Sunshine Week Sheds Light on "Doc" Marshall

March 15, 2025 (Vol. 19 No. 13) - This week is being observed as Sunshine Week, a nonpartisan effort to shed light on the importance of open records. This is nothing new: Sunshine Week has been observed annually for several decades. However, never has the need for governmental transparency been greater than now. We have an unelected oligarch given free range over government agencies and a President predisposed to defy the courts. In the spirit of Sunshine Week, I choose to shed some light upon the junior senator from the state of Kansas, Roger "Doc" Marshall. There is some question whether Marshall actually lives in Kansas. He has a so-called "ranch cabin" in western Kansas and an expansive (and expensive) $1.2 million home in Florida. While it is not unusual for our elected congressional officials to have a big home in Washington, a place where they are supposed to be. But having a primary residence outside their election district is not only unusual, but illegal. (So far, the senator has Dodge Citied the question of where he calls home.) I'll let you judge where you think the junior senator from Kansas lives. Of course, Marshall's affinity for things not-Kansas doesn't stop there. Of the nearly $8.7 million Marshall raised from 2019-2024, a majority came from out-of-state. More than a quarter of those donations were $5,400 or higher - suggesting that Roger likes his rich friends. In fact, more than half of the senator's campaign donations come from the largest donors - suggesting that he is not the "man of the people" he'd like you to think he is. Not surprising, 72.6 percent of those campaign donations came from men - which explains a lot about his anti-women voting record. While the Kansas City metro area contributed the most to Marshall's war chest ($121,427), the Washington, D.C. area was second ($96,069) and New York was fourth ($70,750). The largest chuck of the senator's $852,566 in Political Action Committee donations during that period came from, ideological/single issue PACs ($295,516), followed by Healthcare PACS ($161,300) and agribusiness PACs ($72,250). For the record, Marshall serves on the Senate agriculture; health education, labor and pensions; homeland security; small business and budget committees. I'll leave it for you to decide whether there is any conflict of interest there. His largest donors were Nuterra Capital ($49,400), the National Republican Senatorial Committee ($44,600), McKee Foods ($28,900) and Goldman Sachs ($26,400). Again, I will leave it to you to decide whether any conflict of interest exists. And what else do we know about the junior senator from Kansas? We know he recently walked out of a western Kansas town meeting when the audience had the audacity to challenge him on Trump's and Musk's dismantling of government. We also know he has a temper and used personal influence to erase his arrest record. What about the man's voting record? You can check it out here. Needless to say, Marshall is one of Trump's MAGA minions. And, oh yes, he is coming up for reelection next year. I just thought my fellow Kansans might like to know more about their state's junior senator before casting a ballot. After all, those of us in a democracy should make our decisions in the bright light of government transparency. Happy Sunshine Week! That's it for now. Fear the Turtle.