Far Away From Home
/The Atlantic ran an article titled “The Knives Come Out for Josh Hawley.” The article contends, briefly, that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s reputation has suffered for his outspoken support of the people who invaded the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Hawley appears less powerful with a Democrat in the white House than he did when a Republican was there.
Most Americans are little interested in Hawley. And they don’t need to be. I would not urge most people to devote their time to reading the 5000 word article. But there is a worthwhile point to be drawn from it.
Since you aren’t going to read the article, let’s rely on a shortcut to give you the gist of it. Below is a “word cloud” of the whole Hawley article. A word cloud counts all the words contained in a block of text and then displays more frequent words in larger text size. Looking at a word could is a rough and imprecise way to measure what is being emphasized and what is not.
What do you see?
It is no surprise that “Hawley” is the largest word in the mix. Of course the name of the man the article is about would appear often (68 times, in fact). And we would expect “conservative” and “senator” and “Washington” to also appear large and central in an article about a conservative US senator.
Senator Josh Hawley
But take note of a word that is not prominent: “Missouri.” It is there, near the bottom. But “Missouri” is not strongly emphasized. And there is an important lesson there.
Hawley was considered a rising star in the Republican party — a young man with a bright future in politics. He is portrayed in the article as a performer on a national stage. He spent his time on national matters, wheedling with other national politicians, and coaxing support from national organizations.
Hawley, however, calculated that his duty was to reflect a GOP base that believes in Trump. “I have heard from people like I’ve never heard before,” he said on Fox News. “They have major, major concerns about the integrity, the fairness of this election. And they expect me to stand up and to raise those concerns.”
No mention there about “the good folks of the great state of Missouri.”
Just before the new year, he announced that he would call on Congress to “launch a full investigation of potential fraud and election irregularities and enact election integrity measures.” The move was classic Hawley. He upstaged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had been imploring senators for weeks to stay away from Electoral College objections.
Students of the Constitution know that control of elections is given to the states. How nay state runs its elections is that state’s business and not a matter for Congress. But Hawley wasn’t content to represent Missouri. Upstaging GOP leader McConnell was not something Missouri voters had elected Hawley to do. It was something he did to draw attention to himself.
Would you agree that Hawley was using the office of US Senator from Missouri to his own advantage? More generally, would you agree that the path to success in American politics at the national level is a matter of getting seen and talked about, with not too much hard work on behalf of the home-state voters?
When the founders established a federal city where the national business would be conducted, they were concerned with the difficulties of travel in the 18th century. And they were concerned that doing business from New York or Philadelphia would offend people from Georgia and South Carolina. They did not anticipate the effect of concentrating government influence in one location.
If they had set out to diminish the voters’ influence on national legislation, they could have done no better than they did — pulling the members of Congress far away from their own constituents and making them gather in one place where corporations and special interests and foreign government lobbyists are close at hand but the voters are hundreds or thousands of miles away.
