Josh Hawley
Josh Hawley | |
|---|---|
 Official portrait, 2019 | |
| United States Senator from Missouri | |
| Assumed office January 3, 2019 | |
| Preceded by | Claire McCaskill |
| 42nd Attorney General of Missouri | |
| In office January 9, 2017 – January 3, 2019 | |
| Governor | Eric Greitens Mike Parson |
| Preceded by | Chris Koster |
| Succeeded by | Eric Schmitt |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Joshua David Hawley December 31, 1979 Springdale, Arkansas, U.S. |
| Party | Republican |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 3 |
| Education | Stanford University (BA) Yale University (JD) |
| Signature |  |
| Website | Senate website Campaign website |
Joshua David Hawley (born December 31, 1979) is an American politician and attorney serving as the senior United States senator from Missouri, a seat he has held since 2019. A member of the Republican Party, Hawley served as the 42nd attorney general of Missouri from 2017 to 2019, before defeating two-term incumbent Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in the 2018 election. He was reelected in 2024.
Born in Springdale, Arkansas, to a banker and a teacher, Hawley graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006. After being a law clerk to Judge Michael W. McConnell and Chief Justice John Roberts, he worked as a lawyer, first in private practice from 2008 to 2011 and then for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty from 2011 to 2015. Before being elected Missouri attorney general, he was also an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, and a faculty member of the conservative Blackstone Legal Fellowship.
As Missouri attorney general, Hawley initiated several high-profile lawsuits and investigations, including a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, an investigation into Missouri governor Eric Greitens, and a lawsuit and investigation into companies associated with the opioid epidemic. His political beliefs have been described as populist and socially conservative.[1][2][3][4]
In December 2020, Hawley became the first senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 United States presidential election. He led efforts in the Senate to do so.[5]
Early life and education
Joshua David Hawley was born on December 31, 1979,[6] in Springdale, Arkansas, to banker Ronald Hawley and teacher Virginia Hawley. In 1981, the Hawleys moved to Lexington, Missouri, after Ronald joined a division of Boatmen's Bancshares there.[7][8][9][10][11]
Hawley attended Lexington Middle School and Rockhurst High School, a private Jesuit boys' prep school in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated in 1998 as a valedictorian.[12] According to his middle school principal, Barbara Weibling, several of Hawley's teachers thought "he was probably going to be president one day."[12] While in high school, Hawley regularly wrote columns for his hometown newspaper, The Lexington News, about such topics as the American militia movement following the Oklahoma City bombing, media coverage of Los Angeles Police Department detective Mark Fuhrman, and affirmative action, which he opposed.[12]
Hawley studied history at Stanford University, where his mother was an alumna.[11] He graduated in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa membership.[11][13] He studied under professor David M. Kennedy, who later contributed the foreword to Hawley's book Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness.[14] Kennedy said Hawley stood out in a school "which is overstuffed with overachieving and very talented young people"[12] and called him "arguably the most gifted student I taught in 50 years".[11]
In the summer of 2000, Hawley was an intern at The Heritage Foundation,[15] a conservative think tank. After spending ten months in London teaching at St Paul's School from 2002 to 2003,[8][16] Hawley returned to the U.S. to attend Yale Law School, graduating in 2006 with a Juris Doctor degree.[10][11][14] The Kansas City Star reported that Hawley's classmates regarded him as "politically ambitious and a deeply religious conservative".[12] At Yale, Hawley was articles editor of the Yale Law Journal, editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review, and president of the school's Federalist Society chapter.[14][17]
Early career
Hawley spent two years as a law clerk after law school, clerking first for Judge Michael W. McConnell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit from 2006 to 2007, then for Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court from 2007 to 2008.[8] While at the Supreme Court, Hawley met his future wife, Erin Morrow, now known as Erin Hawley, a fellow Yale Law graduate who was also clerking for Roberts.[14][18][19]
After his clerkships, Hawley worked in private practice as an appellate litigator at the law firm Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) from 2008 to 2011.[8] In 2011, Hawley returned to Missouri and became an associate professor at the University of Missouri Law School, where he taught constitutional law, constitutional theory, legislation, and torts.[8][20] From 2011 to 2015 Hawley was with Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.[21] At Becket, he wrote briefs and gave legal advice in the Supreme Court cases Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, decided in 2012, and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, decided in 2014.[22][23]
2016 Missouri attorney general campaign
Hawley launched his campaign for attorney general of Missouri on July 23, 2015.[24] Of the $9.2 million raised for the campaign, $4.4 million was provided by David Humphreys, CEO of Joplin-based Tamko Building Products.[25] On August 2, 2016, Hawley defeated Kurt Schaefer in the Republican primary with 64% of the vote.[26] He defeated Democrat Teresa Hensley in the general election with 58.5% of the vote.[26] During the campaign, Hawley criticized "career politicians" who were "climbing the ladder" from one position to another. This was later a focus of bipartisan criticism of him because he ran for the U.S. Senate only two years later.[27] When elected, Hawley became the state's first Republican attorney general since 1988.
Attorney general of Missouri (2017–2019)
Hawley was sworn in as attorney general on January 9, 2017, by Missouri Supreme Court chief justice Patricia Breckenridge.[28][29]
Death of Tory Sanders
On May 5, 2017, Tory Sanders, a Black motorist who had taken a wrong turn in Tennessee, ran out of gas in rural Mississippi County, Missouri. He had gotten lost and was confused; he asked a gas station attendant to call the police for assistance. Deputies responded and put him in protective custody in the county jail. His mental condition deteriorated further and he resisted when they tried to move him to a medical facility. Sheriff Cory Hutcheson led jail staff who repeatedly pepper-sprayed and Tasered Sanders throughout the day. Hutcheson eventually led a team of cops and jailers into the cell and swarmed Sanders, who went into cardiac arrest and died.[30]
In an unrelated case, Hutcheson pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2019 to six months in federal prison for unrelated crimes: wire fraud and identity theft related to illegal tracking of some 200 private cellphone users. He resigned after his plea and can no longer work as a law enforcement officer.[31]
In 2017 Hawley determined that those who had assaulted Sanders had not intended his death, and did not file murder charges. Black lawmakers and the NAACP's Missouri chapter criticized Hawley for his handling of Sanders's death and failure to prosecute, believing he did not find justice for Sanders.[32] No one could be held criminally accountable for Sanders's death.[33][30]
Following the murder of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis police in 2020, interest in Sanders's case revived. Activists hoped that Eric Schmitt, the new state attorney general, would file charges.[32] In February 2021, he chose not to do so.[31] The three-year statute of limitations had expired for manslaughter, and he said he believed there was insufficient evidence to support charges of first- or second-degree murder.[31]
Opioid manufacturer lawsuit and investigation
In June 2017, Hawley announced that Missouri had filed suit in state court against three major drug companies—Endo Health Solutions, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Purdue Pharma—for allegedly hiding the danger of prescription painkillers and contributing to the opioid epidemic. The state argued that the companies violated Missouri consumer protection and Medicaid laws.[34][35] The damages sought were among the largest in state history, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.[34]
In August 2017, Hawley announced that he had opened an investigation into seven opioid distributors: Allergan, Depomed, Insys, Mallinckrodt, Mylan, Pfizer, and Teva Pharmaceuticals.[36] In October 2017, he expanded his investigation into three additional pharmaceutical companies—AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson Corporation—that are the three largest U.S. opioid distributors.[37]
Rape kit audit
On October 29, 2017, the Columbia Missourian published an exposé describing a large backlog of untested rape kits in Missouri and the state's failure to address the backlog, although rape survivors and law enforcement agencies had urged such actions.[38] On November 29, Hawley announced a statewide audit of the number of untested rape kits.[39] The results were made public in May 2018; there were nearly 5,000 such kits.[39] In August 2018, One Nation, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit connected to Republican campaign strategist Karl Rove, ran commercials giving Hawley credit for identifying the problem, a claim The St. Louis Post-Dispatch labeled misleading, because he had been responding to issues raised by law enforcement, survivors and advocates, rather than originating an investigation.[38]
In September 2020, his successor, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, announced that of the 16 rape kit tests that were consequently uploaded to the national DNA database, 11 revealed the names of known criminals, and were referred for possible prosecution.[40]
Investigations into tech companies
In November 2017, Hawley opened an investigation into whether Google's business practices violated state consumer protection and anti-trust laws. The investigation was focused on what data Google collects from users of its services, how it uses content providers' content, and whether its search engine results are biased.[41][42]
In April 2018, after the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Hawley announced that his office had issued a subpoena to Facebook related to how the company shares its users' data. The investigation sought to determine whether Facebook properly handles its users' sensitive data or collects more data than it publicly admits.[43]
Greitens scandals
In December 2017, The Kansas City Star reported that Missouri's Republican Governor Eric Greitens and senior members of his staff used Confide, a messaging app that erases texts after they have been read, on their personal phones. They were accused by government transparency advocates of subverting Missouri's open records laws.[44] Hawley initially declined to prosecute, citing a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the attorney general cannot simultaneously represent a state officer and take legal action against that officer. On December 20, 2017, he announced his office would investigate after all, saying that his clients are "first and foremost the citizens of the state".[45][46][47]
Hawley said text messages between government employees, whether on private or government-issued phones, should be treated the same as emails: a determination must be made as to whether the text is a public record, and if so, whether it is subject to disclosure.[45] His investigation found that no laws had been broken.[48] In March 2018, six former Missouri attorneys released a letter criticizing the investigation as "half-hearted". Hawley's spokesperson called the letter a partisan attack.[48]
When allegations emerged in January 2018 that Greitens had blackmailed a woman with whom he was having an affair, Hawley's office said it did not have jurisdiction to look into the matter. St. Louis circuit attorney Kimberly Gardner opened an investigation into the allegations.[49][50] In April, after a special investigative committee of the Missouri House of Representatives released a report on the allegations, Hawley called on Greitens to resign immediately.[51] The next week, Gardner filed a second felony charge against Greitens, alleging that his campaign had taken donor and email lists from The Mission Continues, a veterans' charity that Greitens founded in 2007, and used the information to raise funds for his 2016 campaign for governor.[52]
Hawley announced an investigation based on the new felony charges.[53][54] On April 30, he announced that his office had launched an investigation into possible violations of the state's Sunshine laws after allegations that a state employee had managed a social media account on Greitens's behalf.[55] The same day, Greitens asked a judge to issue a restraining order blocking Hawley from investigating him.[56]
On May 29, 2018, Greitens announced that he would resign effective June 1, 2018. Hawley issued a statement approving of the decision.[57]
Affordable Care Act lawsuit
In February 2018, Hawley joined 20 other Republican-led states in a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.[58] Though some argued the lawsuit would eliminate insurance protections for people with preexisting conditions, Hawley said he supported protections for preexisting conditions.[59] In September 2018, amid criticism from Hawley's U.S. Senate opponent Claire McCaskill about the lawsuit's effect on coverage of preexisting conditions, Hawley's office said that he supported protections for individuals with preexisting conditions.[59] Hawley later published an op-ed in the Springfield News-Leader, explaining that he supported protecting those with preexisting conditions by creating a taxpayer subsidy to reimburse insurance companies for covering these high-cost patients.[60]
In December 2018, Judge Reed O'Connor ruled the entirety of the ACA unconstitutional. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit did not agree that the entire law should be voided.[61][62][63]
Sentencing of Bobby Bostic
In March 2018, Hawley defended the 1995 sentencing of Bobby Bostic to 241 years in prison. Bostic had been 16 years old when he committed robbery and the other crimes for which he was later convicted and harshly sentenced. He and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had attempted to appeal his sentence to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying it violated the court's ruling in Graham v. Florida, which held that juveniles could not be sentenced to life imprisonment for charges lesser than homicide.[64]
In a Supreme Court filing, Hawley argued that Bostic's sentencing did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and that Graham v. Florida applied only to a sentence for one crime.[65] The judge who had sentenced Bostic said she had come to believe the sentence was too harsh, and asked to join an amicus brief filed by 26 former judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officials.[64][65] On April 24, 2018, the Supreme Court rejected Bostic's appeal.[64]
State staff used for campaign and Sunshine Law violations
On November 14, 2022, Cole County Circuit Court Judge Jon Beetem ruled that Hawley violated Missouri's open records law during his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign by withholding emails between his out-of-state political consultants and his taxpayer-funded staff. Beetem granted summary judgment, ruled Hawley's office had "knowingly and purposefully" violated Missouri's Sunshine Law, and fined the AG's office $12,000. When Hawley was AG, his staff used private email instead of government accounts to communicate with his political consultants. Those consultants illegally gave direct guidance and tasks to Hawley's staff and led meetings during office hours in the Missouri Supreme Court building.[66] Beetem wrote, "There is no genuine dispute that the AGO knew the Sunshine Law required it to produce responsive documents in its possession when it received DSCC's two Sunshine Law requests, but made the conscious decision not to do so."[66]
In 2023, the court demanded that the state pay more than $240,000 for the case's legal fees. An attorney on the case declared that Hawley should pay from the proceeds of his book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs rather than "sticking taxpayers".[67]
Catholic clergy investigation
In August 2018, after a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report detailing over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics in that state, and protests in St. Louis by survivors of clergy sexual abuse in Missouri, Hawley announced that he would begin an investigation into potential cases of abuse in Missouri.[68] Missouri was one of several states to launch such investigations in the wake of the Pennsylvania report; the attorneys general of Illinois, Nebraska, and New Mexico began similar inquiries.[69] Hawley promised that he would investigate any crimes, publish a report for the public, and refer potential cases to local law enforcement officials. Archbishop of St. Louis Robert James Carlson pledged cooperation with the inquiry.[68][70]
After the investigation, which was inherited by Hawley's successor, Eric Schmitt, the attorney general referred 12 former priests in September 2019 for prosecution based on charges of sexual abuse of minors.[71]
U.S. Senate (2019–present)
Elections
2018
In August 2017, Hawley formed an exploratory campaign committee for the U.S. Senate.[72][73] In October 2017, he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination in Missouri's 2018 U.S. Senate election for the seat held by Democrat Claire McCaskill.[74][75] Before the official announcement, four former Republican U.S. senators from Missouri (John Ashcroft, Kit Bond, John Danforth, and McCaskill's predecessor, Jim Talent) asked Hawley to run for the Senate seat.[76]
The tightly contested Republican primary had 11 candidates hoping to unseat McCaskill. Hawley received substantial support from prominent Republicans, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, President Donald Trump, and the Senate Conservatives Fund.[77] He won a large majority of the vote in the primary election.
Trump endorsed Hawley in November 2017.[78] During the general election campaign, the Affordable Care Act became a central issue, with both candidates pledging to protect coverage for preexisting conditions.[79][80][81] McCaskill criticized Hawley for his involvement in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the ACA, potentially eliminating protections for those with preexisting conditions.[59] Hawley, meanwhile, highlighted McCaskill’s upcoming vote on the confirmation of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, depicting her as obstructing Trump.[82] His campaign spokesperson asked, "Will Senator McCaskill ignore her liberal donors and support Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State, or will she stick with Chuck Schumer and continue to obstruct the president?", adding, "It is deeply troubling how focused Senator McCaskill is on doing what's politically convenient instead of doing what's right."