Should Josh Hawley resign? Missouri governor doesn’t say, urges focus on inauguration
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson offered no defense of Sen. Josh Hawley when asked Monday whether the senator should resign after he tried to block certification of presidential election results in two states following a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The Republican governor, who was inaugurated for a full term on Monday, didn’t directly answer the question and instead urged reporters to focus on the inauguration.
“You know, everybody has to be responsible for the decisions they make, good or bad, indifferent. That’s what I’ll say,” Parson said at a news conference after he was sworn in.
Parson acknowledged there had been “a lot of discussion on this,” but asked that on Monday the attention remain on his inauguration. “This is a special day for me and for my family. It’s a special day for our state,” he said.
“We’ll be talking about Washington, D.C. every day from hereafter probably on some level on that,” Parson said.
Hawley has faced severe political blowback since Wednesday’s insurrection. Two prominent Republican donors – Joplin businessman David Humphreys and St. Louis businessman Sam Fox – have disavowed their past support of the GOP senator.
The political arm of Kansas City-based Hallmark on Monday demanded Hawley return $7,000 the group had donated to his campaign. Hallmark’s announcement comes after Simon & Schuster last week canceled publication of an upcoming book by Hawley.
Hallmark’s PAC also asked Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, to return $5,000. Marshall had also voted in favor of blocking certification of election results.
Several senior Senate Democrats have called for the resignation of Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. The two led the charge in the Senate to block certification.
Hawley has brushed aside the resignation calls.
“I will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections,” Hawley said in a statement Thursday. “That’s my job, and I will keep doing it.”
The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob bent on stopping the election count shocked the country and has touched off intense interest in identifying local or state officials who might have been involved. A West Virginia legislator was arrested and charged with participating in the riot.
Missouri state Rep. Justin Hill, a Lake St. Louis Republican, skipped the first day of the General Assembly to be at the rally near the White House that preceded the storming of the Capitol.
Hill said on Facebook that he didn’t participate in the march to the Capitol and only later went to the Capitol grounds after hearing sirens. He said he left immediately “in disgust” and condemned the violence.
Parson, who took the oath of office at noon Monday, made no mention of the violence in in his inaugural address. In his news conference afterward, he again condemned the mob’s attack after saying last week that President Donald Trump wasn’t to blame.
“I believe in civil protest. I believe people have a right to the First Amendment. But what I don’t believe is I don’t believe anybody, for any cause, has the right to commit crimes,” Parson said.
Democrats said Parson should have addressed the insurrection in his speech. House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said the governor could have used the speech to denounce Republicans who helped encourage and incite the mob.
“He instead pretended the events that have shaken the very foundations of American democracy didn’t happen and ignored his party’s complicity in them,” Quade said in a statement.
Missouri Republican officials on Monday deflected questions about whether Republican efforts to question and undermine the election results had fueled an atmosphere that led to the riot.
Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft on Wednesday delivered a speech criticizing how a handful of states had administered their elections. The states mentioned by Ashcroft were several of the same ones in which Republicans had tried to block certification.
“I didn’t say the election was stolen or anything of that sort,” Ashcroft told a reporter on Monday. “What I said was the elections were not run in such a way that people could have confidence in them.”
Ashcroft said millions of people don’t have faith in the election. “I just said we don’t want to be like that,” he added.
Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe said there was “a lot of disappointed folks” following the election and that there would have been disappointment on the other side if the results had been different. Still, he said, people now have to accept the results and move forward.
“Whether you like who the president is or not, he is the leader of our free world and we need to get behind that person and make sure that we as a country continue to survive,” Kehoe said. “We’ve been through a lot in this country, and we’ll survive this as well.”
At least one Missouri Republican stalwart, the father of Jay Ashcroft, had no interest in weighing in. John Ashcroft, a former U.S. attorney general and senator, said he wasn’t going to comment when approached by a reporter after Parson’s inauguration.
“I don’t know enough about it,” Ashcroft said, “and I don’t want to know a whole lot more.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 5:13 PM.
