If former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) does decide to fight on at the U.S. Supreme Court after his much-expected defeat with the Minnesota Supremes, he’ll have at least one public supporter back home in the continuing litigation of this 2008 Senate race: Minnesota GOP Congressman John Kline — who says that the courts should decide there’s no winner at all!
” I encouraged [Norm Coleman] to carry this through the courts until we can get as much confidence here in Minnesota and in the nation that the results are accurate,” Kline told Minnesota Public Radio. But he also added something that has been pitched by Coleman and his legal team in the past — that we can’t truly know whether Coleman or Democratic comedian Al Franken was the true winner of a race this close.
“So in a perfect world I guess, I would like to see the Minnesota Supreme Court say there isn’t a winner here. There is not a winner. We cannot declare a winner,” said Kline. “And then I suppose the law would require Gov. Pawlenty to name somebody, to have an election again in 2010.”
So instead of Franken winning, and the Democrats getting a 60th Senate seat, we would presumably have Pawlenty appointing a Republican.
In all fairness to Kline, he did make at least one legitimate point, regardless of partisanship: That the state should look to the example of Georgia, which held a runoff election when nobody got 50% in their Senate election, and change their own laws to do the same. (Obviously a Senate runoff can have a recount problem, as well, but at least in this case the race would have gone to a runoff and nobody would have really cared which candidate’s initial 42% was the better one.)
