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Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Oy vey....ANOTHER one?
Posted by Jill | 5:34 AM
It's bad enough that sore loserman Norm Coleman simply won't go away and let Minnesota have the two Senators it's supposed to have, instead deciding that his God-given right as a Republican to have a Senate seat in perpetuity outweighs things like vote counts and the fact that Minnesotans are down a Senator. Anyone who thinks the latest court ruling against Coleman's quest to have the Minnesota Senatorial election overturned in his favor is the end had better guess again. Coleman and the GOP have made it very clear that they are not giving up until they get a Supreme Court ruling, and given the composition of the Court these days, they're entirely likely to decide that reactionary conservatism trumps counting votes just as a somewhat less wingnutty court did in 2000.

This fracas in Minnesota has not gone unnoticed in NY-20, where that district now has its very own sore loserman in the form of Jim Tedisco, who has already gone to court even before 5900 additional absentee votes have been counted. And Tedisco has gone even further than Coleman in demanding that his Democratic opponent and the apparent winner, Scott Murphy, not be seated -- ever -- under any circumstances, no matter what the final vote count. Brad Friedman has the details on THAT particular stunt. That particular claim may have been struck immediately, but the mere fact that Tedisco's people made it shows you where the Republicans' heads are in regard to electoral results.

Coleman is just being an asshole in a close election, but that Tedisco's people are essentially claiming that he should be declared the winner no matter how the final vote count ends up is just astounding, or would be if we didn't already know about the authoritarian, dictatorial, anti-lower-case-d-democratic leanings of Republicans. They were paying very close attention in 2000, and got eight years of George W. Bush because Bush's people wouldn't give up, no matter what the vote count was. And they figure if they got that one, they can win any court fight just by continuing it in perpetuity.

And those who lose their representation seem to matter not one whit to them.

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Blogger DBK said...
Greetings from the Great North Woods. Up here in Big Tree country, we don't pay a lot of mind to that Franken-Coleman business. It gets onto the evening news every so often, but right now we're too busy shoveling out from the latest snowfall to worry about which of those millionaires is going to represent us. We figure the courts will get it right eventually, and they seem to be doing that. Sure, it would be nice to have all of our senators in the house when they start divvying up the stimulus money, but we've got enough to concern us without getting deep into that whole mishugas (as they say in St Louis Park).

My understanding is that Coleman is preparing to take it to the state supreme court, not the US Supreme Court, but I might be wrong about that. Constitutionally speaking, I don't think the US SC has any jurisdiction in a state election. I'm not a lawyer, mind you, but that quote in the Brad Blog article you cited about the US SC came from John Cornyn, a US Senator, and US Senators, especially Republicans, generally talk out of their asses when talking about the law. Republican senators don't write laws anymore, or even understand them, you know. Lobbyists write laws for them and then the senators gibber like baboons about "family values" and such to try and get people to believe the laws are for their benefit when, in fact, laws written for Republican members of Congress by lobbyists are written for the benefit of wealthy people who own large businesses.

I thought you knew all that.

Anyway, I think the case can only go as high as the state supreme court. Expect the people of Minnesota to be perfectly placid with whatever decision is rendered. They might get riled up if the US SC takes over. That would certainly tick me off. A bunch of outsiders trying to tell me who my next senator is would definitely get me riled up. Expect a special election to kick Coleman out if the US SC put him in, and kick him out in such a decisive manner that he'd feel it in his hind quarters for quite some time.
4/1/09, 10:25 AM  
Blogger BradF said...
If Coleman wishes, he may appeal to the US Supreme Court after his (likely) loss in the MN Supreme Court.

That doesn't mean SCOTUS has to agree to hear it, however. And they may wish to stay the heck out of it (I don't think they're especially proud, frankly, of what they did in 2000, when they also should have stayed out of a state case, but that's just a guess).

In the meantime, the Coleman camp (Coleman himself, and his attorney Ben Ginsberg -- who also worked on FL 2000) have strongly hinted they will likely be going all the way to SCOTUS if necessary.
4/2/09, 3:51 PM  
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