Josh Hawley is a deeply serious person
By 
How serious? He’s going to challenge the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, not because he actually wants to overturn it of course, but because he’s Just Asking Questions:
“I cannot vote to certify the electoral college results on January 6 without raising the fact that some states, particularly Pennsylvania, failed to follow their own state election laws,” Hawley said. “At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act.”
Hawley also cited previous Democratic objections during the counting of Electoral College votes, saying just as Democrats were “entitled to do so,” that “now those of us concerned about the integrity of this election are entitled to do the same.”
Hawley is very much trying to play this both ways, as part of what is obviously going to be a bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. On the one hand, he’s not throwing in completely with Trump’s combination fundraising grift/paranoid conspiracy theory about the election supposedly being rigged, but on the other hand, he’s raising Serious Questions about how the Democrats maybe did steal the election after all, so perhaps we should look into that, because who could possibly object to a fair and balanced investigation of that Very Serious Question?
(Let me reiterate that it was a terrible idea for Barbara Boxer to have played a similar rhetorical game back in 2005, even though the grounds for doing so were quite a bit stronger — Republican vote suppression in Ohio could well have cost Kerry the election, but the Republicans stole the election fair and square as it were, since that suppression was probably almost all technically legal).
Anyway now that Comrade Hawley is out of the gate, a bunch of other GOP senators are likely to follow, while a bunch more will likely abstain from the vote altogether. Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of Republican senators who affirmatively vote to certify Biden’s electoral victory will end up in the single digits, or even countable on Mordecai Brown’s pitching hand.