Senator Franken
After all that, the court decision comes down strongly against Norm Coleman, "putting at most 400 ballots in play." On April 7, only some of those ballots (not all) will be counted.
It's apparent that Coleman will keep appealing as long as the climate allows, so, please, Minnesota centrists and establishment figures, isn't it about time to start shaming Coleman into ending this thing?
It's apparent that Coleman will keep appealing as long as the climate allows, so, please, Minnesota centrists and establishment figures, isn't it about time to start shaming Coleman into ending this thing?
posted by mikevotes at
5:19 PM
8 Comments:
The Senate needs to seat Franken as soon as he has the proper signatures on the proper documents. To postpone any longer would go beyond propriety and into the realm of perverted priorities (senate comity).
By
-epm, at 9:09 PM
Yeah. The problem is, does the sec state or whoever sign the documents before it gets to the Minn supreme court?
By
mikevotes, at 10:06 PM
That's a tough one, not knowing the details of MN election law. That's why I worded it the way I did. I don't think the Senate should jump the gun vis a vis the state certification. But once certified, they need to not defer to the long shot possibility that some higher court will overturn a certified election.
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-epm, at 10:15 PM
Yeah, after all the mess with Blagojevich and Burris, I don't think the Senate will be anxious to jump too far.
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mikevotes, at 7:11 AM
Pawlenty needs to sign the certificate, and he is beholden to the GOP.
The SOS is a Democrat (and a pretty reasonable one), so one possible route is that Franken could be seated "provisionally" with a SOS-signed certificate. The MN election law says that all court challenges must be over before the certificate is signed. Certainly, this exhausts all State Court options for Coleman. If he wants to move into the Federal Courts, that would have no bearing on the SOS' decision.
Pawlenty will likely see it differently. But I see that route as having consequences for Pawlenty's image, which is based (falsely) on his "nice guy" front and not some die-hard wingnut.
There is an outside chance that the MNSC will order Pawlenty to sign the certificate, giving him an easy way out of his quandary.
On the plus side, every dollar Cornyn directs to this hopeless effort is one less dollar spent on other campaigns to elect far more reliable wingnuts than the wishy-washy Coleman.
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Todd Dugdale , at 8:45 AM
Thanks, Todd. We needed someone who actually knows something about all this.
And, I tend to see pressure as the more likely way this ends at this point. Either shame on Coleman to pull out, or shame on state officials to wrap it up. I think everyone will probably wait through the Minnesota courts, but after that, I think the call to end it will be irresistable.
(And you wonder why I call Cornyn "my state's shame".... He's a particularly unusual piece of work. The problem is that he's actually pretty smart so he can navigate hyperpartisan without coming off too wingnutty.)
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mikevotes, at 10:41 AM
With regard to appeals, to what court would Colman appeal? The MN Supreme Court? Is there another state appellate court between the election court and the supreme?
My generic understanding of supreme courts is that they don't have to accept a case. And with any appeal, the burden is to show a flaw in the lower court's execution of a case, not the underlying case, per se.
But this is all getting a little too hypothetical. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next week.
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-epm, at 12:01 PM
From my understanding, no. The next appeal would be Minn Supreme, and then in theory, a starting in the federal courts.
And supreme courts work state by state, so I don't know Minn, but that choice not hear a case seems pretty standard.
By
mikevotes, at 2:17 PM
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