Josh Hawley Wants Farmers Paid 150% of Their Land’s Value When Power Lines Take It

Josh Hawley spent Veterans Day doing two things most senators never do on the same day. He handed his own party a five-item to-do list for the last six weeks of its Senate majority, and then he filed four amendments meant to stop power companies from running over Missouri farmers.

The list came first, posted to 𝕏 midmorning. It was short, blunt and very Hawley.

That post has been seen more than 240,000 times. It landed while Senate Republicans are trying to decide what to do with the time they have left before the chamber changes hands in January, and while Majority Leader John Thune is pushing judges and a giant energy bill across the floor.

Five things, and most of them already have a bill

This isn’t a wish list pulled out of thin air. Hawley has paper behind most of it. Congress.gov shows his Gas Tax Suspension Act was introduced May 11 and sent to the Finance Committee. His Rural Hospital Emergency Room Guarantee Act went in June 24 and sits with the health committee. In September he filed the No Tax Breaks for Data Centers Act. None of them has moved yet. That’s the point of the post. He wants leadership to move them now, while Republicans still hold the gavel.

The SAVE America Act is the one President Trump pushed all year. It would require proof of citizenship to register and a photo ID to vote. It cleared the House in February and then stalled in the Senate, where it kept running into the 60-vote wall. Hawley putting it last on his list doesn’t mean it matters least. It means he thinks the Senate should stop pretending it can’t be done.

Defunding Planned Parenthood is an old fight for him and for the pro-life movement, and it’s the item least likely to get any Democratic votes.

The data center line is the one that turned heads. The Hill reported it makes Hawley the first Senate Republican to call for a nationwide pause on new data center construction. That sounds like a strange fight for a conservative until you look at the power bills. Those giant server farms pull enormous amounts of electricity, and families in a lot of states have watched their rates climb as utilities build to feed them.

Voters noticed. The Hill pointed to a Pew poll from this summer that found 54% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats weren’t comfortable with a new data center going up near them. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott halted new data center construction pending a statewide audit. Hawley is betting this is one of those issues where regular people in both parties are way ahead of Washington.

Four amendments for the people who own the land

Then came the second move, and for folks in rural Missouri it might be the bigger one. The Senate is working through the big permitting and power-line bill that oil drillers, solar companies and labor unions all want passed. We covered that bill earlier tonight. Part of it makes it easier to build long-distance transmission lines, and that means more land taken by eminent domain.

Hawley’s office laid out four changes he wants, and they read like a farmer wrote them.

The first sets a federal floor for what a landowner gets paid when the government takes land for a power line: 150% of fair market value, with states free to go higher. Right now “just compensation” can mean a check that doesn’t come close to covering what a family loses when a line cuts across a field they’ve worked for generations.

The second doubles the time a state gets to weigh a transmission line, from one year to two, before federal regulators can step in and approve it over the state’s head.

The third gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the option to say no. Under current law, when all the conditions are met, the commission has to use its backstop power to push a line through. Hawley wants that to be a choice, not an automatic.

The fourth raises the bar for when federal regulators can use eminent domain at all, from lines of 230 kilovolts to 765 kilovolts. In plain English, that would take a big chunk of ordinary transmission projects out of Washington’s reach and leave those fights to the states and the people who live there.

A Missouri fight with a track record

Hawley has been here before. His office points to the Grain Belt Express, a high-voltage line meant to cross Missouri farm country, and notes that he helped get a $5 billion federal loan for the project canceled last year. To a lot of landowners along that route, he’s the guy who showed up when the power company didn’t.

He isn’t trying to kill the energy bill. He told The Washington Sun that Monday’s procedural vote was “pretty big” and that the bill has promise. His problem is narrower. “Right now, the federal eminent domain power is really, really expansive,” he said. “I think there’s room to work on that.”

That puts him in an interesting spot. The bill’s authors say the power-line language is what holds the whole bipartisan deal together, and trade press already reads Hawley’s amendments as long shots. But a senator doesn’t need to win every vote to change the conversation. He needs to make the other side explain, on the record, why a farmer shouldn’t get more than market value when Washington takes his land.

Six weeks is not a lot of time

Put the two moves side by side and you see the same instinct. Lower gas prices. Keep rural hospitals open. Make data centers pay their own way instead of sticking families with the bill. Protect the guy whose land is in the way. Lock in voter ID while you still can. Every item is aimed at a voter who feels like Washington stopped listening to him.

Whether Thune puts any of it on the floor is the real test. The Senate has judges to confirm and an energy bill that still has to get through the House. Hawley just made sure that when Republicans talk about how they used their last six weeks, farmers, drivers and small-town hospitals are part of that conversation.