After DUI arrest and SUV police pursuit, Kansas Sen. Suellentrop must resign now

It really is this simple: After allegedly speeding in the wrong direction on Interstate 70 for 10 minutes early Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop must immediately resign — not just from some of his leadership duties, but from his legislative seat. If he won’t, then the Kansas Senate must move swiftly to expel him.

Suellentrop’s arrest for DUI and other offenses in the wee hours Tuesday morning on a blessedly desolate Topeka interstate needs to be, ironically enough, an exceedingly sobering moment for his Senate colleagues. Particularly in his own Republican caucus, which controls the esteemed body.

Suellentrop’s Republican colleagues must understand that temporarily relinquishing a few duties — as his milquetoast written statement late Wednesday says is happening — is far too small a price to pay. Does the phrase “personal responsibility” ring any bells? This issue is really beyond politics, but just imagine this were someone in the other party, and do what you would recommend in that case.

Driving even slightly over the legal limit would have been bad enough. But Suellentrop is accused of careening eastward in the westbound lanes of I-70 near the Capitol for 10 long, perilous minutes.

In a bigger city with more night owls, he very likely would’ve caused a catastrophic head-on crash with multiple fatalities. You don’t need to look around much to see the probabilities. In 2009, a New York mom driving on 10 drinks and a “large amount” of marijuana drove the wrong way and hit an SUV — killing herself, four of the five children in her vehicle and all three men in the other. And just this week, Tampa, Florida said goodbye to police officer Jesse Madsen, who heroically drove purposely head-on into an impaired motorist driving on the wrong side of an interstate, sacrificing his life to save others.

Could that have been a Kansas Capitol Police officer’s fate? Or any of ours? Absolutely: “They about hit me but I’m OK,” one shaken Topeka motorist told the 911 operator at 12:47 a.m. Tuesday, after a near collision with the white SUV in question here. “They were going the wrong direction. They met me coming up the on-ramp and scared the crap out of me.”

Imagine that was you.

Again, if he was in the driver’s seat, it was just blind luck and nothing more that Suellentrop, and anyone ill-fated enough to have shared the road with him, didn’t join the victims of wrong-way drivers and their growing convoy of heartbreak. However scandalized, he should consider himself one of the luckiest people on the planet today.

Still, if these allegations are true — and Suellentrop knows whether they are — his galactically foolish and negligent acts easily warrant the political death penalty. A man who would take so many unknown lives so lightly, as well as his own, has no place in office, much less at the highest echelons of the Kansas Legislature.

You don’t need to wait on the inert judicial process, or even do any blood alcohol tests or see him walk a crooked line, to know that if your Senate majority leader drove on the wrong side of an interstate highway for 10 minutes then he doesn’t belong in any position of public trust.

Let’s pray he comes to that conclusion on his own, and spares his devastated colleagues and supporters the pain of extracting him by force.

While you’re at it, ask the Kansas Highway Patrol why it can’t simply release the first page of the incident report — which, in Kansas, is an open record and spells out some of the basics of what happened. And ask yourself why the judge in this case, Shawnee County District Judge Penny Moylan, couldn’t have been more forthcoming. What information was missing from the highway patrol that caused her to decide there was no probable cause for charges?

Regardless, the Senate must be prepared to act, against the advent of Suellentrop’s refusal to resign. We’re told Senate leadership is paddling furiously under the surface on this scandal. Good. But the rest of us need to see some more ripples of activity, and now.

Suellentrop’s alleged actions, the highway patrol’s refusal to release a record of the events, and the quick, unexplained release of a powerful figure in such a damning case have all combined to seriously fray the public’s faith in the judicial system.

Any hesitation by the Legislature in dealing with it will only make it worse.

This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 1:57 PM.