“He was very focused on the checks — you know, does it include direct checks?” Hawley recalled in an interview. At that point, he told Trump, no congressional leader was discussing them. “And so I told him: I’m not going to vote for a bill unless it includes direct checks.”
Two weeks later, as he briefly threatened to spark a government shutdown over the issue, top GOP leaders assured Hawley that $600 checks would be part of the deal. Over the past week, Hawley upped his demands further, quickly and enthusiastically backing Trump’s late call for even bigger, $2,000 checks.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) effectively blocked the larger figure Wednesday, but Hawley nonetheless established himself as the Republican face behind the push for checks. In doing so, he found common cause with an unlikely ally, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the iconoclastic socialist, and battled publicly with GOP colleagues steeped in the party’s small-government, anti-spending orthodoxy.
Earlier Wednesday, Hawley opened a new front in his war with the Republican establishment — vowing to embrace Trump’s efforts to question the election result by lodging a challenge during Congress’s Jan. 6 electoral college tally. The effort, done against the wishes of McConnell and other party honchos, will not change the outcome of the election, but it has solidified his embrace of Trump and heightened questions about how far Hawley would go to advance his presidential ambitions.
Rep. Paul Mitchell (Mich.), who left the Republican Party this month just weeks before retiring from the House in protest of Trump’s baseless efforts to contest the election, tweeted that Hawley “is just getting in the queue early” for the 2024 presidential race.
“Principles are optional or at least malleable,” Mitchell wrote.
Yet the checks — and the surprising Republican support for boosting them further — mark a signal legislative victory in Hawley’s first Senate term. Whether it heralds a broader GOP shift toward a populist approach more in line with the increasingly working-class nature of the party’s electorate is unknown.
But that is a shift Hawley is eager to accelerate — not only by backing hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus checks, but by taking Trump’s loose platform of restricting immigration, attacking free trade and cracking down on big tech companies and developing it into what Hawley calls a “worker-focused approach” to Republican policymaking.
“There’s a lot of work to be done there building that out,” he said in an interview last week. “It needs to carry over into lots of other areas of social and economic policy. But I just think that the current crisis crystallizes it because the working folks in this country, working families, have borne so much of the economic pain of this downturn.”
Hawley’s efforts have captured attention across the political spectrum, including by many on the left who are watching his emerging populist agenda with at least some degree of intrigue, if not outright admiration.
“There’s some real rethinking going on on the right, and he’s at the center of it,” said Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project and a leftist scholar of populist political movements. “This is a conservative Republican who just happens to be a populist and does not like libertarians, and, philosophically, that brings him a lot closer to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in his approach to corporate power. And that is a real threat to the Democratic Party and the left wing.”
Besides stimulus checks, Hawley has called on the United States to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. He has proposed, with Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), taxing foreign purchasers of U.S. securities to combat currency manipulation. He joined with other Republican senators to suspend guest worker visas at the height of the pandemic, citing mass unemployment. And he has taken special aim at the growing power of massive tech platforms.
Hawley said in a statement Wednesday that his electoral college challenge is in part meant to highlight “the unprecedented effort of mega corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden.” He offered no evidence for his claim, an extension of years blasting big tech’s handling of conservative viewpoints, dating back to his two-year stint as state attorney general.
Even if there are limits to his populism — he backed the Trump tax cuts, which largely benefited the wealthy, and supported an anti-union “right to work” law in Missouri — his policy portfolio represents a repudiation of the traditional free-market Republican doctrine espoused by the likes of former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), let alone the more aggressive libertarianism of Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.). That has made him a suspect figure among more orthodox conservatives, especially Trump critics.
Hawley also has fierce critics on the left. A July 2019 speech in which he declared war against a “cosmopolitan consensus” favoring educated elites over ordinary Americans prompted several commentators to accuse him of being chauvinistic and even anti-Semitic. (Hawley’s retort: “The liberal language police have lost their minds.”)
An April article in the Intercept tagged him as “a fraud and an opportunist,” noting his privileged upbringing and grooming in elite institutions (Stanford, Yale Law and a clerkship with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.). His support for the deep tax cuts and Trump’s radical immigration agenda, author Mehdi Hasan wrote, makes him “your standard right-wing wolf in the clothing of a populist sheep.”
But the push for stimulus checks drew the harshest criticism from the right.
When Hawley first publicly advocated for direct payments in early December, he was virtually alone among congressional Republicans. At the time, a bipartisan group of lawmakers was sketching a rough framework for a coronavirus relief deal that could pass muster in both the Democratic House and Republican Senate, and direct checks were deemed a dealbreaker.
Both he and Sanders, however, argued that checks were an essential part of any relief package. By Friday, Dec. 4, Sanders’s staff was in touch with Hawley’s staff about potentially joining forces, and the two senators spoke the next morning. They agreed to jointly advocate for the same checks that had been included in the Cares Act passed in March — $1,200 per individual and dependent child.
That night, Hawley spoke to Trump as he returned from the Georgia rally. He said he urged Trump to be more vocal about his wishes: “I urged him to say he’d veto it” unless checks were included.
Trump, consumed with his baseless crusade against fraud in the November election, never publicly delivered that ultimatum — or engaged much in the negotiations at all, at least not until the bill had already been passed. Hawley said Trump remained interested behind the scenes, checking in several times on the status of the checks.
A few days later, as he kept in touch with both Trump and Sanders, Hawley made his pitch to fellow Republican senators on a conference call, to a lukewarm reception.
“I said, ‘Go home and ask people: When you say the words “covid relief,” what do they think that means?’ ” he recalled. “In Missouri, covid relief means direct support, to me. It doesn’t mean, oh, you gave $200 billion to some program over here that I have to apply for and may or may not ever see any money from.”
Hawley said he did not believe he’d made headway with his colleagues, but the ground was shifting. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin floated a plan that included modest $600 checks. And that proposal had a price tag that closely matched a key line item in the bipartisan talks: funding for state and local governments, which had become a bitter partisan football.
Within a week, that funding appeared more and more likely to drop by the wayside — opening a path for stimulus checks.
On Dec. 18, Hawley went to the Senate floor to press for a bill providing for $1,200 checks, forcing a colleague to block him from passing it by unanimous consent. What ensued was a clash of the competing strains of contemporary Republican thought.
Hawley preached unadulterated American populism: “If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bailing out this, that and the other, surely — surely — we could start with reasonable, modest relief to the working people in need in this nation.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a product of the tea party revolution — a plastics manufacturer who rode discontent with federal spending and regulation to election in 2010 — countered: “We all have compassion. We all want to fulfill those needs. We just don’t talk in numbers very often,” he said, before objecting to Hawley’s bill. “We are mortgaging our children’s future, and I think we need to be very careful about mortgaging it further.”
In the end, Hawley and Sanders won out: The checks — worth an estimated $166 billion — made the cut.
Sam Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the center-right Niskanen Center and a former aide to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said Hawley’s success could hearken the possible return of the “New Deal Republicanism” that went out with Richard M. Nixon.
Hawley’s facility with the grievance politics of the right, he said, has given him a special ability to appeal to a Republican base that, under Trump, appears to be growing less affluent, more diverse and certainly less interested in the dogma of Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises.
“You can use the cultural animus foil to hide a lot of plutocratic policy,” said Hammond, who has advised Hawley’s office. “But . . . it leaves you vulnerable to someone like Hawley who comes along and talks the talk just as well about the cultural elites and big tech, who stokes the culture war flames just as well but then channels that energy some other place.”
Sanders declined to comment on Hawley’s influence on the direction of the Republican Party.
“I will simply say that I appreciated the effort that Sen. Hawley made in working with me to do everything we could to get a $1,200 direct payment to working families in this country,” he said.
Hawley — who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions and has already started lobbing attacks at the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden — explained his interest in building a more cohesive framework for GOP populism in terms that would not sound out of place at a Sanders rally.
“My state, we are a working-class state in every sense. I see what I’m doing as trying to represent them and trying to articulate their values and their viewpoints and try to fight for policies and programs that actually benefit them,” he said.
“We’re rural, we’re urban, we’re multiracial. But you look at the working people across those different divides, they’ve got a lot of common interests. So I see it in that way. And, you know, I hope that there’ll be lots of people who will have a similar viewpoint. But we’ll see.”
