Sen. Jerry Moran, Your Friend Is Not The Only Kansan Who Isn’t Happy With You | C.J. Janovy

By C.J. Janovy, The Kansas Reflector

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Oct. 1, 2020

Roger Reitz is disappointed in U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran.

He’s not alone, though we won’t know how many people share that feeling until the next time Moran runs for office. And though Reitz’s opinion doesn’t carry much weight anymore — he’s been out of public life for seven years, since his last term as a Republican state senator from Manhattan — it still means something.

“Jerry Moran was very helpful for me in my political work and I appreciated his support,” Reitz said. “He came to my home, there are pictures of me and some other Republicans at the time when I was early in my career in the Senate. The bottom line was, Jerry was always good to me.”

But things changed.

“I’ve written him two letters telling him how I had been disappointed in the way the Republican Party had acted in both Senate and the House as well as nationally,” he said.

He never heard back from his old supporter, even though he’d sent those letters to Moran’s home in Manhattan.

Reitz’s experience is worth considering as the rest of us ponder Moran’s profound hypocrisy, along with that of nearly all Republican senators (including Kansas’ other one, the retiring Pat Roberts), in granting due process to the president’s new U.S. Supreme Court nominee.

“When it comes to selecting a new U.S. Supreme Court justice in an election year, we agree with Kansas Sens. Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran. Everyone should wait until after the election,” Reitz’s hometown paper, the Manhattan Mercury, editorialized on Sept. 21. “That is, we agree with the statements that Republicans Roberts and Moran made in 2016.”

“Senator Moran remains committed to preventing this president from putting another justice on the highest court in the land,” one of Moran’s staffers told the Mercury in 2016.

“Sen. Moran supports the decision to move forward with the confirmation process and is currently working to schedule a meeting with Judge Amy Coney Barrett,” his spokesman told me this week.

The Mercury’s editorial writers noted that Moran had stood on principle against Obama’s nominee. But now, they wondered, “Could it be that principle was never the point? Could it be that rank partisan politics was always the endgame?”

Politicians don’t care what us editorial writers have to say — we know that. But Kansans should care about what people like Reitz have to say.

Before he was member of the Legislature, first in the House and then in the Senate, Reitz was a school board member, a city commissioner and the mayor of Manhattan. He was a family doctor for 50 years, a member of the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

I don’t know him personally and have only spoken to him on the phone, but how could you not love a man who gets introduced at a Manhattan Rotary meeting like this:

“You already know that he plays the piano and he also plays a pretty mean trumpet with the municipal band if you’ve been down to the concerts. One of his hobbies that I know of is model trains and he’s very much in love with those and you better not touch them if you go to his house. He also loves to walk his family dog. Roger is married to Virginia Reitz and they have raised five children. He is a very personal friend and a great Sunday school teacher for the last 40-plus years at the first United Methodist Church in Manhattan.” – A member of the Manhattan Rotary Noon Club introducing Roger Reitz in 2017

Reitz is among the Kansans who have left the Republican Party.

“If the tribalism persists, and the people vote for the tribe and not for what’s the best for the United States, then I take exception to that,” he said in 2018, explaining why he’d changed his voter registration.

“I’m like these folks who have said the Republican Party went away from me, I didn’t go away from it so much,” Reitz told me. “Jerry Moran is still a friend of mine. I really like him as a friend. But his support of Mitch McConnell and everything Republicans have done has disappointed me to no end.”

Reitz said he doesn’t know what motivated his friend to change over the years, but he traces Moran’s transformation to that Supreme Court nomination fight four years ago.

“He wanted to meet the man,” Reitz said of Moran and Merrick Garland. “He said, ‘I’d like to do that, that’s only right.’ It was at one of these small-town gatherings he prided himself on going around to in all the counties.”

Word of Moran’s comments got out and the news picked it up and soon Moran was in trouble with his party.

“That’s the way I remember it,” Reitz said. (The doctor’s memory is as clear as rubbing alcohol.)

“From that time on, seems to me, he has been a strong backer of the Republican way no matter what. That is a lasting disappointment to me,” Reitz said.

I asked Moran’s spokesman what the senator was hearing from constituents — how many calls and emails had been coming in and whether they were in favor or against trying to confirm Barrett this year — but he didn’t reply.

Moran has had to tread extra carefully over the last few weeks. When the president wouldn’t commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost the election, Moran seemed to say that was wrong.

The peaceful transition of power is an essential part of our democracy. Nothing but the rule of law under the Constitution determines this process.
— Senator Jerry Moran (@JerryMoran) September 24, 2020

We haven’t yet heard Moran’s thoughts on the tax-dodging, veteran-insulting president’s debate-night request that violent white supremacists “stand by.”

So there’s still time for Moran to show some, as he’s fond of putting it, Kansas common sense and reverse his position on Barrett’s nomination.

Refusing to be such a blatant hypocrite is the least he could do for people like Reitz. Because Kansas is full of them.

The Kansas Reflector seeks to increase people's awareness of how decisions made by elected representatives and other public servants affect our day-to-day lives. We hope to empower and inspire greater participation in democracy throughout Kansas.