Sen. Marshall, here’s what I wanted to ask you at the Oakley town hall you fled from | Opinion

Sen. Roger Marshall, I hope you read this.

I don’t know how else to reach you, since your phone lines have been jammed for months and you fled the last town hall I attended. I want to help you avoid a repeat of what happened recently in Oakley. Like dozens of other Kansans, I drove a long way to be at your event. Presumably you held it four hours away from where most of your constituents live for the same reason you kept the time and place off your website: to keep people from showing up. But the details leaked online, and so your constituents made the effort to meet you.

I did not know any of the other attendees, except for my family members, but we obviously weren’t paid agitators. We were Kansans, the same as the locals, and there for the same reason: to hear your answers to some very predictable questions. Imagine our surprise when you turned on your heel and walked out on us.

In the little time you gave us, you insulted us, lied to us and tried to pit us against one another. For example, you opened your speech by reading a script you said was “from my heart.” You painted yourself as an ally of Ukraine and told us that you “begged” the Biden administration to support them. You did not mention that you have voted against humanitarian aid to Ukraine since 2022, and did not explain why the night before your town hall you posted in social media: “Not another penny.”

I would have been very interested to hear why you split from Sen. Jerry Moran, who understands that aid dollars are spent in Kansas to buy food and supplies for our allies. Instead, we got a canned, partisan attack on Joe Biden — but you voted against aid, not him.

Blamed measles death on immigrants

When a Kansan mentioned the recent preventable measles death of an unvaccinated American child, you blamed it on immigrants. How bizarre. Foreigners are not undermining our vaccination rates. Robert Kennedy Jr. spent many years making money as a grifter selling vicious lies about vaccines. Those lies killed dozens of people, including children, by scaring people away from safe immunizations. Then you voted to confirm him as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I wanted to ask why you would brag about handing the keys to our public health to a notorious anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. I imagine the point of scapegoating immigrants was to avoid explaining it.

The comment that sent you packing was the very polite observation, offered by a local conservative, that it is wrong to haphazardly fire thousands of veterans working for the federal government. He was obviously right. Americans are being attacked for serving their country. Your political allies have insulted them, demonized them and fired them for no good reason — very often illegally. The process is so inept that in many cases, people who were just fired by some young Department of Government Efficiency pawn have to be begged to come back to work once wiser heads prevail and realize the victims were vital workers in some critical mission.

Your job is to be a check and balance on the administration, which does not seem to know or care how the government it is breaking works. Instead of explaining why you’ve decided not to do that, you rattled off another lie: that what’s happening is a regrettable necessity to fight “waste, fraud and abuse.” Senator, you are not a fool. You understand as well as anyone else that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE are arsonists pretending to fight fires. They are the waste, fraud and abuse.

Called constituents ‘rudest’

I can understand it would be hard to talk about these crises. You have done very little work you could be proud of since the inauguration. But it was dishonest and wrong to respond by attacking us. You called us “one of the rudest audiences I’ve ever had” for attending your public event, and tried (unsuccessfully) to pit the locals against us. You repeatedly mocked everyone there for thinking of ourselves as “infallible,” a weird and hypocritical comment that sat equally poorly with locals and Lawrencians alike. Afterward, you tried to justify your hostility by publicly announcing that you could confirm that “paid troublemakers” disrupted your town hall. To your credit, you later backed down and admitted it was just a “rumor.” Thank you for that — I hope it will mean I will not receive any more harassing phone calls from your fans.

Senator, I just wanted to hear you explain yourself. We all do. And you could do a better job of that so easily. It starts by listening to Kansans. Reading scripts at a handpicked audience has not prepared you for a world where even conservative voters have hard questions about the chaos you are supposed to be preventing. When you understand the pain you are causing by letting the executive branch go unchecked, talk to us honestly about what you mean to do about it. Tell us whether you mean to keep siding with Musk over Kansans, for example, and when we can expect Congress to start holding the administration accountable for corruption and incompetence.

And when you talk to us, you will have to do it here, in Kansas. It might be convenient to hold fundraisers near your home in Florida, but you will serve us better by talking to us where we live. From KCK to Oakley, we’re all waiting for you. Come talk to us.