Tensions between McConnell, Hawley fester after defense bill spat  

The rocky relationship between Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a rising conservative populist star, is in the spotlight after McConnell played a leading role in killing a Hawley-sponsored amendment to the annual defense bill.  

Hawley says McConnell was dead set on killing his provision, which would have provided compensation to St. Louis-area residents who were exposed to radiation from improperly stored nuclear waste left over from the Manhattan Project in the 1940s.  

Hawley’s proposal appeared to have a good chance of being part of the final version of the defense bill after the Senate voted 61-37 in late July to include it as an amendment.  

But the Missouri senator said McConnell made it clear at the outset of the “Four Corners” negotiations among congressional leaders over the final bill that he wanted the Hawley provision taken out. 

McConnell’s allies say Hawley’s proposal would have created a huge unfunded mandate and note that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has made it a top priority to cut the federal deficit, also opposed Hawley’s proposal to reauthorize and expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which will expire next year.  

A Senate GOP aide said Hawley’s proposal would have cost more than $100 billion over 10 years, a number Hawley says mischaracterizes the actual cost of compensating radiation victims in Missouri. 

But while McConnell’s staff insists the Senate GOP leader opposed Hawley’s priority on policy grounds, it’s not lost on Senate insiders that Hawley has been a vocal critic of McConnell’s leadership style and supported Sen. Rick Scott’s (R-Fla.) attempt to oust McConnell from his leadership spot last year.

McConnell sent a message to GOP senators who challenged him in the leadership election when he bumped Scott from the powerful Commerce Committee in February. He also removed Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who supported Scott’s ill-fated leadership bid, from the Commerce panel.

Hawley was outspoken in calling for a leadership change after Senate Republicans lost a seat in the 2022 midterm election, which shrank their minority to 49 seats.  

“We got to do something different,” he said at the time. “We’re not appealing to working-class independents, we don’t have their confidence.”  

McConnell teed off on another Hawley proposal during a Republican lunch meeting in October, when he warned Republican senators not to sign a Hawley-sponsored bill that would ban publicly traded companies from making independent expenditures and political ads and from giving money to Super PACs. 

McConnell warned colleagues at the meeting that they would face “incoming” from the center-right if they backed Hawley’s bill and read off a list of Republican senators whose campaigns benefited from the Senate Leadership Fund, an outside pollical fund aligned with the GOP leader.  

Now Hawley is wondering why McConnell was so intent on killing his proposal to provide compensation to victims of improperly stored radioactive waste in his home state.

“They didn’t give a reason” for why his amendment was stripped, Hawley said.

He’s angry that Congress is gearing up to approve $61 billion in new funding for Ukraine but can’t spare a few billion to help families around St. Louis suffering from the waste left over from a World War II weapons project. 

“You can’t roll over the people of Missouri, you cannot roll over all those who have had radiation exposure, take away the life-saving help they’re depending on and just expect me to be quiet about it. I’m going to make it as painful as I possibly can,” he said.  

He said McConnell should meet with the advocates for compensating Missouri families.  

Hawley protested the removal of his amendment by delaying a vote to advance the defense bill earlier in the week and then offered a motion to table the bill, entirely. That motion failed by a vote of 73-26. 

He said he submitted a revised version of his amendment to cut $100 billion from the 10-year cost of extending radiation exposure compensation program.

When congressional leaders said that wasn’t good enough and asked him to come up with pay-fors to offset the cost of the program, Hawley complied.  

“We actually did submit over $20 billion in pay-fors, which would pretty much cover the cost. Then the only thing we heard back from them after that was, ‘Well, I don’t know. We don’t know if we really want to do this.” 

A Senate GOP aide said that Hawley’s pay-fors didn’t pass muster with other committees. 

Hawley said he was perplexed by the request to come up with pay-fors because RECA is a mandatory spending program that was championed by former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) more than 30 years ago and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.  

Congress rarely offsets the cost of renewing longstanding mandatory spending programs, which do not rely on the annual appropriations bills for funding.  

Hawley said he worked directly with McConnell’s office to keep his amendment in the defense bill, but it was crystal clear from early in the talks that the GOP leader wanted to strip it

“[Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer [D-N.Y.] said before they even had a Four Corners meeting, he said McConnell went to him and said ‘I don’t want RECA in there. I want to get rid of it,’ From the very beginning, it was like McConnell’s going to be a problem,” Hawley said, explaining the guidance Schumer gave to Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), the lead Democratic co-sponsor of the bill.

Schumer and most Democrats voted for Hawley’s bipartisan proposal to reauthorize and expand the radiation exposure compensation program. McConnell voted against it.  

Hawley introduced the proposal with the support of Luján and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). President Biden endorsed it in August because it would also provide compensation to people exposed to radiation in New Mexico from the testing of the first atomic bomb in 1945.