mr. Hutchinson said he believed the effort led by Texas was based on a flawed legal theory, a view shared by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who had been among the first in her party to congratulate President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his victory. She called the court’s ruling “an unsurprising affirmation of the principle that one state cannot tell another state how to run its elections.”

Now he tells us!

I’ll remind you of two things: 1)  I asked his office directly if he supported the Rutledge intervention and he did not respond. 2) The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette did get a statement about Rutledge’s intervention:

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“The Attorney General is exercising her discretion as the elected official responsible for legal action on behalf of the state. Only the Attorney General can provide the reasons that led to her decision to join the case. I was not consulted in regard to the decision. As Governor, I have not been asked to sign onto any brief and I do not intend to do so.”

I see no disagreement with Rutledge’s decision expressed in this statement. I see no mention of a flawed legal theory.

But I do see, even now, that he, and other Republicans, refuse to term Joe Biden president-elect, at least until the Electoral College votes.  (By comparison, Hutchinson was quoted as calling Trump president-elect in 2016 long before the Electoral College had met to complete a much closer election.) Some, Rep. Steve Scalise, for example, apparently aren’t willing to accept the Electoral College vote.

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This is a good place for this illustration of the GOP Talking Point Factory at work again on those words that Hutchinson just can’t bring himself to utter.

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