It’s the start of a New Year and — despite a fresh set of delaying tactics from the Coleman campaign — the beginning of the end of Norm Coleman’s tenure as a United States Senator.

For those of you who wonder why the recount process is taking so long, there are two reasons, and both are related.  For the first, a letter writer in today’s StarTribune (h/t WineRev)  explains that it’s about making the final certified result as lawsuit-proof as possible:

Thank you for your accurate assessment of the integrity and consistency of the Minnesota Senate recount (editorial, Dec. 30).

This process has been conducted with such fairness and impartiality that it may be difficult to challenge in court, quite a feat in this political environment. With patience, the people’s will in the Minnesota U.S. Senate election will be known and all votes will be counted correctly. Minnesotans should be proud of this and rebuff any attempts to mock it.

The reason Mark Ritchie has to dot the i’s and cross the t’s is, of course, Norm Coleman and his Hordes of Lawyers, who are threatening to sue if the state canvassing board declares Al Franken the winner, just because he got the most votes and all.  This would delay things yet again, because of this little wrinkle in Minnesota law:

Subd. 2.Time of issuance; certain offices.

No certificate of election shall be issued until seven days after the canvassing board has declared the result of the election. In case of a contest, an election certificate shall not be issued until a court of proper jurisdiction has finally determined the contest. This subdivision shall not apply to candidates elected to the office of state senator or representative.

The English translation is that the Coleman camp will have seven days from the time the canvassing board declares Al Franken the winner to file yet another lawsuit to delay the certification of Franken’s victory.   This means that, should they sue — and they probably will — they would keep Franken from being certified right away, and their good buddy Cornyn would use Franken’s lack of certification as a reason to try and filibuster him out of being seated, should he travel to DC next week.   

So Al may not be able to attend the first week of the new session of Congress.  Whoop dee do.  

 Coleman’s people were hoping to get the Minnesota Supreme Court to stop tomorrow’s counting of the fifth-pile ballots — the wrongly-rejected absentee ballots, the last set of ballots not yet to be officially recounted.  They failed, because the Supreme Court’s ruling today allowed for the count, which will cover the 953 fifth-pile ballots that both campaigns and the county officials all agreed could be counted, to start at 9:00 am tomorrow as scheduled, presuming Mark Ritchie, the Franken campaign, and the various county officials involved were able to provide the Soops with a certain set of requested data by that time –and Ritchie immediately issued a press release stating that the request of the Soops would not hold up the start of the fifth-pile count.

The UpTake’s Mike McIntee has done a spreadsheet weighting each county by the percentages from the recount.   It assumes the formerly-rejected absentee votes will break in each county just like they did for the general population in that county.   Granted, that’s a rather big assumption given the small number of votes in a few counties.   But for those who are interested, McIntee’s spreadsheet shows that, of the 953 votes (bearing in mind that Dean Barkley was running as a third-party candidate and got a non-trivial percentage of votes statewide), Coleman gets 388, while Franken gets 419.  This would result in a final total that puts Franken up by 80 votes, a pickup of 31.

Coleman’s legal actions have generally fared pretty poorly.  He lucked out when the too-trusting Soops ruled that the campaigns could have a say in how the fifth-pile ballots were handled, but they seem to have learned their lesson, being that their latest decision — the one that didn’t stop the counting of the fifth-pile ballots — was signed by Alan Page, the justice who had dissented from their decision to involve the campaigns in the creation of standards for fifth-pile ballots. Furthermore, once the state canvassing board renders their decision, Minnesotans will — even if John Cornyn doesn’t — accept Al Franken as their newest Senator.  

I expect that Norm will try one last legal Hail Mary, and implement it within hours if not minutes after the board declares Al Franken the winner sometime in the next few days.  The Minnesota Supreme Court will look at for a day or two, then bounce it straight back to him.   Then, seven days after the canvassing board’s declaration, the vote will be certified, and Al Franken will, a week or so late, be allowed to join his brethren and cistern in the United States Senate.

Box Turtle Cornyn may well have won the battle of keeping Franken from being seated next week.  But he won’t win the war, because there’s really not much Coleman or Cornyn can do now but to delay the inevitable a few days.