But others were frustrated that Hawley pushed the party into a lose-lose choice, and that he did little to explain his actions. When Republican senators called a New Year’s Eve call to discuss the imminent certification process, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, asked Hawley twice to explain his views. The requests were answered with silence; Hawley was not on the line, advisers said, because of a scheduling conflict.
He has not yet said which states he intends to object to. House Republicans are eyeing six – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. But Hawley has so far highlighted only Pennsylvania, where he argues that a law that loosens postal voting restrictions violated the state constitution.
McConnell vehemently discouraged senators from joining the House’s objections, warning that it could put Republicans in a difficult position, especially those running for re-election in 2022. Senator Roy Blunt, Hawley’s senior senator, is among them .
“I think if you have a plan, it must be a plan that has some chance of working,” Blunt told reporters on Sunday, although an aide declined the request for an interview about Hawley.
In the face of Republican criticism, Hawley wrote to colleagues saying that he preferred to have a debate in the Senate floor “so that the entire American people could judge”, rather than “by press release, teleconference or e-mail”.
It is a position that other senators may hesitate to put their colleagues in, but like Trump, Hawley prides himself on not playing by Washington conventions.
He often promotes his education in a small town in western Missouri, investing against coastal elites who, he said, used big business, technology and the media to slowly marginalize workers. Although he has deeply conservative views on the right to abortion and other cultural issues, he speaks freely about the dignity of work and unions in a language often used by the left. When the coronavirus pandemic began to devastate the economy last year, he pushed first for a government-sponsored salary replacement and later for direct payments of $ 2,000 to Americans, allying himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont.