Joe has been keeping you up to date about the Al Franken vs. Norm Coleman race in Minnesota - a race that Al Franken won five months ago. The Republicans have been basically filibustering the election, using legal maneuvers, like a convict on death row, to stop the state from certifying Franken's victory. The GOP goal isn't to win the election - they know they've already lost - it's to hope that nobody cares if they just keep appealing and appealing legal loss after loss, stopping Minnesota from getting its second senator, ever, but more importantly, stopping the Democrats from getting their 60th Senate seat.
That means that whatever pressure national Republicans were putting on Coleman before, it's going to be far worse now. Perhaps now the Democrats in Washington will care about the Franken race, because they sure rolled over and played dead up until now. Had the Dems only challenged Coleman earlier, forced him to concede the way that they'd have forced us were the situation reversed, perhaps we'd have sixty seats today. Oh well, another profile in Democratic courage that ends up biting us in the behind.
David Waldman at DKos has a delicious idea:
Seat Al Franken and give him his committee assignments now, or we'll block a new organizing resolution that would let you reassign Specter's previously Republican committee seats to one of your own.In other words, the GOP just lost a seat on every committee that Specter sat on. They can't reassign Specter's seat to another GOP Senator without a new organizing resolution, something we can block.
