In the weeks since Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley pumped his fist in solidarity with a seditious mob, we do have to admit that he has remained consistent.
He’s stayed true to the radical impulses that he showed even as a kid columnist for his hometown paper in Lexington, Missouri, where he defended those drawn to conspiracy theories decades before fueling them himself.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in which 168 people died, 15-year-old Hawley cautioned readers that not all of Timothy McVeigh’s fellow anti-government militia members should be “stereotyped” as potential domestic terrorists.
During the O.J. Simpson trial, after Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman was outed as a slinger of racial slurs, young Hawley lamented that “derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused.”
A man of many mentors, Hawley’s have lately declared themselves appalled by what’s become of him. After he egged on those rioters — and even after people were killed, still had the sangfroid to try and nullify an election — two of his former sponsors separately told The Star that they felt “bamboozled.”
Of course, the ability to dazzle men who imagine that they see themselves in a smart young striver didn’t begin or end with our 41-year-old junior senator.
But Hawley had burned his bridges with many of those who got him started in politics long before his recent actions, simply by failing to return the calls of early donors and supporters once they had served their purpose.
He hasn’t kept a lot of friends, in or out of politics, as he’s raced through a series of elite institutions and opportunities.
A natural divider, even among social conservatives, he alienated some former allies by questioning whether Neomi Rao was really pro-life enough to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
And he has much more in common than we initially realized with the president who noted that there were “very fine people on both sides” at that march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Maybe Hawley’s strong opposition to rechristening military bases named for Confederate traitors was not purely cynical after all. (Sorry, Ted Cruz, but maybe it’s Hawley who is Donald Trump’s true heir.)
WHINES ON THE FRONT PAGE ABOUT BEING ‘MUZZLED’
Since the attack on the U.S. Capitol on the Feast of the Epiphany, Hawley has also remained consistent in peddling fantasies. Like those in the front-page New York Post op-ed in which he claims that he’s being canceled by “leftist politicians demanding I resign from office for representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.”
No, he’s being pressured to resign for his role in the disinformation campaign that did get people killed, and almost resulted in assassinations in the building where he works.
He’s been consistent, too, in refusing to ever change out of that velvety-soft cloak of victimhood he loves so much. “Now,” he wrote, “corporate America is canceling my political events, because two parties are apparently one too many for their taste.” Not only that, but anyone who wants nothing further to do with Hawley is according to him violating the First Amendment.
He’s consistent in claiming that he’s somehow the object of a “muzzling” — even as he’s doing PR for his next campaign and his next book.
This, of course, while some of the dupes who stormed the U.S. Capitol after being misled by Hawley and other Trump allies about nonexistent election fraud are in court facing criminal charges, as they should be.
But, let’s stay focused on what’s important to Josh Hawley, which is Josh Hawley.
“He gets away with a lot based on his background,” said his Yale Law School classmate Irina D. Manta, now a law professor at Hofstra University. “So much of his life has been based on getting the right people to groom him.”
Manta recently wrote in USA Today about how, after doing little actual work as her co-vice president of their Yale Law chapter of the Federalist Society, Hawley beat her out for president by exploiting a little-known rule that those who had signed up for but had never been active in the society could vote, too.
That he’s more eager to claim credit than to exert himself does not necessarily set him apart in politics. But again and again, those who’ve known him over the years describe him as a skilled cutter of corners.
“He was always unethical,’’ Manta said in an interview. “He always played fast and loose with the truth.”
One of the things he’s lying about now, over and over, in fact, is the law he purports to love.
PENNSYLVANIA BALLOT OBJECTIONS IN BAD FAITH
A top GOP election lawyer laid out in an interview with us why Hawley has to know that everything he is saying about election fraud is false.
“There isn’t any ‘there’ there,” the lawyer said of fraud allegations, in an election in which his party did incredibly well down-ballot, picking up three legislative state chambers and seats in Congress. “I’m a Republican election lawyer,” he said, “and would have been first to say there’s a problem.”
Instead, he saw only “doubt sown by the president on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. When there’s a problem, there’s actual evidence.”
When Hawley and others say they are questioning the constitutionality of the way Pennsylvania changed its election laws, that, too, is misleading, the lawyer said, since the reality is that in 2019, before the pandemic, Republican state lawmakers and the state’s Democratic lawyer agreed to a bunch of legislative reforms that significantly expanded voting by mail.
That law, Act 77, itself stipulates that any challenge to whether the law was in keeping with the state constitution had to be taken to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania within six months. That deadline came and went, and no challenge was ever brought.
Until, that is, more than a year after the law passed, and more significantly, until after ballots had been cast and counted, some Republicans in the state objected to the law to get rid of a result they didn’t like.
“They blew the deadline,” the lawyer said, and then asked the court to “throw out more than half the votes on the basis of something you never challenged before.”
Hawley, of course, continues to pretend he’s involved in a good-faith effort to stand up for the constituents he’s still trying to confuse and for the law he’s still trying to undermine.
“He’s a smart lawyer,” his fellow Republican said. “Everything I just told you he’s well aware of.” But he’s aware, too, that to inherit Trump’s voters in '24, there’s no reason to start telling them the truth they don’t want to hear.
