Today's New York Times has an article on Minnesota's one Senator: Amy Klobuchar. For the past six months, she's been doing the work of two. With the economic crisis, it's not easy carrying the whole load, although Klobuchar and her staff have risen to the occasion:
In a way, the time for a state to have a lone senator could not be worse, political experts said.The situation is clearly hurting the people of Minnesota. But, that shouldn't be the case. Norm Coleman lost.
Former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, a former senator from Minnesota, said the nation’s economic woes and the growing needs of constituents increased the already overwhelming demands facing a senator. “Doing that all by yourself?” Mr. Mondale said. “It’s a big burden, really daunting.”
A political scientist at the University of Minnesota, Lawrence R. Jacobs, said that given the deluge of requests for help from those losing jobs, homes, everything, Ms. Klobuchar was “a little like the Dutch boy trying to plug the dike.”
Norm's own lawsuit to get more votes counted backfired on him. After the additional votes were counted, he's down by an even wider margin:
The ballots counted Tuesday were ones that the three judges had concluded were wrongly rejected. State Elections Director Gary Poser went through them one by one in court, calling 198 votes for DFLer Franken, 111 for Republican Coleman and 42 for the Independence Party's Dean Barkley or others.In this race, a lead of 312 votes is a landslide.
The tally increased Franken's narrow lead from 225 votes to 312, out of 2.9 million votes cast in the November election.
It's time long past time for Norm to give it up. But, he won't because Norm doesn't care about Minnesotans. Coleman's loyalties lie with the leaders of the Republican Senate back in D.C. :
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement that the court failed to address "the main issue," that the judges had disenfranchised more than 4,000 Minnesotans by failing to count their ballots. "That's why it's so critical for this process to move forward before the Minnesota Supreme Court and why Senate Republicans fully support Senator Coleman's efforts," he said.That's just BS. The "main issue" is that Coleman can't win, but the Republicans really, really don't want the Democrats to have their 59th vote in the Senate. The Republican Senators are disenfranchising the people of Minnesota.
Franken's lawyer summed up the situation:
"The problem former Senator Coleman has is he lost fair and square," Elias said. "No amount of lawyering or sophisticated legal arguments is going to change that."But GOP money is going to keep dragging this out. That has to end. And, the Senate Democrats need to get much more aggressive about it.
