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Hawley named to key US Senate committees, including judiciary

U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
Carolina Hidalgo | St. Louis Public Radio
U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Missouri’s U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley has snagged some plum Senate committee assignments for a newcomer, possibly signaling his strong ties to the chamber’s GOP leadership.

Hawley, a former law professor, will serve on the Senate's Committee on the Judiciary, which means he’ll have a say in any future judicial nominations by President Donald Trump. That includes any future Supreme Court vacancies.

Hawley also has been named to the Armed Services and Homeland Security panels, in effect replacing the state influence on those panels of outgoing Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat he defeated in November.

U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
Credit Carolina Hidalgo | St. Louis Public Radio
U.S. Senator-elect Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

In addition, Hawley will be on the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship and the Special Committee on Aging.

Hawley said in a statement: “Missouri will have strong representation in some of the most important debates we will have as a nation – from providing for our national defense, to securing our borders, to confirming constitutionalist judges, to overseeing the Department of Justice, as well as defending our seniors and small businesses.”

Follow Jo Mannies on Twitter:@jmannies

Copyright 2018 St. Louis Public Radio

Jo Mannies has been covering Missouri politics and government for almost four decades, much of that time as a reporter and columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She was the first woman to cover St. Louis City Hall, was the newspaper’s second woman sportswriter in its history, and spent four years in the Post-Dispatch Washington Bureau. She joined the St. Louis Beacon in 2009. She has won several local, regional and national awards, and has covered every president since Jimmy Carter. She scared fellow first-graders in the late 1950s when she showed them how close Alaska was to Russia and met Richard M. Nixon when she was in high school. She graduated from Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, and was the daughter of a high school basketball coach. She is married and has two grown children, both lawyers. She’s a history and movie buff, cultivates a massive flower garden, and bakes banana bread regularly for her colleagues.