Josh Hawley circles the drain
Just a few weeks ago, Josh Hawley was being hailed as a rising star in the Republican Party – the same title once bestowed upon people like Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy – so you could probably see a pattern here. A number of people either feared or hoped he would run for president in 2024 on the same MAGA platform as his hero, but the stunt he thought would launch his campaign – trying to overturn a fairly won democratic election – hasn’t exactly done that. In about a 48-hour period, Hawley’s name has become synonymous with sedition, and rather than magically give Trump the second term that everyone was hoping for, they got Trump’s begrudging concession the day after.
Things got even worse for Hawley when Simon & Schuster decided to cancel his upcoming book, making no secret that Hawley’s attacks on the election played a role in their decision. Of course, when Hawley should be concerned about a terrorist attack made on the U.S. Capitol, he’s more concerned about losing his book deal. It’s one thing for him to rant about cancel culture being the reason behind it – flat-out ignoring the publisher’s own statement, but this is an attorney who graduated from Yale and yet his grasp of the Constitution is still roughly at the same place as your typical self-described “constitutional conservative.”
He’s arguing that the publisher is depriving him of his First Amendment rights – hoping to win some Trumpers over by demonstrating both profound ignorance and narcissism in one shot. For this display alone while America is under siege, he should be expelled from the Senate – never mind the fact that he’s responsible for the siege in the first place.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making