Since Josh Hawley was a young man, powerful people have told him he was special. His teachers gave him the “Special R” award, just one feather in the Rockhurst High School valedictorian’s cap of outstandingness. Hawley’s mentor at Stanford, David Kennedy, took a shine to him just weeks into his freshman year, and came to see him as possibly the most gifted student he ever taught. At Yale Law, the dean, Harold Koh, took care to seat the young banker’s son from Missouri beside the state’s former senator John Danforth when Danforth visited. Hawley was working on a book about Theodore Roosevelt; he was fascinated by Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea that American democracy depends on regular people in local communities. It wouldn’t have been polite for Hawley to admit to ambitions such as becoming senator or president. But the glimmer of potential lingered in the air. Here, Danforth thought, is somebody who is really special.
Hawley impressed Chief Justice John Roberts, who favored polished clerks over rabid ideologues. Hawley skipped the kingmaker’s queue in Missouri politics, helped along in his 2016 race for attorney general by conservative power players he knew from his days as a D.C. religious-liberty litigator. He launched a campaign for a U.S. Senate seat nine months after winning the AG job, urged on by Danforth and a coterie of big donors the elder senator had recruited. To all of these people, Hawley represented an opportunity: to promote homegrown talent of the conservative legal movement, to elevate a statesman in the era of Trump, even to shape what conservatism should mean.
Hawley’s combination of conservative politics, news-anchor gravitas, apparent ambition, and Ivy League success made him a target of liberal hatred from the moment he arrived in the Senate. But lately, all that Hawley specialness has attracted a special kind of rage from his former allies in the conservative world, too. On January 6, a violent mob stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of Electoral College votes. Five people died, including a Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick. When news outlets around the world wrote the story of the riot, many illustrated it with a photo of Hawley, raising his fist to a crowd of then-peaceful protesters.
The Missouri senator became the avatar of the congressional insurrection, the one lawmakers started before the mob showed up. Conservatives and liberals alike blamed Hawley for encouraging the Capitol attackers by questioning the legitimacy of the election. . . . “Ted [Cruz] is now just that annoying fly in the room—okay, we’ll swat it eventually,” a Republican campaign operative told me. “Josh is seen as so much worse.”
How did Hawley become the most hated man in Washington? Sometimes, ideological allies turn on one another because they don’t want to admit their collective sins, and they need somebody to blame. Hawley arrived in Washington in 2019 with a claim to glory. He had defeated a Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill; flipped a Senate seat in a terrible election year for Republicans; and done it all before his 40th birthday. But glory doesn’t last long when you’re a junior senator. So Hawley perfected the ultimate Washington attention play: defying GOP orthodoxy.
He started by holding up Donald Trump’s nomination of Neomi Rao, an all but custom-made pick for an influential seat on the D.C. Circuit, citing worries that she supported abortion rights. . . . This became a pattern. Each time Hawley took a stand, he didn’t just earn headlines and attention—he rebelled against one of his mentors. When Roberts voted to overturn Louisiana abortion restrictions this summer, Hawley complained on Twitter. When another Supreme Court decision significantly expanded LGBTQ rights, Hawley launched a thinly veiled attack on the Federalist Society, arguing that religious conservatives had gotten screwed.
For some of Hawley’s onetime allies, these transgressions alone were enough to raise their ire. I asked David McIntosh, a co-founder of the Federalist Society and the president of the Club for Growth, Washington’s most hard-core enforcer of free-market orthodoxy, what he thought of Hawley’s decision to object to the certification of the Electoral College results. “You can come down either way on that,” he said. What was truly unforgivable is that the organization spent $3.1 million on Hawley’s 2018 Senate race, and he’s not the guy the group’s leaders thought they were electing. . . . He sees Hawley’s Electoral College intervention and his turn toward populist economics as outgrowths of the same “misdirected ambition.”
Despite those betrayals, Hawley remained, until the Capitol riot, part of the elite conservative guild. Even those who found his cowboy-style escapades grating believed that he was an outstanding lawyer who revered the Constitution and the rule of law. . . . But after he [Trump] lost to Biden, the elite conservative world reached an unspoken consensus: Undermining the election results was the line not to be crossed. Even Bill Barr, Trump’s once doggedly loyal attorney general, filmed an interview where he all but said that Trump’s actions had “precipitated the riots on the Hill.”
Hawley, however, calculated that his duty was to reflect a GOP base that believes in Trump. . . . The move was classic Hawley. He upstaged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had been imploring senators for weeks to stay away from Electoral College objections. . . . But his larger goal was clear. The Republican Party’s base believed the election had been stolen. And on January 6, he was going to be their voice in the Capitol.
Hawley’s calls for an investigation created an awkward situation for some of his allies. Conservative elites had rolled their eyes when bombastic House members such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Louie Gohmert promoted conspiracy theories and leaned into the hashtag #StoptheSteal. . . . . But when Hawley added his credibility to the false idea that the election had been stolen, that meant serious lawyers and people like McConnell suddenly had to formulate real arguments as to why #StoptheSteal wasn’t just goofy, but wrong.
January 6 did not go as Hawley had planned. Senator James Lankford was in the middle of a decorous speech questioning 2020 voting practices when the mob broke in, moving toward the Senate chamber. Hawley’s staff was shocked—his communications director was alone near the Senate floor when people started running and yelling. For hours, senators hid as their would-be attackers milled among their desks wearing red caps and carrying Trump flags.
The violence was an invitation to humility that Hawley declined. After the senators had returned to their chamber and it was time for him to speak, Hawley thanked law enforcement and denounced the day’s violence, then plowed ahead with his arguments about Pennsylvania’s constitution. He ended up objecting to certifying the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Condemnation was swift and nearly universal. Predictably, Democrats were quick to call for Hawley’s resignation . . . McConnell slapped him down on the floor of the Senate. In Missouri, the disavowals were even more brutal. Danforth wrote an email to another wealthy Hawley supporter, Sam Fox, to apologize for having recruited him to Hawley’s cause. “Everybody makes mistakes,” Fox replied.
People in Hawley’s elite conservative legal world were the most aggrieved. They couldn’t believe he would aid Trump’s bizarre attempt to overturn the election. “The Federalist Society must take a stand to remove anyone from leadership and to take away the legitimacy of our public forums to anyone who participated in this attack on the rule of law and our Constitution.
For all the time that he’s spent arguing over his right to air concerns, Hawley has generally avoided publicly acknowledging that Biden is the legitimately elected president of this country. (A spokesperson told me that he does believe Biden won.) But it’s also possible to see Hawley’s challenge to the 2020 election results as an act of representation, a truer reflection of Trump’s conservative movement than any speech about norms. Perhaps this is why his former allies are so mad. By lending his voice to the conspiracist base, Hawley exposed the lie that sustains the elite conservative world: that those with the right training and pedigree are inherently trustworthy stewards of the rule of law.
Hawley had once offered a redemptive fantasy to a certain kind of conservative—all the benefits of Trump with the polish of a statesman. He was supposed to save elite conservatism from Trump’s crass embrace of conspiracism, trade skepticism, and thuggish assaults on the rule of law, not mimic it. Trump 2.0 is not what Hawley’s backers thought all that specialness was for.
In the days since the attack on the Capitol, Danforth has been performing public penance. “‘Disappointed’ would be an understatement. I feel responsible,” he told me. The former senator did not seem to hate Hawley so much as grieve what he has become. “I feel that he had so much to offer. He could have been a terrific senator, and a terrific leader. Maybe presidential, who knows?” he said. Hawley had potential, intellect, and ability—a conservative version of Pat Moynihan, Danforth likes to say. “But instead of being positive and constructive, he turned out to be destructive.”
1 comment:
What scares me is that the most severe consequence that conventional wisdom and polite discourse imagines will overtake Hawley is loss of the approval and financial support of conservative elites.
From what is already publicly known, he is guilty of crimes. He incited a deadly insurrection. It is probable that what we don't yet know will show that he helped plan the insurrection. It seems likely that use of the military to quell "public disorder" from our side to the steal that Hawley attempted on January 6 was part of the this planning, and that makes all of this treason. It is quite likely that he is guilty of capital crimes.
I am quite content to let the criminal investigations into what happened on January 6 proceed in an orderly fashion. Of course the crimes committed by the foot soldiers and followers who are on camera taking actions that clearly establish their guilt, are the first crimes that are charged and investigated. Only at a later stage, after the communications and potential cooperation of these foot soldiers is secured, do we move on to investigating and charging the leaders.
And in this case, because the leaders are undoubtedly R legislators, or at least R legislator adjacent, it would be completely reasonable for a D president to pay a decent respect to conflict of interest by appointing a special counsel, or for the D trifecta to establish something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to handle R participation in these crimes. And, of course, especially if thousands are eventually found to have committed treason, some sort of amnesty for at least followers should definitely be considered
All those caveats and qualifications aside, what we should be talking about right now in terms of what consequences Hawley should face, should focus on the likelihood that he will face the death penalty, rather than the potential loss of credibility with conservative thinkers, or campaign funding form conservative donors.
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