I am so ready to hear Franken in his new Senate voice. We need his help. Good Luck in all his efforts.

Once again, PW, thank you for your great reporting and analysis of this very exciting election. My interest was certainly piqued by reading your (nearly) daily updates and dissection. What a great service you have done for us.

Thanks!

Thank you, DocRoss.

Thank you Phoenix Woman! the adventures of Senator Franken to be continued!

– Coleman is on the hook for all court costs of the contest, and Franken’s team and the ECC will be sending Norm their respective bills.
– Franken gets to tell Norm how much Norm owes him for that little witness-tampering stunt Team Coleman tried to pull with Pamela Howell.

HOLY CRAP PHEONIX WOMEN!

even I see the light at the end of teh tunnel!

YAYYYYYY

Thanks PW for your diligence in following this.

let me add my thanks for all your sterling reportage on this affair – you have been a fabulous go-to gal

and mad props to Minnesota – yer doin’ it right !

choked up when Senator-elect Franken invoked Wellstone

That’s gonna be one big bill with alla that there lawyerin’. ;)

Are we there yet?

what sort of legal bills is this gonna cost Normie????

With prejudice. OH yeah.

I agree with Stephanie Miller; the best part will be hearing O’REALLY choke on the words, “Senator Franken”. I don’t get cable and would never allow FAUX news on my television if I did, but I’m just sayin’… LOL!

Cat In Seattle

Normie = $0 : Grand Obstructionist Party = a bunch.

Media Matters/County Fair put up a piece where Joe frickin’ Scarborough sez “Give it up, Norm!” I immediately put that on my Facebook, saying I unreservedly agreed with the conservative talk show host.

Coleman legal arm have scheduled a news conference for 11 AM Central this morning. Either they’ll announce their intention file notice of appeal –this whole “they’ll wait nine and a half days just to stick it to us” meme is erroneous and overblown IMO– or they’ll throw in the towel.

For those wondering when the Tremblecrats intend to pipe up as one and demand a full and final political resolution to all of this, I think that it’s been simmering and that we’ll soon see things come to a boil now that they’ve got, you know, the judicial ruling that they need to wave around.

It’s comprehensive and unambiguous, readily soundbite-able, and it lends itself to incessant repetition so to make it sensible and definitive to those who haven’t been paying particularly close attention.

Politics soon will begin to trump such notions as the right to full recourse to the legal process, and public opinion will follow; if people ain’t good and sick of this BS just yet, then soon shall they be made so.

We’ve already seen examples of Normie’s kindred souls (such as they are) among the punditry telling him it’s time to fold up the tents, legal beagles of varying stripes have been weighing in, and now it’s but a matter of time.

Anyway, The UpTake intends to stream the Coleman camp’s legal division’s presser at the top of the hour.

there was someting in the Star Trib a while ago (which I can’t find now) that suggested legal bills are well over the $11 million raised so far and possibly up to $20 million.

What’s the jobs multiplier on lawyering? Should we consider this to be part of the stim package?

per TPM, deafening silence from Gooper Establishment

Was that just for the Coleman gang team?

I must say that TERM LIMITS would solve more problems than it creates.

For those who love elective office, you can run for several of them in your career.

Egg-salent! /Monty Burns

Buh Bye, Normie! Hello, Oblivion…

When does Limpy Limbaugh start bloviating about how Frankin and his party (who’s name Limpy shall never speak correctly) stole the election?

Hopefully it won’t be total oblivian Normie still has another legal matter to contend with regarding those alleged illegal extortians contributions.

Schweet!

There was some discussion a couple of weeks ago (either here or over at Emptywheel) to the effect that if Coleman wants to appeal, he may have to put up the money up front to cover Franken’s expenses… The 11:00 presser will be interesting.

Great coverage PW!

Let’s thank our lucky stars for Andersen v. Rolvaag, and the resulting clear and straight-forward template our state has provided as an example for the rest of the country.

This is not to say this decision won’t be attacked by extreme partisans, but to point out that no one should be the least bit hesitant to defend the integrity of the process, and to acknowledge the level of pride that Minnesotans can rightly claim as concerns the fair and transparent administration of democracy, at every level in our state.

It’s time to stop the foolishness folks, Franken isn’t the vote ‘leader’, he is not the leading vote-getter, he is the election winner.

I think its for both sides, but didn’t Pheonixwoman say above that Norm’s going to be responsible for both sides’ expenses? In which case, hilarity will ensue. Norm may have to move to one of those big foreclosure tent cities….

Ben Ginsburg – Coleman’s lawyer – is saying live that they’re going to appeal and they’ll take the time to be careful.

Term limits have severely wounded California, especially since one of the outgrowths of term limits was safe-seat gerrymandering for both parties.

Many legislators now spend all their time positioning themselves for the next partisan primary.

I once believed in term limits, and still think they are valuable at the local office level, but they’ve sure done some damage here!

ka-ching.

Is that the sound of the lawyers cash registers or of Ginsburg’s brain throwing gears?

the cash registers, but point taken… when lawyers say they’re going to take their sweet time, be afraid, be very afraid.…

Completely agree. You lose the experienced people and the ones you elect spend all their time getting ready for the next round. It seems to create a musical chairs sort of thing. They also devote a lot of time raising money. I don’t like term limits at all. People should be able to vote for whomever they want to even if their choices are bad.

Have the Bush toadies on the US Supreme Court assured them that they will correct the harm done to poor Normie?

We have term limits in Michigan. Believe me when I say I do NOT want the U.S. Congress to go there. It doesn’t provide an opportunity for Citizens to participate in the legislative process. It just means that career politicians groom their aides to take over their seats when they’re term-limited out, and that nobody in the lege has enough experience of what works and (more to the point) what doesn’t to get anything sensible accomplished.

Which, I would guess only makes lobbyists more powerful?

Bingo.

In other words, they’ll file at 4:55 PM CDT on April 23.

Excellent news, PW. Unfortunately my prediction that Franken’s certificate would be issued by tax day misunderestimated the ECC’s task in dealing with team coleman’s logic, witness and other forms of judicial torture.

All those illegal campaign contributions funnelled through his wife’s employer may do some good after all.

And now, on to the MNSC and Al’s senatorial oath of office.

About 10 seconds after Limpy comes on the air today, that’s when.

The stall is in…

Yeah, PS, the stall is in.

But you’ve got to wonder about a coach who tells the team to run the four-corners offense when he’s down 20 with 1 minute to play.

Someplace — I think over at the Great Orange Satan, I saw an estimate that the post recount increase in Franken’s margin in this contest had cost Coleman something like $500.000 per vote. I very much appreciated someone doing the math — I think I now understand how the Republicans managed to ruin the world economy.

As I understand Coleman’s situation now, this decision makes him responsible for the Court Costs that were entailed in the ECC process — that is the cost of bringing the three judges to St. Paul for a couple of months, plus their staff and clerks (It appears to me there were perhaps a dozen or so of these), and all other moneys expended by the court to process the case. Coleman owes this money to the State of Minnesota. He also has to pay the fine of 7500 occassioned by the failure to disclose the Pamala Howell information in a timely way to the Franken Attorneys — that is a violation of the discovery rules — and Franken can bill Coleman for the cost of his legal team for about a day, as a result of discovery violation. That could be perhaps 50 thousand. Adding it up, I think we are looking at perhaps half a million dollars. maybe more.

I believe the Supreme Court could ask Coleman for a bond for the next appeal — they may not do so, but they could. What makes this interesting is that back in December when we first came to understand what a deep hole we were in given the state budget, Pawlenty came in with a plan for dealing with the problem that took a big bite out of the Court System budget. This notion of cutting deeply into court appropriations did not sit well with the Chief Justice, Pawlenty’s former Law Partner and old friend, — in Minnesota one part of the Chief Justice job is to advocate for the resources the Court System Budget requires with the Governor and the Legislature — and while Pawlenty has given back a little, I can’t imagine the Judicial Branch not taking this opportunity to look to its own interests, and demand a substantial appeals bond as the appeal moves forward. There is simply no guarentee that Coleman, after a final loss in the State Supreme Court, will keep his fund raising machine around, and raise the money for his fines and court costs, and pay off what he owes to the Minnesota Court System, let alone to Al Franken. So they need to put Coleman out on the market for an adequate appeals bond. If the bond were about half a million, that would be a little over 12 thousand for each of the 41 surviving Republican Senators. If they are all so hot about Coleman keeping up the appeals, let them put some money on the table.

I think this is a powerful argument — the Courts are already badly underfunded, and will be taking a hit on their budget this year, and Coleman and the Republicans are running up costs like there is no tomorrow. If Coleman and the Republicans are doing this so as to forestall the Senate dealing with Obama’s Reform Agenda at the hehest of the various lobbists they represent — they ought to pay the freight, and not take it out of the hide of the already overstressed Minnesota Court Services. Just as many who are not particularly expert on the overall Financial Collapse can understand the large bonuses paid by firms getting assistance under TARP — a lot of folk can understand the money story here. As our DFL legislators now drill down on the final budget — who gets cut and by how much?…they need to mention the expenses Coleman is forcing on the State from time to time.