Wwhen Sen. Josh Hawley expressed support late last year for giving checks to millions of $ 2,000 Americans, he said he received a call from Senator Bernie Sanders ’camp. What happened next was the formation of one of Capitol Hill’s weird political political couples, as the Republican Trumpist from Missouri and the Socialist Democrat from Vermont teamed up to make a very public bet to get a shared priority.
This partnership could have continued last week, with another Hawley announcement that put him in touch with Sanders and other progressives: his support for requiring companies with revenues of $ 1 billion or more to pay their workers a minimum hourly wage of $ 15.
But of course, something pretty important has happened since Hawley and Sanders first got together. The Missouri Republican was a reference and amplifier of the theories of the conspiracy of former President Donald Trump according to which he unjustly lost the 2020 elections, theories that fueled the deadly assault on the United States Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd on January 6th. photograph, Hawley was seen raising his fist in solidarity with the congregants that morning in front of the Capitol. When the Senate met after the crowd was cleared, Hawley was the only senator to speak out against opposing Electoral College certification.
Thus, when Hawley unveiled his minimum wage plan on Friday, there were no apparent public or private efforts to collaborate with progressives. There were no sequels in the fight for the $ 2,000 checks. Hawley told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that he had not received any calls from Sanders or any fellow Democrats about the proposal or talked to any of them about it. Sanders, meanwhile, declined to say whether he had even spoken to Hawley, only in response to questions Democrats had gone through in an effort to force companies to pay a $ 15 salary on their COVID bill. A source close to Sanders confirmed that the two men did not talk about the proposed amendment to require companies to pay a minimum wage of $ 15.
“I do not think so [Democrats] particularly I want to work with no one.”
– Josh Hawley
When asked if Democrats wanted to work with him right now, Hawley said, “I don’t think they want to work particularly with anyone.”
But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Senator Jon Ossoff – the Georgia Democrat who won his Senate seat the same day Hawley cheered on the people attacking him – told The Daily Beast on Tuesday: “I will not rule out working with any college.” He said he would be open to considering Hawley’s proposal, adding, “I am encouraged that there is interest among Republican senators in taking steps to raise wages.”
Since Jan. 6, Democrats have been contemplating how they could return to normal work with the more than 150 Republicans in Congress who voted to oppose the 2020 election results and who spread conspiracies because President Joe Biden of some way not to win fairly. Relations on Capitol Hill, typically huge, have been strained, with outbreaks and personal attacks boiling over in committee hearings. Some Democratic lawmakers now keep lists of who they can work with and who they can’t, according to the votes that took place after the Jan. 6 attack.
But Hawley’s case could be a unique testament to the tense new atmosphere on Capitol Hill. For some Democrats, no other high-profile GOP lawmaker is more associated with the January 6 events. Among many, especially activists, Hawley is now firmly persona non grata, a despicable figure who has earned herself a pariah career. “Josh Hawley has a lot to answer for,” said Joe Sanberg, a California businessman and advocate for salary increases. “I don’t think it’s a relevant part of the conversation about the fair fight for the minimum wage of 22 million people earning less than $ 15 an hour.”
But few, if any, occupy the space of the political spectrum shared by the freshman Republican, a space that Hawley has placed to find, at times, common ground with the progressives.
In addition to the magnificent $ 2,000 check campaign and the proposed minimum wage, Hawley has introduced legislation to require some colleges to pay off student debts that default on their loans and bills to curb pharmaceutical prices. He has been a outspoken critic of Wall Street and corporate America, albeit from a conservative perspective, but in ways that found him occasionally playing notes similar to some on the left.
For many progressives who might be inclined to agree with some of Hawley’s proposals, caution and skepticism have prevailed over the populist overtures of the ambitious senator. Many have pointed out that their brand of populism is animated by a nationalist and anti-immigration sentiment that they find xenophobic or even racist; others just don’t take their stances too seriously.
“I’ve always been immensely skeptical of it,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a professor of economics at the University of Utah who focuses on inequality, labor and antitrust issues. “It’s not about making common cause with strange political bedfellows … I definitely consider having Hawley in some supposed coalition discredits that coalition.”
But other Democrats have welcomed the emergence of Republicans who could potentially help them advance the economic policies of workers who have been campaigning for years. Clearly, Sanders previously believed that working with Hawley could help provide direct relief to people affected by the pandemic. “We are working on bipartisan legislation,” Sanders said in a speech from the Senate chamber in December. “And Senator Hawley has done a very, very good job on that.”
Hawley, meanwhile, has been a vocal critic of the “radical left.” But when the partnership with Sanders arose last year, he told reporters, “Hey, like I said, I’ll work with anyone.”
The senators’ efforts in the stimulus checks caused commentators to raise their eyebrows, in a potential “left-right populist alliance,” as He Washington Post Greg Sargent said it. Ultimately, the bill passed on Dec. 26 fell far short of what the duo was asking for, with direct checks of just $ 600 and a separate independent vote on the $ 2,000 checks they pushed for later, it was blocked by the leadership of the Republican Senate Party. But that full amount will almost certainly come, with Congress controlled by Democrats scheduled to send $ 1,400 direct as part of a new relief plan this month.
“He has a terrible judgment. He always tries to move where he thinks there are political winds; when you move with political winds without any moral center, it takes you directly to hurricanes.”
– Joe Sanberg, advocate for the minimum wage
The new round of relief was still an abstraction when Capitol Hill was broken on Jan. 6, the same day Democrats sealed the Senate majority. Seven Senate Democrats then asked the Senate Ethics Committee to open an investigation to get a “full account” of the role of Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the day’s events. Arguing that they had “given legitimacy to the cause of the crowd and made future violence more likely,” the senators said the body will determine whether Republicans violated the rules and therefore deserve punishment, including expulsion. . Sanders was not on the menu.
In response, Hawley accused Democrats of trying to “cancel” him and filed his own complaint to the Ethics panel about his letter.
The Missouri senator played virtually no role in setting up the COVID relief plan that was 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.
However, Hawley has tried to get some of the ongoing stimulus action, especially with regard to the minimum wage, which has become one of the key axes of the current aid plan. In addition to proposing a requirement for “$ 1 billion” companies to pay an hourly wage of $ 15, Hawley deployed what he called the “Blue-Necklace Bonus,” a tax credit intended to give employees ‘Smaller businesses a way to get the $ 15 threshold, at the expense of the government. Critics responded that the structure of their plan would give companies huge loopholes to avoid paying a fair wage.
It also explicitly excludes noncitizens and undocumented workers, a non-initial for Democrats, and a signal to progressives like Sanberg that it is impossible to take anything good from Hawley’s proposals without also assuming the bad. “She is OK. He always tries to move where he thinks the political winds are: when you move with political winds without any moral center, he takes you directly to the hurricanes, ”he said.
But Pete d’Alessandro, Sanders’ former political adviser in Iowa, said sometimes there is no choice. “Won’t you work with all the senators who think we still have to look at the election?” he told The Daily Beast. “Because there’s more to Hawley than that. If they buy what Congress is supposed to do, if they draw these buckets, there won’t be many people to work with at some point.”