Jerry Moran


Gerald Wesley Moran is an American lawyer and politician who is the senior United States senator from Kansas, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he was chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 113th U.S. Congress, during which he led successful Republican efforts in the 2014 election, producing the first Republican Senate majority since 2006. Previously, he was a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing.
Raised in Plainville, Kansas, Moran graduated from the University of Kansas and the University of Kansas School of Law. He worked in private law and was the state special assistant attorney general and deputy attorney of Rooks County. He served in the Kansas Senate from 1989 to 1997 and was majority leader for his last two years. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1996 and spent seven terms there with little electoral opposition. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 after defeating fellow U.S. representative Todd Tiahrt in a contentious primary. He was reelected to the Senate in 2016 and 2022.
Moran has been the dean of the Kansas congressional delegation since 2021, when Senator Pat Roberts retired.

Early life, education, and career

Moran was born in Great Bend, Kansas, the son of Madeline Eleanor and Raymond Edwin "Ray" Moran. He was raised in Plainville. He attended Fort Hays State University before enrolling at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in economics in 1976. While attending the University of Kansas, he worked as a summer intern for U.S. representative Keith Sebelius in 1974, when impeachment proceedings were being prepared against President Richard Nixon.
Moran worked as a banker before receiving his Juris Doctor from the University of Kansas School of Law in 1982. He practiced law at Stinson, Mag & Fizzell in Kansas City, and later joined Jeter & Larson Law Firm in Hays, where he practiced for 15 years. In addition to his law practice, he served as the state special assistant attorney general and deputy county attorney of Rooks County. He also served as an adjunct professor of political science at Fort Hays State University.

Kansas Senate

Moran served eight years in the Kansas Senate. He served two years as the vice president and his last two years as majority leader.

U.S. House of Representatives

Elections

Moran was elected to Congress in 1996 and reelected six times, never facing serious opposition in the conservative 1st district. In 2006, his opponent was John Doll, against whom he received almost 79% of the vote—one of the highest totals for a Republican congressional incumbent in that election.

Tenure

During his time in the House of Representatives, Moran conducted an annual town hall meeting in each of the 69 counties in Kansas's "Big First" Congressional District.
As a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee, Moran worked with colleagues to craft legislation to aid Kansas farms and ranches. He was also an active member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, where he served as chair of the Subcommittee on Health.
Slate's David Weigel wrote that, despite his insistence that earmarks are a way to get members of Congress to vote for spending "we can't afford", Moran requested $19.4 million in earmarks in the 2010 budget.

U.S. Senate

Elections

Moran became the Republican nominee for the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Kansas after defeating Representative Todd Tiahrt in the Republican primary, 50% to 45%. In the general election, Moran defeated Democrat Lisa Johnston, Libertarian Michael Dann, and Reform Party candidate Joe Bellis, with 70% of the vote.

Tenure

Moran was elected chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 113th U.S. Congress on November 14, 2012. He oversaw the Republican gain of nine Senate seats in the 2014 United States Senate elections, resulting in the first Republican Senate majority since 2006.
On January 5, 2021, Moran announced that he would vote to certify the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count, which was to take place the following day. He was participating in the certification when Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol. During the attack, Moran tweeted that he condemned "the violence and destruction at the U.S. Capitol in the strongest possible terms. It is completely unacceptable and unpatriotic."
For his tenure as the chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee in the 116th Congress, Moran earned an "F" grade from the nonpartisan Lugar Center's Congressional Oversight Hearing Index. In 2025, amid the Department of Government Efficiency's attempts to fire probationary workers in the Department of Veterans Affairs, Moran said he was asking whether the firing of VA workers would affect services for veterans. He said, "We've been reassured that it doesn't affect direct care, but we're looking for more information."

Committee assignments

Current:
Past:
Moran's voting record is conservative. He has a lifetime rating of 86 percent from the American Conservative Union and a lifetime 71 percent rating from the Club for Growth. In 2023, the Lugar Center ranked Moran eighth among senators for bipartisanship.

Agriculture

In March 2019, Moran was one of 38 senators to sign a letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue warning that dairy farmers "have continued to face market instability and are struggling to survive the fourth year of sustained low prices" and urging his department to "strongly encourage these farmers to consider the Dairy Margin Coverage program."
In May 2019, Moran was a cosponsor of the Transporting Livestock Across America Safely Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Ben Sasse and Jon Tester intended to reform hours of service for livestock haulers by authorizing drivers to have the flexibility to rest at any point during their trip without it being counted against their hours of service and exempting loading and unloading times from the hours of service calculation of driving time.

Health care

Moran opposed the Medicare reform package of 2003, unlike most congressmen from rural districts. He also opposed the Affordable Care Act.
In May 2011, Moran sponsored S. 1058, the Pharmacy Competition and Consumer Choice Act of 2011. In the House, he served as co-chair of the House Rural Health Care Coalition and co-founder of the Congressional Community Pharmacy Coalition.
Moran voted against the July 2017 Senate health care bill. He criticized the closed-door process for developing the bill and criticized the legislation for not repealing the entire ACA.

National security and military

Since 2014, Moran has served on the United States Air Force Academy Board of Visitors.
In the early 2000s, Moran opposed a timetable for military withdrawal from Iraq.
Since entering Congress, Moran has traveled to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to visit deployed American forces and meet with foreign leaders.
In March 2018, Moran was one of five Republican senators to vote against tabling a resolution spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee that would have required President Trump to withdraw U.S. troops either in or influencing Yemen within the next 30 days unless they were combating Al-Qaeda. In October 2018, Moran was one of seven senators to sign a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that they found it "difficult to reconcile known facts with at least two" of the Trump administration's certifications that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were attempting to protect Yemeni civilians and were in compliance with U.S. laws on arms sales, citing their lack of understanding for "a certification that the Saudi and Emirati governments are complying with applicable agreements and laws regulating defense articles when the explicitly states that, in certain instances, they have not done so." In June 2019, Moran was one of seven Republicans to vote to block Trump's Saudi arms deal providing weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, and one of five Republicans to vote against another 20 arms sales.
In January 2019, Moran was one of 11 Republican senators to vote to advance legislation intended to block Trump's intent to lift sanctions against three Russian companies.
In February 2019, amid a report by the Commerce Department that ZTE had been caught illegally shipping goods of American origin to Iran and North Korea, Moran was one of seven senators to sponsor a bill reimposing sanctions on ZTE in the event that ZTE did not honor both American laws and its agreement with the Trump administration.
In July 2019, Moran was one of 16 Republican senators to send a letter to acting Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin encouraging them to work with them to prevent a continuing resolution "for FY 2020 that would delay the implementation of the President's National Defense Strategy and increase costs" and writing that the yearlong continuing resolution suggested by administration officials would render the Defense Department "incapable of increasing readiness, recapitalizing our force, or rationalizing funding to align with the National Defense Strategy."