This is an adapted excerpt from the Oct. 12 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Holly’s Sweet Treats in Hutchinson, Kansas, can make just about anything: wedding cakes straight out of a storybook, cakes shaped like cows, cupcakes decorated like cartoon horses — even a real cake that looks like a fake one. But until last weekend, there was one thing the bakery couldn’t make: Republican Sen. Roger Marshall pay his bill for cookies he ordered six years ago.
In 2020, when Marshall was running for the U.S. Senate, he hosted a Republican primary watch party, for which he hired Holly’s Sweet Treats to make a bunch of super cute treats, like fudge brownies, mini strawberry muffins and sugar cookies with careful buttercream frosting in blue and yellow that spelled out Marshall’s name. The bill came to $678.75. But the senator never paid.
Six years later, Marshall is now running for re-election. And one of the things the former practicing OB-GYN has now become very famous for in his home state is how strongly he feels about people who don’t pay their bills.
Last month, New York Times reporter Sarah Kliff put out an exclusive, headlined: “A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator.”
According to Kliff’s reporting, Marshall brought hundreds of lawsuits against his own patients for failure to pay on time. He had lawyers routinely ask judges for arrest warrants for his patients if they missed a court date. Court records show the senator charged an 18% annual interest rate on unpaid bills, and he had his patients arrested for unpaid bills as low as $114, garnishing their paychecks and bank accounts if they didn’t pay up.
Marshall responded to the Times’ reporting by claiming that this was all very normal and standard, something every medical practice does. Through a spokesperson, he said he wasn’t personally involved in decisions to arrest people and garnish their wages.
Then, last weekend, the Kansas City Star checked that out. According to an analysis of medical debt lawsuits in the Kansas court system, “the 18% annual interest rate that Marshall applied to unpaid bills was by far the highest of the roughly 150 medical practices whose public records were reviewed by the Kansas City Star.”
And the lawyer who represented Marshall in many of the lawsuits filed against his patients told the paper that it wasn’t a standard rate at all and that it was the senator’s choice: “Roger Marshall’s office was responsible for determining how much interest patients owed on unpaid bills.”
This is the same guy who didn’t pay his own cookie bill for six years. Until last week, when the owner of that bakeshop in Hutchinson posted the bill online, along with a picture of the cookies she baked for Marshall.
After the post started to get some traction — perhaps given how famous he is now for being real strict about other people not paying their bills — Marshall decided to make a big show of finally paying off the bill.
He posted online that he not only paid the bill, but double-paid it. “We have repaid the bill from 2020, double,” Marshall wrote in a post on X, attaching a screenshot of the invoice. But according to that invoice, Marshall paid Holly’s Sweet Treats $1,300. The original bill was $678.75, meaning “double” would be $1,357.50. So he’s still stiffing the bakery $57.50.
That said, if the bakery wanted to charge him, say, 18% interest, like he charged all his patients, then Marshall would still owe Holly’s Sweet Treats more than that, about $112 — which is very close to the $114 over which he had one of his patients arrested.
But it doesn’t end there for Marshall. A joint project between MS NOW and the Kansas Reflector has revealed the perplexing news that, for the past five years, the senator has reported he has exactly zero paid campaign staffers. “According to Senator Marshall’s most recent FEC records filed in July, no one working for Marshall’s campaign had received a paycheck in the past five years,” the report reads, referring to the Federal Election Commission.
Is that because Marshall inspires such devotion that every single person working on his campaign has donated all of their time to him, for free, for years? We don’t know. But theoretically, it would be really, truly illegal for Marshall to have any of his Senate staffers doing any work on his campaign, since those jobs are taxpayer-funded.
Marshall’s chief of staff told MS NOW and the Kansas Reflector that the campaign does now have some paid staff, though he declined to offer any evidence or details about it, like how many people were being paid or when their employment began.
The bottom line is, these scandals are starting to stack up, and the Republican incumbent may now lose his seat. Marshall is up against a strong Democratic candidate, Adam Hamilton, a pastor who leads the largest United Methodist church in the country. Two former Republican governors of Kansas have come out and endorsed Hamilton. And on Monday, MS NOW’s election desk moved its rating of that Kansas Senate race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”
That’s still favoring Republicans, but it’s amazing that a deep-red state like Kansas, with an incumbent Republican senator, is merely leaning that direction. The state hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, yet Hamilton could potentially break that streak in a few weeks.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post Roger Marshall’s cookie-bill controversy could jeopardize Kansas for the GOP appeared first on MS NOW.
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