May you be like a classic Disney movie — locked in a vault and unreleased for decades.

May you be like an American Express credit card — accepted few places and rapidly accruing debt.

May you be like mitochondria — doing intensive labor in a cell.

May you be like the McDonald’s McRib — here for a limited time only.

May you be like one of your sexual assault accusations — ignored by your base and hastily buried.

May you be like an HBO Max subscription — on trial and then canceled forever.

May you be like a Clemson football player — wearing orange and getting paid nothing.

President Trump’s legal team is entering into what might be its most desperate election challenge yet — and given its overwhelmingly failed past efforts, that’s saying something. Its move to join in the attempts by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) to have the Supreme Court overturn the results in four key states has been ridiculed even by some top Republicans.

Texas’s own senior GOP senator, John Cornyn, said, “I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory” behind it. Jeb Bush responded by saying there was no theory and predicted that the court would reject it out of hand. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) even went so far Thursday as to suggest it was a “PR stunt rather than a lawsuit” and that Paxton might be merely seeking a Trump pardon for his personal legal problems.

The thing is, though, our legal system has mechanisms to combat frivolous lawsuits. Broadly speaking, there is supposed to be a price to pay for flooding the zone with the kind of dubious claims and alleged “PR stunts” that have characterized the Trump team’s legal strategy.....

But Gillers also noted that sanctions could also come from outside the courts. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.), for instance, has filed complaints in five states seeking to strip Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and 22 lawyers affiliated with Trump’s effort of their law licenses. Pascrell has accused the lawyers of frivolous lawsuits and “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.”

“Given the complaints filed by Rep. Pascrell and others, the risk to the lawyers has been increasing daily,” Gillers said. “For all we know, discipline investigations may already be occurring but are not yet public. In early stages, they are confidential.”

On the question of the Court's jurisdiction, the Pennsylvania filing makes a powerful argument that Texas lacks Article III standing to bring its claims.

First, Texas cannot establish it suffered an injury in fact. An injury in fact requires a plaintiff to show the "invasion of a legally protected interest"; that the injury is both "concrete and particularized"; and that the injury is "actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical." Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540, 1548 (2016). According to Texas, the alleged violations of Pennsylvania's Election Code undermined the authority granted to the Pennsylvania General Assembly under the Electors Clause. Motion at 3, 10-11, 13-15. But as the text of the Electors Clause itself makes clear, the injury caused by the alleged usurpation of the General Assembly's constitutional authority belongs to that institution. AIRC, 576 U.S. at 800 (legislature claimed that it was stripped of its responsibility for redistricting vested in it by the Elections Clause). The State of Texas is not the Pennsylvania General Assembly. See Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill, __ U.S. __, 139 S.Ct. 1945, 1953 (2019) (noting the "mismatch between the body seeking to litigate [the Virginia House of Delegates] and the body to which the relevant constitutional provision allegedly assigned exclusive redistricting authority [the General Assembly]&quot .

Second, Texas's claimed injury is not fairly traceable to a violation of the Electors Clause. As discussed above, each of Texas's allegations of violations of Pennsylvania law has been rejected by state and federal courts.

Third, Texas fares no better in relying on parens patriae for standing. It is settled law that "a State has standing to sue only when its sovereign or quasi-sovereign interests are implicated and it is not merely litigating as a volunteer the personal claims of its citizens." Pennsylvania, 426 U.S. at 665. The state, thus, must "articulate an interest apart from the interests of particular private parties." Alfred L. Snapp & Son, Inc. v. Puerto Rico, ex rel., Baez, 458 U.S. 592, 607 (1982). In other words, "the State must be more than a nominal party." Ibid. That, however, is exactly what Texas is here. Texas seeks to "assert parens patriae standing for [its] citizens who are Presidential Electors." Motion at 15. Even if, as Texas claims, the presidential electors its citizens have selected suffered a purported injury akin to the personal injury allegedly sustained by the 20-legislator bloc in Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433, 438 (1939), which they did not, that does not somehow metastasize into a claim by the state rather than those presidential electors. The 20-person bloc of legislatures in Coleman sued in their own right without the involvement of the State of Kansas. Ibid. Texas has no sovereign or quasi-sovereign interest at stake. It is a nominal party, at best.