Roger Marshall: “I recall the first time I sat down with the late great Senator Bob Dole after I had been elected to Congress. And the…”

“I recall the first time I sat down with the late great Senator Bob Dole after I had been elected to Congress. And the purpose of that meeting was to get to know the Senator, but I had a big issue I was getting ready to vote on, and I wanted to get his advice. As I presented to him the legislation I was going to be voting on the next day, he stopped and looked at me, and he said: Roger, what you need to do is just go back to Kansas and listen to the people of Kansas. They will tell you the answer to that question. So this August was no different than any break I have had. Like many of my colleagues, we went back to our home States. I went from Wathena to Wichita, from small towns to big cities, from the inner city to rural America; and we listened. We sat down with unions, small businesses, big businesses, folks from financial services, and farmers and ranchers. We sat down with leaders from public schools and private schools. We had roundtables. We did multiple roundtables on childcare, homelessness. We sat down with multiple minority business owners, and we talked about the challenges they had, specifically about access to capital. We did roundtables on nutrition and healthcare. In Abilene, KS, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Small Business Administration, founded by our 34th President of the United States, Kansans' own Dwight David Eisenhower; we participated in a DHS human trafficking event and in history.…”