The war of words continues in the legal battle over Gov. Tom Wolf's COVID-19 mitigation orders.

Lawyers for the county's side of a lawsuit against the governor and the secretary of health called for the state's request for a stay to be thrown out due to “continued attempts” to violate federal court rules.

Tom King, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said the state's appeal for a stay included no fewer than 26 news articles and citations that were never presented to the original judge, U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV. That, he said, is a violation of appellate procedure rules, and is the second time the state has made efforts to do so.

“They did that because they know the record they made in front of Judge Stickman was not very well done,” he said.

The pleading, filed Wednesday afternoon in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, asks the judge or panel of judges to whom the case is assigned to summarily dismiss the state's request for a stay due to its “continued attempts to circumvent the Federal Rules of Evidence and Rules of Appellate Procedure.”

Neither the governor, Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine nor the state Attorney General's Office — which filed the request for a stay — responded to requests for comment Wednesday.

The plaintiffs' response sets up another showdown in the ongoing lawsuit and subsequent appeal filed by Butler County and three other counties, four local Republican officials and several businesses over Wolf's shutdown and stay-at-home orders issued early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In mid-September, Stickman ruled as unconstitutional the governor's business-closure, shelter-in-place and crowd size limitation orders, granting relief to the politicians and businesses. The counties were dismissed from the suit.

Two hours before the response was filed Wednesday afternoon, eight top Pennsylvania lawmakers filed an amici curiae — or “friends of the court” — brief, urging the appellate court to be vigilant in reviewing the case.In the brief, the legislators — including Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Bryan Cutler, R-100th, House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, R-171st, and Majority Whip Donna Oberlander, R-63rd — said Wolf's and Levine's powers during a public health crisis is broad enough to help them navigate it “nimbly,” it is also broad enough for the executive branch to step outside the constitution in handling the crisis.While the General Assembly passed a resolution overriding Wolf's declaration of an emergency, the state Supreme Court ruled that the governor had to sign such a resolution for it to take effect.“The result is that, except for the Judiciary, there is virtually no other check or balance against the Governor and Secretary when they overstep their constitutional bounds in issuing orders under the statutes,” the brief states.King said the plaintiffs are “appreciative of the fact that they've supported our position.”Combined with the four local politicians — U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-16th, and state Reps. Tim Bonner, R-8th, Daryl Metcalfe, R-12th, and Marci Mustello, R-11th — the eight amici mean 12 Pennsylvania lawmakers have explicitly and on-the-record made their voices heard in the suit.

In the response, the plaintiffs claim the state did not argue their case for a stay on its merits, instead engaging “in ad hominem attacks on the District Court,” such as calling the decision “nonsensical.”It wasn't just the reference to the decision as nonsense King and the plaintiffs took issue with, as King said the personal attacks occurred throughout the state's request for a stay.Throughout the pleading, the state used language typically used to criticize legal findings — calling the decision “legally unsustainable,” for example — but used creative phrases as well, such as comparing one of Stickman's citations to “reading the final passage of Orwell's 1984 and concluding that it is a book about a man who loves Big Brother.”“They attacked the court,” he said. “I'm not so bold as to predict the outcome, but I'll tell you that, ordinarily, that's not the way you practice law in an appellate court.”The plaintiffs' response also argues that issuing a stay does not significantly hamper the state's response to COVID-19, as the three orders are largely limited and, for the most part, had been suspended even before Stickman had found them to be unconstitutional.“This case does not eliminate public health measures such as masks, gloves, social distancing or uniform percentage occupancies applied in a constitutionally permissible manner,” it states. “However, it does reverse the constitutional violations asserted ... under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”