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What does Josh Hawley think he’s doing?

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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This is what some people have been afraid of: that Trumpism will not flame out, that it will instead change shape, that it will acquire perfect chestnut hair and blue suits that fit, that it will trade seething mania for intellectual finesse, that it will blather not about strong walls and weak toilets but about cosmopolitan hegemony, that it will not obsess over stolen elections and evil Democrats but instead lodge procedural complaints that sow doubt about the legitimacy of Democratic victories. And so on Jan. 6, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) objected to the electoral vote count in the name of The People, about eight hours after The People laid siege to his workplace.
“We do need an investigation into irregularities, fraud,” Hawley said, deglazing President Trump’s ecstatic paranoia into a call for election integrity. “We do need a way forward together.”

Hawley, against Senate custom, was playing directly to the TV camera. His flinty baritone was dialed down to match the somber aftermath of insurrection. The 41-year-old junior senator denounced the violence of the day, and of the past year, and then framed his objection as a restoration of order. He was there to give peaceful voice to the anger of constituents but, on a granular level, Hawley’s move had something to do with the laws and constitution of Pennsylvania. It also had something to do, if you followed Mitt Romney’s cues, with the ambitions of Josh Hawley.



Speaking late on Jan. 6, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) called the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol “an insurrection incited by the President of the United States.” (The Washington Post)
“I ask my colleague,” said Romney (R-Utah), seeming to address Hawley, “do we weigh our political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy and the cause of freedom?”
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For 20 years Hawley’s political fortunes came together neatly: Stanford University, Yale Law School, clerkship for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a few years of litigation at a powerhouse D.C. firm, a few years as an admired professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, two years as attorney general of Missouri and two years so far in the U.S. Senate, pampered with chatter about presidential prospects.
As this avowed populist prepared to take a stand in the Senate, he raised his fist in solidarity with pro-Trump protesters who had massed by the Capitol. An hour later, the worst of populism stormed the building, assaulted police officers and parkoured around the seat of the republic in a mockery of the process.
Democrats, pundits and some Republicans saw a connection between the mob’s siege and Hawley’s procedural objection, which he announced Dec. 30 ahead of others like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Hawley’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate have demanded their resignations and — in the case of Republican Ben Sasse (Neb.) — called Hawley’s actions “really dumbass.” He is now “public enemy No. 1” for the Lincoln Project, the posse of anti-Trump conservatives. The businessman in Joplin, Mo., who helped launch Hawley’s political career called him “anti-democracy.” Simon & Schuster is refusing to publish his new book, titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” because of “his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy.” He has “blood on his hands,” according to the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. Hallmark, based in Kansas City, sent Hawley a card asking him to refund its contributions.
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It’s a different anger than people reserve for Trump, who seems oblivious to the damage caused by his ego spasms. With Hawley, the backlash from friend and foe is colored by disappointment.
“Josh knows better,” says Thomas A. Lambert, law professor at Missouri, where he became friends with Hawley and his wife, Erin, after they joined the faculty in 2011.
“He is parroting the big lie, even though he knows better,” says former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill, whom Hawley defeated in 2018.
“A lot of people who should’ve known better thought they could achieve their policy goals under Trump and Trumpism,” says historian David M. Kennedy, who mentored Hawley as his undergraduate thesis adviser at Stanford. “But elites should educate, uplift and enlighten the body politic, not exploit its darkest corners. Josh and company have failed to educate them, and instead exploited them.”
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This is what some people have been afraid of. This is why Hawley’s opponents are using outrage from Jan. 6 to try to crush him.
Maybe the right read on this isn’t Josh knows better but Josh knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Hawley is likely to emerge with the political upper hand from today, and it’s important to be clear-eyed about that,” tweeted Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), on the night of the siege. “Elite opinion may pile on him for a while. But by this time next year his GOP colleagues will be begging him to do fundraising events for them.”

Hawley presses his concerns about voting “irregularities” hours after pro-Trump rioters, claiming the election had been stolen from the president, violently stormed the Capitol. (AP)
Fifteen years ago this week, John C. Danforth, a Republican senator from Missouri from 1976 to 1995, gave a lecture at Yale Law School titled “Who Is Responsible for World Order?” In the audience was 27-year-old Joshua D. Hawley, who had come to the law school to become a “philosopher-in-action.” Hawley was then president of the campus chapter of the conservative Federalist Society and an editor for the Yale Law Journal. He was also transforming his Stanford thesis into a book called “Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.”
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At a dinner after the lecture, the dean of the law school sat the two Missourians next to each other. Hawley didn’t strike Danforth as one of those Ayn Rand individualists; he was into communitarianism, into the strength of the social fabric. Danforth was impressed. They kept in occasional touch. “He was a true intellectual who thought deeply about politics and political philosophy,” says Danforth, who would help launch Hawley’s political career nine years later. “I thought he would bring something special to politics, like Pat Moynihan in my day.”
Hawley, who declined to be interviewed for this story, grew up in Lexington, Mo., 40 miles east of Kansas City. His father was a community banker, his mother a teacher. His parents hosted Bible study at their home. As a teenager he listened to Rush Limbaugh, according to the National Review, and wrote a political column for the local newspaper called “State of the Union,” in which he used flourishes such as “the future of this nation hangs in the balance,” according to the Riverfront Times.
At Stanford, Hawley majored in history and worked with adviser Kennedy on a thesis about Teddy Roosevelt. Hawley pondered the competing political philosophies of Roosevelt, champion of statism, and Woodrow Wilson, the market-oriented internationalist, according to Kennedy.
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“He was an utterly boon companion: charming, witty, unpretentious,” Kennedy says. What fascinated Hawley about Roosevelt “was his attempt to infuse politics with some kind of moral dimension, and to summon people to be morally strenuous in their lives for the good of the greater community, not just for their own personal advancement.”
According to Kennedy, they discussed two career paths: academia or politics, perhaps a PhD, perhaps a JD. After a year teaching at St. Paul’s School in London, Hawley settled on the law degree and, it appears, a path toward politics.
“It’s easy to forget, in the crush of learning rules and precedents, that all law is for something, directed toward some end,” Hawley was quoted as saying in Yale’s commencement literature in 2006. “The job of the reflective practitioner, I take it, is to help ensure those ends are the right ones.”
The language was professorial but the meaning was aspirational: Hawley seemed to be saying that a thoughtful man, while immersed in procedure, remembers to use the law for good.

Hawley sits alone before the session to certify President-elect Biden’s win. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Hawley met his wife while they clerked for Roberts, and in 2011 they both accepted associate professorships at the University of Missouri School of Law in Columbia. They were respected by their colleagues, who got the impression that Hawley was bound for public office.
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