No, Roger Marshall: We can’t just ‘move on’ when you’re still telling the Big Lie

All Roger Marshall wants is for Americans to put his role in that little insurrection thing in the rearview mirror.

On Saturday, CNN’s Pamela Brown pressed the freshman U.S. senator from Kansas about his vote to toss out millions of Americans’ ballots in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and about his joining Texas’ lawsuit to invalidate President Joe Biden’s decisive victory. Marshall was one of the small cadre of GOP senators who voted against certifying the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, just hours after a berserk mob invaded the U.S. Capitol, killing at least five people, including one police officer. (Marshall had company in the vote with his Missouri neighbor, Sen. Josh Hawley, natch.)

So does he have any regrets, or concerns that his actions contributed to the fact that fully 70% of Republican voters think the election was illegitimate, Brown asked?

Of course not. “Look, Pamela, it’s, we’re just so ready to move on,” he said, beaming his TV smile. “I made a decision based upon the facts that I knew at that point in time. … But it’s time to move on. It’s time for this country to heal. It’s time for a spirit of forgiveness to be happening.”

Normally, saying “I’m sorry” precedes the expectation of forgiveness.

And he isn’t sorry, since he still didn’t back down from his vague claims about nonexistent voter fraud. “I was concerned then,” he told Brown, “and still am today,” that the election wasn’t aboveboard. (Just the presidential part of it, of course — he’s raised no objection to Republicans’ strong down-ballot showing around the country.)

This isn’t the first time Marshall has urged America to “move on.” In late January, he insisted that a second impeachment trial for Donald Trump would divide us too much, and that “this country has to heal.”

That’s an odd prescription from a doctor-turned-politician who makes it a regular practice to pick at the country’s culture war wounds. His Twitter feed and official press releases often read like a MAGA “Mad Libs.”

Biden’s address last week was “the lowest energy speech I have ever personally heard on the House floor,” he said. “Dem Senators” want to “enact their radical agenda & tip the scales of power in their favor,” he tweeted. He joined fellow firebrand Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa introducing the eye-rollingly named TASTEE Act, or Telling Agencies to Stop Tweaking What Employees Eat Act of 2021, “pushing back against the Left’s ‘War on Meat’ and ‘Meatless Mondays.’”

Marshall certainly has meat on his mind — red meat for his Breitbart sound bite base. But if he really thinks it’s “time for this country to work together and focus on the goals that we can solve together,” as he said to Brown, he could start by apologizing for being one of the leading proponents of the Big Lie about the election.

Instead, he’s still telling the lie that he repeated on CNN, that “six states broke their own laws or their own constitution” to make it easier to vote during a pandemic. And to allow, for example, the same expanded mail-in voting that Kansas used in the election in which he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Kansas has allowed no-excuse absentee voting since the 1990s and actively promoted mail voting in 2020.

Twenty-three states accept ballots after Election Day as long as officials verify they were cast on or before that day, and one of those is Kansas, which allowed ballots postmarked on or before Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020, to count if they arrived by that Friday.

Yet Marshall is still suggesting that Biden’s election wasn’t legal in six states. And as long as he’s telling that one, he’s not on the side of any healing.

This story was originally published May 2, 2021 at 5:00 AM.