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The question has come up lately over whether Tim Pawlenty will sign Al Franken’s election certificate when the Minnesota Supreme Court requests he do so, or if he’ll stonewall it until the case has gone through the Federal courts.   Here’s the answer, from Pawlenty’s interview with MSNBC today (h/t Mike Lillis of Minnesota Independent):

The Minnesota Supreme Court said, in a recent decision, that a certificate shouldn’t issue — or isn’t likely that it should issue until the state court process has run its course. That would include the appellate process.

It’s pretty clear that one side or the other’s going to take that next step … and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me or anyone else to step in front of it.

It’s frustrating that this has taken so long, but we need to get a proper and just and accurate and legal result, and it’s going to take, it looks like, a few more months to get that.

Got that? He’s agreeing with the MN SC that the contest ends when it’s run its course through the state courts — not the Federal ones.

He’s apparently decided that, regardless of what the RNC’s promising him, he doesn’t want to ensure his gubernatorial defeat in 2010 by telling Eric Magnuson and the citizens of Minnesota to pound salt. If he’s going to make a presidential run in 2012, he’s better off doing so as a sitting governor than as one who was tossed out on his ear. He barely won in 2006 46.7% to 45.7%, and that was against a deeply flawed Democratic candidate who, had he not made one final gaffe, would be sitting in the governor’s mansion now.

Furthermore, Minnesota’s going to lose a congressional district in the wake of the 2010 census. The logical candidate would be Bachmann’s, and that’s the one the Democratic-controlled state lege would pick to eliminate. But the governor has the final say — and if Republicans still control the governor’s mansion, that makes it easier for them to protect her heavily-gerrymandered seat.