Senator’s six-year-old cookie bill finally gets paid — but the baker isn’t buying his explanation

THE DAILY BS: HOW MUCH CAN YOU HANDLE?

SPARE ME THE BS. I’ve got things to do.

Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall’s 2020 campaign failed to pay a bakery’s $678.75 bill for six years.
After the owner went public, Marshall sent $1,300 and described it as paying double — although twice the invoice would be $1,357.50.
The episode revived scrutiny of his former medical practice’s lawsuits against hundreds of patients over unpaid bills.

MORE TO IT. I’ve got time.

Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas has finally paid a six-year-old bakery bill, but the woman who made the cookies isn’t changing her mind about the senator. And the controversy has produced an especially awkward comparison with his former medical practice’s history of collecting unpaid debts.

Holly Thomas, owner of Holly’s Sweet Treats in Hutchinson, Kansas, said Marshall’s 2020 Senate campaign ordered baked goods for a Republican primary election watch party and left a $678.75 invoice unpaid.

On October 8, she finally took the dispute public.

“Do you know why I will never vote for Roger Marshall?” Thomas wrote on Facebook.

She explained that she was a new small-business owner when the order was placed, and the pandemic had made the financial situation especially difficult.

“For nearly a year, I made repeated attempts to collect payment, reaching out by phone and email,” she wrote.

According to Thomas, the campaign never returned her calls or paid the invoice.

The order involved 450 treats, including custom campaign cookies and other baked goods, according to subsequent reporting.

After her complaint spread online, Marshall responded on October 10 by posting a screenshot of a $1,300 payment.

“We have absolutely no idea how this happened,” the senator wrote, saying the campaign contacted the bakery to apologize once it learned about the unpaid invoice.

Marshall described the payment as double the original bill.

But that created another problem: $678.75 multiplied by two equals $1,357.50, not $1,300.

That’s $57.50 short of an exact doubling, although the payment was substantially more than the original amount owed.

Thomas confirmed that the money had arrived.

“Better late than never, right? Six years later, I guess we can finally mark that invoice PAID!” she wrote.

But the dispute didn’t end with the cookies.

Marshall, an obstetrician-gynecologist before entering Congress, has previously faced scrutiny over debt-collection lawsuits involving his medical practice.

USA Today reported that the practice had sued approximately 700 patients over medical debts.

The comparison was difficult to miss: Marshall’s former practice pursued patients who owed money, while his political campaign left a small-business vendor waiting six years for payment.

Marshall says he did not know about the unpaid bakery invoice until the issue came to his attention. The available reporting does not establish that he personally knew about the debt during the intervening years.

Thomas, meanwhile, said her complaint was about financial responsibility rather than party politics.

“This isn’t about political parties or policy disagreements,” she wrote. “It’s about my personal experience as a small business owner and the importance of honoring financial commitments.”

The bakery now has its money, but Marshall is heading into another Senate election with an unusually memorable controversy involving six-year-old cookies, an unpaid bill and a public explanation that generated its own arithmetic problem.