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Sen. Josh Hawley
Josh Hawley, who is only 43 and has held his seat since only 2019, is the senior United States senator from Missouri. He is a Republican. If you know him from anything, it is probably from that photo of him on January 6 raising his fist in solidarity to a group of insurrectionists outside the U.S. Capitol.
Later that same day, Hawley was caught on video running for his life from the mob. This did not stop him from then using the viral image of his apparent support for January 6 rioters to raise funds, or from continuing to object to the Electoral College certification of President Joe Biden’s election win.
Hawley is no hero. Yet, as the proverb goes, politics makes strange bedfellows.
On October 31, Hawley introduced legislation that, if passed, would prohibit publicly traded corporations from pouring money into politics. Hawley’s bill was framed as a first step toward undoing the widely criticized 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. The Citizens United decision allowed for unprecedented sums of often untraceable corporate money to flow into American elections.
It’s unclear at this point whether Hawley is offering a trick or a treat with this Halloween political spending bill. Many Democrats have long sought a ban on political spending by publicly traded companies, though Hawley, up to this point, has not exactly been a poster child for bipartisanship. Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell panned Hawley’s bill to other influential Republicans, according to multiple sources.
On the same day Hawley introduced his bill aimed at limiting corporate political spending, McConnell lunched with Republican senators to bluntly warn them against signing on to support the proposed legislation. At the meeting, McConnell reportedly read off a list of current senators who were heavily supported by the Senate Leadership Fund and likely owe their seats to the influx of cash provided by this shady super PAC with strong ties to McConnell himself.
Hawley’s name was on McConnell’s list. Hawley benefited from more than $20 million in super PAC money spent to support his 2018 campaign.
It is difficult to know what to make of this rare display of what at first glance appears to be integrity from a Republican senator not previously known for such things.
The picture becomes a little clear when viewed within the context of Hawley’s statement that specifically mentions the “woke, social agendas” of mega-corporations. In addition to wanting to be seen as fighting “woke” corporations (whatever that means), Hawley may also be seeking to punish corporations that previously donated to him and then unsparingly called him out for his decisions to show support for January 6 rioters and to vote to overturn Biden’s election victory.
Hawley’s bill does not address all problematic aspects of the Citizens United decision. For instance, it would not impact the ability of nonprofits and other types of associations that are not publicly traded corporations to spend money on politics without any obligation to disclose their donors.
Still, almost everyone is against virtually unlimited corporate political spending other than the Supreme Court and the congressional lawmakers who directly and vastly benefit from it. If a bill does a good thing, does it matter that it was advanced by a loathsome character for dubious reasons?
Far-right Republicans like Josh Hawley are increasingly generating their campaign war chests through outrage-fueled small-dollar donors, as opposed to going begging from large corporations. Among corporate types, even the conservative ones, there is little appetite for overturning democracy. So, Hawley’s bill, though perhaps hypocritical given where so much of his backing came from previously, might not affect him personally all that much if it becomes law.
Yet, with the backing of a hard-right Republican like Hawley, this bill might have a chance of passing. Only a handful of House Republicans would need to support the measure for it to become law — that is, if Democrats can get over supporting something Hawley introduced for the sake of promoting a broader policy goal.
Stranger things have happened. If this unusual bill does make it into law, 2024 election spending still will not come off as stingy. However, the measure might blunt political spending just enough to leave the $14.4 billion 2020 record intact for the most expensive election in history.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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