Gene Suellentrop handed his Kansas Senate leadership colleagues a crowbar, and they still can’t seem to see the need to pry him from office.
Late Friday, the Senate majority leader was formally charged with multiple violations for alleged DUI and endangering the public safety by driving the wrong way for some 10 minutes on Interstate 70 in Topeka: 90 mph in a 65-mph zone, eluding police and avoiding a police roadblock and tire-deflating device.
That evening, Republican leadership appeared it would make news of some sort with a much-anticipated press release about their comrade. Would Senate President Ty Masterson announce Suellentrop’s resignation from the Senate? Would he call for it? Would Suellentrop himself admit the need to resign and start repairing his life?
Nah. Masterson and Senate Vice President Rick Wilborn merely issued a scandalously lame statement taking note of the serious charges against him and offering prayers for his family. Oh, and congratulating themselves for persevering on through the legislative session despite the scandal.
Come on. Taking no action and showing no leadership whatsoever in the face of disgrace in their top ranks is nothing to be proud of. And they’re beyond lucky there weren’t other families to offer their thoughts and prayers to, for that wrong-way driver was driving a weapon of mass destruction.
In addition, that statement they put out was politically blind and socially tone-deaf. Someone falls off a ladder cleaning out the gutters at home, you send thoughts and prayers. A top Senate leader who does what Suellentrop allegedly did, you send him packing.
When are Republican Senate leaders going to figure that out? We asked top GOP leaders and haven’t heard back. Each day they delay, more ordinary Kansans are coming to realize their elected leaders really are as impervious and imperious as they’d feared.
It takes idiocy, apathy or both to add to the public’s considerable cynicism in the year 2021. But the Kansas Senate’s Republican leadership is somehow managing to accomplish this.
They surely can’t hope that the rope Suellentrop wove for himself can be turned into a political lifeline.
Ask Suellentrop’s own Republican rank-and-file what they think. “They say if it was an average Joe, he’d still be in jail,” one Republican senator told us.
It will be up to Shawnee County District Attorney Mike Kagay to prove those who still think nothing much will come of this wrong.
Meanwhile, the Republican Senate leadership is only expanding the ranks of those who think that the powerful will always protect their own.
