‘Colossal example of bad lawyering’: Legal experts slam Josh Hawley’s ‘shameful’ efforts to undo Trump’s loss

A pair of legal experts ripped apart Sen. Josh Hawley's court challenge of Donald Trump's election loss as a "colossal example of bad lawyering."

The Missouri Republican challenged Pennsylvania's "no excuse" mail-in voting on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Jan. 6, 2021, the day Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to delay congressional certification of the election, but legal experts Alan and Bruce Howard wrote a column for the Kansas City Star showing that Hawley's effort was doomed from the start.

"A prime example of bad lawyering is when a lawyer loses a possibly winnable case because he misses an important legal deadline," wrote the pair of brothers, one a professor of law emeritus at the St. Louis University Law School and the other an attorney and former professor at University of Southern California Law School.

A recent court ruling suggested that Hawley might have had a shot at winning his challenge, but a five-judge unanimous majority reaffirmed a lower court decision that the votes must be considered legally valid because the challenge came too late to disqualify them.

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"In addition to being legally invalid, Hawley’s objection to the Senate certification of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden was inequitable and antidemocratic," the Howards wrote. "Hawley challenged the legitimacy of America’s 2020 presidential election, and sought to cancel millions of votes legally cast by the people of Pennsylvania, on the basis of a legal argument that had already been rejected by the highest state and federal courts. Hawley falsely suggested that the United States, the longest continuous democracy on the planet, allowed its citizens to cast and count millions of illegal votes for the most powerful political office in the world."

"By improperly seeking to discredit and disallow Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for Biden," they added, "Hawley collaborated with Donald Trump’s corrosive effort to convince the American people — and the world — that America’s presidential election was improper and illegal."

The authors said Hawley's arguments were based on a legal premise that had already been rejected by the state Supreme Court, and they said the senator, a trained lawyer himself, should have known better, and they said his handling of the matter was sloppy from start to finish.

"Hawley’s failure to enlist a plaintiff in Pennsylvania to do so before the 2020 election, but instead asking the U.S. Senate to unfairly disenfranchise millions of Pennsylvania voters after the election in violation of the controlling equitable doctrine of laches, was a colossal example of bad lawyering — but far more important, it was shamefully inequitable, anti-democratic and anti-American voter," they wrote.

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