1.04.2009

Republican obstructionists fight on

Al Franken held a 225 vote lead over Norm Coleman in the ongoing Minnesota Senate race at the conclusion of the weekend's recount. Franken's victory now seems to be a foregone conclusion to this sequence of events, according to a Talking Points Memo analysis of the situation. Yet, Coleman and his Party are not ready to accept this result and move on. They intend to exhaust the legal options available to them. Elsewhere, TPM asks and answers this question:

So what does this mean? Minnesota law is unique in that it prohibits the issuing of an official certificate of election until the legal challenges are all resolved. Unless Coleman backs down and concedes defeat, he could bottle up a Franken win for weeks or even months, depending on how appeals go — even though it appears to be nearly impossible that he could ever succeed.

And since the Senate Republican leadership has promised to block the seating of Al Franken on any provisional basis, that means this seat could stay vacant for a while.

So, at the moment, it appears that Minnesotans will soon needlessly lack the political representation provided to them and to every other state by the Constitution because the Norm Coleman and the Republican Party wishes to use the judiciary to gum up the works for their Democratic Party competitors.

Events and revealed intentions such as these ought to be recalled whenever a GOP politician invokes state rights, tort reform, accepting the inevitable for the sake of stability, etc. when these ideas suit his or her interests.

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