20 more Republicans, including McCarthy, endorse Texas challenge to Biden victory

The list of House Republicans formally challenging the presidential election results jumped on Friday, as 20 more lawmakers, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), endorsed the Texas lawsuit alleging widespread voter fraud.

A day earlier, the House amicus brief accompanying the Texas challenge had attracted the support of 106 Republican lawmakers, including Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). The revised document, released Friday, brings the figure up to 126, representing roughly two-thirds of the Republican conference.

In its challenge, Texas has asked the Supreme Court to review the election results in four states carried by President-elect Joe Biden: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

President Trump won those battleground states in 2016, and the Texas suit, filed Tuesday by the state’s Republican attorney general, alleges that “voting irregularities” surrounding this year’s presidential contest call into question Biden’s victory in all four states.

“Presently, evidence of material illegality in the 2020 general elections held in Defendant States grows daily,” the suit charges.

The amicus brief was spearheaded by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), the outgoing head of the Republican Study Committee and a close Trump ally who was a prominent defender fo the president during his impeachment last year.

Other prominent Republicans to endorse the legal brief are Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee; Andy Biggs (Ariz.), who heads the conservative Freedom Caucus; and Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.), the incoming Republican Study Committee chairman.

The Texas suit is just the latest in a long string of suits from Trump and his allies contesting this year’s election results. Virtually all of them have been dismissed by the courts, at times with scornful statements from the presiding judges, who have openly mocked the absence of evidence revealing fraud on any scale.

Trump has cheered the suits, making unsubstantiated claims that the election was rigged by a cabal of state election workers, foreign governments and election technology companies all fighting to tip the scale toward Biden. Yet even Republican officials overseeing the election process have rejected Trump’s claims with increasingly urgent appeals for voters to accept the results.

Support for the Texas challenge is hardly unanimous within the Republican ranks, and a number of GOP lawmakers have condemned the suit — and the accompanying amicus brief — for trampling on the right of individual states to conduct their own elections by their own rules.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a conservative Trump ally, hammered the suit as “a dangerous violation of federalism” — one that “sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states.”

In an interview with MSNBC on Friday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) agreed.

“Texas is a big state,” Alexander said, “but I don’t know exactly why it has a right to tell four other states how to run their elections.”