We need a senator, not a Trump Muppet | Opinion
What’s more important to you, your country or Donald Trump?
A lot of Kansans are contemplating how they feel about the former president in the wake of Trump’s conviction last week on 34 felony counts related to hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
It was an icky case where Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records to try to cover up that he paid Stormy $130,000 not to tell the world that they’d had a sleazy sexual encounter, after meeting at a celebrity golf tournament while Trump’s wife was home with a four-month-old infant.
Lots of Republican politicians and the pundits in their echo chamber, Fox (alleged) News, have chosen their side: A state court of law found Trump guilty as charged, therefore, the grand jury that indicted him, the district attorney who prosecuted him, the judge overseeing the case and the jurors who weighed the evidence and unanimously found him guilty are all corrupt and the system is rigged.
Let’s set aside for a moment that the process is the exact same one that Republicans have always championed — and that prisons are filled with convicts claiming they got railroaded by the system. If there’s ever been a unifying theme of the Republican Party, it’s been law and order — as in “What part of illegal don’t you understand?”
But when it’s Trump, well, let’s just say we’re growing an odd crop of advocates for defendants’ civil rights this year.
It was disappointing, indeed somewhat surprising, to see Kansas’ senior senator, Jerry Moran (a thoughtful man who usually knows better), jump on the Trump train:
“These charges were brought by partisan actors with the intent to subvert a political opponent’s candidacy,” Moran posted on X. “Our nation will be further divided if we continue to allow political disputes to be settled utilizing the court system. The undermining of a political candidate erodes public trust in our judicial system and sets a dangerous precedent.”
With all due respect to the senator, I would point out that political disputes have often been settled in court. Bush v. Gore springs immediately to mind, as does the recent case where the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Trump and overruled a Colorado attempt to ban him from the ballot for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
But it’s one thing to decry the influence of legal proceedings on American democracy, and quite another to throw Molotov cocktails at it.
Which brings us to the junior senator from Kansas, Dr. Roger Marshall.
Since the verdict, Marshall has been a good little Trump Muppet.
“The political persecution of Donald Trump is the most egregious miscarriage of justice in our nation’s history,” he wrote on X. And he told Fox News: “What we saw was a rigged judge, a rigged DA, the whole timing of this trial was rigged as well.”
If that was the extent of Marshall’s tantrum, it would be just another example of the kind of performance art we’ve all come to expect from him since he was elected to the Senate.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Marshall and seven of his Republican Senate colleagues signed a pledge that they’ll roadblock all federal agency and judicial nominees, along with “any Democrat legislation or authorities that are not directly relevant to the safety of the American people” — whatever that means.
“We are going to grind the Senate to a halt as best we can,” Marshall vowed on Fox.
Asked by a different Fox host if more senators will be joining the obstructionist eight, Marshall replied “They better.”
Well, they better not.
Senators have one job — to pass legislation to try to improve the lives of 333 million Americans.
If they’re not doing that — and they do a pretty lousy job of it in the best of times — there’s no reason for them to be in Washington, soaking up salary and expenses on the taxpayers’ dime.
What Marshall has forgotten in his tunnel-vision crusade to restore Trump to power is that senators are supposed to work for us, not just run interference for political pals who get themselves in trouble with the law. If he won’t do his job, we need to find someone who will.
At the beginning of this column, I posed the question “What’s more important to you, your country or Donald Trump?”
Sen. Roger Marshall has made his choice.
And it’s the wrong one.
This story was originally published June 4, 2024 at 4:50 AM.
