The Awful, Ugly Truth About Josh Hawley
Senate races during off-election cycles (the mid-term cycles between presidential elections) are so often overlooked that moderate and progressive voters often don’t bother voting in them.
I like hard data, and this research from Pew (dating back to 2014, so very much pre-Trump era data) is some of the best that I’ve read about voting stats. Per the article, in 2010, only roughly 37% of eligible voters turned out to vote, which resulted in a Republican-controlled House and Senate (and the birth of the Tea Party, reformed in the House as the so-called “Freedom Caucus”).
In Missouri, we have a particularly pro-right to work (put another way, anti-labor), pro-life, pro-Trump Republican party. The state has suffered economically under this Republican super majority with major cuts to seniors, education, and programs that primarily benefit the poorest Missourians. Our governor recently resigned amidst a series of scandals, enshrining him as one of the least successful governors in state history.
Josh Hawley, our attorney general, has yet to serve a full term in his current job and is still looking to make the leap from inexperienced law enforcement officer to legislator. Coming in on the Trump/Greitens “outsider” wave of utterly inexperienced candidates (like Trump, Greitens had never held public office until he became governor), Hawley held no elected position until he became Missouri’s top prosecutor.
As a legal professional, Hawley has enviable pedigree. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford and his law degree from Yale. He clerked for SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts and spent some time as an associate law professor at the University of Missouri (where his wife is currently a professor). As a prosecutor, he’s never served as a local or regional D.A., never worked inside of any justice department, or really done much of anything outside of clerking and lobbying for conservative religious lobbying organizations and law firms.
If you wanted to sue an employer or an institution for religious discrimination, he’s clearly a guy you’d want to go to, especially if you were Hobby Lobby (he wrote a brief for the 2012 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case; you can probably guess what side he was on). His conservative street cred is one thing, but his actual track record as attorney general is quite another.
Articles You Need to Read Right Now About Hawley
Hawley’s Office is in Turmoil
When you run for national office: you attract national attention. The New York times ran a piece this week about Hawley’s mismanaged and overwhelmed Jefferson City office. (You can read the full article here). The piece highlights his lack of oversight and organizational skills. This is costing real Missourians, a state hovering on the brink of insolvency, millions in legal costs due to poorly-managed litigation:
“The biggest problems in the office under Mr. Hawley have come in the civil litigation division, which defends the state against lawsuits. Only a single litigator who worked under Mr. Hawley’s predecessor is left in the main office in Jefferson City, Missouri’s capital. And the problem extends beyond the transition; eight civil litigation attorneys hired under Mr. Hawley have already left, in a division typically staffed by 25 to 30 lawyers.
Without experienced lawyers, settlement and judgment costs climbed. The state paid $35 million out of its legal expense fund for the 2018 fiscal year, compared with roughly $22 million combined in 2015 and 2016, the last two full fiscal years under the previous attorney general, Chris Koster. (The 2017 fiscal year straddled both administrations.)”
Hawley is Suing to Kill Protections Enshrined in the Affordable Care Act
In case you missed it: in February of this year, Hawley joined 19 other states and signed onto a lawsuit angling to dismantle what remains of the Affordable Care Act.
Hawley’s team has been shuffling through campaign ads and rhetoric which try to assure would-be voters that he “supports” pre-existing conditions, using his son (cynically, I would argue) as a pawn to soften his stance. He can insist all he wants that he “supports” preexisting conditions (as if it were a philosophical position and not language encoded in existing law that allows actual people, me for instance, to purchase affordable insurance they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten).
It’s hard to imagine how, in any way, Hawley supports sick people who need the ACA’s protections, especially people who otherwise would not have been covered before Obama’s signature healthcare law was enacted.
If this lawsuit is successful, and if he doesn’t withdraw from it: sick people insured through the ACA will lose their healthcare coverage, period, the end.
You can read more about Hawley’s promise to “repeal Obamacare” (his words) here. Here’s some more local news coverage about how Hawley, despite his claims, has no real backup plan for protecting the insured if the lawsuit overturns the ACA protections.
Those aren’t the only protections that Hawley sued to end. He helped sue the Trump government to overturn protections for overtime pay, costing over a quarter of a million Missourians over $29M in lost revenue.
Is Hawley Shaking Things Up or Messing Them Up
Hawley used the term “shake up” to describe how he would lead the Missouri’s justice department. There’s little question that he’s shaken things up, but the question is: to what end?
He’s hemorrhaged staff more than his predecessors. His teams have been chastised by judges in court for not providing necessary documents to opposing counsel. He is required by law to live in Jefferson City and only after the St. Louis Post Dispatch report on that issue did he acquire an apartment in the state capital.
Check out more about his spotty tenure here.
Why Promote him to Senate?
Hawley announced his intention to run for senate only 10 months into his current job, one which he probably can’t focus on nearly enough as he campaigns. It’s easy to predict his playbook, one deeply entrenched in conservative rhetoric: he states that the sexual revolution led to a spike in sex trafficking, he’s pro border wall, anti minimum wage increases, and anti anything related to the EPA (his vehemence for the federal government goes so deep, he started the “Federalism” unit as a watchdog against regulations that regulate, among other things, clean air and water).
His office has been plagued by scandal, and he failed to adequately investigate the crimes of the Governor’s office (the Times story above revealed that the AG’s office agreed the then governor’s to limit their interviews with Greitens’ staff to 15 minutes each).
He rages against “coastal elites” while having attended both Stanford and Yale, which are basically two crowning achievements in coastal elitism as far as education is concerned. He rails against career politicians, despite the fact that, at 38, the vast majority of his limited resume includes a Supreme Court clerkship (that’s a federal job, for those of you following along at home), working at a state-run school as a professor, and now cashing a paycheck as a public employee.
We do know that he will give a blank check to a president currently unchecked by anyone in his party because he’s on record as saying he’ll do just that. We don’t have enough knowledge of his experience to rate him as a lawmaker, because he’s never been one. His tenure as a public official is, to put it mildly, scarred. He seems to lack the most basic leadership knowledge to enforce the rule of law he’s happy to crow about while he’s on the campaign trail, even while he’s being accused of super-duper illegal campaign collusion with the NRA. (You can read all about that shady and horrifying lawbreaking here.)
It’s unthinkable that we are stuck with Hawley for the rest of his tenure as Attorney General, but we can do something about that in 2020 (which will include a presidential election and, therefore, greater voter turnout).
If he’s elected to the Senate, his national impact will extend all the way to the 2024, making him even tougher to beat as a conservative incumbent in a conservative state like MO.
Let’s not wait until those midterm elections to deny Hawley a spot in the U.S. Senate. Let’s do it now. Let’s force him to keep the job he ran for only two years ago. Let’s make him finish the term.
And then, please: let’s fire him from that job, too.
