Common, Common Business Practices

Begin with the woman, because the Senator would rather you began with the law. Her name is Meischa Zimmerman, and in December 2009 the obstetrics practice in Great Bend, Kansas, that Roger Marshall owned opened a collection case against her over a bill of about $3,600, at 18 percent annual interest, which the Kansas City Star found to be by far the highest rate of the roughly 150 medical practices whose records it reviewed. She was paying about fifty dollars a month. She was arrested three times over the next years for failing to appear in court on it, and one of those times she was eight months pregnant, in front of her two-year-old. The Senator's lawyers say the arrests were for failure to appear and not for a missed payment, which is true, and which the paper would like the reader to think about for a moment: she was jailed, while pregnant, for not showing up to a hearing about a bill for her previous pregnancy, filed by the doctor. The New York Times found more than 700 such suits between 1998 and 2019, over balances as small as $101, with 81 patients arrested, and found that the practice's lawyers "repeatedly requested arrest warrants." The Senator's lawyer says he was not personally involved in the warrant decisions. His campaign's response to the Times was: "Sixty days before an election, the New York Times has decided that a rural doctor keeping the hospital's lights on is some kind of scandal." His own, at the State Fair in Hutchinson on September 12, when the crowd chanted "Shame on you," was: "Those were common, common business practices." By Wednesday, at the last debate, the reports were "blatant lies" that "couldn't be further from the truth," and "we did everything possible to keep them from going to collections," and once they were in collections, he said, the arrests were out of his hands. The Times counted more than 700 of them. The paper has read the Senator's accounts of what he did everything possible to prevent, and would note that the hands the warrants were out of were paid by him.

Last Monday night the President came to Park City, outside Wichita, to help. "They gave him a bum rap," he said. "Roger, I have to tell it like it is. You got screwed with that stuff." And then: "He was given a bum rap, because he was mandated by law to request, strongly, money owed from patients. You're not allowed not to do it. You have to, by law, go after those people. If he didn't make these requests, he would be breaking the law. He would have been breaking a very strong criminal law and he would be subject to criminal arrest and liability." The Star's fact-check of that: "No federal or state law requires doctors to sue patients over unpaid medical debt." There is also no law requiring a creditor's lawyer to ask a judge for an arrest warrant. The President also described the Senator, approvingly, as "kind of a Shylock-type guy." The Senator is not Jewish. The Kansas Democratic Party pointed out that the word is "a centuries-old antisemitic slur, built on the ugliest stereotypes about Jewish people and money." The Senator's spokesperson did not respond. The paper would summarize the Senator's week this way: his defense of jailing his patients is that it was ordinary, and the President's defense is that it was mandatory, and neither is true, and one of them came with a slur.

Now the Senate record, which is the President's record with a stethoscope. On September 10, 2025, Senator Marshall voted to table the Schumer amendment that would have ordered the Epstein files released, which killed it 51 to 49 with only Hawley and Paul breaking; he called it a "political stunt" that held service members "hostage." The Senate Majority PAC is running an ad in Kansas built on audio of the Senator saying, of the files, "It's just not of much interest to me right now." The Star rates "Marshall blocked the Epstein files release" as Partially True, since he did not object two months later when the Senate passed the release bill by unanimous consent, and the paper rates "not of much interest to me" as the most honest thing on the tape. On the war with Iran, he has voted no on every war-powers resolution, including the one that failed 49 to 50 on September 24, and his statement in March called the first one "a political ploy to work against the Administration's military operations" and the strike "bold, necessary, and long-overdue." By September he was telling CBS, "I want the war to be over as soon as anybody does," and telling Kansas public radio that the economic cost is "the price to pay for national security." Diesel in Kansas was up 79 percent in a year at harvest. The Senator wants the war over as much as anybody, and votes for it as much as anybody, and the paper has now written this sentence about a Republican in five states and would like it noted that it is the same sentence.

The paper wrote on Saturday about a Republican in Iowa who called the President's Russian diesel deal a bad idea on television and would not sign a letter against it. The Senator from Kansas is a member of the body that wrote the letter. On October 13 twelve senators, six of them Republicans, Tillis, McConnell, Collins, Murkowski, Cornyn and Armstrong, asked the President to rescind the license that lets Russian diesel back into the market, calling it "a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies." Senator Marshall's name is not on it. Asked about the deal at the debate on Wednesday, he managed both halves of the Iowa posture in a single answer: "it doesn't sound like a great idea," and then, "if this brings Russia to the bargaining table, and it ends the war, then I am all for it right now." He also told Kansas that "the real problem with the cost of diesel, in particular, No. 1, is the Ukraine war," which is to say that the man who has voted against every resolution to end the war that took diesel to $6.32 in Kansas would like the farmers to blame the country being invaded. Mr. Hamilton's answer was, "What you said just now is you're going to sell out our friends in Ukraine. That's not OK." The paper then applied the test it applied in Iowa and went looking for one time the President changed course because Roger Marshall asked. On the Argentine beef, the Senator was "frustrated as anybody" and defended it. On the dyed-diesel order, he thanked the White House "for listening to farmers," which is a thank-you note, not an ask. On the Dodge City raids, he said he told the Secretary it was "not quite right," and did not ask for it to stop. On the tariffs, he said Wednesday they are producing "a manufacturing renaissance," and named Great Plains Manufacturing in Salina, a Kubota subsidiary, as one of three Kansas manufacturers the tariffs have helped. The company's chief financial officer, Tim Henry, told the Kansas Reflector on Friday that the Senator may well have seen growth on his visit, "but that growth was not because of tariffs," that steel has been over a thousand dollars a ton for six months, and that the one place tariffs held off a competitor "is not enough to offset the other burdens coming with tariffs today." His own account of the relationship, from the debate: "Just like with my wife, I can disagree with her. Now, my wife is always right, and President Trump is not always right." Mr. Hamilton's: "The president doesn't seem to listen to what he has to say." The paper could find no occasion on which he said anything the President needed to listen to.

The tariffs are where Kansas lives, so the paper will slow down. In the last week of October 2025 the Senate voted three times to end the President's tariff emergencies, on Brazil, on Canada, and on the world, and all three passed, and Senator Marshall voted no three times. His line in March 2025 was "short-term pain for long-term gain." Here is what the pain looked like. Kansas is the top sorghum state in the country, and China was its number one customer, and China bought little to no American sorghum after April 2025, and the price fell from more than six dollars a bushel in 2022 to about three. The Kansas Livestock Association's PAC, which endorsed the Senator in 2016 and 2020, declined to endorse him this year. The Kansas Farm Bureau's president called the President's plan to import Argentine beef "bad for consumers, destructive for ranchers and anti-American in principle"; the Senator, on a telephone town hall in August, said he was "frustrated as anybody" and then defended the imports. And on the stage at the State Fair, to a crowd of farmers, he said: "Look, these tariffs are working. We're expanding our export markets because of them!" and "Does anybody really care that corn exports are up 50 percent over the last two years?" They booed. He had opened the answer with "Maybe someone can give us a K-State update here in a second." The paper would like the record to show that the Senator from Kansas, asked about the trade war at the Kansas State Fair, asked about the football score. The Cook Political Report moved this race to a toss-up on October 6, and its stated reasons were a strong challenger, an incumbent "slow to respond to threats," and "erosion in Trump's support" tied to the farm economy. The paper has read the Senator's votes and thinks Cook was being kind about the second one.

A few more things for the file, since the Senator is a doctor. He voted for the big bill, said "there are no Medicaid cuts," and sits on the Finance Committee that wrote them; Kansas has more rural hospitals at immediate risk of closing than any state in the country. At a Finance Committee hearing in September 2025, with an aide holding a sign reading "76 JABS!", the obstetrician explained that the hepatitis B vaccine given to newborns "makes no sense to me," because "we do a hepatitis test on every mom," and "if she's in a stable monogamous relationship, nobody at home has hepatitis," and "my pediatricians always agree with me." The paper has no pediatricians, but it has read the ones who answered him, and they do not. He objected to the Arizona and Pennsylvania electors on January 6, 2021, after the Capitol was cleared. He blamed "Biden-era diversity efforts" among air traffic controllers for the Washington midair collision that killed 67 people, many of them on a flight from Wichita, days after it happened. He stopped holding town halls, after one in which the room turned on him, because he "feared" they would "lead to violence." He bought a $1.2 million house with a boat dock in Sarasota, Florida, applied for a Florida driver's license from it, took taxpayer-funded official trips near it, and is now selling it, and when he explained at the State Fair why Kansas is home, the crowd chanted, "You don't live here!"

Adam Hamilton is the Democrat, and the paper will deal with the attack on him first, because the attack is the campaign. In 1990, at 25, Mr. Hamilton founded the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood with about ten people in a funeral home; it is now the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States, roughly 24,000 members on nine campuses, and last year it fed more than 45,000 people and gave away 60,000 children's books. He preached at the National Prayer Service after President Obama's second inauguration. He has written more than twenty books. He spent five years trying to hold his denomination together through its split over gay clergy and marriage, on the side of the people who wanted the church to stop, in his words, hurting people, and when the ban came down in 2024 he said, "The thought that our denomination will no longer hurt people, I think, will be a source of great joy." He describes himself as "a liberal conservative and a conservative liberal, depending on the issue and the day of the week," he was a registered Republican as recently as 2020, and two former Republican governors of Kansas, Bill Graves and Mike Hayden, have endorsed him. Governor Hayden's reason: the Senator "has spent his time in the Senate putting party and politics over the people of Kansas."

Here is what the Republican Party of the United States has said about this man. In Olathe on September 14 the Vice President told a factory floor that the choice was between "a proud Christian" and "a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself," and said Mr. Hamilton had "proudly supported a drag group called Our Ladies of Perpetual Indulgence," "the devil worshiping group that was saying special blessings before LA Dodgers games." There is no such group. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a 47-year-old charity; the Dodgers gave their Los Angeles chapter a community award in 2023; nobody blessed a game; and Resurrection was one of dozens of sponsors of Kansas City's Pride festival. The Vice President also played sermon clips cut to suggest Mr. Hamilton believes eating meat and being white are sins. "Every single line of what you just read was a lie," Mr. Hamilton told ABC. The Senator's contribution: "Adam Hamilton is a radical Democrat, and his sermons are identical to the Democratic Party platform," and "a woke megachurch CEO," and "the ultimate snake oil salesman," and, on Wednesday, the name Schumer seventeen times in an hour, "This guy is funded by Chuck Schumer," "He'll be beholden to Chuck Schumer forever." Mr. Hamilton has said he would not vote for Mr. Schumer as leader, and said afterward that it seemed the Senator thought he was running against him. The President's, on Truth Social: "I can state unequivocally that Adam Hamilton is not one of us!" And last Monday, from the stage: "lunatic." The Great Plains bishop of the United Methodist Church, David Wilson, wrote that the attacks on the church "criticize fellow Christians merely for living up to what Jesus taught in the Gospel texts." One hundred twenty Kansas Methodist ministers signed a letter asking the Senator to stop "insulting, demeaning, or dismissing the faith of other Christians." The paper is not a church. It would only observe that the Senator who voted to keep the Epstein files closed, and the President whose name is in them, and the Vice President who says grace at the table where they sit, have decided that the pastor is the one with the faith problem.

And then the ad, which the paper will set out fully because the Star did. In November 2005 two teenage boys at a Resurrection youth retreat said a volunteer had touched them inappropriately. The church ran an internal investigation, did not call the police, found it inconclusive, and did not tell the parents. The volunteer, Scott Preston Moore, came back as a cabin leader in 2006 and was accused again of entering campers' rooms; the church then went to the sheriff about both years; the prosecutor declined to charge; the church barred him from working with children. In 2013 Moore was convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery against a 16-year-old at his own home, a separate case, and served a year. Mr. Hamilton has said, "We absolutely would have taken it to the police first" now, and the church changed its policy the next year. The paper thinks the church got 2005 wrong and thinks Mr. Hamilton should say so in exactly those words. On Wednesday he came close: "I should have checked to make sure that he wasn't going back. That was a mistake on my part." The paper would still like the word, but it has heard worse apologies this week from people with more to apologize for, and the Senator's answer on the 81 arrests was that the reports were lies. The Senator's ad says Mr. Hamilton "protected a pedophile." The Star's verdict on that claim is False, on "Hamilton welcomed him back" is Misleading, and on "Hamilton never called police" is Misleading. The ad also used footage of children at Tall Oaks Camp, which had nothing to do with any of it and had not consented; the camp sent a cease-and-desist; a family in Lacygne found their rental cabins in the same ad, learned of it from a reporter, and worried about a boycott "even though we had nothing to do with it"; the campaign's explanation was that the camp was "a stock image" and that "the image has already been corrected," and that night a Tall Oaks board member counted the uncorrected ad three times in ten minutes on KMBC. The Senator apologized. The paper wrote this week about a candidate in Georgia who put a murdered eight-year-old in an ad over her family's letter and a candidate in Ohio who paid $4 million to put a rape victim's mother on television. Kansas is where the party found footage of other people's children and ran it under the word "pedophile." It is the same week. It is the same instinct.

Mr. Hamilton's platform is short and the paper read it: end the tariff chaos and make Congress vote on new tariffs; restore the ACA credits and the Medicaid that the big bill took; no corporate PAC money, which he has kept to; no stock trading by members; raise the Social Security cap on incomes over a million; immigration laws enforced, with "every person treated with dignity and respect," and ICE working with local police rather than around them. The Senator posted the same sentiment after federal agents arrested 104 people in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal in September without telling him or the three cities; he did not ask for the operation to stop, and the paper does not count a post as a position. On the war: "the wrong decision." On the Senate: "If it's good for Kansas, I'm all in. But if it's bad for Kansas, I'm a hard no." His line at the fair, which got the cheer the Senator's football joke did not: "If you love six-dollar-a-gallon diesel fuel, you can thank Roger Marshall." He raised $13.5 million through September to the Senator's $7 million, $9.9 million of it in the last quarter against the Senator's $866,000, and the Senate Leadership Fund has had to move $8.2 million into a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

The Daily Buffoon endorses Adam Hamilton for the United States Senate from Kansas. The polls are a tie, 46 to 46 in the averages, with the pastor up among independents by fifteen, and the President at 40 percent in a state he carried by sixteen. The paper endorses him with the 2005 retreat on the record, because the choice in Kansas is between a man whose church failed to call the sheriff about a volunteer twenty-one years ago and has said so, and a man whose practice called the sheriff on 81 of its own patients and has called it ordinary; between a man who held a denomination together over the question of whom to stop hurting, and a man who voted to keep a file of hurt children closed because it was "not of much interest"; and between a man whom two Republican governors of Kansas trust with the seat and a man whom the Kansas Livestock Association no longer does. Kansas has been voting since October 14, and more than 122,000 Kansans had voted by Thursday; the in-person count, 98,189, is nearly double what it was at this point in 2022. The paper would like the Senator's former patients to know that in this one proceeding, they are not required to appear.

Five clowns. The paper has given five this week to men who used a rape victim's mother and a murdered child in advertising, and it holds the fifth for that family of act, and the Senator earns it twice: once in 2011, when a woman eight months pregnant was handcuffed in front of her toddler over a hearing about his bill, and once this month, when he put footage of other people's children on television under the word "pedophile" and kept it running after the camp asked him to stop. The President says the law made him do the first one. There is no such law. There was only a doctor, a collections lawyer, and a judge, and the doctor's name was on every page, and he calls it common. The paper would like Kansas to make it less so.