In December 2022, Roger Marshall put out a press release he was clearly proud of. He had just finished holding a town hall in every single one of Kansas's 105 counties.

Here's how he explained why it mattered, in his own words on his own Senate website:

"The very first time I met Senator Bob Dole he told me, 'go out and listen to the people of Kansas – they will give you the answer.' That's exactly what we did with our 105 town hall meetings in each of Kansas' 105 counties."

Go out and listen to the people of Kansas.

That was the standard Marshall set for himself. Not a critic's standard. His own.

He hasn't met it in more than 500 days.

The last time he faced an open crowd, he walked out

Marshall's last town hall that was genuinely open to the public was on Saturday, March 1, 2025, at Logan County Hospital in Oakley, in northwest Kansas.

It did not go the way he wanted.

Constituents showed up angry about DOGE's cuts — to veterans' services, to farm programs, to health care. They pressed him. They interrupted. And according to an account of the meeting, Marshall warned them:

"I'm going to say this one time. If you all keep cutting me off, if you're rude, which you're being, I'm going to leave."

He then called it "one of the rudest audiences I've ever had."

About half an hour in, he announced he had other commitments and left. People yelled and booed as he walked out. Some called him a coward.

Then he made it worse. Marshall pushed the idea that the crowd had been stacked with paid troublemakers rather than real constituents. Within days, he walked that claim back.

The people in that room weren't operatives. They were Kansans. Some of them were his own voters.

And since that morning in Oakley, the door has stayed shut.

Nearly 3,850 Kansans signed their names asking him to show up

This spring, two groups — Prairie Progress Civic Action and Leading Kansas — decided to ask formally.

They circulated a petition with a request so modest it's almost hard to argue with: hold a public town hall. Show up. Answer questions.

The response was not small. Nearly 3,850 Kansans signed. They came from 100 of Kansas's 105 counties — not one city, not one party stronghold, but nearly every corner of the state, including the deep-red rural counties Marshall carried easily.

"We want to ask questions, we want to be respectful, we want to have dialogues and we want to break down some of the extreme rhetoric that has come out," Jessica Cooney of Prairie Progress Civic Action told KWCH.

That's the whole ask. Be respectful. Have a dialogue.

His office called the bomb squad on the petitions

On May 27, 2026, organizers carried the signatures to Marshall's Wichita office in cardboard boxes.

What happened next is not a metaphor. It actually happened.

Marshall's office called the Wichita police around noon to report five suspicious cardboard boxes outside the office with a note addressed to the senator. Officers responded. So did the police department's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit — the bomb squad.

They examined the boxes and found what was inside: paper. Protest fliers and petition signatures. No threat.

Think about what that says. Thousands of Kansans asked their senator for a conversation. His office treated the request as a potential bomb.

KWCH asked Marshall's office for comment on the petition. His office did not respond.

"That's the job"

The letter that ran in the Topeka Capital-Journal this week was written by Judith Moler, a Shawnee County resident. Her argument wasn't complicated:

"If you're willing to cast the votes, you should be willing to answer the questions."

She pointed out something worth repeating. Marshall represents nearly three million Kansans — every one of them, including the ones who didn't vote for him. As she put it, access to your senator "shouldn't depend on receiving an invitation, donating to a campaign or already agreeing with him."

That word — invitation — matters. Marshall hasn't disappeared from Kansas. He still does events. But the ones he does now tend to be controlled.

Just over two weeks after Oakley, on March 17, 2025, Marshall held a meeting in Yates Center — in a small conference room in the basement of the Woodson County Courthouse. Christy Davis, a fifth-generation Kansan who was inside, described it in the Kansas Reflector with one word: "orchestrated."

As she wrote, it "was not a public town hall. Only those invited to participate were given the opportunity to speak." Meanwhile about twenty constituents stood outside holding signs.

One of those signs read: "I WISH I WAS GETTING PAID TO BE HERE."

They hadn't forgotten what he'd accused them of.

That's not a town hall. That's an audience.

Why the dodging matters

A town hall isn't a formality. It's the one setting where a senator can't control the questions.

And Marshall has a lot of questions he'd have to answer in a room full of Kansans:

• He is a key founding member of the Senate DOGE Caucus, announced in December 2024 to work alongside Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
• He personally urged that crackdown. "One of the very first things I spoke to Elon and Vivek about was the problems in the USAID program," Marshall said, per the Kansas Reflector. The resulting freeze left $340 million in American-grown food — wheat, sorghum, rice, lentils and more — idled at U.S. ports. Kansas's other Republican senator, Jerry Moran, warned that "time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes."
• At that closed-door Yates Center meeting, Marshall assured the room that "tariffs are resulting in more jobs coming home," and did not address proposed Medicaid or USDA cuts — in a state where Medicaid covers 1 in 7 Kansans and 41% of Kansas children.

Those are exactly the subjects the Oakley crowd wanted to raise — veterans, farm programs, health care. Which may be precisely why there hasn't been another open meeting since.

Bob Dole's advice, the advice Marshall quoted approvingly in his own press release, was to go out and listen to the people of Kansas, because they will give you the answer.

In March 2025, the people of Kansas tried to give him an answer. He called them rude and left.

More than five hundred days later, they're still waiting for him to come back.

Source

• Judith Moler, "Kansans demand Senator Roger Marshall hold meetings | Opinion", Topeka Capital-Journal, July 25, 2026.
• Petition delivery and signature count: KWCH, May 27, 2026. Bomb squad response: KSAL.
• Oakley town hall, March 1, 2025: Kansas City Star via Yahoo. Yates Center meeting, March 17, 2025: Christy Davis, Kansas Reflector (commentary).