Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall has nothing in common with his ‘boyhood hero’ Bob Dole
In a Sunday morning appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall began by bowing to his “boyhood hero,” Bob Dole. But Marshall has not followed his hero’s example of bravery, service, self-awareness, humor, compromise or truth-telling.
“Bob Dole conceded the election in 1996,” host Chuck Todd said. “The last president has not. What could the former president learn from Bob Dole?”
“Well, listen,” Marshall answered. “I think that this is an issue of election integrity. We value the ballot and the ballot booth. We want election integrity. There’s a lot of controversy out there and I’m focused right now on making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. I think that’s the focus right now.”
The only reason there’s any controversy is that Republicans including Roger Marshall won’t say what Dole did in a July interview with USA Today: that Donald Trump “had Rudy Giuliani running all over the country, claiming fraud. He never had one bit of fraud in all those lawsuits he filed and statements he made.”
Marshall knew that perfectly well when he went to the Senate floor just hours after the Jan. 6 coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol to join Missouri’s Josh Hawley and a handful of other GOP senators in siding with the insurrectionists and casting doubt on President Joe Biden’s rightful win.
Dole was a partisan Republican through and through — and one of the party’s only elder statesmen to embrace Trump during the 2016 campaign — yet he also understood the concept of country over party.
Marshall keeps thinking the time will come when he’ll no longer be asked about going along with a lie that tried to subvert our democracy, even after both a violent coup attempt and considerable pressure on officials to cheat.
In July, just months before he died, Bob Dole was frail and failing. But even at 98, he was strong enough to say what Marshall never has, which is that Joe Biden won the election.
“Do you believe that Joe Biden was elected fair and square?” Todd asked Marshall. “You know, Joe Biden was sworn into office,” the senator answered. “I called him Mr. President since the day he was sworn in.”
Marshall’s self-serving failure to say that there was no widespread election fraud encourages the future coup attempts we now have every reason to expect.
Also spread COVID misinformation on ‘Meet the Press’
This isn’t just the usual Marshall silliness of not knowing whether he’s in Kansas or Missouri or thinking that Kansas City’s well-known and well-marked statue of Winston and Clementine Churchill was actually Ewing and Muriel Kauffman.
In his brief “Meet the Press” appearance, Marshall said several things that not only weren’t true, but were both false and dangerous.
He suggested that those who’ve had COVID-19 already might not need a vaccine booster, even though you can get COVID more than once, and the vaccine offers far more robust protection than “natural immunity” does.
What he said about trying to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat is a mirror image of reality: On the contrary, Marshall’s party is doing everything possible to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat.
Then there was this: “Do you believe you were elected fair and square in 2020?” Todd asked Marshall.
“You know, absolutely,” the senator said. “I think Kansas has some of the tightest election laws in the land. We went back and looked at that to make sure it was a safe and fair election.”
The 2020 election laws in Kansas closely resembled those in Pennsylvania, yet Marshall signed onto a brief in support of a Texas-led lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election by preventing Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin’s Electoral College votes from being counted.
Like those states, Kansas also had record rates of mail-in voting, which was the practice at the center of the lawsuit.
Naturally, no Republicans in Kansas took issue with their state’s results, since they favored Marshall and others in their own party.
When Marshall says, “We went back and looked at that to make sure it was a safe and fair election” in Kansas, that isn’t true, either: There was no challenge to the outcome and thus no second-guessing.
This isn’t a matter of semantics, or a truth from which we can “move on.” The big lie that Marshall still won’t repudiate remains a threat to our democracy, and one to which we’ll never acquiesce.