Josh Hawley didn’t have to run away this Jan. 6. Republicans should remember why | Opinion
Josh Hawley didn’t have to do any skedaddling Monday.
Instead, Congress certified Donald Trump’s presidential victory with incredible speed. And, let’s face it, that process was a lot different from the last time we went through this whole exercise.
The man in the White House wasn’t trying to overturn the results. There were no giant crowds of protesters in Washington, D.C., carrying Confederate flags and nooses, claiming (falsely) that the election was rigged. And Hawley, Missouri’s senior senator, wasn’t trying to stir up those legions of misguided folks with fist bump salutes and legislative maneuvers to stop the whole thing from going forward.
Most important, Hawley didn’t have to flee in fear for his life from those same, rioting crowds.
What a difference four years makes, eh? We’ll get a peaceful transition of power this year, it looks like, but that’s because Democrats — unlike Hawley last time around — chose to accept the election results.
Of course, Hawley wasn’t the only member of the Kansas-Missouri delegation who failed to meet that standard on Jan. 6, 2021.
Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall cast one of his very first votes in the Senate that day, against certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Sen. Eric Schmitt was still Missouri’s attorney general, and sued to challenge votes in states that Biden won. He lost. Rep. Derek Schmidt joined in that lawsuit as Kansas’ attorney general — he’s in Congress now, a freshman member casting one of his first votes today to certify Trump’s victory.
It was a shameful moment for all of those men. They ostentatiously endorsed a falsehood four years ago, and it blew up on them. Maybe that’s why they were relatively quiet on Monday.
It remains shameful now, even if they’re on the winning side.
Donald Trump’s (entirely legitimate) election victory in 2024 does not mean he actually won in 2020. It does not transmute the falsehood into truth.
Admittedly, Republicans — those in office, and those who vote for them — may understand things differently.
In 2020, two-thirds of GOP voters wrongly believed that Joe Biden had not been legitimately elected president. And in October — just three months ago — just 2 in 10 Republican voters said they were confident the presidential election votes would be counted correctly.
The only thing that changed, of course, is that Donald Trump actually won this time.
You can argue that the most recent election results mean that Americans — or the 49.9% of voters who supported Trump, anyway — have rendered their judgment. That the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t really matter. That the lies of that year don’t matter, either.
And maybe those things don’t matter, at least in the realms of politics and power. Trump won, after all.
That’s disappointing.
This Jan. 6 went peacefully. We should all be grateful for that. But it took place in the shadow of that earlier, uglier Jan. 6. We shouldn’t forget that — and we shouldn’t forget the Kansas and Missouri Republicans, still in power, who helped make it happen.
This story was originally published January 6, 2025 at 12:06 PM.