WWhen Sen. Josh Hawley expressed support for giving $ 2,000 checks to millions of Americans late last year, he said he had received a call from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ camp. What happened next was the formation of one of Capitol Hill’s strangely political foreign couples, while the Missouri Trumpist Republican and Vermont’s Democratic Socialist teamed up to put a lot of public pressure on a shared priority.
This partnership might have continued last week, with another announcement by Hawley that put him in an alliance with Sanders and other progressives: she supports companies with incomes of $ 1 billion or more giving their employees a minimum wage of $ 15 per hour had to pay.
But of course, something important has happened since Hawley and Sanders first teamed up. The Missouri Republican has been a staunch supporter and backer of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that he unfairly lost the 2020 election – theories that fueled the deadly assault on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd on January 6. . In a now infamous photo, Hawley was pictured raising his fist in solidarity with those who gathered outside the Capitol that morning. When the Senate convened after the mob was cleared, Hawley was the only senator to speak out against the College of Electoral certification.
So when Hawley dropped his minimum wage plan on Friday, no public or private efforts to work with progressives followed. There was no follow-up to the fight for $ 2000 checks. Hawley told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he had not received a call from Sanders or any Democratic colleague about the proposal or had spoken to any of them about it. Sanders, meanwhile, declined to say whether he even spoke to Hawley, saying only in response to questions that the Democrats had moved on from an attempt to force companies to pay a $ 15 wage into their COVID account. A source close to Sanders confirmed that the two men did not talk about the proposed amendment to require businesses to pay a minimum wage of $ 15.
‘I do not think [Democrats] especially want to work with anyone.”
– Josh Hawley
Asked if Democrats now want to work with him, Hawley said: “I do not think they want to work with anyone in particular.”
But this does not seem to be the case.
Senator Jon Ossoff – the Democrat from Georgia who won his Senate race the same day, encouraged Hawley the crowd that attacked it – told The Daily Beast on Tuesday: “I’m not going to rule out collaborating with any colleagues. . ” He said he would be willing to consider Hawley’s proposal, adding: “I am encouraged that there is interest among Republican senators to act to raise wages.”
Since Jan. 6, Democrats have been considering how they could work normally again with the more than 150 congressional Republicans who voted to object to the 2020 election results and who spread conspiracies that President Joe Biden somehow did not justify did not win. Relations on the typically nice Capitol Hill were strained, with flares and personal attacks boiling up during committee hearings. Some Democratic lawmakers are now keeping lists of who they can work with and who not, based on the votes cast after the Jan. 6 attack.
But Hawley’s case could be a unique test of the new, tense atmosphere on Capitol Hill. For some Democrats, no other high-profile GOP legislator is related to the January 6 events. Among many, especially activists, Hawley is now a strong persona non grata – a despicable figure who has fully earned himself a career as a pariah. “Josh Hawley has a lot to answer for,” said Joe Sanberg, a California businessman and wage-raising lawyer. “I do not think he is a relevant part of the conversation about the fair fight for the minimum wage for 22 million people earning less than $ 15 an hour.”
But few, if any, occupy the space on the political spectrum that the first-year Republican held out – space that Hawley located to sometimes find a common ground with progressives.
In addition to the lavish $ 2,000 check campaign and the minimum wage proposal, Hawley introduced legislation to require colleges to pay off the debts of students who fail their loans and bills to raise pharmaceutical prices. He was an outspoken critic of Wall Street and America, albeit from a conservative perspective, but in a way that found him occasionally hitting similar notes as some on the left.
For many progressives who tend to agree with some of Hawley’s proposals, vigilance and skepticism have reigned over the ambitious senator’s populist revelations. Many have noted that his populist character is animated by a nationalist, immigration sentiment that they say is xenophobic or even racist; others simply do not take his views too seriously.
“I’ve always been very skeptical about it,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a professor of economics at the University of Utah who focuses on inequality, labor and antitrust issues. “It’s not a matter of making a case with foreign political bedfellows … I certainly believe that the fact that Hawley in a supposed coalition discredits the coalition.”
But other Democrats have welcomed the rise of Republicans who could potentially help them advance the economic policies they have been pursuing for years. It is clear that Sanders previously believed that the collaboration with Hawley could directly provide relief to people hard hit by the pandemic. “We are working on legislation on two parties,” Sanders said in a Senate floor speech in December. “And Senator Hawley has done a very, very good job on this.”
Hawley, meanwhile, was an outspoken critic of the ‘radical left’. But when the partnership with Sanders arose last year, he told reporters, “Hey, like I said, I’ll work with anyone.”
The senators’ efforts to encourage stimulus checks have prompted commentators to raise their eyebrows – at a ‘budding left-right populist alliance’ The Washington Post se Greg Sargent put it this way. Eventually, the bill passed on December 26 fell far short of what the duo demanded, with direct checks of only $ 600, and a stand-alone vote on $ 2,000 checks they later demanded was passed by the Senate’s IDP. leadership blocked. But the full amount will finally come, with the Democratic-controlled Congress sending out $ 1,400 direct payments this month, as part of a new aid plan.
‘He has terrible judgment. He always tries to move to where he thinks political winds are – if you move with political winds without any moral center, it takes you into hurricanes.”
– Joe Sanberg, Advocate for Minimum Wage
The new enlightenment round was still an abstraction when Capitol Hill was broken on January 6, the day the Democrats sealed the majority of the Senate. In the wake of this, seven Senate Democrats called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate a “full version” of Hawley’s role, and that of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), in the events. of the day. The senators argued that they ‘gave legitimacy to the cause of the mob and made future violence more likely’, and said the body should determine whether Republicans violate the rules and therefore deserve punishment – including expulsion. Sanders was not on the letter.
In response, Hawley accused the Democrats of trying to “cancel” him and filed his own complaint with the Ethics Panel over their letter.
The Missouri senator played virtually no role in shaping the COVID aid plan developed after Biden took office. Most Senate Democrats have avoided declaring that they will never work with him again, but no one is in a hurry to work with him.
Hawley nevertheless tried to get a piece of the ongoing stimulus action, especially over the minimum wage, which has become a major focal point of the current aid plan. In addition to proposing a ‘billion dollar’ requirement to pay a wage of $ 15 per hour, Hawley called it the ‘Blue-Collar Bonus’, a tax credit intended to give employees of smaller businesses a way. gives to reach the $ 15 threshold, at government expense. Critics responded that the structure of his plan would provide large loopholes to prevent a fair wage from being paid.
It also explicitly excludes non-citizens and undocumented workers – a non-starter for Democrats, and a sign for progressives like Sanberg that it is impossible to take any good in Hawley’s proposals without also tackling the bad. “He has a terrible judgment. “He always tries to move to where he thinks political winds are – if you move with political winds without any moral center, it takes you into hurricanes,” he said.
But Pete d’Alessandro, a former Sanders Iowa political adviser, said there was sometimes no choice. “Are you not going to work with every senator who thinks we should still look at the election?” he told The Daily Beast. ‘Because there’s more than Hawley to it. If you buy what Congress is supposed to do, if you pull these buckets, there will not be many people to work with at some point. ‘