ÇWhen Senator Josh Hawley expressed his support last year for giving millions of Americans checks for $ 2,000, he said he received a call from Senator Bernie Sanders’ camp. What happened next was the formation of one of the strange strange political couples on Capitol Hill, when Missouri Republican Trumpist and Vermont Socialist Democrat teamed up to make a public effort for a common priority.
That partnership may have continued last week, with another announcement by Hawley that put him in league with Sanders and other progressives: his support to demand that companies with revenues of US $ 1 billion or more pay their workers a minimum wage of US $ 15 an hour.
But of course, something very important has happened since Hawley and Sanders joined forces for the first time. The Missouri Republican was one of the main endorsers and amplifiers of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that he unfairly lost the 2020 election – theories that fueled the deadly attack on the United States Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd in 6 of January. photograph, Hawley was photographed raising his fist in solidarity with those who gathered outside the Capitol that morning. When the Senate met after the crowd was eliminated, Hawley was the only senator to speak out in favor of the objection to the Electoral College certification.
So when Hawley launched his minimum wage plan on Friday, no apparent public or private effort to collaborate with progressives followed. There was no sequel to the $ 2,000 check fight. Hawley told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he did not receive a call from Sanders or any Democratic colleague about the proposal, nor did he speak to any of them about it. Sanders, for his part, declined to say whether he had spoken to Hawley, only saying in response to questions that Democrats stopped trying to force companies to pay a $ 15 salary to their COVID account. A source close to Sanders confirmed that the two men did not speak about the proposed amendment to require companies to pay a minimum wage of $ 15.
“I do not think [Democrats] I particularly want to work with anyone.“
– Josh Hawley
Asked if Democrats would like to work with him now, Hawley said, “I don’t think they want to work with anyone.”
But it doesn’t seem like that.
Senator Jon Ossoff – the Democrat from Georgia who won his run for the Senate on the same day that Hawley encouraged the crowd that attacked him – told The Daily Beast on Tuesday: “I’m not going to rule out working with any colleague.” He said he would be open to considering Hawley’s proposal, adding: “I am encouraged by the interest of Republican senators in taking measures to raise wages.”
Since Jan. 6, Democrats have contemplated how they could work again as normal with the more than 150 Republican members of Congress who voted against the results of the 2020 elections and who spread conspiracies that President Joe Biden somehow did not win fairly. Relationships on Capitol Hill, typically friendly, have been tense, with crises and personal attacks simmering in committee hearings. Some Democratic lawmakers now maintain lists of who they can work with and who they cannot, based on votes that took place after the January 6 attack.
But Hawley’s case could be a unique test of the Capitol’s new tense atmosphere. For some Democrats, no other high-profile Republican legislator is more closely associated with the January 6 events. Among many, particularly activists, Hawley is now a firm persona non grata – a despicable figure who has fully conquered an outcast career. “Josh Hawley has a lot to answer for,” said Joe Sanberg, a California businessman and advocate for wage increases. “I don’t think he’s a relevant part of the conversation about the fair fight for the minimum wage for 22 million people who earn less than $ 15 an hour.”
But few, if any, occupy the space on the political spectrum that the freshman Republican has demarcated – a space that has made Hawley sometimes find common ground with progressives.
In addition to the more flashy $ 2,000 check campaign and the proposed minimum wage, Hawley introduced legislation to require some colleges to pay debts from students who have not paid their loans and bills to control the prices of pharmaceuticals. He has been an outspoken critic of Wall Street and corporate America, albeit from a conservative perspective, but in ways that have occasionally made him hit notes similar to those of some on the left.
For many progressives who may be inclined to agree with some of Hawley’s proposals, caution and skepticism about the ambitious senator’s populist openings prevailed. Many have noted that their type of populism is animated by a nationalist and anti-immigration sentiment that they consider xenophobic or even racist; others just don’t take their postures too seriously.
“I have always been extremely skeptical about this,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a professor of economics at the University of Utah who focuses on issues of inequality, work and antitrust. “It is not a matter of making common cause with strange political comrades … I definitely think that having Hawley in some putative coalition discredits that coalition.”
But other Democrats have welcomed the emergence of Republicans who could potentially help them advance the pro-worker economic policies they have been campaigning for years. Clearly, Sanders previously believed that working with Hawley could help provide direct help to people hard hit by the pandemic. “We are working on bipartisan legislation,” Sanders said in a speech to the Senate plenary in December. “And Senator Hawley did a very, very good job of that.”
Hawley, however, has been a vocal critic of the “radical left”. But when the partnership with Sanders came up last year, he told reporters, “Hey, like I said, I’m going to work with anyone.”
Senators’ efforts at stimulus checks led commentators to raise their eyebrows – in a “nascent left-right populist alliance”, as THE Washington Post’s Greg Sargent put it on. Ultimately, the bill passed on December 26th fell far short of what the pair asked for, with direct checks of just $ 600, and an autonomous plenary vote on checks for $ 2,000 that they later asked for was blocked by leadership of the Republican Party in the Senate. But that total amount will almost certainly come in the end, with Democratic-controlled Congress scheduled to send direct payments of $ 1,400 as part of a new aid plan this month.
“He has a terrible judgment. He’s always trying to get to where he thinks the political winds are – when you’re moving with political winds with no moral center, it takes you right into the hurricanes.“
– Joe Sanberg, defender of the minimum wage
The new round of relief was still an abstraction when the Capitol broke through on January 6, the same day that Democrats sealed the majority in the Senate. Subsequently, seven Democratic senators asked the Senate Ethics Committee to open an investigation to obtain a “complete account” of the role of Hawley, and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), in the day’s events. Arguing that they “lent legitimacy to the crowd’s cause and made future violence more likely,” the senators said the agency would determine whether Republicans violated the rules and therefore deserved punishment – including expulsion. Sanders was not in the letter.
In response, Hawley accused Democrats of trying to “cancel it” and submitted his own complaint to the Ethics panel about the letter.
The Missouri senator came to play virtually no role in formulating the COVID relief plan that 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, however, tried to get some of the stimulus action going on, especially on the minimum wage, which has become the main focus of the current aid plan. In addition to proposing a requirement for “billion dollar” companies to pay $ 15 an hourly wage, Hawley launched what he called a “blue collar bonus”, a tax credit designed to give employees of smaller companies a way to reach the $ 15 threshold, at the expense of the government. Critics responded that the structure of his plan would give companies huge loopholes to avoid paying a fair wage.
It also explicitly excludes noncitizens and undocumented workers – a negative argument for Democrats and a signal for progressives like Sanberg that it is impossible to accept any good in Hawley’s proposals without also assuming evil. “He has a terrible trial. He’s always trying to go where he thinks the political winds are – when you’re moving with political winds with no moral center, it takes you straight into hurricanes, ”he said.
But Pete d’Alessandro, a former political adviser to Sanders in Iowa, said that sometimes there is no choice. “Aren’t you going to work with every senator who thinks we still need to analyze the election?” he told The Daily Beast. “Because there is more to Hawley than that. If you believe in what Congress should do, if you pull those buckets, there won’t be many people to work with at some point. “