Meh.
My strong intuition is that the answer to that question is no, just because it’s impossible for a Republican politician at this stage of the GOP’s decline to alienate his party by doing the wrong thing. If you want to get the base and most of your colleagues in Congress mad at you enough to hold a grudge, you have to scandalize them by doing the right thing. No worries about that with Hawley. He wrote a column yesterday defending his objection to Biden’s certification last week. Turns out he stood up to the mob by, er, doing exactly what it wanted him to do: [D]emocratic debate is not mob violence. It is in fact how we avoid that violence… As to my specific objection: I objected with regard to Pennsylvania because the state failed to follow its own constitution. The Pennsylvania constitution has been interpreted by the state’s courts for over a century to prohibit mail-in voting, except in clearly stated circumstances. But last year, Pennsylvania politicians adopted universal mail-in voting anyway. To make matters worse, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court then changed the rules for when mail-in ballots could be returned. And when Pennsylvania citizens tried to go to court to object, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the case on procedural grounds, in violation of its own precedent. To this day, no court has found the mail-in voting scheme to be constitutional, or even heard the merits of the case… Some wondered why I stuck with my objection following the violence at the Capitol. The reason is simple: I will not bow to a lawless mob, or allow criminals to drown out the legitimate concerns of my constituents. It takes elephant-sized balls to offer yourself as a hero of democracy after you’ve raised your fist in solidarity with a mob that would end up ransacking Congress and joined a group of objectors who, if successful in blocking Biden, would have wrecked American democracy and left the country unsalvageable. The mob wanted to prevent Biden from becoming president and Hawley did what he could to advance their goal, never mind what that would have meant for the votes cast by a majority of Americans in November. The worst part is how slippery he is in ignoring the months of “stop the steal” propaganda pushed by Trump and his cronies, which go unmentioned in his piece.
