I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen. Roger Marshall’s record as an OB/GYN suing hundreds of his patients over often very small delinquent bills and having a significant number of them arrested. Democrat Adam Hamilton is now running an ad on Youtube which describes one of those cases, a woman named Meischa Zimmerman who was arrested in 2011 and, according to her, handcuffed while eight months pregnant and in front of her two year old child. Marshall just sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad false and defamatory and demanding it be taken down.
This seems like it will be a textbook case of what has come to be called the “Streisand Effect”, in which the effort to block some kind of publicity or attention simply has the effect of calling more attention to the original issue.
What jumped out to me was Marshall’s argument for why the ad is false and defamatory. This is a passage from the write-up in the Kansas Reflector …
Heartland Regional OBGYN, where Marshall worked, opened a case against the woman in December 2009, according to court documents. Zimmerman was first arrested in 2011. She said in the Hamilton campaign ad that she was handcuffed while pregnant in front of her 2-year-old daughter.
Marshall’s lawyers took issue with three facets of the ad. They said Zimmerman wasn’t arrested for a missed payment but, instead, for failing to appear in court. They said the campaign ad frames the premise of the arrest on a $50 bill rather than the sum of Zimmerman’s debts. They said the arrest wasn’t a surprise, arguing that court records show Zimmerman “was called to court in three different counties by eight different businesses over a multi-year period, including by a different hospital and in an eviction proceeding.”
There are several claims here, none of them very strong, and none of them even making a meaningful claim that the accusation is false. But note the first one. Marshall is saying that he didn’t have Zimmerman arrested for not paying $50. He had her arrested for not showing up to court when he sued her over non-payment of $50. (Marshall says: “The unmistakable message to a reasonable viewer is that Senator Marshall caused a pregnant patient to be arrested and jailed for missing a single $50 payment. That message is false in every material respect.”)
I would call this a distinction without a difference to most people and certainly a distinction without a difference in political terms. The point about the other court proceedings seems to amount to: ‘she was behind on a lot of bills! not just mine!‘ I’m not sure how much that accomplishes for him. Most people aren’t comfortable with the idea of a woman’s OB/GYN asking a court to arrest her over less than $100 whatever other problems she might have.
This is a reminder of what we talked about this weekend. Trump’s extreme unpopularity is bringing contested elections to pretty Red States that haven’t seen one in a long time. And one of the things it’s showing is that a significant number of Red State incumbents just don’t have the skills for a contested partisan election. Roger Marshall is like the poster boy for that.
