Hawley won't say if he’d back McConnell as leader. Now he's taking McConnell's money | The Kansas City Star

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley won’t say whether he would vote for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell if elected to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate.

Now McConnell is hosting a fundraiser for Hawley, along with Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt and the rest of the Senate's Republican leadership team.

The reception in Washington D.C. will be held on Wednesday, a week after President Donald Trump headlined an event to raise money for Hawley's Senate run, according to an invitation obtained by The Kansas City Star.

The reception’s powerful hosts indicate the importance Republican leaders in Washington place on Hawley and his efforts to unseat Missouri’s Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, widely considered one of the most at-risk Senate Democrats in November.

In addition to Blunt and McConnell, other hosts of the fundraiser at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. are listed as Majority Whip John Cornyn, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Republican conference chairman, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, who serves as Republican Policy Committee chairman, and Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, chairman of the NRSC. Blunt is vice-chairman of the GOP conference.

Attendees are asked to donate $1,000 or $500 to Hawley. Hosts are expected to give $2,500 from political action committees or $1,000 personal contributions. The invitation also asks attendees if they can help with a private dinner following the event.

Hawley did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

In October 2017, not long after he said he would run for Senate, Hawley would not commit to voting for McConnell as Senate Republican leader if elected. Hawley also courted the support of former White House strategist Steve Bannon even as McConnell waged a public battle with Bannon over the direction of the conservative movement.

When asked directly whether his boss would support McConnell, Hawley's campaign spokesman deflected the question in a statement that did not mention McConnell by name, but criticized the Senate McConnell leads as "broken and failing" the people of Missouri.

“Josh is running because he is not willing to tolerate the failure of the D.C. establishment any longer,” Hawley's spokesman, Scott Paradise, said in the statement at the time. “He won’t tolerate Claire McCaskill’s failure. And he won’t tolerate Republican failure, either.”

More recently, he told The Washington Post earlier this month that he would not commit to voting for anyone as leader.

“I think it’s a little premature to say who I would and wouldn’t vote for. I’m not committed to voting for anybody for any leadership position,” Hawley told the Post in an article published March 9.

If there were any hard feelings, McConnell is not letting them get in the way of his efforts to topple McCaskill in November.

At least twice in the past week, McConnell has used his time on the Senate floor swipe at McCaskill for not backing the Republican tax bill. No Senate Democrat voted for the legislation, but McConnell has recently only singled out McCaskill.

McConnell used Trump's trip to St. Louis Wednesday to tout the tax bill and charge that "Missouri's senior senator tried to block tax reform on a party-line vote. Fortunately, there was a Republican senator who voted to help them realize this possibility."

He noted that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had warned that the legislation would bring about "Armageddon."

"Well, I'm not sure where they got their predictions, but I don't think they'll carry much water with middle-class families in Missouri or Indiana or West Virginia," McConnell said.

He took another rhetorical Senate floor swing at McCaskill on Monday, raising Trump's trip to St. Louis and meeting with a woman who works in a cafeteria to again criticize McCaskill for her party-line vote.

“When Democratic leaders called these historic middle class tax cuts crumbs, the senior senator from Missouri followed suit and called them scraps,” McConnell said, adding that he was “proud” that Republicans, including Blunt, “stood up for the middle class families who deserve to keep more of their own money.”