Josh Hawley: Missouri's Out-of-State, Out-of-Touch Senator

 

by Pa Rock

Missouri Citizen Journalist

Josh Hawley's "hometown" newspaper, The Kansas City Star, ran an article a couple of days ago showing that the new senator has already mastered the fire are raising money.  The upstart politician, a lawyer by training, raised an astounding three million dollars in the first three months of this year, over half of which ($1.7 million) were unitemized donations that totaled less than $200 each).   Not too shabby!   Of the donations that were itemized, those over $200, most came from outside of Missouri.  

January, of course, was an awfully good month for Hawley as far as fleecing the rubes was concerned.  He began the month by rushing to be the first senator to announce that he would vote against confirming Joe Biden's victory in the Senate.  Then, on January 6th, the day of that actual vote in the Senate, and the day of the redneck riots at the Capitol, Hawley posed for that iconic fist-in-the-air photo.  Then, when the vote was actually being held, Hawley was sitting in the Senate chamber hastily sending out a fundraising email.  Nothing was going to get in the way of his ambition, not even the preservation of democracy.

Conservative voters have responded bigly to Hawley and sent him cash by the bucketloads, but donations to the headline-grabbing senator from political action committees, a mainstay of Republican politicians, have all but dried up.  Many PACs announced that they would no longer support candidates whom they saw as trying to undermine the presidential election of 2020.  Hallmark, in fact, a major employer in Hawley's "hometown" of Kansas City, asked Senator Hawley to return past donations that they had given him.  (There ought to be a card for that!)

Hawley, a native of Arkansas, grew up in the Kansas City area where his father was a banker and his mother a teacher.  He attended a private religious high school in Kansas City, and later received his undergraduate degree at Stanford in California before moving on to Connecticut where he received his law degree from Yale.   He was a law professor before entering politics.  Hawley's wife Erin is a native of New Mexico and is also a lawyer and a law professor.

The Hawley's currently own a home in Virginia but have no fixed residence in Missouri.  They claim a residence with his sister, a dermatologist who lives in Nixa, Missouri.

Josh Hawley's enormous intake of campaign money (or "speech" as Republicans like to refer to cash) will put him at a huge advantage when and if he runs for re-election to the US Senate in 2024.  Of course, 2024 also happens to be year of the next presidential election, and it is widely assumed that Hawley is far more focused on that race than he is on maintaining his seat in the Senate.   Time will tell which way that fish decides to flop.

Josh still has three more years to mull his future - and who knows what three years will bring.  Heck, in that amount of time he and Erin might even decide to settle in Missouri.

Stranger things have happened!