ROGER SIMON: In Praise of Josh Hawley.

President Donald Trump is obviously the leader of the Republican Party (see the latest Gallup poll on the most admired American) but should the 2020 election remain in its current dubious state and should Trump decide not to run in the future, Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, has moved to the head of the class for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

He has done this by being the first Republican senator to commit to objecting to electoral college certification for presidential election 2020.

This courageous act, in conjunction with similar pledges already made by members of the House, opens the door to serious discussion of the election on the floor of Congress

In so doing Hawley has cited problems that several states had, particularly Pennsylvania, in not following their own election laws. (Georgia’s problems were demonstrated today by the testimony of IT expert Garland Favorito and others in front of their Judiciary Committee.)

But equally, if not more, importantly to the future of our country, and the democratic world in general, Hawley has called out the undue influence of Big Tech in our presidential election, in this case Facebook and Twitter. (He could easily have added the giant of giants, Google, as well.)

Many have asserted these entities, as private companies, have the right to do as they wish. In a perfect world, that is correct. But this world is far from perfect and getting less so.

Big Tech controls the flow of information globally to a degree no one has ever conceived, not even Orwell or Huxley. Traditional anti-trust legislation is virtually Paleolithic when it comes to adjudicating the capabilities of these companies.

Curiously, Hawley seems to have run afoul of Walmart as well: Walmart blames deleted ‘#SoreLoser’ reply to Sen. Josh Hawley on social media team ‘mistake’ (but not before Hawley fired back hard).