Josh hawley

There’s a nickname for House Speaker Mike Johnson shared among some Hill staffers and observers: “Deacon Mike,” a nod to his quiet Southern Baptist religious demeanor. But it also contains the idea that he is a man elevated beyond his expected station, charged with the monumental task of wrangling an extremely thin Republican House majority when he should rightly be in charge of keeping the worship center donuts fresh and the coffee hot.

President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has been one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill. But since his easy re-election last November, he’s also been someone within the Republican party who demanded public commitments from Trump’s nominees on several issues of importance to him – areas of concern that include the influence of big tech, the encroaching role of China and a promise on the part of nominees with little or no record on the abortion issue to support pro-life policies. Senator Hawley spoke to me on the 100th day of Trump’s second presidency about what he’s seeing on tariffs, foreign policy and China.

The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.

Welcome to Thunderdome. When Joe Biden ran for president, he did the same thing he always does when he does anything: invented an obviously fictional story casting himself as a rescuing hero. In his framing of the situation, he — a lifelong politician who has demonstrated nothing but constant ambition for the White House — was a reluctant candidate pulled from the sidelines by the roaming threat of a dangerous Orange Man and his tiki-torch-carrying supporters in Charlottesville. Biden wasn’t running because he’d been trying to get the job for decades; he had the nobler purpose of healing the soul of the nation.

One of the accepted media tales about the Republican Party is that because Donald Trump dominates it politically and stylistically, he also dominates its policymaking process. There are several examples where this hasn’t been true, both during his presidency and after it — but perhaps none more prominent than the TikTok debate on Capitol Hill, which resulted in that modern rarity of a sweeping 352-65 bipartisan vote in the House last week, a vote immediately applauded by populist conservative leaders such as Missouri senator Josh Hawley and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.

Trying to make horseshoe theories of left-right politics happen is harder than it seems. Much as the topic of a political realignment has dominated discussion in Washington since the rise of Donald Trump, there has always been something missing: actual legislation to prove such a realignment is possible as policy. I included this point in my piece on the New Right this spring:  One astute observer of national politics, supportive of the New Right’s goals, told me he believes the real fault is the lack of a single clear legislative victory.

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has admitted to misleading Congress, in an apparent violation of the US Code that can carry a sentence of up to five years to prison. In a Friday news dump filled just hours after the news of former president Donald Trump’s indictment, Granholm confessed to making a false statement before the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee on April 20.  At issue is Granholm telling Senator Josh Hawley that she owns no individual stocks, “whereas I should have said that I did not own any conflicting stocks,” she wrote in a letter shared with E&E News.

Missouri senator Josh Hawley's attempt to pass his "No TikTok on United States Devices Act" resulted in a clash with Kentucky senator Rand Paul that made for a rare moment of actual debate on the Senate floor yesterday. The conservative senators were at odds over whether the government should ban the Chinese social media app. "I have never before heard on this floor a defense of the right to spy," Hawley responded. "I didn’t realize that the First Amendment contained a right to espionage. The senator from Kentucky mentions the Bill of Rights. I must have missed the right of the Chinese government to spy on Americans in our Bill of Rights. Because that’s what we’re talking about here." "The company has bent over backwards to work with our government,” Paul claimed.

Newly minted senator JD Vance of Ohio has wasted no time in extolling the virtues of a soft isolationist foreign policy. In a January 31 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Vance endorsed Donald Trump for president largely because Trump isn't a hawk. A prominent member of the GOP's national conservative wing, Vance has made skepticism of American leadership abroad a centerpiece of his political identity. The senator attacks the “bipartisan foreign policy consensus that has led the country astray many times.” Never mind that the so-called "consensus" only really exists under extreme circumstances, such as after the 9/11 terror attacks. Think of the deep divide between right and left over how to deal with Cuba and Saudi Arabia, for example.

Yesterday's 95-1 vote in the Senate to support the admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO is another in a series of signs the Republican Party is figuring out what it means to have an "America First" foreign policy. The additions of the two nations serve to strengthen the NATO alliance in ways long supported by national security-minded conservatives. But they are also a vindication of the more recent arguments, advanced by Donald Trump, that members of NATO must necessarily meet their obligations in terms of military budgets. Finland and Sweden are not freeloaders — they have advanced militaries and spend a great deal on them, and have a long history of taking the threat of Russian aggression seriously.

Cockburn can't help but chuckle. Last night, the January 6 committee showed video of Senator Josh Hawley running from Capitol rioters, mere hours after he'd infamously given them the thumbs-up. Twitter, in its comedic wisdom, pounced all over the footage, and here's the best of of what one particularly resourceful user, @The_Mal_Gallery, came up with. https://twitter.com/The_Mal_Gallery/status/1550290085882564608?s=20&t=YlAB-XpczT1TiCzbDPmAOQ  https://twitter.com/The_Mal_Gallery/status/1550297459943002112 https://twitter.

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

When Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator from the heights of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his run for president, the press, political pundits, the consultant class and pretty much everyone else viewed it as a high-profile publicity stunt. It was a means for Trump to do what he does best: draw attention to himself. The consensus was that he’d make a splash before fading, making way for Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Despite losing reelection and likely taking down the Senate GOP with him, Trump still remains very popular in the Republican party — particularly among a small but hardcore percentage of the base that chooses presidential nominees during the primary season.

President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was adding 20 new names to his previous list of potential Supreme Court nominees in the event of a vacancy. The new list included three very familiar political names: Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. Those names alone indicated that the president is bucking his 2016 method of allowing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to dictate his judicial choices. After a string of Supreme Court rulings that went against conservatives, who felt spurned that they could not get the outcomes they wanted even with a stacked court, the President is perhaps signaling to his base that he will nominate an avowed social conservative, rather than just a textualist or originalist.

Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement. President Trump was among the first to get it, in his own intuitive, messy way. The ambitious Missouri senator Josh Hawley is likewise woke. So are Attorney General Bill Barr and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. But too many credentialed conservatives don’t get it. What’s the it conservatives need to get?