Majority of House Republicans support a lawsuit that aims to overturn the will of voters and hand 2020 election to Trump

GettyImages 1284289810 — A protester in Pennsylvania holds a sign that reads "Count Every Vote."
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

A majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives have signed on to an amicus brief asking the US Supreme Court to effectively overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The letter asks the Supreme Court to recognize the alleged right of Republican-led legislatures to ignore the popular vote and select electors who will support outgoing President Donald Trump.
No evidence of widespread fraud has been presented by the loser of the 2020 election or his allies.
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A majority of House Republicans have formally expressed their opposition to recognizing the democratic outcome of the 2020 election, signing an amicus brief siding with a Texas lawsuit that aims to discard the will of voters in battleground states won by President-elect Joe Biden.

President Donald Trump lost the November election in a relative landslide: 7 million more people voted for his opponent than for him, leaving the outgoing president with 232 votes in the Electoral College to 306 for Biden. But the lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeks to undo the outcome, specifically by throwing out the votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, replacing the will of the people with pro-Trump electors appointed by the states' Republican-led legislatures.

And at least 106 elected Republicans in the House of Representatives agree with that strategy, submitting a brief with the US Supreme Court that "defends the constitutional authority of state legislatures as the only bodies duly authorized to establish the manner by which presidential electors are appointed."

Outside of those who are retiring, there are members who signed the letter who were returned to office in an election they now claim is illegitimate.

—Brad Heath (@bradheath) December 10, 2020

The litigation is highly unlikely to succeed; under the US Constitution, states administer their own elections, Texas provides no say over how they are run in Pennsylvania and vice versa. However, it signals a willingness on the part of many if not most elected Republicans to subvert democracy and their own commitment states' rights for sheer partisan gain.

No evidence of widespread fraud has been uncovered, either by Trump's lawyers, his Department of Justice, or Republican officials who oversaw voting in the states at issue, and certainly none sufficient to justify unprecedented intervention by judges that, as recourse, would effectively rob tens of millions of people of their right to vote - after their vote has already been cast, based on the results of them being counted.

Though in the minority, some elected Republicans have recognized that. On Wednesday, Texas Sen. John Cornyn told CNN he was "unconvinced" by what he characterized as the dubious legal arguments put forward by his state's attorney general, who has since been joined by 17 other states.

Another Texan, Rep. Chip Roy, was more forceful, on Thursday calling the brief filed by his colleagues "a dangerous violation of federalism," if not democratic values, saying he "cannot support an effort that will almost certainly fail... and is inconsistent with my beliefs about protecting Texas sovereignty from the meddling of other states."

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