Josh Hawley wearing a suit jacket and red tie in front of the Capitol building.

Josh Hawley can’t stop embarrassing himself at congressional hearings.

The quick-footed senator went on the attack Tuesday against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, due to an employee’s antisemitic social media posts in the wake of Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas.

Hawley suggested the employee’s views speak for the department, which Mayorkas pushed back on. But Hawley, never one to shy away from a possible viral moment, kept interrupting the secretary.

“Your performance is despicable, and the fact you’re not willing to provide answers to this community is absolutely atrocious,” he bellowed.

Mayorkas, who said he couldn’t comment on an ongoing personnel matter and mentioned the person in question was hired in 2019, responded with an all-out assault on Hawley’s attention-seeking soliloquies.

“What I find despicable is the indication that this language, tremendously odious, could actually be emblematic of the sentiments of the 260,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security,” he said.

And that was just the start of Mayorkas’ retort. The secretary also brought up that his mother was a Holocaust survivor.

That’s right: Hawley was accusing someone whose own mother labored in the concentration camps of being complicit in the spread of antisemitism.

How utterly shameless.

“Senator Hawley takes an adversarial approach to me in this question, and perhaps he doesn’t know my own background,” said Mayorkas.

“Perhaps he doesn’t know that I am the child of a Holocaust survivor. Perhaps he does not know that my mother lost almost all of her family at the hands of the Nazis. So I find his adversarial tone to be entirely misplaced. I find it to be disrespectful of me and my heritage. And I do not expect an apology, but I did want to say what I just articulated.”

Hawley’s behavior Tuesday is par for the course. The senator is allll about showing off his supposed manhood, which he wrote an entire book about, by the way!

This apparent desire for masculine affirmation — and Fox News hits — leads Hawley to try and dunk on congressional witnesses. Just a couple of weeks ago, he tried hammering NCAA president Charlie Baker on transgender athletes and Israel.

But Baker wouldn’t give him any breathing room.

https://twitter.com/alex_kirshner/status/1714315183726936176?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714315183726936176%7Ctwgr%5E3a37fcaa9271fa11be19c08df0c3da697aae0a66%7Ctwcon%5Es1_u0026ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.queerty.com%2Fjosh-hawley-creepy-obsession-with-womens-locker-rooms-trans-athletes-reaches-bizarre-new-level-20231019

Hawley is the definition of a performative politician, as evidenced by his cowardly behavior on January 6. Though the anti-gay senator raised his fist in solidarity with the crowd of Trump supporters outside the Capitol, he fled when they stormed the building.

Hawley wants to project so much masculinity. Instead, he keeps coming across as an obsequious coward.

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