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

• 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 a right of Republican-led legislatures to ignore the popular vote and select electors who will support President Donald Trump.
• No evidence of widespread fraud has been presented by the loser of the 2020 election or his allies.

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.

At least 126 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 those who are retiring, most of those who signed the letter were returned to office in an election they now claim is illegitimate.

On Thursday, 106 Republicans signed on to the effort to overturn the election; 20 more added their names on Friday, with Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana claiming they were omitted only due to a "clerical error."

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

Read more: New document shows all the details of the $908 billion bipartisan coronavirus stimulus in the works

No evidence of widespread fraud has been uncovered, whether by Trump's lawyers, his Department of Justice, or Republican officials who oversaw voting in the states at issue.

Though in the minority, some elected Republicans have recognized the gravity of what the lawsuit is seeking. On Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas 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 counterparts in 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 was "inconsistent with my beliefs about protecting Texas sovereignty from the meddling of other states."

In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, echoed that line of attack.

"That doesn't like a very Republican argument to me," Alexander said of the litigation. "Republicans believe that states are in charge of elections. And Texas is a big state, but I don't know exactly why it has a right to tell four other states how to run their elections."

Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com