George Will points to Hawley while arguing senators should be barred from presidency

Longtime Washington Post columnist George Will says the Constitution should be amended to bar senators from running for president, specifically pointing to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).

“The 328 senators of the previous 50 years have illustrated the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve: a few of them dreadful, a few excellent, most mediocre,” Will wrote in the Post on Wednesday. “Although Josh Hawley, Missouri’s freshman Republican, might not be worse than all the other 327, he exemplifies the worst about would-be presidents incubated in the Senate.”

Hawley, Will wrote, has since he arrived in the upper chamber in 2019 “hit the ground running — away from the Senate.”

“Twenty-four months later, he was the principal catalyst of the attempted nullification of the presidential election preceding the one that he hopes will elevate him,” Will argued. “Nimbly clambering aboard every passing bandwagon that can carry him to the Fox News greenroom, he treats the Senate as a mere steppingstone for his ascent to an office commensurate with his estimate of his talents.”

Hawley was the first senator to say he would object to the certification of President Biden’s victory in 2020 and is widely expected to be considering a run for president in 2024.

The Missouri lawmaker earned headlines earlier this year for his fierce questioning of Biden’s pick for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, about sentences she imposed on defendants in cases related to child pornography, which Hawley characterized as lenient.

Hawley regularly makes appearances on Fox News and in other conservative media, and he received blowback from critics in February when his campaign began selling coffee mugs emblazoned with a photo of him the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Will has previously argued senators should not be allowed to run for president.

“It would improve the Senate remarkably,” Will said during an event earlier this month. “You wouldn’t have all those people just biding their time there. Second, it would improve our pool of presidential candidates. We used to get our presidents from governors, who have to run something larger than a Senate office, who have been accountable for more than 1/100th of a legislative body.”