Norm Coleman has had several vote quests struck down by the Minnesota Second District Court, and Al Franken told a conference of Democratic Senators today that he can see a “light at the end of the tunnel.” I hope that means Al will be awarded certification on his seat by the Minnesota Court very soon. The Democrats need his vote to fight off the filibuster strength of the Republicans in the Senate.
In order to get a real sense of what’s happening, I spent time reading .pdf files at the Minnesota Second District Court web site this afternoon, and, going back a couple of weeks, it’s clear that Norm Coleman is following every failed approach with a newer one… what he is doing is stalling and, I expect, it is stalling at the instruction of the Republican National Committee.
The difference between reading the court documents to reading reports in the Minneapolis Star Tribune is that they court is not trying to boost circulation by keeping a Coleman / Franken controversy going. The newspaper is having financial problems and this certainly must sell papers.
If you read the Court documents, there is really very little chance for Coleman (listed as “Contestant”) against Franken (“Contestee”) at this point. Most of the uncounted votes he listed have been rejected for firm legal reasons. The Star Tribune leads their politics page with “Coleman’s hopes are down to 1,360 ballots” as of two hours ago. Yet, in Court documents from the 2nd of March through today, most of them have been clearly rejected and those that remain couldn’t produce enough votes to overturn Franken’s lead.
So will Coleman just give up (Doubtful – there’s not a pro-Minnesota bone in his body), or do we have a week or two of court deliberation and added requests for something else from the Republican side?
We’ll see.
