The Minnesota Supreme Court

As mentioned yesterday, Norm finally filed his brief.  Of course, he did so late in the afternoon, with less than two hours to go before the deadline.  (The UpTake has the rather bizarre press conference call held by — who else? — Bogus Ben Ginsberg.)

MinnPost’s Eric Black does a rundown of the arguments set forth in the 63-page document.   Essentially, it’s the same old equal-protection claim that got bounced by the Election Contest Court when they dismissed Norm’s case with prejudice a few weeks ago.    However, there are a few problems with this claim:

1) As MinnPost commenter Frank Bowden points out, this is a hypocritical Hail Mary on Team Coleman’s part, as Bogus Ben Ginsberg himself admitted back in 2006 that "Just like, really, with the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have some fundamental philosophical difficulties with the whole notion of Equal Protection."  But of course when has hypocrisy ever stopped a Republican?  However, this is directly related to another problem:

2)  As Billmon points out, invoking the equal-protection gambit could have far-ranging negative consequences for the Republicans: 

But if we’re really going to start vigorously applying the 14th Amendment to how votes are cast and counted in this country, then a whole bunch of GOP-friendly election realities are going to be open to constitutional challenge. How, for example, is it "equal" for poor and urban precincts to have 1/5th the number of voting machines per capita as wealthy surburban ones? Is it "equal" for election officials to routinely deny elderly, undereducated or inexperienced voters the assistance they need to understand complex, confusing and/or poorly constructed ballots? Is it "equal" for prosecutors to aggressively pursue registration fraud cases against ACORN, while generally ignoring those against GOP-leaning groups?

Can you say "disparate impact"? How about "protected class"?

This is also why Billmon thinks the US Supremes won’t dare touch this sucker.  Scalia tried to keep Bush v. Gore from being used as a precedent precisely to avoid the threat to Republican separate-and-unequal election facilities nationwide. 

3)  The rulings of the State Canvassing Board, the Election Contest Court, and the Minnesota Supreme Court have all stuck well within the contours of existing Minnesota elections recount law.    Team Coleman has tried to get around this — most notably the state statute that absentee-ballot voting is a privilege and not a right (which rules out equal-protection violations) — by citing laws from other jurisdictions, but the Election Contest Court ruled that those laws were not relevant to this case.   There’s nothing for even Strip-Search Sammy Alito to use as a means to make a Federal case out of this, and that’s even assuming that he and Scalia would want to do so (see also #2).