josh hawley 2

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FMR bAK

merri ok:

see main

MRS COMSTOCK // CLARENCE ALITO

see mayorkas beef impeach

see working class hero/good ol boy/ pseudo-pop

2 23 pow on bomb train

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8 26

Trump's AG pick is letting a a 111-year-old corpse dictate your rights

Thom HartmannAugust 06, 2026

Todd Blanche is campaigning to become our real, confirmed Attorney General, presumably so he can better help Donald Trump, his corrupt family, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make off with as much of our money as they can.

Most recently, his campaign took him to the rightwing “religious” group Intercessors for America. When he was asked about progress in totally ending legal abortion in America, or at least Red State America, he told them:

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and and it will be permanent.”

He added, later in the call:

“If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that. They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.”

So, how’s he going to pull this off? His sworn testimony before Congress may offer us a glimpse into the plan.

Ted Cruz asked him:

“18 USC 24 Section 1461, the Comstock Act, provides that every article or thing designed or adapted or intended for producing abortion is declared to be non-mailable. I have to admit that statutory text to me looks quite straightforward. It is not subtle. It is not difficult. It is straightforward. …

“[W]ill you commit that the Department will carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act and other Federal pro-life acts?”

Blanche answered: “Yes.”

How does he plan to “protect every life from the moment of conception”? Apparently, with the Comstock Act. And he may well have the backing of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court as their next step after their Dobbs decision.

Back during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March of 2024, the Comstock Act was invoked repeatedly by Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Erin Hawley, the wife of Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who was the lawyer arguing before the Court that the abortion drug, Mifepristone, should be banned nationwide.

Justice Sam Alito said:

“This [Comstock Act] is a prominent provision. It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law. Everybody in this field knew about it.”

Erin Hawley was emphatic:

“We don’t think that there’s any case of this court that empowers FDA to ignore other federal law. The Comstock Act says that drugs should not be mailed … either through the mail or through common carriers.”

And Clarence Thomas laid out the possibility of future litigation when he essentially threatened the lawyer for Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of Mifepristone:

“How do you respond to an argument that mailing your product and advertising it would violate the Comstock Act?” He went on to note that the law “is fairly broad, and it specifically covers drugs such as yours.”

In other words, they want the Act enforced today.

So, what the heck is the Comstock Act and why are Republicans trying to revive it before the Supreme Court and in threatening letters to pharmacy chains?

You’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.

Comstock spent decades scouring the country collecting hard-core pornography, which he enthusiastically shared with men in Congress, and harassing “loose women.” For example, when he visited a belly-dancing show (then a new craze) in Chicago at the Cairo Theatre during the World’s Fair of 1893, he demanded the show be shut down.

As Amy Sohn, who wrote a brilliant Comstock biography titled The Man Who Hated Women, noted:

“Despite national controversy and Comstock’s intervention, ultimately the only alteration made to the fair’s belly dancing was costuming: the dancers swapped their gauze blouses for thin woolen undershirts. The vice hunter had lost in Chicago. But he would not forget the dancers, and would have four of them arrested and fined when they came to New York that winter. New York, after all, was Comstockland.”

Comstock lobbied for and shepherded through Congress a law passed on March 3, 1873 titled “An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use.” Today we refer to it as the Comstock Act.

It’s language with regard to abortion is not at all ambiguous:

“Every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance … designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use; and

“Every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every written or printed card, letter, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or from whom, or by what means any of such mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, or where or by whom any act or operation of any kind for the procuring or producing of abortion will be done or performed, or how or by what means abortion may be produced, whether sealed or unsealed; and

“Every paper, writing, advertisement, or representation that any article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose; and

“Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing—

“Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.” (emphasis mine)

The penalty is also not ambiguous. Persons mailing information about abortion, or drugs or devices to produce an abortion:

“[S]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both, for the first such offense, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, for each such offense thereafter.” (emphasis mine)

The Biden administration argued that the Comstock Act of 1873 was set aside almost a century ago.

And, indeed, in 1930, the Appeals Court for the Second Circuit ruled in Youngs Rubber Corp. v. C.I. Lee & Co that the law couldn’t apply to things sent through the mail that are legal, even if they were illegal at the time of the passage of the Comstock Act. (The case involved condoms manufactured by Youngs Rubber Company.)

“Such a construction,” the Court wrote, “would prevent mailing to or by a physician of any drug or mechanical device ‘adapted’ for contraceptive or abortifacient uses, although the physician desired to use or to prescribe it for proper medical purposes.”

The law has been amended by Congress four times (in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994), but the language above about abortion was never struck because legislators figured the 1930 appeals court’s ruling rendered it nugatory.

But don’t tell that to Trump’s appointee, Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, who ruled in 2023 that Mifepristone was to be banned nationwide: he based a large part of his decision on the plain language of the Comstock Act.

Republican members of Congress agree, and want the Comstock Act enforced nationwide now. They think they don’t even need a ruling from the Supreme Court: they just need Todd Blanche to “enforce the law already on the books.”

In a letter sent to CVS (among other pharmacy chains), Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and eight other Republican senators (Lankford, Daines, Braun, Rubio, Marshall, Risch, Crapo and Blackburn) wrote that the Biden interpretation (and that of Congress in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994) is wrong.

They explicitly asserted that the Comstock Act is still in effect and they want it enforced:

“We write to express our support and agreement with 21 [Republican] State Attorneys General,” they wrote “who have reminded you that Federal law in 18 U.S.C. 1461-1462 [the Comstock Act] criminalizes nationwide using the mail, or interstate shipment by any express company or common carrier, to send or receive any drug that is ‘designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’”

The 1930 court ruling that lawmakers and judges had, for over 90 years, believed only applied the Comstock Act to items that were illegal (like child porn), Senator Hide-Smith wrote:

“[D]oes not protect CVS or any other individual or entity from being prosecuted within the five-year statute of limitations for the illegal mailing or interstate shipment of abortion drugs … even for conduct that occurs today.”

Keep in mind, under the plain language of the Comstock Act this could also apply to birth control pills, IUDs, and other things used to prevent pregnancy. And, of course, pornography and “masturbation devices” like vibrators.

The lawyer for Republicans defending Kacsmaryk’s ruling, Erin Hawley, went so far as to assert before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that even physicians and pharmacies shouldn’t be able to receive Mifepristone or other drugs that could produce an abortion via the mail, FedEx, or UPS:

“What the Comstock law says is that it is improper to mail things that induce or cause abortions, which is precisely the action the FDA took in 2021 when it permitted the mailing of abortion drugs.”

If Hawley’s interpretation is enforced by Todd Blanche once he’s securely settled into his office with a vote by Republicans in the Senate, all abortions in the United States could be ended when drugs and suction and surgical devices designed specifically for the procedure can no longer be shipped to hospitals, clinics, or physicians’ offices.

This is no idle threat.

As Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond wrote for his Substack newsletter, anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson, who’s helped several cities around the country put into law local versions of the Comstock Act, told him:

“If a future president were to enforce these federal statutes, then they could shut down every abortion facility in America.”

This is the specific goal of these mostly “Christian” religious fanatics: to completely outlaw all abortion and radically restrict access to birth control. And having Blanche start enforcing the law that’s already on the books, provoking a battle heading for the Supreme Court, is all it would take.

Such a case would, based on Blanche’s sworn testimony to the Senate, have Republicans, Clarence Thomas, and Sam Alito gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation.

So, if you’re concerned about the future of abortion rights in America, it might be a good time to call your Senators — particularly if either is a Republican — and let them know your thoughts on Blanche’s nomination that’ll probably get a vote in the next two days.

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AN 7 26

WASHINGTON — Former Justice Department lawyer Elizabeth Oyer has posted a video to YouTube blaming Missouri Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt and Josh Hawley for an onslaught of hate messages and death threats she has received.

“Hey everybody,” Oyer said in the video. “I started getting death threats after I testified against Todd Blanche last week.”

Blanche has been nominated to be attorney general by President Donald Trump, and Schmitt and Hawley sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which must make an initial vote on his nomination.

Oyer’s video shows images of several emails she received, many of which came from fake email addresses and contained messages such as, “Die in hell you pos,” “I hope you die tragically,” “Let’s hope somebody murders your family and gets clemency,” and other threatening messages containing obscenities.

“Two Republican senators with a political agenda rage-baited their followers into believing nasty and dangerous lies,” she states, referencing Hawley and Schmitt.

The committee’s July 16 hearing had five witnesses, including Oyer, who was the pardoning attorney for the Department of Justice for 13 years. In her written testimony to the committee, Oyer said she was fired by Blanche after she refused to restore firearm rights for actor and filmmaker Mel Gibson, a close friend of Trump.

The hearing was meant to consider the pending nomination of Blanche. Schmitt and Hawley, however, did not ask Oyer about Blanche. Instead, they drilled her about the recommendation she made to President Joe Biden to commute 40 people’s federal death sentences to life in prison without parole.

“You personally recommended commuting all 40 death sentence cases, an even broader action than Biden took,” Schmitt said in the hearing.

Biden commuted 37 of the death sentences.

Schmitt was unable to be immediately reached for comment, but a spokesperson commented on his behalf.

“(Liz Oyer’s) disgraceful clemency recommendations ignored the victims’ families’ concerns and were so extreme that even Joe Biden’s autopen handlers couldn’t stomach them,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Hawley confronted Oyer with photos of the parolees, many of whom committed violent acts of rape and murder. He showed photos of the victims and referenced them by name. In an interview with the Missourian, Hawley said that these were the real victims, not Oyer.

“The people who were murdered, and devastated and raped by the criminals that she recommended that President Biden give clemency to, those folks are the real victims here,” Hawley said. “I was proud to tell their stories.”

In her video, Oyer said that Hawley had misrepresented her by claiming that she had sympathy for the perpetrators of the crimes.

“That is dangerous misinformation, and Josh Hawley knows it,” Oyer said in the video.

In response, Hawley said that he had read from memos that Oyer sent.

“She tried to weasel her way out of it, and say she hadn’t said this or that,” Hawley said. “We have the memos, and I put them in the record.”

This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

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RWW

04/21/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Last week, Christian nationalist Sen. Josh Hawley spoke at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky, where he declared that the United States must operate under a "Christian economy" in order to restore "biblical masculinity" in the country.

Warning that young men are being led astray by misogynistic "manosphere" influencers like Andrew Tate, Hawley said that the nation must focus on raising up men who are equipped to lead their families in accordance with the Bible. The key to accomplishing this, Hawley asserted, is creating a Christian economy "where a man can support himself and his wife and family by the work of his hands."

"The Lord calls you men to something more, and your lives are central to the revival of this nation," Hawley proclaimed. "As a culture, we have to reclaim that truth, and we have to raise up healthy examples of biblical masculinity to say that, 'No, we need strong men.' We need them. We need men and families who are leading them, who are choosing to get married, who are providing for their families."

"You know what else we need?" he continued. "We need an economy where men can get a job and afford to have a family. And increasingly, they cannot in this country and that's a problem. It's more than a problem. It's a crisis. it is almost impossible now in this country, 21st century America, to support a wife and children on a blue-collar wage."

"We need an economy where a man can support himself and his wife and family by the work of his hands," Hawley said. "Not dependent on government, not dependent on somebody else; by the work of his own hands. Today, more and more families, if people do get married, if the husband and wife do get married and have children, both spouses have to work jobs, increasingly long hours, just to pay for the basic necessities of life, just to have the family."

"The corporations love it," Hawley claimed. "I can't tell you how many corporate lobbyists I've had in my office who said, 'Sen. Hawley, we need to do more to get more people in the workforce. And particularly, we need to get all the men and all the women we can in the workforce. We need everybody working all the time.'"

"If you've got to have two incomes of full-time work in this country to raise a family, who's going to raise the children?" Hawley asked rhetorically. "I'll tell you who's going to raise the children: it's going to be government daycare, which is what the government wants and the corporations want. They would love for that to happen. They'd love for the government to raise our kids. We'll go work endlessly—husband and wife—endlessly, and the kids will be raised either by YouTube, Netflix, or the government. What a terrible series of choices."

"I just submit to you that we don't need a more conservative economy, we don't need a more liberal economy, we need a Christian economy," Hawley continued. "We need a Christian economy that rewards the family, that protects the family, that rewards marriage. And I think, as Christians, we ought to be unabashed by it."

"If we say we're for the family, we've got to be for a society that supports the family," Hawley said. "My worry right now is we're trending in this country increasingly towards one of two extremes: Either communism, and we see that in places like New York—universal basic income, just give us the money, we don't want to work, just give us the money—or a kind of neo-feudalism [where the wealthy enrich themselves while] everybody else will have to slave away for endless hours, husbands and wives together, working for companies ... and barely make enough to see their children once a week."

"I just submit to you, that's not the United States of America, and more importantly, that is not the kingdom," he declared. "No, we need a kingdom economy. Last I looked, the Lord Jesus was king over our economic life, over our labor, over our families, as much as he is over the church. Amen? We need to reassert the Lordship of Christ. And for those who say to us, 'Leave this to us. Christians, leave the economics to us. Christians, leave the social policy to us. Christians, leave the family to us,' we will say, 'Not on your life, because we serve a Lord who's lord over all of those things. And we will raise up an altar to claim this ground for him, for this country, over the innocent unborn, over our families, over our men and over their labor.'"

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04/21/2026 RWW

Kyle Mantyla

Brian Kaylor @ Religion News Service: Trump's assigned verse in Bible marathon is red meat for Christian nationalists

The choice of ‘Two Chronicles’ is not a coincidence.

Charisma Madarang @ Rolling Stone: Trump Labor Secretary Resigns Amid Misconduct Scandal

Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the third Cabinet member to leave their post during Trump’s second term.

The Throckmorton Initiative: The United States is Not a Covenant Nation

No matter what Senator Josh Hawley says, the Constitution is the law of the land.

Charlie Nash @ Mediaite: ‘I Am Sorry for Misleading People’: Tucker Carlson Delivers Jaw-Dropping Mea Culpa for Endorsing Trump

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson apologized on Monday for campaigning for President Donald Trump, declaring that he would be “tormented” by the decision “for a long time” to come.

Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Nick Fuentes Is Physically Disgusted by His Own Groyper Fanboys

A devoted Fuentes supporter went on CNN to talk about his hero and then found himself in his crosshairs.

Mark A. Kellner @ The Roys Report: Mark Driscoll’s claim he’s speaking at Trump’s ‘Rededicate 250’ is false, source confirms

It was billed as the coup of coups: controversial evangelical pastor Mark Driscoll said he was invited to speak at a “Rededicate 250” event planned for May 17 on the National Mall. The 12-hour gathering, billed as “A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” is part of the Freedom 250 initiative organized by The White House. Driscoll told his supporters he was on the guest list for speakers.

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How Josh Hawley learned to stop worrying and love regime change - Alternet.org

3 26

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February 12, 2026, edition of Newsmax's Carl Higbie Frontline

CARL HIGBIE (HOST): So the fact of the matter is, this guy, by all available information, Keith Ellison, stifled the investigation until it couldn't be kept quiet. And he said, oh, I cooperated with the investigation. No, you did not. Here, this is from the House's own -- Democrat House, their own report said, look at those two middle ones.

Minnesota Department of Education received 30 complaints involving Feeding Our Future between June 2018 and December 2021. Minnesota Department of Education did not investigate some complaints about Feeding our Future despite their frequency or serious -- this is from 2018 and only after whistleblowers started going public three years later, and the FBI got involved and the IRS got involved. Only then did Keith Ellison's attorney general's office even lift a single finger, just so they wouldn't look like they're trying to cover it up. This case was entirely, entirely driven by whistleblowers, and then it was prosecuted by U.S. federal attorneys, not local attorneys. So don't sit there and lie through your teeth about how you tried to stop your law -- we didn't like this fraud. But here's the part that should probably land him in handcuffs, and I hope this committee refers him for criminal charges.

...

HIGBIE: Dead to rights. Ellison is sitting there denying this whole conversation that he had. But it's on tape. This is worse than Bill Clinton debating what the meaning of the word is is. I mean, is this guy stupid? And Hawley just kept dropping transcripts.

...

HIGBIE: He's just reading it. What did Ellison think was going to happen here? I mean, I've seen enough, and apparently so has the good senator.

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HIGBIE: Yup. Let's do that. In fact, let's bury this guy under the jail. I mean, this is a layup for the DOJ. Josh Hawley just laid everything out. This is what I want, OK? This is what I voted for. All these people in jail. I think this is what basically everybody who voted for Trump wanted. Arrest the people who steal our money and break our laws and think they're above it. Pam Bondi could totally redeem herself from yesterday. I would be her number one cheerleader if she went out there and indicted him tomorrow. You have a politician soliciting and being offered a donation on tape in exchange for dropping a fraud investigation that is the sole responsibility of his office. That turned out to be over $250 million stolen from his people. Not to mention that he let another $9 billion just get lit on fire and thrown out the door. Some of which ended up in Mogadishu. Lock him up.

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an 1 26

U.S. President Donald Trump was furious when, on January 8, five GOP senators — Kentucky's Rand Paul, Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, Maine's Susan Collins, Missouri's Josh Hawley, and Indiana's Todd Young — joined Senate Democrats in a War Powers Act resolution opposing military escalation in Venezuela. Trump railed against them relentlessly, saying that they "should be ashamed" and "should never be elected to office again."

But in a column published on Thursday, January 15, MS NOW's Steve Benen laments that two of them — Hawley and Young — have caved in to "bullying" from Trump.

"Three of the five GOP senators who voted with Democrats last week — Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky — stuck to their guns, but two did not," Benen observes. "Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was the first to fold, announcing his reversal on Wednesday morning, and Indiana's Todd Young soon followed suit. It's worth appreciating why."

Benen continues, "Almost immediately after last week's vote, the president made no effort to hide his disgust…. In the days that followed, MS NOW confirmed that Trump called each member of the quintet, berating the GOP members who defied him. The president, as MS NOW's source summarized, was 'very upset, angry, yelling.' Trump was especially animated with Young, whose phone meeting with the president was 'very heated.' On Tuesday, during remarks in Detroit, Trump continued to target the senators who'd disappointed him, slamming Paul as a 'stone-cold loser' and describing Collins and Murkowski as 'disasters.'"

The MS NOW columnist and "Rachel Maddow Show" producer argues that Hawley and Young underscore Trump's ability to intimidate Republicans who disagree with him.

"Paul, Collins and Murkowski, however, followed through on their beliefs," Benen argues. "Hawley and Young reversed course under pressure…. Trump wasn't willing to tolerate any attempt to limit his authority in Venezuela — even if the Senate vote wouldn't have actually limited his authority in Venezuela — and so, he tried to scold Senate Republicans into submission. By surrendering, Hawley and Young sent an unsubtle reminder to the White House: Sometimes, with some people, bullying works."

*Steve Benen's full MS NOW column is available at this link.

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sorta fight w trump? MEDICARE CUTS BBB?

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AN 12 25

Sources within the Trump White House are furious over GOP Sen. Josh Hawley's new anti-abortion political spending operation, according to a new report from Axios, suggesting that the Missouri lawmaker "learned nothing" from the results of the 2022 midterm elections and calling the move "asinine stupidity."

On Friday, Hawley and his wife, Erin Hawley, announced the formation of Love Live Initiative, a dark money group aimed at making political contributions to anti-abortion causes. The plan, so far, calls for spending on national TV ads and working to put a greater spotlight on anti-abortion ballot measures.

"We think that there needs to be a voice, strong voice, advocating for life, and not just in the narrow political sense, but also advocating culturally," Hawley told Axios last week.

On Monday, Axios published a follow-up report in which anonymous top advisers close to President Donald Trump expressed major frustration over Hawley's new group, criticizing the senator for not giving the White House a heads-up and for resurrecting an issue that could further harm the GOP heading into the 2026 midterms.

"Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [overturning Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms," a top Trump adviser told the outlet.

Despite midterm races generally going poorly for the party in charge of the White House, the 2022 races bucked the historical trend considerably, with Democrats losing the House to the GOP by only a slim margin and actually gaining a seat in the Senate. This overperformance has largely been credited to voter outrage over the conservative Supreme Court majority overturning Roe v. Wade earlier in the year, prompting a renewed wave of anti-abortion laws in red states.

Since then, Republicans have largely backed off from anti-abortion messaging, viewing it as a losing issue for the party. The White House insiders speaking to Axios said that the GOP should be exclusively focused on economic issues for the 2026 races, and did not mince words about Hawley's decision to dig back into anti-abortion causes.

"[The economy] alone will be the driving force behind the next election," the adviser said. "Picking a fight on an issue like abortion in a midterm is the height of asinine stupidity."

White House sources also suggested to Axios that Hawley's new group is part of a broader plan to position himself as a candidate for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, against presumed frontrunner, Vice President JD Vance.

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an 7 25

'Gang behavior': Hawley slammed for proposal to restrict $600 rebate to 'our people'

Adam Lynch

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an 7 25

'Zero shame': Hawley torched after introducing bill to reverse Medicaid cuts he voted for

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sn an 6 25

U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley is presenting himself as the rare Republican willing to fight for low-income Americans who will lose their health care or food assistance if his party makes massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. He has been rewarded with much credulous reporting suggesting he is sincere about that.

But as Missouri’s senior U.S. senator and former attorney general, it’s fair to expect Hawley to know what is happening on the ground here: an abject failure to administer federal benefits in compliance with current law.

There is absolutely no possibility that Missouri can handle additional red tape like the “work requirements” in both the House and Senate versions of Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill,” yet Hawley has endorsed them.

Missouri just isn’t capable of enhanced eligibility requirements. A lawsuit brought by disabled Missourians who were denied SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, proves this.

One plaintiff with cancer and COPD, lacking internet access, transportation — and, let’s not forget, food —used her prepaid cell phone minutes sitting on hold for days trying to get an application. When she gave up and paid for a ride to a benefits office, she got an application but couldn’t complete the required interview due to lack of staff. So she spent more days on hold before having her application denied for failure to complete the interview that she couldn’t get.

IFrame Content

That lawsuit was filed when Hawley’s fellow senator from Missouri, Eric Schmitt, was our attorney general. Instead of fixing the problem, the state has defended the lawsuit for three years.

When the court found that Missouri was not complying with the law, current Attorney General Andrew Bailey appealed a non-appealable order that merely requires monthly progress reports on call wait times. In January of this year, the lowest daily average call wait time was 58 minutes and the highest average was 2 hours. The maximum wait time was 5 hours, roughly 21,000 calls were dropped and 14,134 callers gave up (or ran out of cell phone minutes, or had to pick up their kids, or had to go to work, etc).

On the Medicaid front, Missouri was investigated and offered support by the Biden Administration to deal with our worst in the nation, legally non-compliant wait times for enrollment.

Individuals submitting their renewal information — online, in person, by fax, or even certified mail — regularly lose their coverage automatically because the state fails to process their documents in time.

A woman who already had coverage through MO HealthNet, Missouri’s Medicaid program, went months without prenatal care because she was unable to reach anyone to tell them she was pregnant.

When the pandemic freeze on Medicaid disenrollments expired, Missouri made a mess of the eligibility review process so families learned at the pediatrician’s office that their children had lost their health insurance despite still being eligible. Children who went without medications for manageable conditions like asthma ended up at emergency rooms.

Now imagine everyone has to navigate a dysfunctional system every six months to keep their health insurance as both versions of the bill would require. Or even once a month – as the bills would allow.

You have to take time off work to prove you are working. Or you have to use up time and cell phone minutes to try to prove you can’t work and qualify for an exemption. In a system as broken as Missouri’s, many people can’t jump through those hoops even when they treat it like a full time job.

If Missouri can’t or won’t run it’s SNAP program properly under current law – where the federal government pays all of the benefits and 50% of the cost of administering those food aid dollars that go straight into our local economies – there is no way food insecurity here won’t get significantly worse and our economy won’t take a serious hit with Republicans’ planned cuts.

Those proposed cuts include states losing at least 5% and up to 25% of their SNAP dollars depending on their “error rate” of under and over payments to households with SNAP. Missouri’s most recent error rate is 10.2%, which means we would lose 25% of our funding for being over 10%, like the majority of states. And the bill would also cut funding for administrative costs which will inevitably make our error rate worse. SNAP is an optional program, and I wouldn’t put it past our legislature to end it all together and let people starve.

As to Medicaid, instead of allocating the funding needed to run MO HealthNet properly, our legislators blame leadership issues or technology problems. Our legislature has done nothing to prepare for what the proposed Trump cuts would do to us, nor what the DOGE impoundments are already doing. They just keep passing tax cut after tax cut.

Given we are not currently capable of running our Medicaid or SNAP programs, there is no possibility that we can manage added expensive red tape.

But that’s the goal. Republicans know, because it has been widely documented, that work requirements don’t work even in more functional states. They don’t increase employment because people with Medicaid who can work are already working.

(I am setting aside the larger undiscussed issue of why working full time in the U.S. is not enough to afford health care, unlike in peer nations.)

The idea that there is $880 billion, or even a fraction of that, in “fraud, waste, and abuse,” in Medicaid is ridiculous. The savings Republicans are counting on would come from deliberately making it too burdensome for the struggling people these programs were intended to help to continue using them.

Look at Arkansas. The state implemented a work requirement and 18,000 people lost their insurance in the few months before a court determined the requirement had been illegally implemented.

Georgia enacted a program in lieu of Medicaid expansion that requires monthly eligibility paperwork. It has enrolled only 3% of Georgians with qualifying incomes, and the money spent on verifying eligibility has dwarfed that spent on providing actual medical care.

Republicans are counting on this happening on a much larger scale to offset their tax cuts. It’s an incredibly wasteful and dangerous strategy.

We burn money on processes to root out non-existent “fraud.” Then, when the people least equipped to navigate those processes can’t do so, they will lose their preventative health care and end up sicker and resorting to more expensive care at hospitals that are required by law to treat them regardless of ability to pay. Then all our premiums go up.

In Missouri, cuts will exacerbate our existing shortage of healthcare providers as more rural hospitals shutter due to lack of funds.

Hawley acknowledged that Missouri’s rural hospitals are in trouble when he opposed a different provision in the House bill, which would curtail a Republican-created and very popular state tax used to get federal Medicaid dollars to hospitals. (He has since caved on the House’s curtailment, and now only opposes the Senate’s significantly more drastic one.)

Rural Missourians will have particular difficulty navigating the work requirement due to lacking internet access, transportation, and job opportunities. And you know what makes it harder to keep a job? Losing your health insurance so you can’t manage your health conditions.

Despite there being no universe in which Missouri becomes capable of administering additional eligibility requirements anytime soon, Hawley doesn’t even object to Republicans moving the implementation deadline up from 2029 to next year. This is not a serious proposal for a functioning eligibility process. It’s a plan to take insurance from eligible people on purpose.

When Hawley was asked last week about people “inadvertently losing coverage,” he said: “We can sort that out.” How? If it’s so easy to sort, why didn’t Hawley or Schmitt sort it out when they were state officials or since?

Hawley is portraying himself as an advocate for the people by using the Trumpian tactic of telling us that up is down and a cut is not a cut. Presuming Hawley knows anything about the reality in Missouri, he knows better.

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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RUNNING IN 2028?

puzzle, threat to dark money, really his problem is mcconn control pursestrings?

===

With minimum wage bill, news organizations help Republican Sen. Josh Hawley rebrand as a working class ally

06/16/25 MMA

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rww

01/02/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump flunks 3 key tests following deadly New Orleans attack

Within hours of the New Year’s attack in New Orleans, the president-elect simultaneously flunked tests of accuracy, decency and credibility.

David Edwards @ Raw Story: Christian MAGA TV host calls for government 'blanket crackdown on mosques' after attacks

David Brody, a Christian pro-MAGA TV host on Real America's Voice, called for a "blanket crackdown on mosques" by the government after two potential attacks on New Year's Day.

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Oklahoma's new social studies standards go all in on Christian Nationalism

As part of his ongoing efforts to brainwash children into Christianity, Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters just released the new standards for public school social studies classes. (These are the required topics teachers must incorporate into their lessons.) And, as expected, the standards include all kinds of religious indoctrination.

Kevin Drum @ Jabberwocking: Trump already planning to break the law

Trump isn't going after gray areas. If the Journal is right, he plans to enact policies that he flat out knows to be illegal. He's just hoping that his hand-picked Supreme Court will let him do it.

Daniel Desrochers @ The Kansas City Star: Josh Hawley thinks America needs a religious revival. Is this man helping him find it?

H.W. Crocker III thinks Western civilization is in trouble. He supports conservative Christian moral values and has decried the rise of a new, secular America where a growing number of people answer “none” to surveys asking which religion they practice. He’s lauded the Confederacy and its soldiers and generals in books like the “Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War” and “Robert E. Lee on Leadership.” And, this year, he picked up a new job: communications consultant for Sen. Josh Hawley’s Senate campaign.

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Alternet

'Cowardly fled the scene of his crime': Sen. Hawley blasted over scathing letter to DOJ and FBI

Maya BoddieDecember 04, 2024

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) published a scathing letter addressed to to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday, warning them that "real justice" is on the way.

"I’m putting DOJ & FBI on notice: Don’t shred a single document," Hawley wrote via X. "Don’t delete a single file. Accountability is coming. The Judiciary Committee WILL investigate - and find out who authorized spying on Christians, attacks on prolifers, the vendettas against Trump - all of it."

The Missouri The letter begins: "Dear Attorney General Garland and Director Wray: I have received reports that, under your leadership, DOJ and FBI employees are destroying records and other documents in an effort to conceal the widespread misconduct that took place under the Biden Administration. You must immediately stop this attempt to evade accountability, and should terminate any employees involved."

READ MORE: Trump lining up billionaire defense investor and megadonor to be number two at Pentagon

Hawley concluded, "The bottom line is this: you must immediately take all necessary steps to preserve all documents, records, and other materials generated by your agencies during your respective tenures in office. You must cease any bad-faith document destruction. And you should prepare for the real justice to come."

American Enterprise Institute Norman Ornstein commented: "Instigator of violent insurrection who cowardly fled the scene of his crime speaks"

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan replied: As much as I loathe Hawley and his ideology, at least he understands politics and what his role is and how to exercise power. When was the last time you saw Dick Durbin write a letter like this to Republican officials? He rolled over for Justices Roberts, Thomas and Alito.

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NO LNX

alternet-

'I'm advocating Christian nationalism': Josh Hawley's ties to Project 2025 exposed

States attorneys general participate in their meeting with President Donald J. Trump on protecting consumers from social media abuse Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Alexandria JacobsonandRaw Story October 21, 2024

Two staffers for Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) are credited as contributors to the controversial conservative “presidential transition” plan, Project 2025, according to a Raw Story review of the 922-page document.

John Ehrett, chief counsel for Hawley since April 2023, according to LinkedIn and Congressional research website LegiStorm, is cited as a contributor to the plan from conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, that calls for curtailing abortion access, increasing deportations, eliminating government agencies like the Department of Education and banning transgender athletes from sports as part of a plan for a conservative presidency.

The contributor credit states Ehrett’s affiliation with the “Office of Senator Josh Hawley.”

Screen grab from Project 2025 document that says "John Ehrett, Office of Senator Josh Hawley" (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLead...)

Two papers written by Vijay Menon, a legislative assistant for Hawley since March 2022, according to LinkedIn and LegiStorm, are cited in the Project 2025 document as well.

A 2019 paper co-authored by Menon advocates for the repeal of the Community Eligibility Provision in the National School Lunch Program, saying it “converts a federal assistance program meant to help families in need into an entitlement.” More than 71.2 million reimbursable school lunches were served in Missouri during the 2023-2024 school year, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

ALSO READ: How America will change if Trump wins

A 2018 report cited in the document is titled, “Understanding the Hidden $1.1 Trillion Welfare System and How to Reform It.” The Heritage Foundation said it came up with the 2016 figure from "Office of Management and Budget documents and other official government sources.”

Screen grab from Project 2025 document that shows a citation crediting Vijay Menon - highlighted by Raw Story (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLead...)

Ehrett and Menon did not respond to Raw Story’s questions, nor did communications staff for Hawley’s congressional office and campaign.

Another Republican Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told NBC Montana in August that he wasn’t aware that Chris Anderson, a national security adviser for his congressional office since May 2022, was credited as working on Project 2025. The contributor credit states his affiliation with the “Office of Senator Steve Daines.”

“In fact, the first I heard of that, I remember the press mentioned it. Look, there’s individuals here in Capitol Hill that work on lots of projects,” Daines told NBC Montana.

Anderson did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

“I literally have not seen it,” Daines said to NBC Montana about Project 2025. “I spoke to President Trump about it, and he hasn’t seen it. Look, it’s something he’s not supporting.”

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has disavowed Project 2025, but his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), has close ties with the Heritage Foundation and its founder, Forbes reported. According to CNN, more than 140 former Trump administration officials were involved in its creation.

Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is directly quoted in the document saying, “The next conservative president must dismantle the administrative state and return power back to the states and the American people. This publication is a blueprint to do just that.”

Heritage Foundation ties

Hawley and several of his current and former congressional staff members have worked with the Heritage Foundation.

During the Heritage Foundation Leadership Summit in April 2023, Hawley credited the Heritage Foundation with helping “inspire my interest in conservative policy” during a summer internship in 2000. INCUBATOR

Hawley spoke at the Heritage Foundation another time in February of that year for a speech called, “China and Ukraine: A Time for Truth.”

Hawley has been particularly vocal about advocating for Christian nationalism, and such principles are found throughout the Project 2025 document.

“Some will say I’m calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. Some will say I’m advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. My question is: Is there any other kind worth having?” Hawley said at the National Conservatism Conference in July, The New Republic reported.

For example, a Project 2025 chapter on the “Department of Labor and other related agencies” by Jonathan Berry emphasizes Christian principles and “service to God.”

“The Judeo-Christian tradition, stretching back to Genesis, has always recognized fruitful work as integral to human dignity, as service to God, neighbor, and family. And Americans have long been known for their work ethic," the document says. "While it is primarily the culture’s responsibility to affirm the dignity of work, our federal labor and employment agencies have an important role to play by protecting workers, setting boundaries for the healthy functioning of labor markets, and ultimately encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family."

Current Hawley legislative assistant, Menon, was a former research assistant in domestic policy studies for the Heritage Foundation, according to its website. His LinkedIn says he was a graduate fellow and research assistant between June 2017 and March 2019.

Layne Nichols, a legislative correspondent for Hawley since January, completed a congressional fellowship with the Heritage Foundation this year from April to June, according to his LinkedIn. Nichols did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Former Hawley staffers went on to work for the Heritage Foundation, including Alex Velez-Green, who worked with Hawley’s congressional office for at least four years, most recently as a national security adviser. He is now a senior policy adviser with the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation.

Eric Teetsel was Hawley’s chief of staff until September 2022 when he moved on to serve as vice president, government relations for the Heritage Foundation for two years.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

Hawley is running for reelection against Democrat Lucas Kunce. A September survey of voters by Emerson College Polling and The Hill showed Hawley polling with 51 percent of the vote and Kunce with 40 percent.

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One of Josh Hawley’s favorite lines of attack during his first run for U.S. Senate in 2018 was to lambaste his Democratic opponent for using a private jet to travel the state.

“I say, ‘Look, I’m driving everywhere, why don’t you drive?’ She can’t do it,” Hawley told Politico during the 2018 campaign about then-Sen. Claire McCaskill. “She’s totally addicted to her luxury lifestyle.”

Six years later, as Hawley seeks a second term, the attack is being turned back against him.

Lucas Kunce, the Democratic candidate for Senate, is pouncing on videos being circulated by his campaign of Hawley boarding a Gulfstream IV SP to hopscotch the state last week for rallies with Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.

The three-stop tour with Butker, Kunce said, was the senator’s first event in Missouri in weeks.

“Missouri’s flyover country for this guy,” Kunce said at a campaign rally in Jefferson City on Saturday. By contrast, Kunce says he’s traveling to campaign events in a minivan with his wife and 16-month-old son.

It’s a familiar knock on Hawley, who even as he was hammering McCaskill in 2018 over private planes still accepted a $6,000 charter jet flight as an in-kind donation from a Jefferson City lobbyist.

But Hawley’s use of chartered jets began to increase last December, according to his most recent disclosure filed with the Federal Elections Commission in July. Hawley’s campaign spent more than $132,000 on chartered flights between mid-December and June. The largest expenses were $23,000 on March 19 and $21,000 on Feb. 6 to Air Charter Advisors.

The next round of campaign disclosure reports are due this week.

Responding to the criticism, Hawley’s campaign pivoted to its attack on an essay Kunce wrote in 2021 making the case that the U.S. needed to end its reliance on fossil fuels for the sake of national security.

“We get it,” Abigail Jackson, Hawley’s spokeswoman, said in an email to The Independent. “Kunce has made it clear he hates all vehicles that run on gas and diesel.”

Hawley and Kunce are entering the final weeks of a contentious fight for Missouri’s U.S. Senate seat.

Every public poll has shown Hawley in the lead, and national Democrats have largely ignored the race. But Kunce has run a populist campaign fueled by millions of small-dollar donations that have allowed him to go toe-to-toe with Hawley in television ad spending.

Since the August primary, Kunce’s campaign has spent more than $6 million on television advertising, according to FEC records analyzed by The Independent.

Hawley’s campaign has spent $3.9 million, while an independent PAC supporting his re-election, Show Me Strong, has spent roughly $1.9 million.

Kunce, a Marine veteran, paints Hawley as an out-of-touch plutocrat that’s he’s dubbed “Posh Josh” who only is running for Senate to benefit himself and his future political aspirations.

“While I spent 13 years in and out of war zones overseas, Josh Hawley and his political buddies were literally waging war on the people I’d signed up to serve right here at home,” Kunce told a rally of supporters at the Marine Corps League in Jefferson City Saturday. “And that’s not a hyperbole.”

Hawley, who served as Missouri attorney general for two years before joining the Senate, has portrayed Kunce as a radical on issues like immigration and LGBTQ rights. And he’s worked to tie Kunce to national Democrats in a state where Republicans have won every statewide election since 2018.

“We have to save our country,” Hawley told a crowd of supporters in Parkville on Thursday. “We are in crisis. This country is in crisis. It’s in chaos. And you and I know why that’s true. It’s in crisis because of the policies of my opponent, Lucas Kunce.”

Hawley’s campaign has repeatedly demanded Kunce state who he supports in the upcoming presidential election, something he has steadfastly refused to do.

“Now will he answer a simple question on the presidential election?” said Jackson, Hawley’s spokeswoman. “Is he voting for Trump or Kamala?”

Kunce says he won’t answer the question because it’s an effort by Hawley to distract voters and nationalize the race.

And he claims Hawley’s motivation is fear.

“He sees us coming for him,” Kunce said. “He knows he’s unlikable and he knows he is on the wrong side of every single issue.”

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GOP senators Hawley and Cotton call for 'National Guard' deployment against student protestors - Alternet.org

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1 24 rww --> public witness

For the Fourth of July last year, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri wanted to push his version of Christian Nationalism, so he tweeted a quote from Patrick Henry — the U.S. founder famous for declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

“It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Hawley shared with his 1.4 million followers as Henry’s words.

Only problem is Henry never said that.

The quote actually comes from a 1956 article by someone else (since Henry had been dead for over 150 years by that point). In a 1989 book attacking the constitutional idea of church-state separation, evangelical pseudo-historian David Barton, a mentor of Speaker Mike Johnson, apparently read the piece incorrectly and attributed the words to Henry. After numerous scholars pointed out its real origin, Barton retracted that and other false quotes he used to claim U.S. founders wanted a “Christian” nation.

But the zombie quote lives on, frequently used by those pushing Christian Nationalism to justify their ideology and policies. After Hawley tweeted it out, numerous scholars and journalists quickly noted the quote was fake. Unrepentant, Hawley left the fake quote up, refused to apologize or even admit the deception, and instead claimed people were attacking him for pointing out history. He tweeted the next day, “I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding.”

After fist-pumping for Christian Nationalism and running away from the truth, Hawley doubled down on his effort to undo our constitutional system.

Since then he has continued his quest to rewrite history with misleading claims. In October, he penned a piece for Compact magazine arguing conservatives should fight to create a “Christian democracy for America.” Now, he’s gone even further in a nearly 4,400-word essay for First Things, a conservative Christian magazine whose editor in 2016 quickly shifted from “Never Trump” to endorsing Trump and transforming the publication in that direction. Founded by the late Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus, it has become a leading Christian platform for pushing nationalism.

Hawley’s piece, the main article in the February issue (and already published online), notes his vision from the start with its title: “Our Christian Nation.” And while he doesn’t attempt to quote Patrick Henry in the piece, the essay suffers from the same misunderstanding of U.S. history along with misrepresentations of Christianity. It also advances the cause of Christian Nationalism with odd arguments and non sequiturs.

But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise. The bad history and theology are necessary to justify dangerous public policies. The senator who became the congressional face — and fist — of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection wants to get his hands on much more than just our elections.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) gestures toward a crowd of Donald Trump supporters gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to protest the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory on Jan. 6, 2021. (Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico via AP)

Given his prominence as a U.S. senator generally expected to mount a presidential campaign in a future cycle, his essay offers an important — and alarming — look at a vision to remake America into a place that privileges a narrow slice of conservative Christianity. So this issue of A Public Witness considers Hawley’s argument for “our Christian nation” to unpack where he’s wrong and why it matters.

Dissenting Voices

As his essay’s title notes, Hawley argues in the piece that “America has been a Christian nation.” He insists the founders intended that, even though they didn’t mention it in their writings or in the Constitution (where they instead prohibited religious tests for office).

Given the lack of evidence about a desire for a “Christian nation” from important figures like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Hawley instead looks elsewhere to back his claim. So he repeatedly invokes the Puritans, including John Winthrop, a British colonist from before the founding era. Hawley cites Winthrop’s idea of the new land as a “city upon a hill” (from a speech in which Winthrop also offered a theological foundation for the genocide of Native Americans). But Hawley leaves out the other side of the debate in Winthrop’s colony about the role of religion in government....$

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Even Trump is 'well aware' that Josh Hawley is beatable in 2024: Ex-Missouri sec of state - Alternet.org

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house Republicans, who will have a tiny two-vote margin in less than three weeks, are still on their winter break despite two impending budget crises that could lead to government shutdowns as soon as January 19. Speaker Mike Johnson allowed the House to go into recess on December 14, ignoring urging from the White House and the Senate for aid packages for Ukraine and Israel. Members are not expected to return until next week.

But dozens of House Republicans, including Speaker Johnson, are headed to Texas Wednesday, betting their focus on the southern border will help them win the November elections. They’re kicking off the year by trying to do something Congress hasn’t done in almost 150 years: impeach a presidential cabinet secretary.

Republicans have been gunning for the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, since President Joe Biden nominated him three years ago. Born in Havana to Cuban Jewish parents, including a mother whose family fled the Holocaust, Mayorkas is the first Latino, the first immigrant, and the first Cuban American to lead DHS. He was confirmed despite tremendous pushback by Senate Republicans in a 56-43 vote on February 2, 2021, after U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) took the rare step of putting a hold on his nomination.

Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) announced Tuesday the House will begin impeachment proceedings against Secretary Mayorkas next week, Punchbowl News was first to report, calling it “a major escalation in Green’s nearly year-long probe into Mayorkas.”

The last time Congress impeached a cabinet secretary was in 1876, when they impeached President Ulysses S. Grant’s Secretary of War, William Worth Belknap. He was not convicted by the Senate.

“Our investigation made clear that this crisis finds its foundation in Secretary Mayorkas’ decision-making and refusal to enforce the laws passed by Congress, and that his failure to fulfill his oath of office demands accountability,” Green told Punchbowl News in a statement. “The bipartisan House vote in November to refer articles of impeachment to my Committee only served to highlight the importance of our taking up the impeachment process – which is what we will begin doing next Wednesday.”

Punchbowl News reports “the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border has arguably been House Republicans’ biggest rallying cry heading into a critical election year. The issue is widely seen as a huge political problem for Democrats and Biden. The president’s poll numbers on this issue are terrible.”

The White House is pushing back against Republicans’ framing of the issue at the southern border.

“Actions speak louder than words,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement, Politico reports. “House Republicans’ anti-border security record is defined by attempting to cut Customs and Border Protection personnel, opposing President Biden’s record-breaking border security funding, and refusing to take up the President’s supplemental funding request.”

“After voting in 2023 to eliminate over 2,000 Border Patrol agents and erode our capacity to seize fentanyl earlier in 2023, House Republicans left Washington in mid-December even as President Biden and Republicans and Democrats in the Senate remained to forge ahead on a bipartisan agreement,” Bates added.

White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt on social media added, “President Biden has requested $13.6 billion for border enforcement & migration management, increasing the Border Patrol by 1,300, judge teams by 375 and asylum officers by 1600 to expedite the screening process, and critical drug detection technology.”

House Republicans will be at the border Wednesday, “calling for solutions” to the “border crisis,” as Texas CBS affiliate KENS5 reports.

They’re also pushing for the Senate to pass HR2, legislation American Immigration Council policy director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick calls “hardline.”

“Mandates the indefinite detention of toddlers,” “Makes it a federal crime to violate a visa, even unknowingly,” “Empowers DHS to waive every single other law on the books to build, maintain, and operate border infrastructure,” and “Ends 99.9% of asylum,” he says.

Meanwhile, several far-right Republicans got an early start in Texas, meeting up with a Fox News reporter, telling him, “shut the border down, or we’ll shut the government down. We control the money.”

IFrame Content

Wednesday morning Secretary Mayorkas responded to news the House is moving to impeach him.

Watch his remarks below or at this link.

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aha pseudo populism good ol boy? // woke corp BS?

an ah 1123

mAGA Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) has been railing against the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and has been pushing a measure attacking the controversial 2010 decision — which, he argues, conservatives never should have defended. Hawley's measure is a rare example of a pro-Donald Trump Republican attacking a High Court ruling that has drawn more criticism from the left than from the right.

But journalist Jason Linkins, in an article published by the liberal-leaning New Republic on November 4, slams the Missouri Republican's campaign to "overturn Citizens United" is a "complete joke."

"There are many — mainly on the left — who'd like to somehow overturn Citizens United v. FEC, the execrable 2010 decision that unleashed a tidal wave of funny money into our politics and demonstrated that the Supreme Court didn't need to have a 6–3 conservative tilt to cock up the entire country," Linkins argues. "It would be great if we could pass a law and set things right, but here's the rub: Congress can't fix it, sorry!"

Linkins adds, "As MSNBC's Jordan Rubin explained, overturning the decision would require one of two unlikely events: the Supreme Court choosing to reverse itself or the successful enactment of a constitutional amendment…. The fact that Hawley, even with the assent of Congress and the president, literally cannot 'overturn' Citizens United makes this matter done and dusted."

The journalist stresses that despite all of Hawley's "posturing," his Citizens United proposals "would leave unchecked the flood of dark money" in U.S. politics.

"If you're authentically aggrieved by the Citizens United decision," Linkins explains, "this is where the profound misrule lies: Political nonprofits — mainly 501(c)(4)s — can accept unlimited donations and don't have to disclose their donors, even when the nonprofit then sends the money to super PACs, which do have to disclose donors."

:{*:{Read Jason Linkins' full article for The New Republic at this link.}:

'Despicable': DHS secretary decimates GOP Senator Josh Hawley ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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Article: "Defiant Josh Hawley defends THAT fist bump before the Capitol riot and says there's no proof that the group he saluted engaged in 'criminal' behavior" by Nikki Schwab.

Article: "Hawley Introduces Bill to Keep Corporate America's Dollars Out of U.S. Politics" by Josh Hawley.

Article: "Mitch McConnell warns GOP senators they'll face 'incoming' if they back Hawley bill to limit corporate giving in campaigns" by Manu Raju.

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A 'sloppy error': Analyst slams 'theocratic' Josh Hawley for using fake historical quote

Alex HendersonJuly 05, 2023

Ever since the Religious Right achieved prominence in the Republican Party in the early 1980s —much to the dismay of the late conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) — far-right Christian fundamentalists and white evangelicals have been claiming that the United States is a "Christian nation." But there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives Christianity priority over any other religion.

The Constitution's 1st Amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Catholics and Protestants most definitely enjoy religious freedom under the 1st Amendment, but so do Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Bahais, Rastafarians and members of other faiths.

READ MORE: How Pat Robertson helped shape the radical Christian nationalism Barry Goldwater warned against

In a July 4, 2023 post on Twitter, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) promoted the false claim that the U.S. was "founded on" Christianity — and misquoted Founding Father Patrick Henry in the process.

:{:{}:

The far-right MAGA Republican quoted Henry as saying, "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."

But Henry never said that. Twitter users fact-checked Hawley by pointing out that the quote was from a 1956 article about Henry in The Virginian — not something that Henry, who died in 1799, actually said. The article was written 157 years after Henry's death.

MSNBC's Steve Benen, producer of "The Rachel Maddow Show," did some additional fact-checking in an opinion column for MaddowBlog published on July 5

READ MORE: Flag-waving' liberal Norman Lear, now 100, warns against the 'threat of authoritarianism' America faces

"On the surface," Benen argues, "it's obviously unfortunate to see a senator — a graduate of Stanford and Yale — make a mistake like this, especially as so many other Republicans also fall for fake quotes. But let's not brush past the underlying point the Missouri Republican was trying to make by way of a made-up line: Hawley seems certain that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, with members of one faith tradition — his own — enjoying exalted status over others."

Benen emphasizes that the U.S. was not "founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ" as Hawley claims.

"Thomas Jefferson — in an actual quote — wrote in 1802 that our 1st Amendment built 'a wall of separation between church and state,'" Benen notes. "In 1797, John Adams agreed: 'The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.'"

The Religious Right has repeatedly claimed that "separation of church and state" isn't in the U.S. Constitution, but while the 1st Amendment doesn't use those exact words, the concept is mostly definitely present in the "no law respecting an establishment of religion" declaration. And "separation between church and state," as Benen points out, were the exact words of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.

"It's unfortunate that Hawley made a rather obvious mistake," Benen laments, "but more important than the senator’s sloppy error is the fact that a prominent Republican senator thought it’d be a good idea to tout an inherently theocratic vision on the 4th of July."

READ MORE: 'Tell it to God': Evangelical pastor spars with Ted Cruz over Uganda’s 'Kill the Gays' law

Read Steve Benen's full MaddowBlog column at this link.

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you’ve probably never heard of Anthony Comstock, a Civil War Union soldier and New York Postmaster, who died in 1915. You need to learn about him and his legacy, however, as his long fingers are about to reach up out of the grave and wrap themselves around the necks of every American woman of childbearing years.

Anthony Comstock was a mama’s boy who hated sex. His mother died when he was 10 years old and the shock apparently never left him; women who didn’t live up to her ideal were his open and declared enemies, as were pornography, masturbation, and abortion. He was so ignorant of sex and reproduction that he believed a visible human-like fetus developed “within seconds” of sexual intercourse.

Comstock spent decades scouring the country collecting pornography, which he enthusiastically shared with men in Congress, and harassing “loose women.” For example, when he visited a belly-dancing show (then a new craze) in Chicago at the Cairo Theatre during the World’s Fair of 1893, he demanded the show be shut down.

As Amy Sohn, who wrote a brilliant Comstock biography titled The Man Who Hated Women, noted:

Its language with regard to abortion is not at all ambiguous:

“Every description calculated to induce or incite a person to so use or apply any such article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing—

“Is declared to be nonmailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier.” (emphasis mine)

The penalty is also not ambiguous. Persons mailing information about abortion, or drugs or devices to produce an abortion:

The Biden administration argues that the Comstock Act of 1873 was set aside almost a century ago.

“Such a construction,” the court wrote, “would prevent mailing to or by a physician of any drug or mechanical device ‘adapted’ for contraceptive or abortifacient uses, although the physician desired to use or to prescribe it for proper medical purposes.”

The law has been amended by Congress four times (in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994), but the language above was never struck because legislators figured the appeals court’s ruling rendered it nugatory.

But don’t tell that to Trump’s appointee Texas District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Amarillo, who ruled last month that Mifepristone was to be banned nationwide: he based a large part of his decision on the plain language of the Comstock Act.

And don’t tell it to the three rightwing judges hearing an appeal this week of Kacsmaryk’s decision before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

When the Biden administration’s attorney argued that Kacsmaryk’s decision was “unprecedented,”Circuit Judge James Ho — also a Trump appointee, who personally swore his good friend Kacsmaryk into his office — interrupted her with a curt snap, saying:

“I guess I’m just wondering why not just focus on the facts of this case rather than have this sort of ‘FDA can do no wrong’ theme.”

The appeals court, made up of a George W. Bush appointee and two Trump appointees, earlier had ruled in their preliminary finding to hear the case that they disagreed with the Biden administration’s assertion that, to quote the three judges, “the [Comstock] law does not mean what it says it means.”

When the Biden interpretation of the Comstock Act was brought up in oral arguments, the Bush appointee, Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, said there is “some disagreement” about whether previous court rulings actually invalidated the law.

Republican members of Congress agree, and want the Comstock Act enforced nationwide.

In a letter sent to CVS(among other pharmacy chains), Mississippi Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and eight other Republican senators (Lankford, Daines, Braun, Rubio, Marshall, Risch, Crapo and Blackburn) wrote that the Biden interpretation (and that of Congress in 1955, 1958, 1971, and 1994) is wrong.

“We write to express our support and agreement with 21 State Attorneys General,” they wrote “who have reminded you that Federal law in 18 U.S.C. 1461-1462 [the Comstock Act] criminalizes nationwide using the mail, or interstate shipment by any express company or common carrier, to send or receive any drug that is ‘designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.’”

The 1930 court ruling that lawmakers and judges had, for over 90 years, believed only applied the Comstock Act to items that were illegal (like child porn), she wrote:

The lawyer for Republicans defending Kacsmaryk’s ruling before the Fifth Circuit, Erin Hawley (the wife of Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley), went so far as to assert before the court that even physicians and pharmacies shouldn’t be able to receive Mifipristone or other drugs that could produce an abortion via the mail, FedEx, or UPS:

If Hawley’s interpretation is ultimately adopted by the Supreme Court, all abortions in the United States would be ended when drugs and suction and surgical devices designed specifically for the procedure can no longer be shipped to hospitals, clinics, or physicians’ offices.

And this is no idle threat.

Given how all three judges on the Fifth Circuit reacted to this week’s arguments, most court observers believe they’ll vote to sustain Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling and ban Mifipristone nationwide, perhaps even outlawing its legal shipment to pharmacies for other uses like helping with incomplete miscarriages.

Other drugs and surgical devices used for abortions are almost certainly next.

“If a future president were to enforce these federal statutes, then they could shut down every abortion facility in America.”

Such a ruling by the Fifth Circuit will kick the whole mess up to the Supreme Court, where six hardcore rightwing Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church but was raised Catholic) are gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation.

This battle promises to be long and hard-fought, and if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the Fifth Circuit’s anticipated decision the only solution will be for Congress to overturn the Comstock Act itself.

And that’s unlikely to happen unless or until Democrats can take back the House, hold the White House, and gain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in the 2024 election. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Several states are now stockpiling Mifipristone in anticipation of just such a dystopian outcome. Families with women and girls of childbearing age may want to do the same.

Forewarned is forearmed.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

President Joe Biden should 'forcefully resist' TX judge’s 'medically unsound' abortion pill ruling: columnist ›

Texas judge overseeing abortion pill case filed by Josh Hawley's wife donated to his Senate campaign: report ›

The abortion pill, abortion bans and Republican policies that kill ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

If mifepristone gets banned, medical abortion works with misoprostol ... ›

How the 'abortion pill' works, according to an expert | CNN ›

Beyond the 'abortion pill': Real stories about mifepristone : Shots ... ›

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an 5 23

sen. Josh Hawley's new book, "Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs," did nothing to impress one book reviewer who dismissed his arguments about the state of manhood in America with a dismissive, "Whatever."

In a review for the Guardian, Lloyd Green noted that the controversial Missouri Republican -- most famous for his clenched-fist tribute to the Jan 6 insurrectionists -- went out of his way to cherry-pick the philosophers he needed to make his point and the end result shows that he can best be described as "a neo-Confederate at war with modernity."

As the reviewer notes, Hawley selectively picked his targets and studiously avoided mentioning the toxicity of Donald Trump whose re-election he supports, with Green writing, "Hawley is a plutocrat-populist as well as a hectoring moralist," before adding, "For all his smut-bashing, the latest developments affecting Trump have left him profoundly unmoved."

"He has nothing to say about Trump: the man who said, and has defended saying, 'When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p*ssy. You can do anything,'" Green elaborated. "Hawley blames 'Epicurean liberals' for the failures of American men. 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity' is liberalism’s credo, he claims. Maybe yes, maybe no. Whatever."

"Hawley is also selective – surprise – about his philosophers. He is critical of Rousseau and Marx but delivers a bouquet to Burke. For what it’s worth, Burke cared about British plunder of India. These days, Hawley is at best agnostic about Ukraine." Green continued. "He ignores Bentham and Mill, the intellectual fathers of 19th-century English liberalism and utilitarianism. It is as if – surprise! – Hawley wishes time and progress would stop."

Green went on to note that, after Jan 6, Hawley's book was dropped by his publisher he found a new home, with the reviewer adding, "Hawley got himself published anyway, by Regnery, a conservative imprint. He’s doing fine. He seems to believe, however, that he possesses a God-given right to be heard."

You can read more here.

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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/josh-hawley-outlawing-woke-speech/

$? 3 23 edit bd

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2x?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/george-will-infant-josh-hawley

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https://www.alternet.org/josh-hawley-gop/

:{Hawley flattened in brutal profanity-laced column for berating St. Louis reporter:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

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an kos 2 23

The GOP continues to sling whatever trash they’ve got at President Joe Biden in the wake of his historic trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and his total dunking on them about the debt ceiling, Social Security, and Medicare. They’re taking their talking points from Tucker Carlson, keeping up the narrative Biden is responsible for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because he hates white people.

Here’s the repugnant Sen. Josh Hawley doubling down on that, and throwing in some antisemitism for the heck of it: “My message to congressional Republican: you can either be the party of Ukraine & globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of American.”

[twt w tukr]

Let’s talk about the working Americans of East Palestine, Ohio, and who is really helping them. The population of the town is 4,761 as of the 2020 census. It’s in Columbiana County, population 101,877 in 2020. In 2021, the last year statistics are available from, there were 32,077 people in the county who were enrolled in Medicaid, the joint federal/state funded health insurance program for low-income individuals and families.

So, yeah, that’s about a third of the population of the county—the smallest geographical area for which Medicaid data is available. Ohio as a whole saw a nearly 28% hike in Medicaid and CHIP enrollments during the pandemic. (CHIP is the program for children’s health.)

More than 7,500 households in Columbiana County were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or food stamps, in November 2022. That’s 14,407 people, including 5,421 children.

This is not a prosperous place. The median household income for the county was $49,265 in 2021, the latest figures available. That’s $12,997 lower than the median Ohio household income and $20,452 less than the U.S. median household income. The minimum wage in Ohio is $10.10/hour, $5.05 for tipped employees.

At the same time, though, the unemployment rate for the county is just 4.3%, all of which means that there are a lot of working people in this place who are living in or very nearly in poverty. And yes, you hardly need to ask: Those people voted for Trump in 2020, 72% to 27% for Biden. They’re probably now lining up in diners all through the county to be interviewed by New York Times reporters.

These are the very programs the GOP always wants to destroy, the programs that truly help working people. Medicaid, food assistance—they’re all on the chopping block as far as the GOP is concerned, and always have been.

This isn’t about Ukraine, and it sure as hell isn’t about the working people of East Palestine, Ohio—where were any of them when Trump was deregulating the rails and making this kind of disaster almost inevitable? Oh, that’s right, supporting an insurrection against the government.

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an ah 1 23

Friday, January 6, 2023 marks the second anniversary of what historian Michael Beschloss has described as one of the darkest days in United States history: the January 6, 2021 insurrection. That day, a violent mob of MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing the certification of now-President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

As violent as that attack was, Beschloss has emphasized that it could have been much worse and escalated into “assassinations and/or hostage-taking” if the insurrectionists had been able to get to either members of Congress or then-Vice President Mike Pence. Some of the insurrectionists were calling for Pence’s murder that day, chanting, “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.” And a hangman’s gallows was set up outside the Capitol.

Two years ago, Corporate America was quick to condemn the Capitol insurrection. But in an in-depth report published by Mother Jones on January 5, journalist Tim Murphy laments that some companies have since made campaign contributions to “Stop the Steal” Republicans who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

“Two years after President Donald Trump incited a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol and halt the certification of the Electoral College results, the January 6 insurrection is still a live wire in American politics,” Murphy explains. “Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy last month for his role in the riot. Advocates of Trump’s election lies received such an intense electoral rebuke in the midterm election that Democrats actually expanded their majority in the Senate…. But many of America’s largest companies have long since moved on.”

Murphy adds, “In the first national election since a sitting president tried to overturn the popular will, some of the country’s biggest brands showered election deniers with millions of dollars in donations via their political action committees.”

The Mother Jones reporter goes on to cite specific examples of companies that condemned “Stop the Steal” Republicans and election denialists two years ago but have since given them donations.

“In the days after the insurrection,” Murphy recalls, “dozens of companies told Popular Information and other outlets that they were pausing or reconsidering their political donations. Hallmark, which had donated to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in the past, singled him out by name in its statement condemning the attack. Big-pocketed corporations such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Comcast, PricewaterhouseCoopers and AT&T promised to suspend all contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results either temporarily or for the entire 2022 cycle.”

Murphy continues, “But not only did each of those six companies eventually turn the spigot back on, they all ended up writing checks to help reelectRep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) —a leading opponent of certification whose own chief of staff attempted to distribute a fake slate of electors on the day of the insurrection, according to the January 6 Committee. Kelly, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee from a heavily Republican district, was a major recipient of corporate cash. Other contributors included PACs belonging toIntel and Verizon, both of which had told Popular Information they were suspending donations to the election-rejecters; Aflac, which had said it would be pausing all its political donations for an unspecified amount of time;Johnson & Johnson; FedEx; and the spirits-producing Sazerac Company.”

The Mother Jones reporter points out that during the “2022 cycle,” Anheuser-Busch “gave $139,500 to election-denying members of Congress” in addition to giving a “maximum contribution” to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

“Among the dozens of recipients: Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), who tweeted that the election was ‘RIGGED’ for Biden in the run-up to January 6 and afterwards shared misinformation alleging that ‘Antifa thugs’ were responsible for the riot,” Murphy reports. “Airlines were major supporters of Stop the Steal candidates. Delta Airlines gave $225,000 to election-denying members of Congress, according to ProPublica‘s searchable database. Southwest Airlines’ ‘Freedom Fund’ gave $39,500 to election-rejecting candidates, including Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), who tweeted on January 3, 2021 that he’d just met ‘with folks from Stop the Steal’ at our nation’s Capitol’ and ‘encouraged them to keep fighting.’”

Murphy adds, “American Airlines, which told Popular Information that it was pausing all political contributions for three months, eventually funneled $165,000 to dozens of Republicans who voted not to certify the election results, including Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who asked Trump for a pardon after helping to organize congressional opposition to certification.”

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11 22 kirk claims him

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/why-j-d-vance-and-blake-masters-are-crucial-to-josh-hawleys-2023-strategy-report/

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https://scorecard.lcv.org/moc/joshua-hawley

see media bias section 230

i forgot CFG hit ads took out claire mckaskell

raga farm team? pow

leader on sedition caucus w/ cruz, both go for trump 2.0 fist salute

html seismic

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dobbs amicus with cruz and

jOSH HAWLEY U.S. SENATOR Counsel of Record MICHAEL K. VELCHIK JOHN S. EHRETT 115 Russell Senate Office Bldg. Washington, D.C. 20510 (202) 224-6154 Ellen_James@hawley.senate.gov

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/missouri-ags-office-fined-12000-for-sunshine-law-violation-under-josh-hawley/

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2x? an march?

United States Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) on Wednesday defended Ginni Thomas' newly-uncovered text message exchanges with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows regarding the January 6th, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Hawley, who infamously expressed solidarity with then-President Donald Trump's violent mob, was one of two Senators to formally object to the congressional certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory in the 2020 election. The other was twice-failed Republican presidential primary candidate Ted Cruz of Texas.

The correspondence between Meadows and Thomas – a long-time right-wing activist whose husband Clarence is an associate Supreme Court justice – revealed that they were both intimately involved with the Trump-led coup to destroy American democracy.

This morning, Hawley said during an appearance on Fox News that any criticism of Thomas and her communications with Meadows amount to "misogyny" and that Democrats are exploiting Thomas' marriage to "rig" the Supreme Court.

"And here's the bottom line. This is ridiculous, these attacks on Justice Thomas. And the idea that Ginni Thomas' wife is supposed to sign off on her texts and her work with her husband as if he's in charge of her in some way — isn't that misogyny? Isn't that what the Democrats are always saying that they're against?" Hawley mused. "But the truth is is that they will take any avenue they can to try and smear Justice Thomas and Republicans have got to stand up against it and say, 'we're not gonna let you smear and rig the Supreme Court,' which is what they're trying to do."

Watch below via The Recount:

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8 22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Hawley

joshua David Hawley (born December 31, 1979) is an American politician and lawyer who has served as the junior United States senator from Missouri since 2019. A member of the Republican Party, Hawley served as the 42nd attorney general of Missouri from 2017 to 2019, before defeating two-term incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in the 2018 election.

Born in Springdale, Arkansas, to a banker and a teacher, Hawley graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006. He was a law clerk to Tenth Circuit Judge Michael W. McConnell and Chief Justice John Roberts and then worked as a lawyer, first in private practice from 2008 to 2011 and then for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty from 2011 to 2015. Before becoming Missouri attorney general, he was also a post-graduate intern at St Paul's School in London, an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, and a faculty member of the conservativeBlackstone Legal Fellowship.

As Missouri attorney general, Hawley initiated several high-profile lawsuits and investigations, including a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, an investigation into Missouri governor Eric Greitens, and a lawsuit and investigation into companies associated with the opioid epidemic. In the Senate, Hawley became widely known for his criticism of Big Tech, as well as for his criticism of the Chinese government and his support for an independent Hong Kong. His political beliefs have been described as strongly socially conservative.^[3] Critics have characterized his ideology as reactionary and theocratic.^[4][5][6]

In December 2020, Hawley provoked a political backlash when he became the first senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 United States presidential election. Hawley led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count^{[7][8][9][10][11]} and rallied supporters of the notion that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, which subsequently motivated the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.^{[12][13][14][15][16]} In late January 2021, Hawley denied trying to overturn the election results.^[17][18]

Early life and education

Joshua David Hawley was born on December 31, 1979,^[19] in Springdale, Arkansas, to banker Ronald Hawley and teacher Virginia Hawley. In 1981, the Hawleys moved to Lexington, Missouri, after Ronald joined a division of Boatmen's Bancshares there.^{[20][21][22][23][24]}

Hawley attended Lexington Middle School and then Rockhurst High School, a private Jesuit boys' prep schoolin Kansas City, Missouri, from which he graduated in 1998 as a valedictorian.^[25] According to his middle school principal, Barbara Weibling, several of Hawley's teachers thought "he was probably going to be president one day."^[25]

While in high school, Hawley regularly wrote columns for his hometown newspaper The Lexington News, writing about such topics as the American militia movement following the Oklahoma City bombing, media coverage of Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman, and affirmative action, which he opposed.^[25] He then studied history at Stanford University, where his mother was an alumna.^[24] Hawley graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa membership.^[24][26] Hawley studied under professor David M. Kennedy, who later contributed the foreword to a book Hawley wrote,Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.^[27] Kennedy said Hawley stood out in a school "which is overstuffed with overachieving and very talented young people,"^[25] and has described Hawley as "arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years."^[24]

After spending ten months in London as a post graduate intern at St Paul's School from 2002 to 2003,^[21][28] Hawley returned to the U.S. to attend Yale Law School, graduating in 2006 with a Juris Doctor degree.^[23][24][27] The Kansas City Star reported that Hawley's classmates saw him as "politically ambitious and a deeply religious conservative."^[25] While at Yale, Hawley was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and served as president of the school's Federalist Society chapter.^[27]

Early career

Hawley spent two years as a law clerk after law school, clerking first for Judge Michael W. McConnell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2006 to 2007, then for Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2007 to 2008.^[21] While at the Supreme Court, Hawley met his future wife, Erin Morrow, a fellow Yale Law graduate who was also clerking for Roberts.^[27][29][30]

After his clerkships, Hawley worked in private practice as an appellate litigator at the law firm Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) from 2008 to 2011.^[21] From 2011 to 2015, he worked for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty at its Washington, D.C., offices before moving to Missouri.^[31] At Becket, he wrote briefs and gave legal advice in the Supreme Court cases Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, decided in 2012, and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, decided in 2014.^[32][33] In 2011, Hawley returned to Missouri and became an associate professor at the University of Missouri Law School, where he taughtconstitutional law, constitutional theory, legislation, and torts.^[21][34]

In June 2013, Hawley served as a faculty member of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which is funded by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian organization that has been d**esignated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).^[35][36]

Attorney General of Missouri (2017–2019)

2016 election

Main article: 2016 Missouri Attorney General election

In 2016, Hawley ran for Attorney General of Missouri. Of the $9.2 million raised for the campaign, $4.4 million was provided by David Humphreys, CEO of Joplin-based Tamko Building Products.^[37] On August 2, Hawley defeated Kurt Schaefer in the Republican primary with 64 percent of the vote.^[38] He defeated Democrat Teresa Hensley in the general election on November 8 with 58.5 percent of the vote.^[38] During the campaign, Hawley criticized "career politicians" who were "climbing the ladder" from one position to another, which later became a point of bipartisan criticism of him when he ran for the U.S. Senate two years later.^[39]

Death of Tory Sanders

On May 5, 2017, Tory Sanders, a black motorist who had taken a wrong turn in Tennessee ran out of gas in rural Mississippi County, Missouri. He had gotten lost and was confused and asked a gas station attendant to call the police for assistance. Deputies responded and put him in the county jail. His mental condition had deteriorated further and he resisted when jail staff, under the command of Sheriff Cory Hutcheson, tried to release him as they had no grounds on which to hold him. Hutcheson, who himself faced and later was convicted of a variety of federal and state charges, led a team of police and jailers who repeatedly pepper-sprayed and tasered Sanders throughout the day. Hutcheson eventually led a team of cops and jailers into the cell and swarmed Sanders, who went into cardiac arrest and died. The cause of death was judged to be "excited delirium", a condition frequently cited in custody-related deaths but not recognized by major psychiatric authorities.^[40][41]

Hawley determined that those who had assaulted Sanders had not intended his death, and decided not to file murder charges. When the case was reviewed by Hawley's successor, Eric Schmitt, insufficient evidence caused him to reject first or second-degree murder charges, but the statute of limitations had expired for any lesser offenses, so no one could be held criminally accountable for Sanders's death.^[40][41] Hawley's handling of the case led to criticism from black lawmakers and the NAACP's Missouri chapter.^[42] Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, there was renewed interest in the case, with activists hoping that Schmitt would file charges.^[42] In February 2021, he chose not to do so.^[43]

Opioid manufacturer lawsuit and investigation

In June 2017, Hawley announced that Missouri had filed suit in state court against three major drug companies, Endo Health Solutions, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Purdue Pharma, for allegedly hiding the danger of prescription painkillers and contributing to the opioid epidemic. The state argued that the companies violated Missouri consumer protection and Medicaid laws.^[44][45] The damages sought were among the largest in state history, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.^[44]

In August 2017, Hawley announced that he had opened an investigation into seven opioid distributors (Allergan, Depomed, Insys, Mallinckrodt, Mylan, Pfizer, and Teva Pharmaceuticals).^[46] In October 2017, Hawley expanded his investigation into three additional pharmaceutical companies (AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson Corporation), the three largest U.S. opioid distributors.^[47]

Rape kit audit

On October 29, 2017, the Columbia Missourian published an exposé describing a large backlog of untested rape kits in Missouri and the long-ignored efforts of rape survivors and law enforcement agencies to have the state address the backlog.^[48] On November 29, Hawley announced a statewide audit of the number of untested rape kits.^[49] The results were made public in May 2018; there were 5,000 such kits.^[49] In August 2018, One Nation, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit connected to Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove, ran commercials giving Hawley credit for identifying the problem, a claim The St. Louis Post-Dispatch labeled misleading.^[48] In September 2020, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced that of the 16 rape kit tests that were consequently uploaded to the national DNA database, 11 revealed the names of known criminals, and were referred for possible prosecution.^[50]

Investigations into tech companies

In November 2017, Hawley opened an investigation into whether Google's business practices violated state consumer protection and anti-trust laws. The investigation was focused on what data Google collects from users of its services, how it uses content providers' content, and whether its search engine results are biased.^[51][52]

In April 2018, after the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Hawley announced that his office had issued a subpoena to Facebook related to how the company shares its users' data. The investigation sought to find whether Facebook properly handles its users' sensitive data or collects more data than it publicly admits.^[53]

Greitens scandals

Main article: Eric Greitens § Affair and invasion of privacy charge

In December 2017, The Kansas City Star reported that Missouri's Republican Governor Eric Greitens and senior members of his staff used Confide, a messaging app that erases texts after they have been read, on their personal phones. They were accused by government transparency advocates of subverting Missouri's open records laws.^[54] Hawley initially declined to prosecute, citing a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the attorney general cannot simultaneously represent a state officer and take legal action against that officer, but on December 20, 2017, he announced his office would investigate after all, saying that his clients are "first and foremost the citizens of the state".^[55][56][57] Hawley said text messages between government employees, whether made on private or government-issued phones, should be treated the same as emails: a determination must be made as to whether the text is a public record, and if so, whether it is subject to disclosure.^[55] Hawley's investigation found that no laws had been broken.^[58] In March 2018, six former Missouri attorneys released a letter describing the investigation as "half-hearted". Hawley's spokesperson called the letter a partisan attack.^[58]

When allegations emerged in January 2018 that Greitens had blackmailed a woman with whom he was having an affair, Hawley's office said it did not have jurisdiction to look into the matter. St. Louis circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner opened an investigation into the allegations.^[59][60] In April, after a special investigative committee of the Missouri House of Representatives released a report on the allegations, Hawley called on Greitens to resign immediately.^[61] The next week, Gardner filed a second felony charge against Greitens, alleging that his campaign had taken donor and email lists from The Mission Continues, a veterans' charity Greitens founded in 2007, and used the information to raise funds for his 2016 campaign for governor.^[62]

Hawley announced an investigation based on the new felony charges.^[63][64] On April 30, he announced that his office had launched an investigation into possible violations of the state's Sunshine laws, following allegations that a state employee had managed a social media account on Greitens's behalf.^[65] The same day, Greitens asked a judge to issue a restraining order blocking Hawley from investigating him.^[66]

On May 29, 2018, Greitens announced that he would resign effective June 1, 2018. Hawley issued a statement approving of the decision.^[67]

Affordable Care Act lawsuit

Main article: California v. Texas

In February 2018, Hawley joined 20 other Republican-led states in a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.^[68] Though some argued the lawsuit would eliminate insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions, Hawley said he supported protections for preexisting conditions.^[69] In September 2018, amid criticism from Hawley's U.S. Senate opponent Claire McCaskill about the lawsuit's impact on preexisting conditions, Hawley's office said that he supported protections for individuals with preexisting conditions.^[69] Hawley later published an op-ed in the Springfield News-Leader explaining that he supported protecting those with preexisting conditions by creating a taxpayer subsidy to reimburse insurance companies for covering these high-cost patients.^[70] In December 2018, Judge Reed O'Connor ruled the entirety of the ACA unconstitutional, but on appeal, the Fifth Circuit did not agree that the entire law should be voided.^[71][72][73]

Sentencing of Bobby Bostic

Main article: Bobby Bostic

In March 2018, Hawley defended the 1995 sentencing of Bobby Bostic, a Missouri man who had committed robbery and other crimes at the age of 16, to 241 years in prison. Bostic and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had attempted to appeal his sentence to the Supreme Court, saying it violated the court's ruling in Graham v. Florida, which held that juveniles could not be sentenced to life imprisonment for charges lesser than homicide.^[74] In a Supreme Court filing, Hawley argued that Bostic's sentencing did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and that Graham v. Florida only applied to a sentence for one crime.^[75] The judge who sentenced Bostic said she had come to believe the sentence was too harsh, and asked to join an amicus brief filed by 26 former judges, prosecutors and law enforcement officials.^[74][75] On April 24, the Supreme Court rejected Bostic's appeal.^[74]

Catholic clergy investigation

Main article: Grand jury investigation of Catholic Church sexual abuse in Pennsylvania

In August 2018, after a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report detailing over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics, as well as protests by survivors of clergy sexual abuse in St. Louis, Hawley announced that he would begin an investigation into potential cases of abuse in Missouri.^[76] Missouri was one of several states to launch such investigations in the wake of the Pennsylvania report; the attorneys general of Illinois, Nebraska, and New Mexico began similar inquiries.^[77] Hawley promised that he would investigate any crimes, publish a report for the public, and refer potential cases to local law enforcement officials. Archbishop of St. Louis Robert James Carlson pledged cooperation with the inquiry.^[76][78]

The investigation, which was inherited by Hawley's successor, Eric Schmitt, charged 12 former priests with sexual abuse of minors in September 2019.^[79]

U.S. Senate

Elections

2018

Main article: 2018 United States Senate election in Missouri

In August 2017, Hawley formed an exploratory campaign committee for the U.S. Senate.^[80][81] In October 2017, he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination in Missouri's 2018 U.S. Senate election for the seat held by Democrat Claire McCaskill.^[82][83] Before the official announcement, four former Republican U.S. Senators from Missouri (John Ashcroft, Kit Bond, John Danforth, and McCaskill's predecessor, Jim Talent) asked Hawley to run for the Senate seat.^[84]

The tightly contested Republican primary had 11 candidates hoping to unseat McCaskill. Hawley received substantial support from prominent Republicans, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, President Donald Trump, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.^[85] He won a large majority of the vote in the primary election.

Trump endorsed Hawley in November 2017.^[86] During the general election campaign, Obamacare was a key issue, with both candidates pledging to ensure protections for preexisting conditions.^[87][88][89] McCaskill criticized Hawley's participation in a lawsuit that could end insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions by overturning the Affordable Care Act.^[69] Hawley made McCaskill's upcoming vote on the confirmation of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State a campaign issue.^[90] His campaign spokesperson asked, "Will Senator McCaskill ignore her liberal donors and support Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State, or will she stick with Chuck Schumer and continue to obstruct the president?", adding, "It is deeply troubling how focused Senator McCaskill is on doing what's politically convenient instead of doing what's right."^[90]

Hawley met criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for initiating his Senate campaign less than a year after being sworn in as attorney general, as during his attorney general campaign, Hawley had put out advertisements criticizing "ladder-climbing politicians." Hawley dismissed this, saying that the Senate was not on his mind during the attorney general campaign.^[27]

During the campaign, Hawley released his and his wife's tax returns and called on McCaskill to release her and her husband's returns. McCaskill released her returns, which she files separately from her husband. When asked if he thought Trump should release his returns, Hawley did not say.^[91]

In the November 2018 general election, Hawley defeated McCaskill, 51 percent to 46 percent.^[92]

On December 6, 2018, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft launched an inquiry into whether Hawley misappropriated public funds for his Senate campaign. Hawley's office denied any wrongdoing.^[93] On February 28, 2019, Ashcroft closed the investigation because there was insufficient evidence that "an offense has been committed."^[94] A 2021 New York Post investigation of questionable campaign expenditures revealed that Hawley had apparently illegally spent such funds, for instance charging $80.04 at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville to "travel", on a lobbyist-funded junket to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Almost a year later Hawley's office said he had reimbursed the campaign for the inappropriate expenditures.^[95]

Tenure

Hawley was sworn in as a U.S. Senator on January 3, 2019.^[96]

In June 2019, Hawley played a major role in preventing Trump nominee Michael S. Bogren from being appointed as a district judge for the Western District of Michigan. Hawley accused Bogren of "anti-religious animus" in a case he took as a lawyer, in which Bogren compared Catholic views on homosexuality to the Ku Klux Klan's views on interracial marriage.^[97][98][99]

During the Hong Kong protests in October 2019, Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz visited Hong Kong and spoke in favor of the protests.^[100] Hawley called the city a "police state".^[100] Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam said Hawley's assertion was "irresponsible and unfounded".^[100]

On November 18, 2019, Hawley announced the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act,^[101] which would make it illegal for American companies to store user data or encryption keys in China. Engadget noted the bill might cause "serious problems" for companies that are legally obligated to store data in China, such as Apple and TikTok, and "might force them to leave China altogether". It was not Hawley's first technology-related bill; he had also introduced proposals to ban loot boxes in gaming and to restrict social network features "deemed addictive", among others.^[102] Hawley focused on TikTok, saying the bill would cover Russia as well as China, and "any other country the State Department deems a security risk".^[103] He said the bill was "targeted at social media platforms and data-intensive businesses", and "would block such mergers by default without pre-approval from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States".^[104] The bill also prevents the collection of "more user data than is necessary to conduct business".^[105]

Hawley joined President Donald Trump in his calls for an increase of the initial $600 coronavirus relief checks provided by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 to $2,000, which put him on the same side as "unlikely ally" Bernie Sanders.^[106] Alongside Sanders and Chuck Schumer, Hawley attempted to force a vote to increase the checks, but it was blocked by other Republican senators.^[107]

On February 8, 2021, after he voted against the nomination of Denis McDonough for Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Hawley became the only senator to vote against all of President Joe Biden's cabinet nominees,^[108] with the exception of Cecilia Rouse, whom he voted to confirm as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.^[109]

Ten months into Biden's term, Hawley had voted to approve only 4 of 118 executive appointments that received a Senate vote, and none in the preceding 5 months. This record made him a standout among senators. Political scientist Wendy Schiller compared Hawley to "senators who have basically made it their career to stop the Senate in its tracks." She noted that Hawley differed from his predecessors in that his obstruction had no clear policy goal, but was more about punishing the Biden administration.^[110]

On August 3, 2022, Hawley cast the sole vote against the Senate resolution agreeing to Sweden joining the NATO defense alliance; it passed, 95–1.^[111] On the same day, he also voted against a similar Senate resolution agreeing to Finland joining NATO; that resolution also passed 95–1.^[112] Before and after the votes, Hawley said the resolutions were not in America's best interest, with China posing a greater threat than Russia.^[113][114] According to Politico:^[115]

Hawley has worked for months to distinguish himself from the Republican pack on national security, beginning with his blockade of Pentagon nominees in protest of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and his opposition to a $40 billion Ukraine aid package.

Attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results

Further information: Attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election § Senate efforts

After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Hawley announced his intention to object to the Senate's certification of the Electoral College vote count on January 6, 2021.^[7] He was the first senator to do so.^[8] Trump had refused to concede and made frequent baseless claims of fraud in the election. Hawley said that his attempt to reverse the election result was on behalf of those "concerned about election integrity."^[7][116] He made numerous statements suggesting that Trump could possibly remain in office.^[14] The New York Times wrote that Hawley was elevating false claims that President-elect Joe Biden stole the election.^[7] His maneuver prompted bipartisan condemnation of his action as undemocratic.^[117][118]

On December 30, 2020, Hawley said, "some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws", though multiple courts had rejected such claims.^[13][15] He repeated the false assertion about Pennsylvania in a February 2021 fundraising email, though the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had unanimously rejected the argument and the United States Supreme Court had declined to consider an appeal.^[119][120]

On December 30, 2020, after Hawley tweeted he would join the effort to object to Biden's victory, Walmart's official Twitter account responded, "Go ahead. Get your 2 hour debate. #soreloser."^[121] Hawley responded, accusing Walmart of using "slave labor" and "driv[ing] mom and pop stores out of business".^[121] Walmart deleted the tweet, apologizing to Hawley and saying it was "mistakenly posted by a member of our social media team."^[121] The event led the hashtag #BoycottWalmart to trend on Twitter.^[121]

On January 4, 2021, Hawley tweeted that his Washington, D.C. home had been vandalized and his family had been threatened by "Antifa scumbags" in an act of "leftwing violence" due to his claims of fraud.^[122] He said he was in Missouri at the time.^[122] ShutDownDC, the group that staged the event, said it was a peaceful candlelight vigil and claimed they did not vandalize Hawley's house or knock on the door.^[122] A video of the event shared by the group showed that some protesters wrote on the sidewalk in chalk, chanted through a megaphone, and left a copy of the U.S. Constitution at Hawley's door.^[122] Vienna, Virginia police said the protesters were peaceful with "no issues, no arrests" necessary; police spokesman Juan Vazquez said the police "didn't think it was that big of a deal."^[1]

Storming of the U.S. Capitol and public reaction

Main article: 2021 storming of the United States Capitol

Hawley gives a raised fist salute to pro-Trump protesters outside of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some of these protesters stormed the Capitol building about an hour later.^[123]

Captured still from a video of Hawley later running from a mob on January 6, shown during the Select Committee meeting of July 21, 2022, and within many Internet memes

On January 6, 2021, when Congress met to...count the electoral votes for the 2020 presidential election, they were interrupted by pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building, forcing members of Congress to evacuate. Before the counting of the votes, to which Hawley had publicly announced he would object, he was photographed saluting the protestors with a raised fist outside the Capitol.^[124][125] The photograph immediately became a subject of controversy; The Kansas City Star called it "the image that will haunt Josh Hawley" and "one of the iconic images to emerge from the day the Capitol was breached by rioters"^[123] and Pulitzer Prize-winning St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger said "the staging was perfect" and recommended the photograph be known as Hawley: The Face of Sedition.^[126] Tom Coleman, a former U.S. representative from Missouri and a fellow Republican, said Hawley's "clenched fist in front of the Capitol will seal his fate."^[123] The photographer, Francis Chung, declined to weigh in on the photograph's political impact, saying it "is what it is" and "kind of speaks for itself."^[123] Later that day, video showed Hawley running through the Capitol, fleeing the rioters.^[127]

That same day, The Kansas City Star's editorial board published an editorial arguing that Hawley "has blood on his hands" due to the event,which they called a "coup attempt",^{[128][129][130]} saying that "no one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible" than Hawley, "who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway".^[128] The next day, it published an editorial calling for Hawley to resign or be removed from office.^[131] Similarly, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri's other major newspaper, published an editorial on January 7 calling for Hawley to resign and Republican "silent enablers" to denounce Trumpism, writing that "Hawley's tardy, cover-his-ass condemnation of the violence ranks at the top of his substantial list of phony, smarmy and politically expedient declarations" and "Trumpism must die before it morphs into Hitlerism. Defenders like Hawley deserve to be cast into political purgatory for having promoted it".^[132]

Political scientists Henry Farrell and Elizabeth N. Saunders called Hawley's ploy a "cynical theatrical gesture" with Hawley "pursuing short-term political gain at the risk of long-term chaos."^[133] John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and Hawley's political mentor,^[134] said that supporting Hawley was the "worst mistake I ever made in my life".^[135] Danforth said Hawley was directly responsible for the riot.^[136] David M. Kennedy, who served as Hawley's academic adviser at Stanford, said he "absolutely could not have predicted that the bright, idealistic, clear-thinking young student that I knew would follow this path"^[24] and was "more than a little bamboozled by it, certainly distressed by it", though he said he did not believe Hawley directly incited the mob.^[25]

Prominent conservative columnist George Will wrote on the day of the riot that Hawley, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz "will each wear the scarlet S of a seditionist."^[137] On January 9, NBC News reported that several Republican Party insiders anonymously condemned Hawley's actions, with one strategist saying of the fist salute that Hawley "looked phony and out of place and like a doofus" in a manner reminiscent of Michael Dukakis's tank photograph.^[138] After the riot, Hawley's approval rating dropped by six percentage points among Missouri voters, and nine among Missouri Republicans.^[139]

AFGE members protest against Hawley on January 12

In the wake of the riot, other Republican lawmakers tried to persuade Hawley to abandon his objections to Biden's win,^[140] but he voted in support of the objections to the electoral votes for Arizona and Pennsylvania, making baseless claims that Pennsylvania election officials violated state election laws.^[141] Both senators from Pennsylvania rejected his objections, and the Senate rejected his objections by votes of 6–93 and 7–92, respectively.^[142] Some political commentators and Democratic lawmakers dubbed Hawley and other senators who sought to overturn the election the Sedition Caucus.^[143] Hawley has since faced bipartisan calls for his resignation,^{[128][137][144][145]} to which he has responded that he "will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections."^[146] Thousands of law school students and alumni, including at Hawley's alma mater Yale Law School, also called for Hawley and Cruz to be disbarred.^[147] On January 9, hundreds of protesters assembled in Downtown St. Louis in front of the Old Courthouse to demand Hawley's resignation.^[148][149]

Several political donors and companies associated with Hawley have cut off financial ties. David Humphreys, who with his mother and sister donated more than $6 million to Hawley's campaigns, called for him to be censured, having "revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold."^[37] On January 7, Simon & Schuster canceled its planned publication of Hawley's book The Tyranny of Big Tech, saying it "cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat";^[150] the book was later picked up by Regnery Publishing, which frequently publishes books by conservative authors.^[151]

On January 11, several companies, including Airbnb, American Express, AT&T, Best Buy, Dow Inc., and Mastercard, announced they would end fundraising for all Republicans who objected to Biden's victory, including Hawley;Hallmark Cards, based in Kansas City, said it had asked Hawley and Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas to return all contributions.^[152] Conversely, the Senate Conservatives Fund, a conservative political action committee, began raising money for Hawley and aggressively supporting him following the riot, raising $700,000 and spending nearly $400,000 to send texts and emails in support of him.^[153] A group of former Claire McCaskill staffers created a political action committee aimed at unseating Hawley with the backronym JOSH PAC (Just Oust Seditious Hacks).^[154][155]

On January 21, seven Democratic senators filed a complaint against Hawley and Cruz to the Senate Ethics Committee, arguing that they "lent legitimacy to the mob's cause and made future violence more likely."^[156] Hawley called the complaint "a flagrant abuse of the Senate ethics process and a flagrant attempt to exact partisan revenge".^[156] In response, Hawley filed an ethics complaint of his own against the seven senators, alleging their complaint was unethical due to potential coordination with Democratic Party leadership and claiming that he was a victim of cancel culture.^[157]

After the storming of the Capitol, several people sent disparaging messages intended for Hawley to Representative Josh Harder, a California Democrat, as they had confused the two due to their names' similarity.^[158]

On May 28, 2021, Hawley voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the riot.^[159]

On July 21, 2022, the House Select Committee broadcast video footage of Hawley running through the halls of Congress to escape the mob on January 6, contrasting it with his earlier fist-raised encouragement of the crowd.^[127][160] The video provoked laughter in the chamber and commentary on social media that included "Run Josh Run" (Dan Rather) and "Josh Hawley running away to a variety of soundtracks."^[127][161]

Committee assignments

For the 117th United States Congress, Hawley was named to four Senate committees.^[162] They are:

Committee on Armed Services
- Subcommittee on Airland
- Subcommittee on Personnel
- Subcommittee on SeaPower
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
- Emerging Threats and Spending Oversight
- Governmental Operations and Border Management
Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Committee on the Judiciary
- Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights
- Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism
- Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law (Ranking)
- Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law

For the 116th United States Congress, Hawley was named to five Senate committees.^[163] They are:

Political positions

Hawley's political views have been described as nationalist^[164] and populist.^[165] He has been called a Trump loyalist.^[140][166]

Abortion

Hawley opposes abortion and has called for the appointment of "constitutionalist, pro-life judges" to the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts.^[167] He has called Roe v. Wade "one of the most unjust decisions" in American judicial history. Missouri's Right to Life PAC endorsed Hawley for Senate.^[167] In July 2020, Hawley said he would not support any Supreme Court nominee who did not explicitly say that they would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.^[168] In October 2020, Hawley voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, who had not said she would overturn Roe.^[169][170]

COVID-19 pandemic

During early negotiations on COVID-19 relief spending, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a partial rebate for around 70 million households with net incomes below about $50,000. His proposal faced "swift bipartisan opposition", including from Hawley, leading the restrictions to be dropped.^[171]

In April 2020, Hawley proposed that the U.S. government pay businesses to keep their workers on payroll for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and rehire any workers who had already been laid off. His proposal was similar to programs that various European countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK, had implemented.^[172]

In December 2020, Hawley teamed up with Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, to demand that any new stimulus deal include direct payments of at least $1,200 to American workers. As leverage, Hawley and Sanders used the upcoming Christmas recess and the deadline to pass a new continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown.^[173][174]

In June 2021, Hawley called for Anthony Fauci to resign from his role as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.^[175]

Environment

As Missouri attorney general, Hawley pushed for the deregulation of environmental protections put in place by President Barack Obama, and filed four lawsuits against the Trump administration in an attempt to expedite that process.^[176] Hawley acknowledged the irony in his maneuver, saying "it turns out the best way to help President Trump pursue his agenda of rolling back federal overreach is to sue him."^[176]

Foreign policy

Some of his former colleagues at St Paul's School claimed Hawley was "very hawkish" in his early 20s, supporting the Iraq War in its early stages and at one point making himself popcorn to eat while watching news coverage of the 2003 invasion.^[28] While a 25-year-old law student at Yale University, he wrote supportive blog posts of the war in 2005, as well as nation-building in Iraq.^[177] At the time, he supported a proactive democracy promotion foreign policy.^[177]

Since entering the U.S. Senate, Hawley reoriented himself as a staunch opponent of U.S. wars in the Middle East.^[177] Hawley has advocated for the U.S. to shift its focus away from the Middle East and toward China, which he sees as a grave threat to both democracy and national security.^{[178][179][180]} He has criticized the ideas of perpetual war^[178] and cosmopolitanism,^[181][182] for which he has blamed both the left and right wings,^[181] saying that "the quest to turn the world into a liberal order of democracies was always misguided," as it "depended on unsustainable American sacrifice and force of arms."^[183] In addition, Hawley has criticized the World Trade Organization, going so far as to call for it to be abolished, which he called "a start", and suggested that "along with it, the new model global economy" should be abolished as well.^[183][184]

During the Biden administration, Hawley systematically blocked quick confirmation of Biden's nominees for foreign policy and intelligence posts, forcing the Senate to take extra steps to confirm nominees and delaying the filling of posts.^[185]

Afghanistan

After the 2021 fall of Kabul and the 2021 Kabul airport attack, Hawley was one in "a wave of other Republicans" who called on President Joe Biden to resign.^[186]

China and Hong Kong

Hawley is an outspoken critic of China, which he has called "the greatest security threat to this country in this century."^[180] He has said the U.S.'s goal should not be "to remake China from within" but rather "to deny Beijing's ability to impose its will without, whether it be upon Hong Kong, or Taiwan, or our allies and partners, or upon us."^[180]

In October 2019, Hawley co-sponsored the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. Before the bill went to the House of Representatives, he visited Hong Kong to see the protests. He commented on Twitter that Beijing was trying to turn Hong Kong into a "police state". Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam called the comment "irresponsible".^[187] On November 19, 2019, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the act.^[188]

Hawley has worked to create legislation that would prohibit data transmission to a set of blacklisted nations, including China.^[189]

On July 10, 2020, Hawley sent a letter to NBA commissioner Adam Silver criticizing the league for allowing players to put messages on their jerseys supporting the Black Lives Matter movement but not the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests or law enforcement officers.^[190] To promote the letter, Hawley's press office emailed it along with an announcement to several NBA reporters, including ESPN reporter Adrian Wojnarowski.^[191] Wojnarowski responded "Fuck You."^[191] Hawley then tweeted a screenshot of Wojnarowski's response; Wojnarowski subsequently apologized to Hawley directly and posted an apology on Twitter.^[191] On July 12, ESPN temporarily suspended Wojnarowski over the incident.^[192] On September 23, 2020, Hawley once again criticized Silver for the NBA's business in China, tweeting, "Adam Silver just comes right out and says it: NBA's relationship with China involves 'trade offs' but overall is a 'net positive.' And by 'net positive,' he means billions of dollars for the NBA and by 'trade offs,' he means slave labor."^[190]

Israel

During his 2018 Senate campaign, Hawley's press office sent out an email criticizing Claire McCaskill for supporting the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, writing, "We should be standing with President Trump and Israel today. If you aren't, you are standing with the mullahs and John Kerry. Sen. McCaskill needs to make it clear that she stands with President Trump and Israel, and not the mullahs."^[193]

Hawley opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.^[194]

Antisemitism allegations

On July 16, 2019, at the National Conservatism Conference, organized by Israeli professor Yoram Hazony, Hawley said:

For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities. This class lives in the United States, but they identify as "citizens of the world." They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.^[182]

In his address, Hawley also denounced the "cosmopolitan agenda", the "cosmopolitan class", the "cosmopolitan consensus", the "cosmopolitan economy", and the "cosmopolitan elite".^[194] His statement was called antisemitic by several political commentators and Jewish leaders, as well as by the Anti-Defamation League, which called for Hawley to apologize.^{[182][194][195]} The Jewish Telegraphic Agency specifically compared Hawley's reference to "cosmopolitan elites" to the term "rootless cosmopolitan", an antisemitic smear popularized by Joseph Stalin and also used by Nazis.^[182] Andrew Silow-Carroll wrote for J. The Jewish News of Northern California that Hawley was using his connections with Jewish people as a way to dodge allegations of antisemitism.^[196] In response to the allegations, Hawley tweeted, "The liberal language police have lost their minds."^{[182][194][195]} Hazony and the Republican Jewish Coalition defended Hawley's remarks.^[194]

On October 21, 2019, Hawley attacked Jewish Washington Post reporter Greg Sargent as a "smug, rich liberal elitist"; Sargent responded in a column that he was in fact raised in poverty.^[197][198] Mehdi Hasan argued Hawley's attack was antisemitic, though Sargent did not make that claim.^[197][198]

Allegations of support for theocracy

Hawley's views on morality and Christianity's role in government have been criticized as theocratic. Hawley has said that "Scripture teaches that political government is mandated by God for his service and is one means by which the enthroned Christ carries out his rule... Government serves Christ's kingdom rule; this is its purpose. And Christians' purpose in politics should be to advance the kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present."^[3] He has described as "heresy" the idea that people should be free to "choose your own meaning, define your own values, emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self".^[3] Journalist Katherine Stewart argued in The New York Times that Hawley was a Christian nationalist, and that his attempts to overturn the election were motivated by a desire to save the country from liberalism and hedonism.^[199] An article on Hawley by author Ian Millhiser is titled "the one man most likely to turn the U.S. into a theocracy".^[200]

Mexico

In July 2019, Hawley traveled to McAllen, Texas, along the Mexico–United States border, saying, "the nonstop flow of drugs and human trafficking coming into this country is a crisis, plain and simple. I want to learn more about the challenges our agents face, the problems these local communities are dealing with, and how we can figure out a path forward. We are facing a surge at the southern border like we have never seen before, and Congress needs to get off its backside and act."^[201]

On November 6, 2019, Hawley recommend that the U.S. impose sanctions and freeze assets of Mexican officials he did not feel were doing enough to address Mexican drug cartels.^[202]

On January 19, 2021, Hawley blocked the quick confirmation of Department of Homeland Security secretary nominee Alejandro Mayorkas after Mayorkas would not commit to spending $1.4 billion the U.S. government had appropriated for a border wall expansion.^[203]

Russia

Hawley has called the Mueller report a "hoax" and the Steele dossier "lies from a Russian spy".^[204]

In January 2019, Hawley was one of 11 Republican senators to vote for legislation aimed at blocking Trump's intended lifting of sanctions on three Russian companies.^[205]

In July 2020, Hawley said he did not believe news reports about a Russian bounty program funding the Taliban, but still said, "if they so much as think about putting bounties on the heads of American soldiers, there will be punishment."^[206]

In January 2022, Hawley called on Biden to drop support of plans for Ukraine to eventually join NATO, on the basis that committing troops to defend Ukraine would undermine America's ability to prevent Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.^[207]

Saudi Arabia

During a debate with Claire McCaskill in his 2018 Senate campaign, Hawley and McCaskill agreed that if it was confirmed that the Saudi government was behind the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the U.S. should respond severely.^[208]

After the 2019 Abqaiq–Khurais attack, Hawley said, "we shouldn't attack anybody on behalf of Saudi Arabia for Saudi Arabia's national interests" and instead should "preserve the security of the American people and the prosperity of our middle class."^[209]

Ukraine

In October 2019, Hawley called for an independent investigation into Joe Biden related to alleged dealings with Ukraine.^[210] He defended Donald Trump's phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and criticized Trump's first impeachment, saying Trump's words were "certainly not a crime".^[210] During the impeachment trial, Hawley said if additional witnesses were called and new documents considered, he would attempt to force votes on subpoenas for Michael Atkinson, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, the anonymous whistleblower and a reported acquaintance of the whistleblower.^[211]

Venezuela

On April 3, 2019, Hawley was part of a group of eight Republicans and seven Democrats to sponsor the Venezuelan Emergency Relief, Democracy Assistance and Development (VERDAD) Act, which was aimed at recognizing Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela rather than Nicolás Maduro.^[212] The bill would provide $200 million in aid for Venezuela, $200 million in aid for neighboring countries accepting Venezuelan refugees, revoke U.S. visas from sanctioned Venezuelan officials, and remove sanctions on officials not accused of human rights abuses who recognized Guaidó.^[212]

Gun policy

Hawley received a 93 percent rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) for 2018 and an 86 percent rating for 2016.^[213] He does not support an assault weapons ban, but does support some gun-control measures, including strengthening background checks, banning bump stocks, and banning mentally ill people from having guns.^[214] During his Senate campaign, Hawley used National Media as a media consultant, the same firm the NRA employs.^[215]

Hate crimes

Hawley was one of six Republican senators to vote against advancing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which would allow the U.S. Justice Department to review hate crimes related to COVID-19 and establish an online database.^[216][217] He was the sole senator to vote against the passage of an amended version of the act that would help investigate anti-Asian hate crimes, saying, "It's too broad. As a former prosecutor, my view is it's dangerous to simply give the federal government open-ended authority to define a whole new class of federal hate crime incidents."^[218]

Health care

Hawley has criticized the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). As attorney general of Missouri, he joined a lawsuit with 20 other states seeking to have it declared unconstitutional.^[219][220] Hawley said the act "was never constitutional",^[219] and spoke proudly of his involvement in the lawsuit.^[69] Hawley's 2018 Senate campaign said that he supported protections for individuals with preexisting conditions.^[69] He later published an op-ed in the Springfield News-Leader saying that he supports protecting those with preexisting conditions by creating a taxpayer subsidy to reimburse insurance companies for covering these high cost patients.^[70]

Human trafficking

Hawley has said that human trafficking is the result of the American sexual revolution in the 1960s due to the social encouragement of premarital sex and the use of contraception. After being criticized for these statements, he said that Hollywood culture was a major cause of human trafficking.^[221][222] Hawley has said that the appropriate place for sex is "within marriage".^[223]

Immigration

Hawley supports funding the construction of a wall along the southern border to stop illegal immigration.^[224]

Hawley supported the Trump administration's family separation policy, saying "It is an entirely preventable tragedy. Don't cross the border illegally and this won't happen."^[27]

Labor

In his 2018 Senate campaign, Hawley did not take a firm position on right-to-work legislation that was subject to a referendum by Missouri voters at the time.^[225] His spokesperson said of right-to-work, which would hamper labor unionizing, that "nobody should be forced to pay union dues."^[226]

Also in 2018, Hawley expressed opposition to a raise in the Missouri minimum wage from $7.85/hour to $8.60 in 2019 and $12 by 2023.^[227]

LGBT rights

In December 2015, Hawley supported exemptions for Missouri "businesses and religious groups from participating in same-sex ... marriage ceremonies".^[228]

In June 2020, after the Supreme Court ruled that federal law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, Hawley criticized the decision, saying it "represents the end of the conservative legal movement".^[229][230]

In May 2022 Hawley said he would be "shocked" if Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision ruling same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional, were overturned, calling it "settled law". Nevertheless, he stated his opposition to the decision.^[231]

Social media and Big Tech

Hawley is known for his criticism of Big Tech and social media companies and has often broken with other Republicans in his support for regulation of Internet companies. He cosponsored Do Not Track legislation with Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Mark Warner.^[232] His book The Tyranny of Big Tech was published in May 2021. According to Gilad Edelman of Wired, the book "raises valid concerns about the technology industry, and he proposes solutions worth taking seriously. But he embeds these ideas in a broader argument that is so wildly misleading as to call the entire project into question."^[233] Edelman writes that Hawley distorts the history of anti-trust in the United States, inaccurately portraying early-20th-century antitrust efforts and completely ignoring conservative opposition to antitrust enforcement since the 1970s.^[233]

In August 2019, Hawley introduced the Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act, which would ban features, such as infinite scrolling and auto-play, that he says encourage internet addiction.^[234] Per the bill, users would be unable to use a platform for more than 30 minutes per day unless they manually change the settings once a month.^[235]

In March 2020, Hawley and several other senators proposed the "No TikTok on Government Devices Act", which would prevent federal employees from downloading the app.^[236][237] Previously, Hawley had called the app "a Chinese-owned social media platform so popular among teens that Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly spooked".^[238]

Hawley has criticized Section 230, and has proposed legislation that would regard Internet access as a privilege rather than a right.^[239] His proposal faced bipartisan criticism as "poorly drafted, imprecise, and fatally vague."^[239]

Trade and tariffs

Hawley supported Trump's imposition of trade tariffs,^[27] saying he hoped the tariffs would be temporary, eventually resulting in lower tariffs on U.S. agriculture than before the trade battles.^[27] In September 2018, he fully supported Trump's trade actions, saying, "It's a trade war that China started. If we're in a war, I want to be winning it."^[240]

On May 5, 2020, Hawley wrote an op-ed in The New York Times calling for the abolition of the World Trade Organization, arguing it did not serve American interests and "enabled the rise of China."^{[183][184][241]} Shortly afterward, he introduced a resolution to withdraw the U.S. from the WTO.^[184][242]

Donald Trump

Hawley has been characterized as a Trump loyalist.^[140][166] He voted to acquit Trump during his first Senate impeachment trial^[243] and accused Democrats of having abused the Constitution by starting the impeachment inquiry, declaring that it was "the first purely partisan impeachment in our history".^[243] The day after the Republican-held Senate acquitted Trump, Trump praised Hawley as having played a key role in his acquittal.^[243]

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial blasting Hawley and Senator Roy Blunt for not distancing themselves from the January 6, 2021 storming of the United States Capitol and their continued support for Trump.^[244] Both senators voted to acquit in Trump's second impeachment trial.^[245] During Trump's second impeachment trial in the Senate, Hawley was in the Senate gallery rather than at his desk with the rest of the senators on the Senate floor.^[246] An NBC News reporter tweeted that Hawley could be seen "sitting up in the gallery with his feet up on the seat in front of him, reviewing paperwork". Later accused of ignoring the proceedings, Hawley called them "a total kangaroo trial".^[247]

U.S. Supreme Court nominations

Alex Wagner asks Hawley about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination in a 2018 episode of The Circus (1 minute, 2 seconds)

Hawley's first commercial in the 2018 Senate campaign focused on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, which he supported.^[248] After Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, Hawley staunchly defended him and said that Democrats had staged an "ambush".^[248]

On October 27, 2020, Hawley voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett.^[170]

Hawley was sharply critical of Ketanji Brown Jackson's 2022 nomination to the Supreme Court, saying her tenure as a judge and member of the United States Sentencing Commission showed a "pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes".^[249][250] Multiple news media fact-checks disagreed with Hawley's assertions.^{[251][252][253]} Conservative former prosecutor and commenter Andrew C. McCarthy wrote, "The allegation appears meritless to the point of demagoguery."^[254] Hawley and other Republican senators focused on the charges during Jackson's confirmation hearings, which fueled right-wing conspiracy and QAnon theories.^{[255][256][257]}

Supreme Court shortlist

On September 9, 2020, Trump announced that Hawley, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton were on his shortlist for nominations to the Supreme Court should a vacancy occur. Hawley expressed his appreciation but declined the offer, saying, "Missourians elected me to fight for them in the Senate".^[258] After Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, Trump instead nominated Amy Coney Barrett on September 29.^[259]

Personal life

In 2010, Hawley married Erin Morrow, an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri.^[260] The couple have three children.^[261] Following complaints that, after becoming attorney general, he was not abiding by a statutory requirement that the attorney general must reside within the city limits of the state capital (Jefferson City), Hawley began renting an apartment there, while his family continued to live in Columbia, Missouri.^[262] The Hawleys own a house in Vienna, Virginia, which they bought in 2019 after Hawley was elected to the U.S. Senate, after selling their Columbia home.^[1][2] Hawley's voter registration has his sister's address in Ozark, Missouri so that he can be eligible to run again for Missouri's U.S. Senate seat.^[263]

Hawley was raised Methodist, but he and his family now attend an Evangelical Presbyterian Church.^[30][3][264]

Electoral history

...

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https://newrepublic.com/article/167162/josh-hawley-career-vanish-january-6-running

no lnx

jul 20200 TNR

Alex Shephard/July 26, 2022

GOOD RIDDANCE

The Sad, Quiet Vanishing of Josh Hawley

Eighteen months after he raised his fist to insurrectionists, the Missouri senator’s political project is stalled.

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley

The eight hearings held by the January 6 committee this summer have been many things—often enlightening, sometimes terrifying, they have provided the clearest portrait yet of what led to rioters storming the U.S. Capitol last year. They have, however, seldom been funny. But last Thursday, there was a rare moment of comedy. As the committee dissected the three-hour period when insurrectionists breached the Capitol—and Donald Trump was refusing to do anything to stop them—they played a slowed-down, four-second video showing Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley running from the scene. With a long, awkward gait, Hawley is getting away from rioters as quickly as he can. The footage was almost immediately turned into a meme: Hawley running to the theme from Chariots of Fire; Hawley running to the Benny Hill song.

Josh Hawley running away to a variety of soundtracks.

Pt. 1: Chariots of Fire #January6thCommitteeHearing pic.twitter.com/tVCf2R5tUD

— Mallory Nees (@The_Mal_Gallery) July 22, 2022

The footage was especially cutting because of its interplay with another moment. One of the many infamous images to come from January 6, 2021, is of Hawley raising a fist to the crowd that would soon storm the Capitol. It was a gesture of solidarity; the rioters were there, in many ways, because of Hawley, who was the first senator to pledge to dispute the certification of the election results. One of the most ambitious members of Congress, Hawley was betting that his efforts to dispute, and perhaps overturn, a legitimate and lawful election would pay dividends in the near future. A month later, he would become the only Republican to vote against every single one of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet nominees. He was staking a claim to the future of Donald Trump’s political movement—a claim that he was hoping would come due soon, either in 2024 or in the next presidential election.

Eighteen months later, however, Hawley’s big gamble has shown little signs of paying off: He barely registers as a figure of national consequence. No one is looking to him as the leader of anything, let alone the Republican Party. In February, he received 0.2 percent of the vote when the Conservative Political Action Conference held its annual presidential straw poll. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a reviled figure in GOP circles, received five times as many votes, though both lagged far behind Trump—and, to a lesser extent, the current front-runner to succeed him, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

It also shows the limitations of a certain version of populism on the right. The movement launched by Donald Trump tapped into various cultural and economic frustrations. But efforts to intellectually backfill that movement have largely sputtered. Hawley has made big bets that taking on tech companies like Google and Facebook—largely on spurious grounds that they “censor” conservatives, though occasionally on more persuasive ones relating to concentration—would help launch his national ambitions and cement his role as the intellectual center of the right. He is a frequent guest on Fox News, where he rails against so-called “cancel culture” and pushes the idea that Republicans like him are being censored and oppressed by liberals. (Hawley made a big fuss after a book deal he had with Simon and Schuster was canceled after his support for overturning the election; he quickly signed a deal with a conservative publisher.) And yet, in spite of all of the television appearances and efforts to derail hearings into laundry lists of right-wing grievances, Hawley remains a peripheral figure.

That’s not to say that Hawley’s version of conservatism is anathema to the right. In fact, his rejection of liberalism—and his larger efforts to use the government to enforce his own illiberal ideas about speech, trade, and freedom—are growing in prominence. As libertarian blogger Aaron Ross Powell wrote in a recent newsletter, Hawley’s anti-tech stance is largely rooted in his anti-cosmopolitanism. “In fact, Hawley was arguably the progenitor of the right’s backlash against Big Tech with the explicit aim of undermining the chief mechanism by which America’s cosmopolitan spirit and culture—a by-product of its classical liberal commitments—develops and spreads,” Powell argued. “He’s been the most outspoken senator pushing to place government in charge of moderating online speech, jettisoning his party’s alleged commitment to limited government pre-Trump.”

Hawley’s larger goal has been to take the authoritarian strongman mantle from Trump—or at least to inherit it. And on that point, he has failed miserably. The “techlash” has sputtered on both the left and the right, but particularly on the right. Trump’s frequent complaints about “shadowbanning” and other “censorship” from tech companies have largely fallen out of favor as other boogeymen have proven more politically potent. Those who were complaining about Twitter and Facebook are now talking about trans athletes and “critical race theory” and Disney. Hawley, of course, is one of them. But he’s only one among many.

That hasn’t stopped him from continuing to try to place himself at the center of the new right. Speaking at the conservative group Turning Points USA’s Student Action Summit on Friday, Hawley insisted he had no regrets about the role he played in the violent assault on the Capitol. “I just want to say to all of those liberals out there and the liberal media, just in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, I do not regret it, and I am not backing down,” Hawley said, striking a belligerent note. “I’m not going to apologize, I’m not going to cower, I’m not going to run from you, I’m not going to bend a knee.” It was a poor choice of words—footage of him running like a coward from rioters he had helped to whip into a frenzy was already everywhere. Hawley, by the way, wasn’t even listed as a candidate on TPUSA’s straw poll.

Alex Shephard @alex_shephard

Alex Shephard is a staff writer at The New Republic.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/josh-hawley-2657717027/

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fist bump cruz burn pits?

voted for insulin?

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/gop-senators-criticize-josh-hawley-for-his-opposition-to-adding-finland-sweden-to-nato/

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an 8 22

On Wednesday, August 3, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-1, in favor of Sweden and Finland joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). President Joe Biden applauded the vote, declaring, “This historic vote sends an important signal of the sustained, bipartisan U.S. commitment to NATO, and to ensuring our Alliance is prepared to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. I look forward to signing the accession protocols and welcoming Sweden and Finland, two strong democracies with highly capable militaries, into the greatest defensive alliance in history.”

The vote was a rare example of everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer being on the same page. The lone “no” vote came from far-right Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who used the vote to boast about how MAGA he is on foreign policy and how devoted he is to former President Donald Trump’s “America first” agenda — and Hawley defended the vote during an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Never Trump conservative and veteran Washington Post opinion writer George Will examines Hawley’s “no” vote in his August 10 column, arguing that these events underscore the “degradation” of both journalism and politics in the United States.

“Like an infant feeling ignored and seeking attention by banging his spoon on his highchair tray, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) last week cast the only vote against admitting Finland and Sweden to NATO,” Will explains. “He said adding the two militarily proficient Russian neighbors to NATO would somehow weaken U.S. deterrence of China…. That evening, Hawley appeared on Fox News to receive Tucker Carlson’s benediction. This umpteenth episode of a senator using the Senate as a stepping stone to a cable television green room illustrates what Chris Stirewalt deplores in his new book, ‘Broken News.’”

Stirewalt served as Fox News’ political editor before being fired for, ironically, doing his job well. And he discusses that controversy in his new book, “Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back,” which has an August 23 release date on Amazon.

Will says of Stirewalt, “He was washed out of Fox News by a tsunami of viewer rage because on Election Night 2020, he correctly said Donald Trump had lost Arizona. Now, he says today’s journalism has a supply-side problem — that is, supplying synthetic controversies.”

Stirewalt, in his book, describes the state of U.S. journalism in 2022 as, “What did Trump say? What did Nancy Pelosi say about what Trump said? What did Kevin McCarthy say about what Pelosi said about what Trump said? What did Sean Hannity say about what Rachel Maddow said about what McCarthy said about what Pelosi said about what Trump said?”

Will shares Stirewalt’s complaints, writing, “But journalism also has a demand-side problem: Time was, journalists assumed that news consumers demanded ‘more information, faster and better.’ Now, instantaneous communication via passive media — video and television — supplies what indolent consumers demand. More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the Sixth-Grade level. Video, however, requires only eyes on screens. But such passive media cannot communicate a civilization defined by ideas.”

Will continues, “Our creedal nation, Stirewalt says, ‘requires written words and a common culture in which to understand them’…. Technology — radio, television, the internet — turned journalism from reporting what had happened to reporting what was happening, and now to giving passive news consumers the emotional experience of having their political beliefs ratified.”

Now 81, Will has seen a lot of technological changes over the years. And he shares Stirewalt’s view that technology has made some political journalism a form of lowbrow entertainment.

“Technology has produced a melding of journalism and politics, to the degradation of both, as illustrated by the seamlessness of Hawley’s Senate floor grandstanding and his cable news self-congratulation,” Will observes. “Small wonder, says Stirewalt, that ‘the news business treats politics like sports’ — entertaining, but with no meaning deeper than the score. The fans, consumers of emotional-impact journalism, wear, figuratively speaking, their teams’ colors: red shirts against blue shirts.”

Will continues, “This journalism’s constant attention to politics instead of government — to gaining power instead of its exercise — makes the players on the field, Stirewalt says, ‘want to show off to the fans in the stands instead of trying to win the game.’ Hence Hawley, the quintessential example of the politics that the new journalism encourages. And hence his absurd vote against NATO expansion — spoon clenched in infant fist, banging the highchair tray to say: ‘Pay attention to me!’…. Define news down, and this is the kind of newsmaker you get.”

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hypoc on kids

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/political-shenanigans-kansas-city-star-torches-josh-hawley-for-his-pseudo-concerns-about-abused-children/

A Missouri attorney is torching Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) for his pseudo concern about abused children in his state. In a blistering op-ed published by The Kansas City Star, attorney Rebecca Randles called out the Republican lawmaker for dropping the ball on an investigation that may have impacted the lives of many abused children.

The op-ed began with a brief comparison of Hawley and newly-confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Hawley strongly opposed. Noting that both individuals have had to make professional decisions that impact the lives of others, Randles explained how Hawley failed to hold up his end of that bargain.

"Her black garment is a metaphor for the difficult decisions she has made that impact the lives of others," Randles wrote in reference to Jackson. "Sen. Josh Hawley’s decisions also impact the lives of others. His garment, however, should be a lime green leisure suit on a hanger. He attracts a lot of attention; he’s loud; he makes a lot of statements. But he doesn’t do anything."

After offering a brief overview of Hawley's unfavorable actions amid Trump's post-election legal battle, she weighed in on the lawmaker's "political shenanigans."

"Hawley’s political shenanigans obscure the truth about victimization. He has introduced legislation about pornography, but only in concert with his bashing of the first Black woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court," she wrote. "When he grilled Jackson on her sentencing of an 18-year-old in a child pornography possession case, he was winking at QAnon true believers’ delusions about fictional networks of celebrity and politician pedophiles. However, Hawley ignores his own failure to protect sexually abused children who are very real."

Randles recalled the 2018 Pennsylvania child abuse case that opened the door for her office's Missouri investigation. At the time, Hawley was the attorney general, but according to Randles, he took very little interest in the case. "On review, my law partners and I found that Missouri had even more," she wrote. "Where was the then-attorney general’s outrage?"

Her office had appealed to Hawley to take action and although he agreed to do so, he abandoned the agreement when he moved on to the Senate and made no effort to express any other concerns about the investigation.

"After we challenged Hawley in letters, through advocacy organizations, and in press conferences, he agreed to investigate priests who had abused children," Randles added. "Then he left for the Senate, having done nothing. He left the so-called 'investigation' to his successor. He did not contact our clients (we have had hundreds). He did not contact us for information, and he did not make any kind of report regarding these abuses."

The op-ed concluded with a blistering statement saying, "Loud. Attention-grabbing. Do-nothing. A lime green leisure suit on a hanger.We challenge Sen. Hawley to take a fresh look at the crimes against children committed in his own state, including allegations against elected officials in his own party, and actually do something to protect kids."

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4/22 edit bd

I don’t follow what every Democrat says. No one can. There’s no way for me to know whether the tenor and tone of their collective rhetoric changed last week. But it felt like it got stronger, sharper and angrier.

Consider Brian Schatz.

The Hawaii Senator took to the Senate floor to scorch his colleague Josh Hawley of Missouri, who’s been holding up appointments to the Department of Defense that are necessary to America’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before he signs off, he said, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin must resign for his “failures” in Afghanistan.

Schatz said that’s rich coming from a guy who raised his fist in solidarity with the J6 insurrectionists and who voted to acquit the former president for the high crime of extorting Ukraine’s president.

“This comes from a guy who before the Russian invasion suggested that maybe it would be wise for [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy to make a few concessions about Ukraine and their willingness to join NATO.”

He added:

“They withheld lethal aid until, unless Zelenskyy released false smears against Joe Biden's son. Then [Hawley] voted to exonerate President Trump for this. So spare me the new solidarity with the Ukrainians and with the free world, because this man's record is exactly the opposite.”

His tirade amazed those of us longing for the Democrats to take a strong stand against the Republican Party’s lies and bad faith. Perhaps we’ll see more now that Greg Sargent put a brighter light on it.

The Post columnist interviewed Brian Schatz on Friday. “Democrats need to make more noise,” the Senator conceded. “We have to scream from the rooftops because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Let’s not forget what Schatz said, however.

He said Hawley is “doing a very specific thing.”

“He is damaging the Department of Defense.”

So far, Schatz is the only Democrat seeing what needs seeing.

Though he says he’s outraged by the US pullout from Afghanistan, Josh Hawley is also attacking, directly, the military leadership itself. (He won’t move on appointments until the secretary of defense resigns.)

Demanding Austin’s resignation is not a “reasonable request,” Schatz said. It can’t be. The point is sabotaging civilian control of the military.

You read that right.

The point is cleaving the ranks. The point is to create conditions in which military personnel feel inspired to take action that’s favorable to the Republicans’ (perhaps the former president’s) return to power.

They are picking up where the J6 insurrection left off. But next time, it won’t be a mob of schlubs. It will be an army of highly-trained insurgents bent on restoring whiteness to the center of the republic.

At gunpoint.

Everyone should see what Schatz sees.

So I interviewed Fred Wellman, founder of Beer Hall Projectand a 20-year Army veteran who served when Secretary Austin was General Austin. I called Fred after US Rep. Matt Gaetz failed to humiliate the secretary in testimony before the House Arms Services Committee.

Fred said: “A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.”

Matt Gaetz and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Thoughts?

My main frustration has always been with the “performance wing” of the Republican Party. They don’t want to govern. They want to act.

In this case, Matt Gaetz tried convincing people that “wokeism,” or trying to get a more diverse American military force, is hurting our ability to fight wars. It shows how monumentally stupid he is.

He's dragging culture wars into national defense. That he does so while sitting on the House Armed Service Committee is outrageous.

It’s a committee responsible for oversight of the men and women in uniform, but it’s oversight partially provided by someone as monumentally asinine as Matt Gaetz – that’s just disgusting to me.

Good point. When a country sends people overseas, the presumption should be that leaders will take that responsibility deadly seriously. Deadly serious responsibility is the opposite of Matt Gaetz.

I'm a 20-year Army veteran. I rose through the ranks to be a lieutenant colonel. I retired after Desert Storm and three Iraq tours. I’m the son of a World War II Marine veteran. My son is an Army veteran. My son-in-law continues to serve in the National Guard.

But not everybody can serve.

Less than 7 percent of our nation is veterans. Less than 1 percent serve at all. Less than one-third of the eligible population is capable of serving. I'm talking about fitness, criminal record, mental health, etc. This is the reality of maintaining and growing an all-volunteer force.

That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the officer corps. That's the point of trying to increase the diversity of the pilot corps. That's the point of welcoming all races and creeds. As Secretary Austin said, anybody who's eligible, who has the capability to serve, should be welcomed even if they're non-binary, gay, straight, whatever.

If they're capable of serving, of meeting the physical and mental requirements we need in our military, we've got to open our arms.

There are just not enough white dudes left.

When you have someone like the Florida congressman directly attacking that, that turns away possible recruits. Gaetz is literally undermining those who serve and who may serve in the future.

Sounds like you’re angry?

I amangry.

The Matt Gaetzs and Marsha Blackburns of the world are openly undermining good order and military discipline with a culture war for political effect. A representative sitting on the Armed Services Committee should understand the challenges of an all-volunteer force.

Civilian oversight of the military matters even though those civilians may never have served, may not have been qualified to serve. People like me, people like Secretary Austin – we understand that. Someone who rose to the rank of four-star understands he’s going to answer to some 25-year-old kid on the Armed Services Committee.

That's the nature of it.

But what frustrates me is the lack of respect for the office and a lack of respect for the military as an apolitical and non-political entity.

One of the biggest fears of our founding fathers was a standing army. They didn't want one and that undermined efforts early on in the republic because of rebellions. We had no army to address them.

Even Washington was like, man, we need an army.

A standing army can’t be a tool of a political party. Under the Trump years, it became more partisan. Now Matt Gaetz and his peers in the Republican Party are directly undermining the apolitical and nonpolitical nature of the military by dividing troops from leaders.

The troops love Trump, they believe, but the troops are being failed by “woke” leaders. Where the fuck do you think the leaders are? You don't just magically make a general. Secretary Austin started as a fucking second lieutenant. He rose through the ranks. This is dangerous.

I do not say this lightly.

This is incredibly dangerous.

They attack the military leadership as“woke”because they're trying to cause a break in the ranks. They're literally undermining good order and military discipline deliberately to break the chain of command.

I've never seen that in my lifetime.

You’re describing national security risk. Is that overstating it?

No, I don't think so.

The very nature of our republic relies on an apolitical military every American knows serves them, no matter their race, creed, religion, color, region, political party, whatever. Our republic depends on everyone knowing a standing army is not a threat to the country.

Many in the Republican Party are super-fans of Putin, let's be honest.They're having CPAC in Hungary, for God's sake, a country led by a rightwing dictator, a Putin fan. Imagine a scenario in which they’re in power and we can't fight because they’ve undermined the military.

It's terrifying to think where this could go.

I've seen reports of white nationalism gaining traction in the ranks of the military. There's an effort from above to deal with that.

I learned in military science 101 at West Point that an all-volunteer force is a direct reflection of our society. You raised your children for 18 years before they get into the military. I give them 12 weeks of basic training. That won’t overcome 18 years of raising them as racists.

All I can do is ensure they don't act on those beliefs and undermine good order and military discipline. If they do behave inappropriately, we use the separate military system to discipline them appropriately and remove them from the military as they're no longer a threat.

But we do know white nationalist and patriot front-type groups have been actively sending “their troops,” if you will, into the military for military training. Right-wing nationalist groups are infiltrating the ranks and recruiting veterans after they get out of the military.

At one point,10 percent of Jan6 cases were United States military and veterans. One of them is an active-duty Marine Corps major!

How horrifying that is.

Talk about the fundamental tension between universal values, like honor, and individual interest, like investment in whiteness.

Some really extreme right-wing politicians say universal values are an attack on conservative thought. It's not against conservative thought.

Conservative thought should mean taxes and “pulling up my bootstraps and raising myself up by going into the military” – that's fine.

Saying Black people are inferior soldiers, assaulting the ranks, inciting homophobia and transphobia and attacking fellow service members – That’s not conservative. That’s extremism, white nationalism.

That needs to be stomped out.

There have been several surveys of service members saying the biggest threat they face isn’t Muslim terrorists. It’s extremism in the ranks....

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https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2022/03/justice-thomas-really-really-wants-section-230-repealed-even-if-he-has-to-do-it-himself.htm

justice Thomas Really, REALLY Wants Section 230 Repealed (Even If He Has to Do It Himself)

March 9, 2022 · by Eric Goldman · in Content Regulation, Derivative Liability

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in Doe v. Facebook, a FOSTA case. The Texas Supreme Court held that FOSTA excluded some claims fromSection 230 (disregarding the statutory language Congress adopted), while other claims remain preempted by Section 230. The case will now go back on remand to deal with the FOSTA-excluded claims.

Along with the cert denial, Justice Thomas issued a “statement” bashing Section 230. This is his third solo-authored anti-Section 230 statement; the prior rants came in the Knight First Amendment v. Trump (2021) and Malwarebytes v. Enigma (2020) cases. Those earlier two statements were surely aided by his then-law clerk Josh Divine. a Hawley protégé. I had hoped that maybe Justice Thomas’ anti-230 statements would fade away following Divine’s departure. No such luck.

Justice Thomas writes: “It is hard to see why the protection §230(c)(1) grants publishers against being held strictly liable for third parties’ content should protect Facebook from liability for its own ‘acts and omissions.'” To be clear, Section 230 largely does not address “strict liability” for Internet services because that’s governed by the First Amendment, which typically makes strict liability for publishing or distributing third-party content unconstitutional. See, e.g., Smith v. California.

Also, Facebook’s “acts and omissions” at issue here solely involve the publication of third-party content, which is why Section 230 extends to them. As I’ve explained many times, treating publication decisions as “conduct” and not “speech” would make Section 230 a nullity. (Which, of course, is Justice Thomas’ objective…)

Justice Thomas also writes: “Assuming Congress does not step in to clarify §230’s scope, we should do so in an appropriate case.” Is that an implied threat to Congress? Whatever happened to judicial deference to legislatures? Courts fixing a statute’s “scope” when a legislature doesn’t is called judicial activism/legislating from the bench.

On the plus side, Justice Thomas has been utterly transparent about how he will rule on Section 230 when he gets his chance. He’s now said three times he’s ready to tear up Section 230–apparently regardless of the merits of a defendant’s arguments. That kind of immutable bias going into a case should prompt recusal, but Justice Thomas also has relaxed views about recusal.

More commentary from Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

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an 222

Adam Kinzinger of Illinois is among the few Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who isn’t afraid to vehemently criticize former President Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists, and on February 2, the anti-Trump conservative slammed Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri as a “self-aggrandizing con artist” in response to the GOP senator’s comments on President Joe Biden and Ukraine.

Hawley has criticized Biden for ordering 3000 U.S. troops to Europe. Thousands of Russian troops are stationed on the Russia-Ukraine border, and the Biden Administration fears that Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, will invade Ukraine. Hawley also called for the Biden White House to block Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

While Hawley is a major Trump apologist, Kinzinger is one of two Republicans on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The other is Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, another scathing critic of the former president.

On February 2, Kinzinger tweeted, “I hate to be so personal, but Hawley is one of the worst human beings, and a self egrandizing con artist. When Trump goes down I certainly hope this evil will be laid in the open for all to see, and be ashamed of.”...

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:{:{:{}:

https://democracychronicles.org/lawsuit-nra/

from the Campaign Legal Center:

Today, Campaign Legal Center Action (CLC Action) filed suit on behalf of Giffords against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for failing to announce any action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) for using shell corporations to coordinate campaign spending with seven federal candidates spanning three election cycles from 2014-2018. The lawsuit was filed two days before President Trump addresses the NRA’s annual convention for the third year in a row – the only time in American history a president has done so.

The NRA’s complicated scheme had the effect of evading campaign contribution limits and shielding millions of dollars of political spending – including up to $25 million coordinated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – from public scrutiny. The Trace first reported on the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and Giffords filed four complaints with the FEC to address these violations. The FEC is the independent regulatory agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws in federal elections, the agency routinely deadlocks and fails to reach the required four votes necessary to open an investigation. Today, Giffords is asserting its right of action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the 120-day period expired in which the FEC was legally required to respond.

“Our elections are awash in secret cash, and the federal agency charged with enforcing our nation’s election laws is asleep on the job,” said Trevor Potter, president of CLC, and a former Republican Chairman of the FEC. “Campaign finance laws are supposed to limit the influence of money in our politics. For our system to function properly, the FEC needs to enforce the laws that preserve the independence of campaigns and limit the influence of well-funded special interests.”

“When the FEC doesn’t do its job, groups like the NRA are able to get around the rules designed to limit the influence of money on our democracy,” said Brendan Fischer, director, federal reform at CLC. “The FEC’s failure to enforce the law sends a message to wealthy special interests that they can push the legal envelope and get away with it.”

“The FEC is supposed to be the nation’s election watchdog, but in this case it didn’t bite, bark, or even whimper,” said Adam Skaggs, Chief Counsel, Giffords Law Center. “Instead, it turned a blind eye while the NRA’s leadership made clear it’s more interested in handing bags of cash to candidates who will carry its water than following American laws or looking out for the interests of gun owners. In a desperate attempt to hold onto power and influence, NRA executives have flagrantly ignored our campaign finance laws and undermined the integrity of our election system. The FEC must bring illegal campaign conduct into the light of day and we are proud to join with CLC in calling on it to uphold the laws that protect the legitimacy of our democracy.”

, which explains the underlying story behind the NRA’s scheme.

Campaign finance law allows outside groups like the NRA to make unlimited expenditures supporting candidates only if the expenditures are completely independent of those candidates. To protect this independence, the FEC has rules prohibiting coordination between outside groups and campaigns, which include restrictions on how a vendor may work for both a candidate and an outside group supporting that candidate. Otherwise, the common vendor can act as a conduit to funnel strategic information to the outside group, and then that group’s expenditures are no longer independent.

The lawsuit implicates the NRA’s spending in support of the following seven candidates:

Matt Rosendale (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Montana)
Josh Hawley (2018 campaign for U.S. Senate in Missouri)
Donald Trump (2016 campaign for President of the United States)
Ron Johnson (2016 campaign for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin)
Thom Tillis (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in North Carolina)
Cory Gardner (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Colorado)
Tom Cotton (2014 campaign for U.S. Senate in Arkansas)

You can see the full video here:

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clarence is gunning for big tech?

https://www.protocol.com/policy/thomas-clerk-hawley

no lnx vid 2021

during the Supreme Court's most recent term, Justice Clarence Thomas fired two very public warning shots at Big Tech. First, in an unprompted statement last fall, he called for Section 230 to be reined in, saying the law had been interpreted too broadly by the courts. He followed that up months later with a concurring opinion that suggested Facebook and others ought to be regulated as common carriers.

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The two pieces of writing didn't escape the notice of tech policy watchers. What did go relatively unnoticed, though, was just who was working in Thomas' chambers at the time: a clerk named Josh Divine, who was coming off of a stint working for one of Big Tech's biggest critics and a vocal proponent of Section 230 reform, Senator Josh Hawley.

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an 11 21

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has prompted a social media firestorm with controversial argument suggesting Democrats are making an "attempt to give us a world beyond men."

During an appearance at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Fla., the Republican senator insisted "manhood" was "under attack" as he urged men embrace tradionally masculine positions, reports The Guardian.

"The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic," he said. "They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness – as a danger to society."

Hawley also discuss a seemingly baseless claim about the connection between males and pornography.

"Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?" Hawley said.

"While the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should."

In addition to his claims about pornography, Hawley attempted to connect toxic masculinity to a number of other issues.

"For centuries, lovers of liberty have praised these qualities as the highest standard of manhood. That's not to say that women don't possess them. But it is to say that these virtues are the bright side of the aggression and competitiveness and independence that psychologists, no less than philosophers, have long observed in men." he said.

"Assertiveness and independence are strengths when used to protect and empower others."

Hawley's remarks quickly led to blowback on Twitter as many users dismantled his arguments and his claims about the characteristics of manhood.

"In the good old days, uncriticized American men fucked real top-heavy silicone queens and machine-gunned their way through actual space aliens on a daily basis," David Simon tweeted. "Also, don't shake the junior Missouri senator's hand until you see him wash it.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/missouri-newspaper-bob-woodward-s-new-paints-a-damning-picture-of-josh-hawley-s-big-role-in-the-big-lie/

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180 on afghan newspaper op ed

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/josh-hawley-2655073422/

afghan?

gOP senator demands top Biden officials resign — and threatens to block nominees until they do

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

September 14, 2021

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), best known as the "insurrectionist" who raised his fist high up in the air as he helped incite the January 6 attackers and rioters in front of the Capitol building, is demanding th....

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A Senate hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious ...https://www.nytimes.com › 2020/12/08 › technology › a-...

Dec 8, 2020 — Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that President Trump has heavily ... Dr. Jane M. Orient, a prominent skeptic of vaccines, ...

TECHNOLOGY

A Senate hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious claims about the coronavirus

Tracking Viral Misinformation: Latest Updates

A Senate hearing promoted unproven drugs and dubious claims about the coronavirus

Dec. 8, 2020

By Linda Qiu

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, at the Capitol last week, has embraced the role of the Senate’s leading contrarian on the coronavirus.]

Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, spent much of this year promoting investigations into Hunter Biden, trying fruitlessly to show corruption on the part of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now Mr. Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is more focused on another narrative sympathetic to President Trump if not to established science: that the reaction to the coronavirus pandemic has been overblown and that public health officials have been too quick to come to conclusions about the best ways to deal with it.

So on Tuesday, for not the first time, Mr. Johnson lent his committee’s platform to the promotion of unproven drugs and dubious claims about stemming the spread of the coronavirus while giving prominence to a vaccine skeptic.

In a move that led even most members of his own party on the committee to avoid the hearing, Mr. Johnson called witnesses who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The National Institutes of Health guidelines recommend against using either drug to treat coronavirus patients except in clinical trials.

Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that President Trump has heavily promoted but has shown disappointing results in many clinical trials. Ivermectin is used to treat parasites in humans as well as to prevent heartworms in dogs; research on its effectiveness in treating the coronavirus has been mixed.

Despite the regulatory warnings and the lack of substantial scientific evidence for their efficacy, Mr. Johnson claimed that “discouraging and in some cases prohibiting the research and use of drugs that have been safely used for decades has cost tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people their lives.”

Just three other senators on the 14-member committee attended Tuesday’s session — “such low participation,” Mr. Johnson acknowledged at one point.Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the committee, criticized the hearing in opening remarks but left before asking questions. On the Republican side, only Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Josh Hawley of Missouri made appearances.

For about two and a half hours, the participants continuously challenged public health consensus, sometimes advancing inaccurate and previously debunked claims.

One witness, Dr. Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington, argued that “masks do not work” and “social distancing doesn’t work” by citing a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study tracked virus transmission among Marine Corps recruits who underwent quarantine. But two of the study’s authors refuted Dr. Oskoui’s interpretation. Rather, they said, the study showed that nonpharmaceutical interventions like masks and social distancing cannot be relied on alone to eliminate transmission.

“For me, drawing the conclusion from our study that masking is not effective is like claiming that car brakes are not effective in preventing crashes because accidents still occur when they are used,” said Dr. Stuart C. Sealfon, the senior author of the study and a professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This is either a mistaken or a deliberately misleading interpretation of the results of the study.”

Dr. Sealfon added: “In view of the preponderance of evidence in the scientific literature supporting the benefits of mask wearing in reducing the transmission of SARS-COV-2, no reasonable scientist would conclude that these measures are ineffective. They are very effective, but they are not foolproof.”

Throughout the hearing, Dr. Oskoui also promoted prescribing zinc and vitamin D. He said that the United States should follow the example of Britain and distribute vitamin D supplements to older people.

The N.I.H. also recommends against using zinc to treat the coronavirus except in clinical trials. The British government has offered 2.5 million people free vitamin D to keep bones and muscle healthy, especially as more people stayed indoors, but the National Health Service has noted that “there is currently not enough evidence to support taking vitamin D to prevent or treat coronavirus.”

Dr. Jane M. Orient, a prominent skeptic of vaccines, also cast doubt on mask wearing, suggesting that “maybe instead of putting masks on everybody, we should be putting lids on the toilet or putting Clorox into it before you flush it.” While there is some evidence that toilet bowls can be infectious, the virus is most commonly distributed through close contact with others, and masks do offer some protection.

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Dr. Orient also cited “192 studies compiled on hydroxychloroquine with all showing some benefit when used early.”

:{:{}:

That appeared to be an exaggerated reference to a database of studies gathered by an anonymous group. Of those studies, about 40 were categorized as researching use of hydroxychloroquine as an early treatment, and about two dozen of those concluding that the drug demonstrated “positive” effects.

Mr. Hawley criticized lockdowns as harmful to mental health, accurately citing a government survey showing that a quarter of young adults seriously thought about suicide in June. He then repeated an inaccurate claim from Mr. Trump that the World Health Organization no longer recommends lockdowns.

Mr. Johnson himself echoed praise for hydroxychloroquine, claiming that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also “talked” about the drug. While it is true that Dr. Fauci has discussed hydroxychloroquine in the pandemic, he has warned against its use.

As the hearing drew to a close, the senator offered his opinion of the severity of the pandemic.

“It’s certainly worse than the flu, but is it that much worse to cause that much economic devastation with that severe of a human toll?” Mr. Johnson asked.

That prompted almost immediate pushback from one of his own witnesses, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya of Stanford University School of Medicine, who told the senator: “It is worse than the flu.”

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an 621

Hawley demands Canada be added to religious freedom watch list

Alex Henderson

June 27, 2021

In Alberta, Canada, some pastors were arrested after openly defying COVID-19 restriction, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is claiming that the pastors, James Coates and Tim Stephens, were victims of religiou...

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an 521 R Reich

At the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, I feel compelled to warn you that if we forget and move on from the tragedies of this past year, we're setting ourselves on a dangerous path. Of course I understand the desire to forget all the unpleasantness and start a new chapter. But if we do, we're inviting greater tragedies in the future.

Let me remind you: Donald Trump lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don't you? – he tried to overturn the results.

Trump twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.

Several Republican members of Congress encouraged the attempted coup by joining him in the big lie and refusing to certify the election — even after the mob desecrated the halls of our democracy.

This was in January of this year, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our memory. Meanwhile, those responsible for instigating the attack haven't been held accountable in any respect — including by the media.

The Washington Post hosted a live video chat with Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before the attack.

But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley's new book on big tech. It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley's sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation "for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers" and as "a fierce defender of the Constitution."

CBS This Morning interviewed Florida Republican Rick Scott, another senator who tried to overturn the election by not certifying the results. But there was no mention of his sedition, either. The CBS interviewer confined his questions to Biden's spending plans, which Scott unsurprisingly opposed.

Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also repeatedly appear on major news programs without being questioned about their attempts to undo the results of the election, or their continued promotion of Trump's lies.

The media is supposed to serve as a crucial check on those in power. But in its breathless desire to cover the "news" it is failing to remind us of our recent past.

The consequences of this failure are dire.

Trump's big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and that President Biden is not legitimate, is not disappearing. A majority of Republican voters believe him.

That big lie is being used by Republican state legislatures to justify an all-out assault on the right to vote.

Hours after Florida enacted new voting restrictions, Texas's Republican-led legislature pushed ahead with its own bill that would make it one of the hardest states in which to cast a ballot.

The Republican-controlled Arizona Senate launched a private recount of the 2020 presidential election results in Maricopa County – farming out 2.1 million ballots to GOP partisans with no experience in ballot counting or election monitoring. At least one person involved in the recount participated in the Capitol attack.

The Republican Party even purged one of its leaders, Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, for telling the truth about the election.

Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are muscling their way into election administration, as they attempt to dislodge or bully local election officials who have always run our voting systems.

Trump's big lie will continue to flourish unless the lawmakers who went along with it and have failed to renounce it face real consequences.

That means no book promotions, no cushy interviews, no guest op-eds in the Sunday paper.

What possible excuse is there for booking them if they have not publicly retracted their election lies? If they must appear, they should be asked if they continue to deny the election results and precisely why.

It also means a thorough independent 9-11 type inquiry into what happened, whether members of Congress were involved, how Donald Trump and others were involved.

Republican leaders must not duck this. History is watching.

They must be held accountable to the truth. Otherwise the trauma of 2020 will return — perhaps in even more terrifying form.

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commm dr

this is what you shall do... stand up for the stupid and crazy...

— Walt Whitman, Preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass

A number of readers wondered whether, following my recent piece on The Triplets in the House of Representatives, I was being unfair to the United States Senate, a body that includes at least two people deserving recognition as much as the triplets in the House. I can only acknowledge my oversight with a mea culpa and make amends by directing the readers' attention to two Senators who, with each utterance, warm the cockles of the trumpian heart and the hearts of all who love and miss the trump.

The two Senators are Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Josh Hawley of Missouri. Great minds can differ on which of the two men is the dumbest man in the Senate. NBC's Joe Scarborough bestowed the label on Josh, calling him the dumbest guy in the Senate, but I prefer to bestow that honor on Wisconsin's Ron Johnson. Ron does not have the academic credentials of Josh. Josh attended Stanford, and Yale law school. The lack of those credentials does not, however, deprive him of the right to being first, not second, in the competition.

Ron has served in the Senate since 2010. During that time ample opportunities for him to show his stupidity have presented themselves, and he has rarely failed to take advantage of them. In 2021, however, he has taken positions that in the opinion of this writer give him an insurmountable lead over Josh Hawley. Among his most memorable demonstrations were his comments on the rioters who stormed the United States Capitol as Ron and his colleague took refuge in a safe space in the Capitol building. Ron said of his time being sequestered in a safe space in the Capitol that: "I never felt threatened I didn't foresee this. They made up their own standards in terms of incitement. The first question was 'Was this predictable? Was it foreseeable? And the answer was no, it wasn't. I don't know any Trump supporters who would do that."

In an interview in March he said of the rioters that: "I know those were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn't concerned." He went on to say that had the rioters been members of the Black Lives Matter crowd he would have been more concerned for his safety. He did not explain why he joined his colleagues in being taken to a refuge where they were protected from the people showing their love for the country by storming its capitol nor has he explained why more than 400 of them have been criminally indicted for trying to prove their love of country.

Ron's observations about the good intentions of the rioters by themselves, would perhaps not earn him the distinction I have granted him. It is also his expertise on the Covid-19 vaccine. He has repeatedly downplayed the need for people to get vaccinated against the virus. In an interview with Vicky McKenna on April 23 he explained that if a person had the vaccine he or she didn't need to worry about whether anyone else got the vaccine. As he explained: "So if you have a vaccine, quite honestly, what do you care if your neighbor has one or not. I mean, what is it to you?... So why this big push to make sure everybody gets vaccinated?" The more than 570,000 American who have died could explain why taking the vaccine is important. Anthony Fauci responded to Johnson's comments saying they were nonsense. He said we have very effective vaccines and it makes no sense to take the Johnson position that if he's been vaccinated no one else needs to take the vaccine.

Johnson's competitor is Josh Hawley. Josh is better credentialed than Ron. Josh received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his law degree from Yale Law School. Both of his degrees have served him in poor stead proving, as a president of Harvard once said, the mere fact that you graduate from a great university does not mean you are an educated person. On December 30, 2020, Josh announced by means of a trump like tweet, that he would refuse to certify the vote that Joe Biden had been elected president. "I cannot vote to certify the Electoral College results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws." Not content to express his unwillingness to certify the electoral college results, as the rioters gathered on January 6 preparing to launch their attack on the Capitol, Josh walked by them pumping his fist in the air in a gesture of support. What happened next is history.

Commenting on Josh's tweets and conduct, John Danforth, a former Missouri Senator said: "Supporting Josh Hawley. . . was the worst decision I've ever made in my life. He has consciously appealed to the worst. He has attempted to drive us apart and he has undermined public belief in our democracy. And that's great damage." Senator Danforth got that right. Josh Hawley is a national disgrace. So is Ron Johnson. The nut jobs in the House of Representatives have not upstaged the ones in the Senate. The electorate has made sure there are enough to go around.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/anti-corporate-gop/

no lnx twt

how 'anti-corporate rhetoric' captured 'the paranoid, vindictive post-Trump GOP': conservative

Alex Henderson April 27, 2021

Historically speaking, right-wing Republicans are strident defenders of corporate America. Economist Milton Friedman argued that corporations had no obligation to anyone but their shareholders, and the late talk radio host Rush Limbaugh equated anti-corporatism with anti-capitalism — that is, before he flip-flopped and endorsed former President Donald Trump's pseudo-populism. And in 2021, railing against "woke corporations" is a badge of honor for Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and other Trumpian GOP wingnuts. Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter takes an in-depth look at the strident "anti-corporate rhetoric" coming from the far right in an article published by The Bulwark on April 27 — stressing that it underscores the "paranoid, vindictive" nature of the "post-Trump GOP."

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The message of Republicans who have been railing against "woke capitalism," according to Carpenter, is "Screw with our elections…. and we'll screw your trusts, tax cuts, loopholes and credits."

"Republicans try to pretend that their bullying is something more principled — that it's anti-woke corporate populism — but in reality, it's little more than grievance weaponized as policy," Carpenter explains. "But don't laugh. The way things are going, this could be the next grand unifying theory for the GOP."

Carpenter points out that everyone from Hawley to Fox News' Tucker Carlson to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has been lambasting Corporate America for being "woke." Cruz, who once employed Carpenter as his communications director, came up with the hashtag #GoWokeGoBroke.

"The GOP's clash with business over the last few weeks is different in two ways from what came before," Carpenter observes. "First, on the business side, this case is different because the 'activism' in question — the holding back of donations, the criticism — is not related to some matter of policy or party, but rather, to election administration and the preservation of democracy itself. And on the GOP's side, this case is different because it is based solely upon the politics of retaliation."

The Republicans who have been raging against corporations, Carpenter notes, are upset because the companies have acknowledged Joe Biden as the legitimate president of the United States — rejecting Trump's false claims of voter fraud — and spoken out against GOP voter suppression bills.

"Republicans are proposing punitive action in direct response to political speech from companies about the post-election Big Lie, the attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and Georgia's recently enacted voting law," Carpenter observes. "Threatening to use the power of the state to crack down on that speech is repulsive…. This anti-corporate rhetoric has captured the paranoid, vindictive imagination of the post-Trump GOP."

By "post-Trump GOP," Carpenter isn't saying that the former president is no longer influential in his party. Most Republicans are afraid to say one word against him. Rather, Carpenter means "post-Trump White House GOP" or "post-Trump presidency GOP." And she stresses that the GOP, following Trump's presidency, has maintained his mean-spirited nature.

"There is a culture clash underway," Carpenter writes. "Hawley and the rest of the anti-woke crusaders are saying that Corporate America must heed their 'values' or get smashed — just like Hawley's rioters smashed up the Capitol when the Democrats didn't agree with their 'values' about 'election integrity.' It's all the same brute idea. Comply with my party, or get the fist."

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dynamic duo

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/mlb-georgia/

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an 221 franken hawley ~ local paper op ed

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/eric-garland-and-josh-hawley/

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josh Hawley has become 'the face of the Biden resistance': report

Alex Henderson

February 06, 2021

Among many Democrats and Never Trump conservatives, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has become one of the most hated Republicans in the U.S. Senate and is being associated with violent insurrection, extremism and refusing to accept democratic election results. But in Trumpworld and right-wing media, the GOP senator is viewed much more favorably — and journalists Marc Caputo and Burgess Everett, in an article published by Politico on February 4, stress that Hawley has been positioning himself as the face of Trumpist opposition to President Joe Biden's policies.

Before January 6, Hawley announced that he would contest the certification of Biden's Electoral College victory during a joint session of Congress — and in a now-infamous photo taken on January 6 before the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building, Hawley can be seen raising his fist in solidarity with a mob of extremists. A January 9 headline on NBC News' website read, "Sen. Josh Hawley Becomes a Pariah on Capitol Hill." And Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman and Never Trump conservative who hosts "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, has repeatedly slammed Hawley as someone who helped paved the way for the violence of January 6.

Hawley, of course, has condemned that violence, arguing that it's unfair to link him with insurrection when all he wanted to do was make sure the 2020 election had an accurate vote count. And as Caputo and Everett's article explains, Democrats and Never Trump conservatives are not Hawley's target audience. Hawley is a Trumpist all the way.

"The face of the Biden resistance is taking shape in the Senate: Josh Hawley," Caputo and Everett explain. "In a prelude to a widely expected 2024 presidential bid, the Missouri Republican is the only senator to oppose every one of President Joe Biden's cabinet nominees — a distinction sealed Tuesday when he voted against confirming new Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Hawley briefly held up the confirmation of another cabinet official, for the Department of Homeland Security."

The Politico reporters add, "Even before Biden became president, Hawley initiated his bid for the Trump wing of the party by becoming the first senator to announce he would vote against the Electoral College results certifying the new president's win, thrilling the outgoing president and his followers."

Senate Democrats had been pushing for quick floor votes on Biden’s national-security nominees in light of the insur… https://t.co/IQsws9rwKF

— POLITICO (@POLITICO)1611089380.0

Hawley has denied that he plans to run for president in 2024, but according to Caputo and Everett, "No one familiar with presidential politics or the U.S. Senate is taking the 41-year-old at his word."

Veteran GOP strategist Scott Reed told Politico, "Hawley's always been a young man in a hurry. He ran for attorney general on a plank he would serve all four years and (almost) immediately ran for U.S. Senate once he got in office."

Hawley sounds very Trumpian when he rails against "big tech," "elites" and the mainstream media. And according to Reed, "He's clearly laying groundwork for running for president in 2024. There's no way else to explain this behavior."

GOP consultant David Carney spoke to Politico as well, saying that Hawley is "definitely one of the two dozen guys in the mix for president. Why would anybody know a Missouri senator, basically a freshman who's a first-termer? This is what you need to do to break through the clutter. Now, it's a double-edged sword because if you do too much crazy stuff, you're not credible. So, you have to do non-crazy stuff. You can't become a caricature. You can't be the class clown."

Caputo and Everett note that Hawley has become a very polarizing figure.

"His eagerness to ingratiate himself with Trump supporters led to a now infamous January 6 photo of Hawley, outside the Capitol, pumping his fist in support of a throng of demonstrators who later went on to storm the building, vandalize it and temporarily delay the vote," the reporters observe. "Hawley's role in opposing the Electoral College vote resulted in a Senate ethics complaint, and led Simon & Schuster to cancel his book deal, 'The Tyranny of Big Tech,' last month. And former Missouri Sen. John Danforth — who helped propel Hawley to the seat Danforth held decades ago — withdrew his support of the senator, saying his endorsement was 'the worst mistake I ever made.'"

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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comm dr

Facing growing callsfor his resignation or explusion for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley on Monday filed an ethics complaint against the seven Democratic senators who filed an ethics complaint against him and fellow GOP Sen. Ted Cruz last week over their roles in inciting the deadly January 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The Missouri Republican's counter-complaint (pdf) against Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio.) accuses the Democratic senators of filing an "unprecedently frivolous and improper ethics complaint" and demands that the Senate Ethics Committee mete out "discipline" in response.

In a letter to the group of seven Democrats on Monday, Hawley wrote that he was "astounded to see the outrageous personal and partisan attack you labeled an 'ethics complaint.' It is a startling abuse of the ethics process and a direct assault on democratic debate."

Hawley's counter-complaint prompted immediate mockery, with Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) likening the filing to a schoolyard taunt:

Mcconnell republican who incited fascist insurrection against democracy going with the ‘I’m rubber you’re glue’ def… https://t.co/wLaHykELmj

— Bill Pascrell, Jr. (@Bill Pascrell, Jr.)1611582286.0

The Democratic complaint against Hawley and Cruz states that the Republican senators "amplified claims of election fraud that had resulted in threats of violence against state and local officials around the country."

"Cruz and Hawley continued to amplify the claims of fraud that they likely knew to be baseless and that had led to violence earlier that day," the complaint continues. "Violent action provoked by false fraud claims remains a persistent threat."

In the early hours of January 7—shortly after the violent right-wing mob incited by then-President Donald Trump invaded and ransacked the halls of the Capitol Building—Hawley and Cruz voted with several of their Senate GOP colleagues and more than 100 House Republicans to toss out Arizona and Pennsylvania's electoral votes for President Joe Biden, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful.

Hawley's role in the last-ditch Republican attempt to disenfranchise millions of voters drew particularly close attention, in part thanks to the now-infamous photo of the Missouri senator raising his fist in support of the pro-Trump mob just before it stormed the Capitol, resulting in five deaths.

While Hawley now claims he was "never attempting to overturn the election," The Washington Post's Greg Sargent argued last week that the senator's narrative is "just clever parsing: Hawley and others who announced plans to object to Biden's electors plainly helped persuade untold numbers of Americans that the election result might still be overturned (Hawley even subsequently voted to sustain the objections)."

"As long as a large enough constituency still continued believing the election was stolen from Trump, Hawley would be remembered among them as the leading fighter on their behalf," Sargent wrote. "Hawley thought he could harness these impulses. He is now stuck in the monumentally absurd position of condemning the violence without retracting or apologizing for his role in feeding the Big Lie that incited it."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/josh-hawley-2650126937/

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) exhibited "warning signs" of an extremist sympathizer long before he sided with a mob of people who set out to attack the U.S. Capitol, according to a recent report.

The Kansas City Star revealed on Sunday that Hawley has a history of standing up for racists and extremists that stunned his early mentors.

According to the Star, Hawley spoke up for the rights of militia members after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and defended L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman against charges of racism following the trial of O.J. Simpson.

"Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped," Hawley wrote regarding militia groups following the bombing. "Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings."

Hawley also argued in his writings that Fuhrman was unfairly called a racist after his use of racial slurs came to light during the Simpson trial.

"In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as 'racist' are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding," he opined.

"Since the Capitol rampage, Hawley's mentors have disavowed him," the Star report explained. "Donors have demanded refunds. Colleagues have called for his resignation or expulsion. And those who helped guide his career are asking themselves if they missed something essential about their former mentee."

David Kennedy, a Stanford professor who served Hawley's academic adviser, told the paper that he felt "a little bamboozled" after learning the details of the senator's past.

Read the entire report from The Kansas City Star.

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Hawley slammed for railing against 'the muzzling of America' — on the front page of the New York Post

Alex Henderson

January 25, 2021

In an op-ed published by the New York Post on Sunday, January 24, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri complains bitterly about what he claims is "the latest form of cancel culture" in the United States: being lambasted...

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HNN

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/conservative-movement/

One of the challenges in trying to understand what has happened to a conservative movement that has clearly become detached from reality, is that for decades we've heard that someconservatives needed to be taken seriously as intellectuals. These chosen conservatives are often anointed as "serious" due their academic pedigree (usually Ivy Leaguers). But the equating of impressive degrees with intellectual seriousness has an especially bad track record for conservatives. Time and again when it comes to the integrity, honest analysis, and basic grasp of facts that are the basic standards of any "serious" scholar, they have failed.

Let's make a list of today's conservatives who currently get the "serious" designation by virtue of their elite education and for not being Louis Gohmert. In light of last week's conspiracy-driven, right-wing attack on Congress, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz stand out for their unrelenting intellectual dishonesty. Both Hawley (Yale, JD) and Cruz (Princeton BA, Harvard JD) took to the floor of the Senate just hours after right-wing collaborators had vandalized the Capitol and threatened their colleagues out of an unmoored conviction that the 2020 election had been stolen. Multiple recounts, election certifications, and dozens of court cases later, these two Ivy Leaguers shamelessly continued to raise "concerns" about the election's basic fairness. Yet, when Hawley lost his book contract on the dangers of "big tech" with Simon & Schuster over the weekend, the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt expressed a hesitant reservation at a publisher deciding it didn't like the author instead of the manuscript....Up until that point, Simon & Schuster "obviously believed" that Hawley's manuscript had "merit" and Hiatt assumes that it would have made "a useful contribution to public debate on a vital subject."

Especially after Hawley's surreally dark turn last Wednesday night, why should we assume that a "useful contribution" was forthcoming from him on any debate? Hawley had led investigations into Google and Facebook, to be sure. But certainly part of the answer is that Hawley was seen a "serious" conservative. Ana Marie Cox's recent Washington Post article on Ted Cruz meanwhile stands out for her refreshing willingness to suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, Cruz, despite his reputation for smarts, is "devastatingly average." Mimi Swartz has also started to peel the protective cover of seriousness back. Cruz used "his pseudo-intellectualism and his Ivy League pedigree as a cudgel." And now, she adds, "Any decent soul might ask: If you are so smart, how come you are using that fancy education to subvert the Constitution you've purported to love? Shouldn't you have known better?" Assuming that an Ivy League degree translates into conservatives knowing better has been the problem all along. Swartz adds correctly that Cruz "did know better; he just didn't care." And because he was tabbed as a "serious" conservative, he didn't have to.

Senator Tom Cotton (Harvard BA, JD) stood out last Wednesday by not joining his fellow Ivy Leaguers in their objections on the Senate floor; but he'd already shown his flair for dangerous hyperbole and distortion last summer when the New York Times ran the Senator's opinion piece calling for the troops to march on Black Lives Matter protestors. Cotton cherry-picked the most extreme examples of unrest to malign the overwhelmingly peaceful protests happening on the streets. As any scholar will tell you, cherry-picking the evidence is both lazy and untrustworthy. Not a good look for someone posing as a "serious" conservative.

And one could go on. What really connects these elite-educated Senators is precisely their lack of seriousness intellectually. It's not new, however. Going back to the 1960s, alarmed that the conservative movement was falling into the grips of the delusional John Birch Society, William F. Buckley (Yale, BA) was anointed as that generation's "serious" conservative. While Buckley was public intellectual rather than an office-holder, his political influence was considerable and timely for the conservative movement. In particular, Buckley disavowed the Birchers, whose view of the world was rife with conspiracy theories and seething anti-communism. Some Birchers were convinced that Dwight Eisenhower himself was a communist plant, so the bar was pretty low here for a "serious" conservative to clear. The soft bigotry of low expectations, I guess. But Buckley also wrote in 1957 that the white South was right to oppose the civil rights movement because, he wrote, "for the time being, it is the advanced race." This was, he continued, "a fact . . . that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists." While over his long career Buckley did continue to reexamine the state of conservatism – indeed he had grave reservations about the war in Iraq – his entry intothe ranks of "serious" conservatism was by virtue of his patrician background and elite education. Once in, like the "serious" conservatives of today, he had permission to be either wildly wrong or occasionally right.

in between Buckley's heyday and the current crop of Ivy League-right wingers, we had the era of William Bennett and Newt Gingrich in the 1980s and 1990s. Bennett (Williams College BA, University of Texas PhD, Harvard JD) harrumphed his way to becoming the nation's high school principal, or officially, the Secretary of Education, under Ronald Reagan. In the early 1990s he published The Book of Virtues: A Treasure of Great Moral Stories. It started with a quote from Plato's Republic, and invoked Aristotle in the first paragraph, so you knew it was serious. The book included lessons on the importance of saying "please" and a Laura Richards poem, "In which we which learn to sit still." That this was heralded as an "important" book can only be attributed to the fact that Bennett had earned his stripes as a "serious" conservative. Newsweekpractically sighed with gratitude: "Maybe this is just what the country needs."

And then there was Newt Gingrich (PhD, Tulane). After having been denied tenure at West Georgia College, Gingrich eventually won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1978. He injected into the increasingly conservative Republican Party the slashing political style we all recognize now. Democrats were not simply the opponent, they were "radical" and "traitors." Pundits and columnists of the 1990s raised their collective eyebrow over Gingrich's style even as they soberly reminded their readers that Gingrich had a doctorate and had been a college professor. A 1995 New York Times profile noted that he compared himself to, "Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle." But it also noted that while Gingrich "came to congress in 1979 as a 35 year-old history professor," he often used "hyperbole, absolutes and distortion to make his points, and he can be careless with facts and numbers." While perhaps these are just tools of the trade in politics, they make one unserious as a scholar. But Professor Gingrich has dined out for years now on his farcical reputation as a "serious" conservative.

Like Gingrich, today's elite-educated conservative politicians continue to get a pass when it comes to the basic ethical standards of real scholars, especially the moral obligation to be true to the evidence and facts. Ironically, toward the end of that long day of sedition last week, this principle was articulated poignantly by another conservative, one known more for his religion and wealth than his academic credentials. Mitt Romney (Harvard, JD/MBA), looking exhausted and shaken, pleaded with his fellow Republican senators, "The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth." Sadly, Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, et al., will likely continue to spread lies to keep their conservative base shored up. Their seriousness lies in the danger of their politics, but they themselves are not "serious" conservatives.

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121 guk

...n 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $3m attacking the Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that was ultimately won by Hawley, the 41-year-old Yale law graduate with presidential ambitions who has amplified Donald Trump’s baseless lies about election fraud.

That year, it also spent $1.2m to attack the Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who challenged – and then narrowly lost – against Cruz.

Other legislators supported by Club for Growth include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of fellow Republican Liz Cheney after she said she would support impeachment of the president, and Lance Gooden, who accused Pelosi of being just as responsible for last week’s riot as Trump.

Dozens of the Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to challenge the election results even after insurrectionist stormed the Capitol, which led to five deaths, including the murder of a police officer....

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simon shuster pulls book deal, picked up by regnery, which will disttrib via S&S (no comment from latter an 121)

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/josh-hawley-ben-sasse

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) is still angry about his Republican colleague Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recent political stunt in support of President Donald Trump's dangerous coup to challenge the Electoral College certification despite the U.S. Capitol breach that led to the deaths of five people.

On Friday, Jan.8, Sasse appeared on NPR's "Morning Edition" with host Steve Inskeep where he discussed the disturbing series of events that unfolded this week. The Republican lawmaker lambasted Hawley for his attempt to invalidate the outcome of the election on behalf of a disgraced president.

Sasse did not hold back when it came to sharing his brutally honest opinion of the Missouri senator. "Senator Hawley was doing something that was really dumbass, and I have been clear about that in public and in private since long before he announced he was going to do this" Sasse said.

Although Hawley claims to have been on the right side of history, Sasse argues that his actions were nothing more than "a stunt" and a "terrible idea." He also condemned the senator for repeatedly lying to the American public.

He added, "This was a stunt, it was a terrible, terrible idea, and you don't lie to the American people, and that's been going on. The American people have been lied to, chiefly by Donald Trump, and lies have consequences." twt vid]

sasse's latest remarks come just days after his remarks on the Senate floor just hours after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. At the time, Sasse made his sentiments quite clear. Now, he has become the first Republican senator to confirm that he will consider articles of impeachment to remove Trump from office.

"The House, if they come together and have a process, I will definitely consider whatever articles they might move, because as I told you, I believe the president has disregarded his oath of office," Sasse said during a "CBS This Morning" interview.Lawmakers are currently working to determine the next course of action as Inauguration Day approaches.

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persisted w elect coll objection after insurrection, in fact used it as rationale? said penn mail in vote violated state const ( state suprme ct, refused to hear thus he said never decided?

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/josh-hawley-2649774923

Leading Missouri newspaperThe Kansas City Staron Wednesday published an editorial excoriating Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) over the Republican leader's effort to block certification of President-elect Joe Biden's electoral college victory.

Wednesday afternoon, supporters of the president stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. as Congress moved to certify the electoral college vote. The mob forced representatives, senators, congressional reporters and staffers to don gas masks and evacuate the building. One woman on the Capitol grounds was shot in the chest and later died, the Metropolitan Police Department confirmed.

According toThe Kansas City Star, Hawley — who was the first senator to join President Donald Trump's last-ditch attempt to reverse the vote — "deserves an impressive share of the blame for the blood that's been shed" at the nation's Capitol today.

Per the Star:

"No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday's coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year-old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway."

Acknowledging the "tragic, outrageous and devastating" events that transpired Wednesday at the Capitol Building, the editorial board described the attack as "wholly consistent with Trump's call to overturn the election to address nonexistent fraud."

"Those of you who have excused all of the brazen lawlessness of this administration can take a little bit of credit for these events, too," the paper wrote. "They couldn't have done it without you."

The Kansas City Star further accused Hawley "and other Republicans who upheld Trump's con about widespread fraud" of "[knowing] all along that his claims were bogus."

The paper then implored Hawley and other Republicans to "surprise us":

"Now that they've seen exactly where those lies have landed us, decency demands that they try to prevent further violence by making clear that Joe Biden did not win by cheating."

Josh Hawley to delay affirming Biden victory by forcing votes on ... ›
Josh Hawley, who owns a house in Virginia, uses sister's home ›
[deftly handled this](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/us/politics/josh-hawley-republican-party.html

...The%20Onion), calling out each of the 126 with an individualized message. To Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida, "You have been absolutely fearless when stopping the American people from participating in elections;" to Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, "Never again will we allow U.S. citizens to recklessly turn in their ballots;" to Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, "Thank you for bravely standing up to the American voters;" and so on. Each was accompanied by an especially beguiling photo of a maggot.)

Many of those same members and more—some 140—are now lending their names to the smoke-and-mirrors effort in Congress to challenge the votes of the Electoral College, which already has given the election to Joe Biden. The votes of the electors officially are to be announced on Wednesday by Vice President Mike Pence in his capacity as President of the Senate.

In normal times, this would be a mere formality, but Trump and Republicans have decided to turn it into a clumsy attempt at a coup d'etat, ignoring the rule of law and numerous court rulings. They're putting on an act, trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election as a dumbshow of power, all out of fear of Tin Hat Trump's "base" of voters and to preserve a status quo that ignores the diversity of America, cossets the rich and fosters hate, poverty and inequality.

In the House, the leaders of this effort include the feckless Louie Gohmert of Texas, known as "America's craziest and dumbest congressman." Having just had an election lawsuit thrown out by a Federal appeals court on New Year's Day, he went on *Newsmax* suggesting that the alternative now is going to the streets and "being as violent as antifa and BLM."

He's joined in this mad pursuit—simultaneously dumbing down and radicalizing a significant portion of the party and American populace—by the usual suspects, led by Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama and including Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Jody Hice of Georgia and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. New members of the House are piping up, too, including QAnon queen Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

On the Senate side, opposition to finalizing the presidential result is being led by Josh Hawley of Missouri, a man of vaulting ambition who wants to be president so badly he's is willing to violate his sworn oath of office and destroy the Constitution and Bill of Rights to get there, using conspiracy theories and falsehoods to oil his way into the White House as early as 2024.

In a letter published Saturday, eleven other Republican senators and senators-elect demanded an "emergency 10-day audit" of results in "the disputed states,"—in other words, the states Trump is shocked—shocked!—that he lost to Joe Biden, states he assumed would be a cinch for him. They weren't.

Remember their names:

Ted Cruz (Texas)
Ron Johnson (Wisconsin)
James Lankford (Oklahoma)
Steve Daines (Montana)
John Kennedy (Louisiana)
Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee)
Mike Braun (Indiana)
Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming) (new senator)
Roger Marshall (Kansas) (new senator)
Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) (new senator)
Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) (new senator)

Sadly, this Dirty Dozen (including Hawley), a so-called "Sedition Caucus" in the Senate, probably won't be deterred by news of that phone call Trump made to Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, trying to bully him into finding more votes to change the result in the state from Biden to Trump—a conversation much like the one with Ukraine President Zelensky that a year ago got Donald Trump impeached.

Trump's impeachment didn't lead to conviction by the Senate, thanks to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who would brook no new evidence or witnesses, turning the trial into a sham with a predetermined outcome. But McConnell now is opposed to his colleagues' efforts to subvert the Electoral College. Why? Because McConnell is all about the raw power he alone holds in the Senate. He cares for that and little else except, of course, tax cuts for the superrich, holding rules and regulations at bay and getting as many conservative Federal judges approved by the Senate as quickly as he can.

...

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says he has 140 votes

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/republicans-contest-elecotral-college

partner w/ bernie on covid relief?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-election-2649699950

mo brooks tuberville BS

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an 1220

...Newsweek:

A call to boycott Walmart gained traction on social media after the retail giant "mistakenly" issued a tweet calling Republican Senator Josh Hawley a "sore loser" on Wednesday.

The angry protest against one of the nation's largest retailers came after a member of Walmart's social media team insulted Hawley after he tweeted his intention to object to the results of the presidential election when Congress meets on January 6 to count the votes of the Electoral College.

"I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws," Hawley, who is from Missouri, said in a statement posted to Twitter. "And I cannot vote to certify without pointing out the unprecedented effort of mega corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden."

Yeah, that's all bullshit, and he knows it. And his little tantrum will do nothing but force his fellow congressfolks to stay late after school, to everyone's eternal irritation and chagrin. But it will keep him viable as a 2024 presidential candidate. So that's what that's all about....

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aha omg: in post-truth, JOK video dr is SOP // Neg attack ad, strip of context, hype anger, pix bypass brain

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/gop-conspiracy-theories/

it's been happening for decades — but the transformation is now complete.

It started with the Whitewater investigation, went through all of the Benghazi investigations, and ramped up in recent years when Republicans turned around to falsely claim that the investigation into Donald Trump's ties with a Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election was as a "hoax," ignoring the overwhelming evidence of rampant collusion. On Wednesday, the transformation of the GOP from a real political party to a conspiracy theory cult was finally fully completed.

Wednesday was the day Senate Republicans spent hours and a hefty chunk of taxpayer money to bolster the lie that Democrats "stole" the 2020 election, with their only evidence being the say-so of a narcissistic sociopath whose only spoken language is lying. No one, especially no Republican politician, sincerely believes that Trump was the "real" winner of the 2020 election, or that there's any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud or election irregularities of any real importance. As Sen. Gary Peters, D.-Mich., the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declared during his opening remarks, "this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies" and " is a grave threat to the future of our democracy."

Of course, that is the point.

As the committee chair, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and his fellow Republicans understand, their party can no longer win fair elections or campaign on ideas, since the public rejects most policies the GOP stands for. So the party's only recourse is to dish out a steady stream of conspiracy theories meant to distract from the policy debate while leveraging their power to undermine democracy.

As the mainstream news coverage of the hearing dutifully noted, no evidence of voter fraud was presented during Wednesday's hearing and Democrats on the committee repeatedly emphasized that Trump's claims of "fraud" have been presented before the courts dozens of times and thrown out for lack of evidence. Indeed, anyone who actually watched the hearing or read responsible coverage of it would walk away with the impression that the Republicans were a bunch of raving madmen and the Democrats were the only people speaking any sense.

What the Republicans running the hearing understand, however, is that their audience, the Republican base, neither watched the hearing nor consumed the mainstream media coverage of it. Instead, the purpose of the hearing is to generate footage that can be edited, often misleadingly, into clips that are fed into right-wing media sources and circulated through social media.

Evidence is not needed, nor is proof, nor convincing arguments. All that's needed are clips of the Republican senators, looking officious in the trappings of a Senate hearing, railing about "stolen" elections and defending the honor of those who purport to believe that Joe Biden stole the election. And all those poignant and convincing rebuttals from Democrats? Those can be chopped and edited to make the Democrats look "crazy" and like they're unleashing "unhinged" attacks on the noble Republicans.

None of this is about keeping Trump in office.

Senate Republicans not only understand that he lost, but that his coup efforts are failing. Their crusade now is about exploiting his lies of a "rigged" election for their own political purposes. Feeding the GOP base's victim complex and riling them up with conspiracy theories keeps them too busy obsessively hating Democrats to notice that the Republicans have run the country into the ground. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri showcased the strategy perfectly, with a maudlin speech about how actual evidence of a rigged election wasn't the point, because "the constituents back at home" told him "theyfeltthey had been disenfranchised."

"These are normal, reasonable people. These are not crazy people," he said.

For someone actually watching the hearing, this is maddening. The folks Hawley is talking about are just rabid Republicans who back Trump's coup and are willing to stand by outrageous bad faith arguments to defend their belief that certain voters — namely Black voters in big cities — simply shouldn't have the same right vote.

But when Hawley's remarks about are inevitably cut into a video that removes all this context and fed into right-wing disinformation channels, all that audiences will see is Hawley defending his voters as "normal, reasonable people" who are "not crazy". It will read as him defending the honor of conservatives against those elitist, condescending liberals who are always calling them "crazy", instead of what actually happened, which was that Hawley said conservative "feelings" about the election matter more than the fact of who actually won.

Similarly, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky declared during the hearing that the election "in many ways, was stolen." He did not offer evidence, much less proof for this claim, which was a blatant lie. But it doesn't matter. He knows that his statement will be cut into a video and disseminated. He doesn't need evidence, so much as a quick clip with him looking authoritative as he offers this lie without rebuttal.

That's what GOP politics is all about these days. It's not about making a policy case to voters, since Republican politicians know that will never fly. Instead, it's about identity politics and stirring up hate, however ridiculous, against liberals. Hawley is hoping his constituents be so angry at the alleged liberals calling them "crazy" that they focus on getting their revenge by voting Republican, rather than asking hard questions about, say, why the Republican-run Senate has abandoned them to economic devastation during this pandemic.

This is all the Republican Party is these days: A propaganda engine churning out fake "scandals" meant to send their voters down conspiracy theory rabbit holes or stir irrational right-wing grievances. Anything, really, but ever talk about actual policy or governance, which Republican politicians know is territory they will always lose on.

That's why Republicans have fully committed to Trump's lies about the 2020 election. It's not that they care one whit about Trump — I suspect many of them are glad to see him go since he's a miserable person to be around — but because this conspiracy theory is so useful. Republicans can now focus their voters, ideally for four years, on nursing a grudge over losing an election they "should" have won, if only the votes of those meanie Democrats had been thrown in the trash.

After all, what's the alternative?

Republicans know they'd lose a reasonable debate about policy differences with Democrats. So this is what they've turned themselves into: A conspiracy theory cult that is always dashing from one mad lie to another, stirring up the base with nonsense and hoping the voters will never catch onto what a con the whole thing is.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/qanon-trump

amanda

Trump's attempts to steal the election are fruitless. His legal theater is going nowhere, and it's becoming apparent that this is more about shaking down credulous supporters for cash than about actually overturning the election results. Michigan pounded another nail in Trump's coffin Tuesday, when two Republicans who were blocking the vote certification in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, relented in the face of public outrage. It's all over but the grifting, which will likely continue as long as Trump keeps getting people to give him money for his "legal defense" — money that is being funneled through a PAC and likely straight into Trump's pocket.

Yet the Republican establishment is still tiptoeing around Trump, coddling his fragile ego by refusing to admit he lost the election. Some are going a step further, such as South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been exerting pressure on state officials to toss out legally-cast ballots. Why are all these Republicans so afraid of Trump, who will no longer be president in 63 days?

The main reason appears to be that Republicans really are worried about their electoral prospects after Trump. The record Democratic turnout in the 2020 election — President-elect Joe Biden turned out 14 million more voters than Hillary Clinton in 2016 — caused many Republicans down-ballot from Trump to sweat their re-election prospects. Luckily for them, however, Trump also turned out an eye-popping 10 million new voters, which was enough to save the skins of many GOP candidates, even as Trump lost by slender margins in swing states.

Trump is a turnout machine for Republicans, who have been desperately casting around for years now for a way to save their party despite demographic changes that make the Democrats more popular among voters. The question of whether there will be Trumpism after Trump now dogs both Republicans who want to replicate their electoral successes under the reality TV president and Democrats who dearly hope this whole disaster was an anomaly.

"[S]ome conservative opinion leaders are already looking forward to a post-Trump future where the viable things about the 45th president can be neatly separated from his troublesome persona," Ed Kilgore writes for New York.

He cites "a representative fantasy" by right-wing writer Kristin Tate at The Hill, who longs for a "Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder," proposing that candidate might avoid "the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action."

Kilgore explores the various hopes that Republicans have for a "new Trump."Will it be Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Bible-thumper straight out of "The Handmaid's Tale" who has some crossover appeal for his occasional swipes at corporate America (though mostly for its perceived degeneracy)? Or Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who brings the racism and militant neofascism of Trump, but without the gleeful sleaze of a shameless sexual assailant?

These choices expose why Republicans fear that there may be no way to have Trumpism without Trump. Those guys and other contenders are all missing the secret sauce that helped Trump recruit so heavily among non-voters and infrequent voters. And no, it's not his so-called charisma.

What Trump really has going for him is what I call the "crackpot factor." Trump speaks to voters who share the racism and sexism of typical GOP voters, but who often don't vote because they think politics is boring and are awash in conspiracy theories about how the system is "rigged." Those voters saw a kindred spirit in Trump, a man who speaks fluent conspiracy theory and who got his start in politics by promoting claims that Barack Obama wasn't a native-born U.S. citizen.

Before the 2020 election, the team at FiveThirtyEight took a deep dive on the views of people who vote infrequently or not at all. There's a lot of reasons for non-voting, such as a belief it doesn't matter or the obstacles that make voting difficult, but one important factor was a lack of trust in the system. For some voters, especially nonwhite voters or liberal-leaning voters, this is unfortunately a realistic assessment of the situation, where social progress often feels glacial and voting doesn't seem to make much difference.

does not live in his state

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/josh-hawley/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/hunter-biden-story/

comm dr

press freedom advocates and progressive journalists continued to sound the alarm Thursday following moves by both Twitter and Facebook to ban or restrict sharing of controversial New York Post reporting published earlier this week that claimed to uncover new details about the past work of Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, based on emails and documents supposedly found by a computer repairman on an abandoned laptop and then given to Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney.

As the Guardian reports:guk

In an unprecedented step against a major news publication, Twitter blocked users from posting links to the Post story or photos from the unconfirmed report. Users attempting to share the story were shown a notice saying: "We can't complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful." Users clicking or retweeting a link already posted to Twitter are shown a warning the "link may be unsafe."

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, was among those critics Wednesday who said that while the reporting may itself have little or no merit, the decision by Twitter to block users' ability to share the Post's article—and to shut down the right-wing newspaper's main Twitter account—was a counterproductive and troubling move with long-term implications that should not be overlooked.

"This whole thing is an absolute gift to the right wing. It was a garbage story that wasn't going anyway, just showed Hunter doing the corruption we know about," Grim argued in a tweet. "Now the right will use this censorship to further delegitimize the election."

Right on cue late Thurdsay morning, Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texaswere among those charging that Twitter and Facebook, by their actions against the Post's story, were guilty of rigging the election in favor of the Democrats.

Grim's colleague at The Intercept, co-founder Glenn Greenwald, also let loose with his criticisms in a series of tweets Wednesday and again Thursday morning. For his part, in addition to other implications, Greenwald warned that all kinds of crucial reporting based on "unauthorized materials" would be in future jeopardy if such a policy by powerful media platforms was to remain unchallenged.

As one user said in response to Grim's tweet, the policy is not likely to maintain its aim only at reported pieces by right-wing outfits like the NY Post. "Today it was New York Post," the user said, "tomorrow it'll be Jacobin."

Greenwald also condemned self-identified liberals who were applauding Twitter's moves seemingly based on the sole fact that the actions were taken against a right-wing paper that published a story potentially damaging to Democrats. Such applause, he warned, misses the bigger implications of powerful tech corporations in the era of social media having such outsized impact on the public's ability to access information.

"Amazing how liberals are now full-on free market libertarians—let large corporations do whatever they want!—and have no understanding of or interest in monopoly power," Greenwald said.

While Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday came forth to say that the company's handling of the story was "unacceptable," the fault he articulated was not the blocking of content itself but that the "communications around our actions... was not great."

Weighing in on the debate Thursday morning, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who serves the district representing Silicon Valley, said he believed critics like Grim and Greenwald are making valid points but added that he still has questions about where the line should be drawn by platforms like Twitter or Facebook on so-called illegally obtained materials.

In direct response to Khanna's posted concerns and questions, Greenwald wrote: "That one can imagine a case where Facebook or Twitter validly block content—publication of the address or nude photos of a private citizen taken without consent—doesn't justify the broad rule Twitter invoked or repression of this story about the Bidens."

Meanwhile, Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, argued that the problem with Twitter's actions has nothing to do with how the company has communicated its reasoning. Similar to Greenwald, Timm warned such a policy—taken to its logical conclusion—would have woeful impacts on free speech and investigative journalism efforts like the Panama Papers project in 2016 which used internal documents—leaked or hacked or otherwise obtained—that exposed a global network of offshore banking operations and money laundering.

"No one really knows for sure, but there was a lot of speculation that the Panama Papers were hacked and then given to journalists," tweeted Timm. "Should Twitter wipe out all those old links too?"

Timm lamented that Twitter's decision will only serve to increase interest in the story—a dynamic that could be considered a backfire, especially if the nature or content of the reporting is, in fact, dubious.

"Now everyone will be talking about the NY Post story for a week instead of a day," Timmtweeted Wednesday night.

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Experts dismiss 'garbage' Hunter Biden exposé in NY Post: 'Seems ... ›

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https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/video-fake-trump-mass-shooting-twitter-carpe-donktum-meme-898890/

pro-Trump meme-maker Carpe Donktum, a.k.a. Logan Cook, was suspended from Twitter on Monday following controversy over a video originating from a contributor to his website, Meme World. Following outcry from the right, however, Cook was quickly reinstated on the platform, prompting questions about censorship and Twitter’s response to allegations of political bias.

Cook, who describes himself on Twitter as an “Eternally Sarcastic Memesmith specializing in the creation of memes to support President Donald J. Trump,” is the creator of MemeWorld, a pro-Trump meme site. MemeWorld became engulfed in controversy on Monday following a New York Timesreport that a violent July 2018 video created by MemeWorld contributor TheGeekzTeam was screened at the right-wing American Priority Conference last week. The video, which is essentially a compilation of pro-Trump memes, features an edited version of a clip from the movie The Kingsman,which shows President Trump’s face superimposed onto that of actor Colin Firth as he guns down a crowd full of his critics, primarily members of the media. It was posted on the subreddit r/TheDonald last year and received thousands of upvotes.

How a Government Agency's Offbeat Twitter Memes Landed in the Library of Congress

Off-the-Rails President Takes to Twitter in Anti-Semitic and Racist Rant

In a statement to the New York Times,Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary for the White House, said that while President Trump had not seen the clip, “based upon everything he has heard, he strongly condemns this video.” Yet many interpreted the clip as a casual endorsement on behalf of Trump supporters towards violence against the president’s critics. Critics of the clip also accused Trump supporters of hypocrisy in light of their condemnation of a similarly violent image of comedian Kathy Griffin holding what appeared to be a fake version of the president’s decapitated head. (Griffin is also depicted in the video being mutilated with an axe.)

Initially, it was reported that Cook, who has been lauded as a “genius” by the president and visited the White House as part of a “social media summit” last July, was the creator of the video. While Cook denied this on Twitter, he confirmed that a “friend” who contributed to MemeWorld made the clip, and that that person would continue to be listed as a contributor. He also went on to endorse the message behind the video. “The Kingsman video is CLEARLY satirical and the violence depicted is metaphoric,” Cook said in a statement on MemeWorld that he posted on Twitter, accusing the New York Timesof launching an “outrage campaign” against him.“No reasonable person would believe that this video was a call to action, or an endorsement of violence towards the media. The only person that could potentially be ‘incited’ by this video is Donald Trump himself, as the main character of the video is him. THERE IS NO CALL TO ACTION.”

The defense that violent content is sarcastic or intended in jest is common among right-wing memers, says Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communication at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “This is a propaganda technique to avoid detection and removal,” they tell Rolling Stone. “The bottom line is no, maybe they aren’t calling specifically for the president to go out and shoot the media, but these political memes have an indirect effect on our culture, and the political climate, which is already boiling over. In this case, the meme promotes attacks on the media, social movements such as Black Lives Matter, and Trump’s political opponents.”

Shortly after Cook posted his statement, multiple news outlets reported that he had been suspended by Twitter. (The Twitter account for TheGeekzTeam, which posted the video, remains active.) News of the suspension prompted outrage on far-right corners of social media, who argued that Twitter was applying left-wing bias in suspending Cook. Right-wing critics have long accused Twitter of harboring a bias against conservatives,with many on the right arguing that big tech platforms censor or shadow-ban those who espouse conservative views (though there is little evidence to support this claim). Earlier this year, Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation advocating for big tech platforms to undergo an audit investigating allegations of left-wing bias, while many on the left have also accused CEO Jack Dorsey and Twitter of bending over backwards to appease conservatives, in part byrefusing to censor right-wing trending topics and hosting dinners with right-wing leaders.

Approximately half an hour later, Cook’s account was reinstated. In a Periscope, he said that Twitter had decided to suspend him based on an unrelated copyright violationin a Feb. 2018 video, and that the suspension had been reversed. In the Periscope, Cook questioned this reasoning, claiming that the video featured no copyright infringement with the exception of a five-second song clip at the end of the video. In response to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment, a Twitter spokesperson says that “per ourcopyright policy, we respond to valid copyright complaints sent to us by a copyright owner or their authorized representatives.”

Aside from Twitter, many big tech platforms like YouTube have been criticized for keeping the video online. Although YouTube, for instance, prohibits content that incites violence, the platform decided to age-gate the video and display a warning on the grounds that it contained “violence that is clearly fictional,” a spokesperson told CNN.

In a statement sent to Rolling Stone,the activist network CREDO Action decried platforms’ willingness to keep the video up. “Hate speech and violent threats must be taken seriously by YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other big tech companies that are letting these messages run rampant across their platforms,” said CREDO Action campaign manager Jelani Drew-Davi. “The #TrumpVideo needs to be taken down immediately, as it actively promotes violence against specific people and members of the media.”

In This Article: Donald Trump,

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/this-gop-rising-star-pretends-to-be-a-populist-but-he-represents-something-much-darker/

no lnx

This GOP rising star pretends to be a ‘populist’ — but he represents something much darker

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly July 25, 2019

The junior senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley, can sound like he has a lot in common with progressives. His schtick is to advocate for “middle Americans” who have been dismissed by the political elite. For example, here is how he ended his commencement address at The King’s College in New York this summer.

We must rebuild a culture that affirms the dignity of the working man and woman, that protects their way of life and honors their central role in the life of this country. We must rebuild an economy that will offer opportunity for every American worker, whatever degree she may have, wherever he may live—an economy that rewards hard, productive work. For that, after all, is the work that built this country. We must rebuild a democracy run not by the elites, but by the great middle of America, a democracy that allows the working man and woman to realize their God-given ability to govern themselves and help manage the life of his nation.

That is the great task of the hour.

Hawley talks a lot about breaking up monopolies—especially big tech—and emphasizes that this country needs trade policies that benefit workers rather than line the pockets of multi-national corporations. He even hits a theme addressed by Daniel Block here at the Washington Monthly when he says that America must invest “in research and innovation in the heartland of this country, not just in San Francisco and New York.”

But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find that Hawley is nothing more than a smarter, most strategic version of Donald Trump. Just as the president’s campaign fooled a lot of people into thinking he was some kind of economic populist, Hawley is the leading elected official of a movement that calls itself “post-liberal.” Alexander Zaitchick explains.

Behind this weltanschauung is an emergent conservative tendency dubbed “post-liberalism”—a stewing amalgam of long-marginalized ideas on the right that have found new life, like ancient spores released by an earthquake, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. While the lead thinkers of this movement might more accurately be dubbed “pre-liberals,” they claim Hawley as one of their own, and it is through the prism of their crabbed, reactionary political thought that Hawley’s tech crusade is best understood.

Following a speech he gave at the National Conservatism Conference last week, the senator garnered some renewed attention, including a spot with Tucker Carlson, where the man who once described himself as a “trust fund baby” talked with the son of a banker who attended Yale Law School about how liberals are the party of elites.

The reason for the renewed attention is that, in that speech, Hawley attempted to put a more positive face on nationalism.

For years the politics of both Left and Right have been informed by a political consensus that reflects the interests not of the American middle, but of a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities…

[T]hey subscribe to a set of values held by similarelitesin other places: things like the importance of global integration and the danger of national loyalties; the priority of social change over tradition, career over community, and achievement and merit and progress.

Call it the cosmopolitan consensus…

According to the cosmopolitan consensus, globalization is a moral imperative. That’s because our elites distrust patriotism and dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers…The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.

Hawley took some heat from the Jewish community in his home state for his constant references to the “cosmopolitan consensus,” the “cosmopolitan elite,” the “cosmopolitan class,” the “cosmopolitan economy,” and the “cosmopolitan agenda.”

Karen Aroesty, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in St. Louis, said Hawley may not have intended to offend anyone with his speech. But terms like “cosmopolitan” and “globalist” have a sinister history as anti-Semitic dog whistles, and she said Hawley should apologize.

Hawley’s speech, “raised real concern for members of the Jewish community who are and should be acutely sensitive with increased incidents of antisemitism in the US and beyond,” Aroesty said….”For the Senator and all who have a public platform that comes with power, context matters. Words matter.”

In case you are not familiar with the history of the word “cosmopolitan,” Amulya Shankar provides us with some of its history.

It was an “anti-Semitic fighting term,” Volker Ullrich writes in his biography, Hitler: Ascent, “used against the Jews by Nazis and Bolsheviks alike.” Ullrich writes that the Jewish diaspora in Europe was “considered not only cosmopolitan, but also rootless, and in the late 1940s the term became a code word for Jews who insisted on their Jewish identity.”

James Fallows says that Hawley doesn’t get a pass on being ignorant of that history

1) Anyone w a Stanford BA in history and a JD from Yale (like Hawley) knows *exactly* the implications of “cosmopolitan.” https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-08-03/cosmopolitan-dog-whistle-word-once-used-nazi-germany-and-communist-russia …

Again, not “everyone” knows this. But Hawley must.

2) America is great precisely *because* its ideals and embrace are universal. https://twitter.com/BennettJonah/status/1151278921649987584 …

'Cosmopolitan' is a dog whistle word once used in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia

The word “cosmopolitan” has an anti-Semitic history.

pri.org

Jonah Bennett

Sen. Josh Hawley tonight: "It's time we ended this cosmopolitan experiment and recovered the promise of our republic. Let's start with this: America is not going to become the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is not going to become America."

Perhaps you can understand why Tucker Carlson, the favorite television personality of white supremacists, is so taken with Hawley. His emphasis on the word “cosmopolitan” also aligns him the man in the White House who is most responsible for Trump’s xenophobic immigration policies, Steven Miller.

When it comes to solutions offered by Hawley, Ian Millhiser suggests that they are less political than they are cultural.

“We must work to raise up a generation united in a common love for our distinctive achievements as a people,” the senator proclaims. “We must teach our children who we are, without apology.” and we must “honor the claims of kinship and the covenant of marriage.”

America’s enemies, in Hawley’s vision, are not external. They are a fifth column of “cosmopolitans”…who “dislike the common culture left to us by our forbearers.” To thrive, America must become more chauvinistic, more insular, less open to diversity, and more tightly bound by “place and national feeling and religious faith.”

At the very least, Hawley’s vision of the ideal society is inherently segregationist — though not necessarily along racial lines so much as along religious and cultural ones. It entails a world where people stick to their own kind. “America,” Hawley claims, “is not going to become the rest of the world. And the rest of the world is not going to become America.”

Hawley’s speech, in other words, is nothing less than a direct attack on our national motto — E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. For Josh Hawley, America’s youngest senator, our nation’s original sin is its embrace of pluralism.

For Hawley and his colleagues in the post-liberalism movement, Zaitchick writes that they seek to “cage the furies loosed by Donald Trump and put them at the service of an intellectually coherent movement without the baggage of a leader accused by multiple women of rape.” While the president has a way of emotionally triggering the same audience Hawley is targeting, the senator does so with a contrived gravitas, along with the kind of face and voice that is made for television.

It is clear that this young man has big ambitions, and regardless of all of his talk about elitists, he also has the backing of big money donors like the Koch brothers. So keep an eye on this one. No matter how much he mimics the words of economic populists, he’s a nationalist and a theocrat at heart.

Kansas City Star editorial board blasts Missouri Republican for bill aimed at big tech companies: ‘A dangerous assault on the First Amendment’

by Alex Henderson June 20, 2019

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is drawing criticism from both the left and the right for a bill they are stressing would reduce First Amendment protections for large tech companies. And…

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annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was quite a spectacle, with everything from attacks on “the ghost of John McCain” to speakers claiming Democrats want to take your hamburgers and make you eat dog food.

But for newly-minted Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the festivities were dampened slightly.

According to the Kansas City Star, immediately after exiting the stage at CPAC on Friday, Hawley was served with a subpoena:

Elad Gross, a Democratic candidate for attorney general who is suing Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s office, said on Twitter that the Missouri senator was served moments after he completed his appearance.

“We got him,” Gross said. “After more than two weeks of evading service, Senator Josh Hawley was personally served with the subpoena at CPAC.”

Gross wants to depose Hawley over his handling of Missouri’s “Sunshine Law” as attorney general during the 2018 midterm election, when he successfully ran for Senate. Hawley, for his part, is seeking to quash the subpoena, and his spokeswoman Kelli Ford has dismissed it as “a political stunt by a political candidate.”

While Hawley is not directly named as a party to Gross’ lawsuit, he has faced mounting questions about whether he violated the Sunshine Law when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) asked his office for his emails with OnMessage, a group of out-of-state political consultants. At the time, Hawley’s office claimed there were no emails to turn over — but subsequent reporting showed he had in fact emailed OnMessage consultants using a private account he had not disclosed.

Hawley’s consultant operation itself has been the subject of scrutiny and an investigationby Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft. Previous reports suggested that Hawley used these consultants to run the attorney general’s office while he executed his bid for Senate — which would be illegal if taxpayer money mingled with his campaign activities, and at the very least is a betrayal of his election promise not to leverage one office “to get to another.” A New York Times exposé last year revealed this arrangement threw Hawley’s office into chaos, with staffers confused about the chain of command, civil rights litigators quitting, judges blasting Hawley for incompetent, delayed discovery, insufficient vetting for top aides, and millions of dollars of taxpayer money wasted.

It does not appear as if these problems will go away any time soon. Hawley should hold himself accountable, and cooperate.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has been under investigation by the Missouri Secretary of State for allegations that he illegally used taxpayer resources while he was state attorney general to support his Senate campaign. The allegations followed reports that he had farmed out his office to private political consultants to run while he prepared to run for higher office, and potentially mingled staff between both the attorney general’s office and his campaign office.

But it gets worse. Hawley was asked by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) to provide emails between his staff and the consultants, and his office responded that there were none. But on Friday, the Kansas City Star reported that there were, in fact, emails — they just communicated using private accounts and failed to disclose them, a possible violation of Missouri’s sunshine laws:

The decision by Hawley’s AG office to use private email rather than government accounts was first uncovered by The Star, which reported in October that his staff was using the private accounts to communicate with his out-of-state consultants. The Star’s investigation found that Hawley’s campaign consultants Timmy Teepell and Gail Gitcho gave direct guidance and tasks to his taxpayer-funded staff and led meetings during work hours in the state Supreme Court building, where the attorney general’s official office is located.

After that reporting, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, with the help of State Auditor Nicole Galloway, a Democrat, launched an investigation to determine whether Hawley illegally used state resources in the attorney general’s office to support his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

It was in response to Ashcroft’s investigation that the attorney general’s office turned over 85 pages of records shortly before Christmas — documents that confirmed The Star’s reporting.

The emails that Hawley’s office failed to turn over include directions to his taxpayer-funded staff from Teepell from his email account with OnMessage Inc., the D.C. consulting firm that worked with Hawley for both of his campaigns.

Experts suggest that it is not definitive that Hawley’s office violated sunshine laws, but that if they knowingly lied, that would be a violation. “If they tell you right out of the box that we don’t have anything, I view that as a violation of law if that turns out not to be true,” said Mark Johnson, a First Amendment lawyer in Kansas City. “The thing that it didn’t say is whether they found the stuff by looking further and at the time they told you they didn’t have anything they honestly didn’t believe it. That would have to be something that would have to be established.”

Regardless, all of this looks very bad for Hawley, who during his campaign pledged he would never leverage “one office to get to another.” He also was highly critical of Hillary Clinton’s private email server during his 2016 run for attorney general, tweeting, “Sec. Clinton’s outrageous conduct & lack of prosecution shows we need an AG who knows how to win for the rule of law.”

Hawley needs to be held accountable if he has violated state laws — and the public deserves answers.

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ref

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article222900205.html

Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has formally requested that the state’s Democratic auditor investigate allegations that Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley used public resources to support his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway was already scheduled to begin an audit of the attorney general’s office in January. Galloway’s office conducts an audit any time there is a change in a statewide office.

Ashcroft is seeking to enlist Galloway’s subpoena power in an investigation sparked by a complaint filed in early November with the secretary of state’s office by The American Democracy Legal Fund, a liberal group backed by influential Democratic operative David Brock. The group demanded an investigation to determine whether Hawley should be prosecuted for violating a state law barring elected officials from using public funds to support political campaigns.

The secretary of state’s office began its formal investigation into the allegations last week.

New GOP senator-elect suddenly revealed to be under investigation for allegedly using public funds to boost his campaign

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krugman/cody f

...For those of us who have long covered health care policy, it's been a mind-boggling turn of events. Republicans, who have always played a losing hand by arguing for the unpopular and wrongheaded idea that there should be more free-market principles applied in health care, are now literally saying one thing and doing the other.

Many GOP candidates are insisting — vociferously — that they are in favor of protecting people with pre-existing conditions — even while the party does its best to dismantle all the protections for people with pre-existing that are at the core of Obamacare.

"Indeed, 20 Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit trying to eliminate protection for pre-existing conditions, and the Trump administration has declined to oppose the suit, in effect endorsing it," Krugman noted. "Now, you might imagine that Republicans would respond to the manifest unpopularity of their health care position by, you know, actually changing their position. But that would be hopelessly old-fashioned. As I said, what they’ve chosen to do instead is lie, insisting that black is white and up is down."

He continued:

Thus Josh Hawley, as Missouri’s attorney general, is part of that lawsuit against Obamacare’s regulation of insurers; but in his campaign for the Senate, he’s posing as a defender of Americans with pre-existing conditions. Dean Heller, running for re-election to the Senate in Nevada, voted for a bill that would have destroyed Obamacare, including all protection for pre-existing conditions; but he’s misrepresenting himself just like Hawley is.

And they aren’t just lying about their own position. They’re also lying about their opponents’. Incredibly, Republicans have spent the years since passage of the A.C.A. accusing Democrats of wanting to destroy Medicare.

And of course, this week saw the publication of Trump's op-ed attacking Medicare-for-All, in which, as the Washington Post explained, “Almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.”

If they wanted to, Republicans could try to convince the American people that their view that the health insurance industry should be less regulated, not more, is correct. Or they could, in the face of the facts and the wild unpopularity of their position, either change their minds or simply leave the issue alone and focus on other topics they care about.

But they've realized Trump has had a lot of success lying to voters faces while stabbing them in the back. And, to top it off, he gratuitously smears Democrats with obvious falsehoods. That's been his consistent strategy, and now the whole party has adopted it as its own.

Monday, Missouri Attorney General and GOP Senate candidate Josh Hawley told reporters during a campaign stop at a glass plant in Kansas City that, while he opposes the Affordable Care Act, he wants to keep one of its most popular provisions: the provision that insurance companies must issue coverage to anyone regardless of their health.

"I think we ought to require insurance companies to cover folks with pre-existing conditions," Hawley said. "I think we ought to — you mandate it. You say, you have to cover them with pre-existing conditions."

There's just one problem: he is currently part of a lawsuit to eliminate that very provision.

Hawley is a party to Texas v. United States, a suit brought by 20 GOP-controlled states which alleges that essentially the entire individual-market provisions of President Barack Obama's signature health care law — including guaranteed issue to those with pre-existing conditions — are invalid, because the individual mandate has been cut to zero by the Republican tax scam bill.

Most legal experts, on the left and the right, believe the lawsuit makes no sense. But given the case is set to be heard by a judge who has ruled against the ACA before, and could potentially be appealed to judges appointed by President Donald Trump, who has taken the extraordinary step of siding with the suit against his own government, there is no guarantee it will lose — and a victory for Hawley and his fellow Republican attorneys general would put 52 million Americans' coverage at risk.

Hawley made no effort to reconcile his claim to support pre-existing condition coverage with his involvement in a lawsuit to obliterate it. Nor did he explain what sort of "mandate" he is advocating for.

Hawley's opponent, incumbent Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, was one of the original votes for the ACA, and for the protection of pre-existing conditions. She has furiously condemned the lawsuit, and Hawley's involvement in it, co-sponsoring a Senate resolution to oppose it.

A seismic shift in public opinion on the ACA has taken place over the last two years. Voters who once feared and distrusted the most significant health care reform in decades now broadly support the law, and Republicans who spent their careers running on killing it suddenly find their old mantra toxic on the campaign trail.

Environmental groups say the RAGA meeting in July was no different from their own efforts; the Republican attorneys general plotted strategy with like-minded groups. The environmentalists say that they are exercising the free speech RAGA claims to be protecting and that they also have the right to petition government officials and to consult experts. Their meetings were not secret, they add.

“This is much more like collusion,” said Nick Surgey, research director at the Center for Media and Democracy. “These corporations have leverage because they pay into RAGA. And most of their money goes to elections.”...Much of RAGA’s strategy will revolve around television ads in states where the group hopes to make a difference.

The group has booked $3.8 million in broadcast and cable TV advertising time for the final five weeks of the state attorney general campaign in North Carolina, where the Republican nominee, state Sen. Buck Newton, is in a tough race against Democratic state Sen. Josh Stein.

The association has already spent, through its Mountaineers Are Always Free PAC, nearly $2 million on four rounds of ads in West Virginia, where it is highlighting the fight against the Clean Power Plan, which would hurt the state’s coal industry. And it has sent $2 million to Josh Hawley’s campaign for attorney general in Missouri, which allows direct contributions. RAGA plans further spending in those states as well as in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

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