Come to listen or to ‘move on’?

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Rep. Roger Marshall represents the state’s First Congressional District, a massive 69-county bloc that covers central and western Kansas and which roughly 700,000 people call home. He was in Salina recently for one of those “town hall” meetings, presumably to hear what was on people’s minds.

According to The Salina Journal, about three dozen people were at the meeting. A lot of them were not happy with the congressman.

One woman asked about the Mueller report, and how Marshall saw any role for Congressional oversight of the president’s powers. She was particularly interested in the report’s narrative about Trump’s foreign policy to expand his financial interests (a Trump hotel in Moscow), or the trips to Mar a Lago, among other ventures.

Rather than answer, Marshall said that “Everywhere I go, Kansans tell me they are ready to move on.”

“I’m not,” the woman said.

Marshall moved on anyway. “We’ve spent two years, thirty million dollars. It’s time to move on. I can’t get any work done if all Nancy Pelosi wants to do is create obstruction. After two years, the Mueller report said there was no obstruction.”

That’s not quite what the Mueller report said. But it was, almost word for word, what the Conservative Political Action Conference and its fringe groups have put in scripts for their disciples to recite at such “town hall” meetings. Reports of other local meetings with other members of congress contain the same message, often verbatim: After Mueller, everyone is “ready to move on.”

If not, it’s Nancy Pelosi’s wicked meddling.

CPAC, with headquarters in National Harbor, Maryland, and the Koch brothers, of Wichita and New York, have for years written the script for congressional Republicans. We seem to make a habit of electing legislators who let others do their thinking and their talking.

How strange that we elect people to tell our story and make our case in Washington, and they come home not to listen, but to tell us how to think – according to someone else.

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