Josh Hawley, a U.S. senator from Missouri, wants to be president.
He has not yet announced of what country.
But it obviously is not the United States given his penchant for trying to overthrow the government.
Hawley, given his fondness for racism and overthrowing the U.S. government, is of course better suited to be president of the Confederate States of America.
Unfortunately, he’s 160 years too late for that.
History can be so cruel.
Hawley is a lying, grandstanding, megalomaniac racist who thinks he’s above the law and refuses to admit when he’s wrong.
This may explain his fondness for Donald Trump.
Hawley lacks Trump’s charisma, but, to his credit, he also apparently lacks Trump’s proclivity for sexual misconduct and his defense of anyone who commits sexual offenses.
Hawley, as Missouri’s attorney general, refused to file charges against a sheriff and deputies whose brutish behavior may have contributed to the death of a Black man who had not been charged with committing a crime.
Troy Sanders, a Tennessee motorist, got lost and found himself in rural Missouri. He reportedly asked directions from a gas station attendant and then approached police and reportedly explained he was in distress and needed mental health attention.
Sanders was then put in a jail cell and received a visit from a mental health counselor who recommended that he be held for 96 hours. When the sheriff and deputies tried to move Sanders to a different cell, he resisted and was repeatedly pepper-sprayed and tasered. The sheriff ordered deputies to forcibly remove Sanders, who went into cardiac arrest and died.
Hawley provided the above information during a press conference.
Hawley did not file charges because, he said, the officers who had assaulted Sanders had not intended his death. This does not mean they were not culpable.
Hawley also was aware that the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, was already under investigation by the attorney general’s office and had been charged with 18 criminal counts, including forgery, illegal surveillance, robbery and assault.
In early 2017, Hawley, who was still attorney general, defended the 1995 sentencing of Bobby Bostic, a Black man who was sentenced to 241 years in prison for committing robbery and other crimes as a 16-year-old. Bostic did not kill anyone or rape anyone but was sentenced to nearly 250 years in prison.
Bostic was finally released from prison in March 2023.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64926059
Hawley defended Alabama U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville who said white nationalists were not racists even though they claimed to be white supremacists and publicly espoused racist beliefs.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article277207638.html
Hawley introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate in 2021 that would prohibit public primary and secondary schools from teaching critical race theory, which, he claimed, teaches students that America is a racist nation.
“I think it’s vital that we teach our kids the truth about our country and our history, and not lies about it. Critical Race Theory, this idea that the country was founded on white supremacy, that the country is systematically evil and racist, that just isn’t true.”
https://khqa.com/news/local/sen-hawley-pushes-back-on-teaching-for-critical-race-theory-in-schools
There are a few things wrong with Hawley’s statement.
OK, everything in his statement is wrong.
One, Critical Race Theory is not taught in public primary and secondary schools nor in many colleges or universities. Two, Hawley’s definition of Critical Race Theory is not an accurate definition. It is, in fact, a gross exaggeration of Critical Race Theory. And thirdly, it is a matter of fact that racism has played a significant part in America’s history.
America nearly exterminated one race of people and enslaved another.
Hawley says America was not founded on racism.
Hawley apparently agrees with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who says that slavery was a jobs program that was good for Black people.
https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-accused-being-pro-slavery-due-new-florida-curriculum-1814694
To a racist, there is no racism.
To a traitor, there is no Constitution.
Hawley was the first Republican in the U.S. Senate to challenge the Electoral College results that validated Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
“At the very least,” he said, “Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act.”
Congress had not acted on allegations of widespread voter fraud because, well, there was no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud.
At the point of Hawley’s statement, nearly a hundred federal and state judges had rejected lawsuits challenging the results of Biden’s victory, saying that charges of allegations were meritless.
Bret Baier, one of the news reporters at Fox News – or shall I say the news reporter at Fox News – acknowledged that Biden was the legally elected president.
He criticized Hawley for not being truthful with his constituents by saying Trump won the election.
“Are you trying to say that as of Jan. 20, that President Trump will be president?” Baier asked the Missouri senator.
“Well, Bret, it depends on what happens on Wednesday. It’s why we have the debate,” Hawley replied.
“No, it doesn’t,” the Fox News anchor said, adding:
“The states, by the Constitution, say they certify the election, they did certify it . . . By the Constitution, Congress doesn’t have the right to overturn the certification. At least as most experts read it.”
Hawley then tried to explain that there was a statute to justify his plan.
“It says that we have a vote of certification and that we have the opportunity to debate the results, to certify the results, we count them and then certify. My point is, this is my only opportunity during the process to raise an objection and to be heard,” Hawley said.
“Don’t you have a responsibility to your constituents to tell them that it’s not going to be President Trump as of January 21 as well?” Baier fired back.
On January 4, two days before Congress would meet to certify the results of the presidential election, Hawley, who was in Missouri, tweeted “Antifa scumbags” came to his home in Vienna, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., “and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by ‘leftwing violence.’ “
Fox News, however, reported that Hawley had greatly exaggerated what had happened.
First, Fox News reported, the protestors were not part of the extremist, anti-racist group Antifa, as Hawley claimed, they were part of an organization called ShutDownDC, which held candles and sang during their 40-minute protest outside Hawley’s home and then walked home.
Video showed a man speaking to a small group of protesters outside Hawley’s home. One protestor left a copy of the U.S. Constitution at the family’s door.
A spokesman for the Vienna police said officers were sent to investigate. Police called the protest “peaceful.”
“No one was arrested,” a police spokesman said. “There was no vandalism that we know of.”
https://www.foxnews.com/us/protesters-josh-hawleys-home-peaceful-police
Hawley continued to declare Trump the winner of the election as Trump incited a mob to go to the Capitol.
Is this when Hawley finally realized that he had been aiding and abetting the insurrection like no senator had done since the Confederate states seceded from the republic.
No, during one of the bleakest moments in American, Hawley fist pumped the rioters to show he stood with them.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/josh-hawley-kansas-city-star-electoral-college/index.html
What followed was one of the bleakest days in American history.
Surely, Hawley came to his senses as heavily outnumbered law enforcement officers put their lives on the line to defend the Capitol after thousands of insurrectionists had trashed the Capitol and called for the murder of Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
What did Hawley do then?
Did he condemn the rioters? Or stand with them?
He ran from the Senate floor once the mob entered the building. He then put out a fundraising appeal.
https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article263717898.html
But police reinforcements had finally brought peace to the Capitol, what did Hawley do then?
He rejected the results of the Electoral College.
The Kansas City Star’s editorial board penned a blistering editorial – headlined “Assault on democracy: Sen. Josh Hawley has blood on his hands in Capitol coup attempt.”
“No one other than President Donald Trump himself is more responsible for Wednesday’s coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol than one Joshua David Hawley, the 41-year-old junior senator from Missouri, who put out a fundraising appeal while the siege was underway.
“This, Sen. Hawley, is what law-breaking and destruction look like. This is what mobs do. This is not a protest, but a riot. One woman was shot by Capitol Police in the chaos and died while lawmakers were sheltering in place.
“No longer can it be asked, as George Will did recently of Hawley ‘Has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?’ Hawley’s actions in the last week had such impact that he deserves an impressive share of the blame for the blood that’s been shed.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/533071-hawley-hometown-paper-says-he-has-blood-on-his-hands/
Hawley’s political mentor, former GOP Sen. John Danforth, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said.
Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska issued remarks that that those who lied about the results of the election bore responsibility for the violence. He said, “lies have consequences” and that the attack on the Capitol was “the inevitable and ugly outcome of the President’s addiction to constantly stoking division.”
Sasse voted to affirm the election results.
“I think it’s obvious that the president’s conduct wasn’t merely reckless and destructive. It was a flagrant dereliction of his duty to uphold and defend the Constitution,” Sasse said in an interview Friday with NPR’s Morning Edition.
Sasse criticized Hawley, in particular, for perpetuating the lies and inciting the rioters.
“Sen. Hawley was doing something that was really dumbass” that helped incite the crowd that mobbed the Capitol, Sasse said.
