The Minnesota Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments at 10 a.m. ET today in the Minnesota Senate election contest, hearing Norm Coleman’s appeal of his defeat at the trial a month and a half ago. Check out our good friends at The Uptake for a video feed. So what can we expect? And when will Minnesota actually get a second Senator?
The first thing to remember is that we won’t get a decision from the judges today, and probably not for several weeks. Instead, both sides will make their oral arguments, after having already filed written briefs over the last few weeks. The big thing to look out for will be how the five Justices of the court — the court has seven members, but two have recused themselves because they sat on the state canvassing board that oversaw the recount — react to the attorneys’ arguments and what sort of questions they pitch.
The Coleman side has charged that variation among local elected officials in accepting or rejecting certain absentee ballots — namely ballots from their own list, and largely from counties that Coleman carried overall — amount to a fundamental violation of the Constitution under the 14th amendment. They have argued for the court to adopt a more lax standard for admitting ballots in, as opposed to strict adherence to the letter of the law on a ballot’s requirements and qualifications. A consequence of this is that it seemingly implies they’ll try to take this to federal court if they lose at the state level.
The Franken side, not surprisingly, argues that the election, the recount and the trial were above board, and that Coleman’s legal arguments range from the spurious to the outlandish. And above all, they demand that Franken be issued a certificate of election by the state as soon as this appeal is done at the state Supreme Court.
Regarding that certificate, that is of course the big prize – the golden ticket that gets a politician into the Senate. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty has given mixed signals on just how quickly he might sign it, though if the court gives him a strong instruction to do so he will almost certainly follow it. On the other hand, Coleman and the national GOP could potentially try to get a federal court to block the issuance of the certificate. We’ll see what happens.
A quick rule of thumb for today is that if an attorney is getting so many tough questions that it verges on ridicule, he’s probably losing. But if he’s getting just enough questions that it seems like the judges want to test out his theories and put him on the spot to answer potential objections, he might just have a shot. And if the lawyer is being treated gently, not facing too many questions, it can really go either way.
