Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley filed an ethics countercomplaint on Monday against seven Senate Democrats who called for an ethics investigation into his objection to certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral count.
Hawley called on the Senate Ethics Committee, presently chaired by Republican Sen. Jim Lankford of Oklahoma and Vice Chairman Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, to investigate the conduct of the seven Democratic senators who filed the complaint against him.
The Missouri senator accused all seven Democratic senators of abuse of the ethics process, alleging potential coordination with dark-money groups.
Hawley requested that the committee look into the seven senators’ contacts with specific liberal nonprofit organizations when they prepared their complaints, as well as whether the lawmakers coordinated with Senate Democratic leadership and the Biden administration.
Additionally, Hawley asked the ethics panel to examine if the seven senators have been contacting lobbyists for corporations to push for the suspension of those corporations’ political contributions.
In a separate letter to the seven Democrats themselves, Hawley blasted them for their accusations against him.
“The idea that one Senator who disagrees with another Senator can therefore have that Senator punished, sanctioned, censured, or removed is utterly antithetical to our democracy and the very idea of open, lawful debate. This line of thinking is, however, sadly consistent with the new woke-mob mentality that you should cancel anyone who disagrees with your views. Your baseless allegations are in that sense unfortunately typical of today’s leftwing cancel culture, a culture that tramples on the democratic traditions that left and right once defended together,” Hawley wrote.
Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Ron Wyden of Oregon filed a nine-page ethics complaint against Hawley and Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last Thursday, claiming that both GOP lawmakers helped incite the Jan. 6 Capitol riots over their objections to the Electoral College results.
“The extent, if any, of communication or coordination between Sens. Hawley and Cruz and the organizers of the rally remains to be investigated,” the complaint stated. “Because several of the House members who objected to the electors coordinated with the organizers of the ‘Save America’ rally, it is not unreasonable to assume that Senators Cruz and Hawley may also have been involved.”
Whitehouse told the Washington Examiner on Friday that he and his fellow Democrats filed the complaint against Cruz and Hawley because the Senate is the only venue that can provide oversight of its own members.
“We don’t know what the relationship of Sen. Cruz is or Sen. Hawley was with the organizers of the attack on the Capitol. And we can’t rely on executive agencies to find out because of the protections for senators under the speech and debate clause and so forth,” he said.
“The Constitution gives the Senate the job to police the conduct of its members, and the Senate has assigned that responsibility to the Senate Ethics Committee,” Whitehouse said. “So that’s the logic of having the Senate Ethics Committee report on what, if any, response to the Senate should pursue.”
