W.When Senator Josh Hawley expressed his support for giving millions of Americans $ 2,000 checks late last year, he said he got a call from Senator Bernie Sanders’ camp. What happened next was the formation of one of Capitol Hill’s strange political stranger couples, when the Trumpist Republican from Missouri and the Democratic Socialist from Vermont came together to make a very public push for a shared priority.
That partnership could have continued last week, with another announcement from Hawley putting him in competition with Sanders and other progressives: his support for requiring companies with revenues of $ 1 billion or more to provide their employees with a minimum wage of $ 15. pay per hour.
But, of course, something very important has happened since Hawley and Sanders first joined forces. The Missouri Republican was a lead booster and enhancer of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that he unfairly lost the 2020 election – theories that fueled the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd on Jan. 6. The photo depicted Hawley raising his fist in solidarity with those who had gathered outside the Capitol that morning. When the Senate met after the mob was acquitted, Hawley was the only senator to speak out against the Electoral College’s certification.
So when Hawley put forward his minimum wage plan on Friday, no apparent public or private efforts to partner with progressives followed. There was no sequel to the $ 2,000 check battle. Hawley told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he had not received a call from Sanders or any Democratic colleague about the proposal or discussed it with any of them. Sanders, meanwhile, declined to say if he had even spoken to Hawley, only saying in response to inquiries that Democrats had gone from attempting to force companies to pay $ 15 wages into their COVID bill. A source close to Sanders confirmed that the two men did not discuss the proposed change to require companies to pay a minimum wage of $ 15.
I do not think so [Democrats] especially want to work with anyone.
Josh Hawley
Asked if the Democrats wanted to work with him now, Hawley said, “I don’t think they want to work with anyone in particular.”
But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Senator Jon Ossoff – the Georgia Democrat who won his race for the Senate on the same day that Hawley cheered on the crowd it attacked – told The Daily Beast Tuesday, “I’m not ruling out working with colleagues.” He said he would be willing to consider Hawley’s proposal, adding, “I find it encouraging that there is interest among Republican senators in taking action to increase wages.”
Since January 6, Democrats have been pondering how to get back to normal work with the more than 150 congressional Republicans who voted to oppose the 2020 election results and spread conspiracies that President Joe Biden had somehow not won fairly. Relationships on the quintessentially gay Capitol Hill are tense, with flare-ups and personal attacks boiling over during the committee hearings. Some Democratic lawmakers now maintain lists of who they can and cannot work with, based on the votes that took place after the January 6 attack.
But Hawley’s case may be a unique test of the tense new atmosphere on Capitol Hill. For some Democrats, no other high-profile GOP legislator is more associated with the January 6 events. Among many, especially activists, Hawley is now an outspoken persona non grata – a despicable figure who has fully deserved a career as an outcast. “Josh Hawley has a lot to answer,” said Joe Sanberg, a California businessman and supporter of pay rises. “I don’t think he’s a relevant part of the conversation about the just struggle 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 plotted – space that Hawley has sited to find, on occasion, interfaces with progressives.
In addition to the rousing $ 2,000 check campaign and the minimum wage proposal, Hawley has enacted legislation requiring some colleges to pay off the debts of students who fail to honor their loans and bills in order to curb pharmaceutical prices. He was an outspoken critic of Wall Street and corporate America, albeit from a conservative perspective, but in a way that occasionally took the same notes as 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 rapprochement has prevailed. Many have noted that its kind of populism is animated by a nationalist, anti-immigration sentiment that they consider xenophobic or even racist; others just don’t take his views too seriously.
“I’ve always been very skeptical about it,” said Marshall Steinbaum, an economics professor at the University of Utah who focuses on inequality, labor and antitrust issues. “It’s not a matter of making common cause with strange political comrades … I absolutely believe that the fact that Hawley is in an alleged coalition discredits that coalition.”
But other Democrats have welcomed the rise of Republicans who could potentially help them advance the pro-worker economic policies they’ve been campaigning for for years. Clearly, Sanders previously believed that working with Hawley could help provide immediate relief to those hard hit by the pandemic. “We are working on bipartisan legislation,” Sanders said in a speech from the Senate floor in December. “And Senator Hawley has done a very, very good job on this.”
Hawley, meanwhile, is an outspoken critic of the ‘radical left’. But when the collaboration with Sanders started last year, he told reporters, “Hey, like I said, I’ll work with everyone.”
Senators’ efforts on stimulus checks are prompting commentators to raise their eyebrows – at a “ burgeoning left-right populist alliance, ” as The Washington Post Greg Sargent said it. Ultimately, the bill passed on Dec. 26 fell far behind what the duo asked for, with direct checks of just $ 600, and a standalone vote on $ 2,000 checks they later pushed for was blocked by the Senate leadership of the GOP. But that full amount will almost certainly come eventually, with the Democratically-controlled Congress slated to send $ 1,400 direct payments this month as part of a new contingency plan.
He has a terrible judgment. He’s always trying to move to where he thinks political winds are – moving with political winds without any moral center will put you right in hurricanes.
Joe Sanberg, advocate of the minimum wage
The new round of relief was still an abstraction when Capitol Hill was torn on January 6, the day the Democrats sealed the Senate majority. In the aftermath, seven Senate Democrats asked the Senate Committee to open an investigation to get a “ full account ” of Hawley’s role, and that of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), in the day’s events. The senators claimed they had “lent legitimacy to the mob’s cause and made future violence more likely,” the senators said that the body should determine whether the Republicans were breaking the rules and therefore deserving of punishment – including expulsion. Sanders was not on the letter.
In response, Hawley accused the Democrats of “ canceling ” him and filed his own complaint about their letter with the Ethics Panel.
The Missouri senator played virtually no part in shaping the COVID contingency 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 has nonetheless sought to bring in some of the ongoing stimulus action, particularly on minimum wages, which has become a major focus of the current contingency plan. Hawley not only proposed that companies with a ‘billion dollars’ should pay an hourly wage of $ 15, but also introduced what he called the ‘Blue-Collar Bonus’, a tax credit designed to give employees of smaller companies a way to to reach the $ 15. threshold, at the expense of the government. Critics replied that the structure of his plan would create huge loopholes for companies to avoid paying fair wages.
It also explicitly excludes non-citizens and undocumented workers – a non-starter for Democrats, and a sign to progressives like Sanberg that it is impossible to do anything good in Hawley’s proposals without also taking on the bad. ‘He has a terrible judgment. He’s always trying to move to where he thinks the political winds are – if you move with political winds without any moral center, it puts you right in hurricanes, ”he said.
But Pete d’Alessandro, a former top political adviser to Sanders in Iowa, said there is sometimes no choice. “Aren’t you going to work with every senator who thinks we have yet to watch the election?” he told The Daily Beast. ‘Because there’s more than Hawley left over there. If you understand what Congress is supposed to do, if you pull these buckets, there won’t be many people to work with at some point. “