Missouri’s Hawley an actual conservative, no pretender

CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO. — Here in the state’s southeast, which calls itself the Bootheel and nurses a genial distrust of Missouri’s metropolitan fleshpots (St. Louis, Kansas City), the loudspeaker is blasting out John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” as Josh Hawley’s cowboy boots alight from his campaign bus at this stop on the “Stop Schumer Fire Claire Tour.” Before he became a Senate candidate, and before he became Missouri’s attorney general — after Stanford, Yale Law School (where he met his wife Erin; they clerked together for Chief Justice John Roberts) — Hawley grew up in a rural Missouri county.

Hawley reminds a small but grateful gathering of farmers that he has litigated against the Waters of the United States rule, by which the federal government torments farmers, treating any occasionally soggy parcel of land as ripe for regulation. While in private practice he supported the Hobby Lobby company’s successful appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that its free exercise of religion was denied by Obamacare’s requirement that employers provide employees with all kinds of contraception.

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill might soon be relieved of the strain of pretending to not be what she is — much more liberal than her state. Until recently, Missouri was America’s bellwether: It voted with the winner in all but one 20th century presidential election. (In 1956, it favored Adlai Stevenson, who hailed from across the river.) But in 2008, John McCain won Missouri narrowly (3,903 votes), Mitt Romney won by 9 points in 2012 and Donald Trump by 18.5 points, so it now is much more Republican than the nation.

McCaskill, 65, has been in politics almost as long (36 years) as Hawley, 38, has been alive. In 2006, a blue tsunami washed her into the Senate. In 2012, she selected her opponent by funding ads that solemnly warned Republican primary voters, many of them very conservative, that Todd Akin was very conservative. They nominated him, and he self-immolated with the interesting physiological theory that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy.

McCaskill boasts that she supposedly ranks as “the fifth-most-likely Senator to break with my party.” But the difference between the fifth-mostlikely and the least likely is insignificant in an era when the Senate votes on almost nothing. And on something that mattered, the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch, she was conspicuously not one of the three Democrats who voted for him.

If elected, Hawley will be the youngest senator in a body where the average age is 63. Hawley is educated and thoughtful, so it is possible to hope that he is as insincere in his praise of the president as McCaskill is in her insistence that she is really not like those anti-Kavanaugh hysterics.

This is an era of “let’s pretend” politics, as Republicans run trillion-dollar deficits during full employment while pretending to believe in fiscal rectitude, and Senate Democrats pretend to be thoughtful while their combined votes on two Supreme Court and 29 appellate court nominees are 391 for and 1,084 against. Hawley, who hopes to serve on the Judiciary Committee, is an actual, not a pretend, conservative. Hawley can be part of the GOP’s intelligent future, if it chooses to have one.