I walked to class last Wednesday with a Minnesotan who is, as of January 5th, under-represented in the United States Senate. She and the millions of other Minnesotans who we expect to abide by the laws of the United States are being denied their rights to equal, state-based representation under Article I, Section 3 ("The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state..."). This is ridiculous.
It's especially ridiculous because, when damn near the exact same problem arose in a 2006 House race, we found a workable compromise for elections being challenged in the courts. There's no good reason why the Senate should not adopt the same solution here.
At least, I thought there was no good reason, until today. Until John Cornyn showed me the real danger of seating Senator-elect Al Franken: World War III.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn is threatening “World War III” if Democrats try to seat Al Franken in the Senate before Norm Coleman can pursue his case through the federal courts.
Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledges that a federal challenge to November’s elections could take “years” to resolve. But he’s adamant that Coleman deserves that chance — even if it means Minnesota is short a senator for the duration.
I read this passage in utter astonishment. Here's a United States Senator, ostensibly sane and oath-bound to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States," advocating that a state be left under-represented in order to further his partisan agenda, and threatening to raise Holy Hell if the people of Minnesota actually get seated the person they elected to serve them.
Okay, he's an asshole. That I can generally forgive.
But Cornyn is being especially obnoxious with this when you consider what happened down in Florida just three years ago.
In 2006, Florida's 13th district had the most expensive House race in American history (at least to that point--I don't know how '08 shook out in that department, if someone broke the record). The general election pitted a self-funding millionaire, Republican Vern Buchanan, against a strong fundraiser with the benefit of the then-operational Millionaire's Amendment, Democrat Christine Jennings. (I was Jennings's campaign blogger, in addition to working on her finance staff--if you dig through my old diaries you can find a number of posts about the race and the subsequent recount.)
What happened was this: electronic voting machines in only one of the five counties in the district reported an impossibly high rate of undervotes in our race. Whether that was a result of ballot design flaws, machine calibration error, rampant user error, or intentional interference is still unknown. All we knew on Election Night was that the official count had us down by fewer than 400 votes, and there was no way in hell that the results were an accurate representation of the voters' will.
Naturally, we challenged the election, and took the case both to the House and to the courts. But what to do in terms of providing the 13th District with congressional representation?
The solution that was finally agreed to was that Buchanan would be provisionally seated in Congress, pending the outcome of the challenges to the election. That way, the House kept the door open to seating Jennings should she prevail, and we in the Sarasota-Bradenton area were still (nominally) represented in Washington.
In Minnesota, there is soon going to be a ruling from the three-judge panel overseeing the recount process, and it is expected to rightly declare Al Franken the winner of the election. At that point, Norm Coleman's legal team has promised an appeal.
Fine, appeal it. Go ahead. But don't stop Minnesota from having its equal voice in the Senate!
This isn't a new idea I'm advocating: commentators have been saying for months that the Buchanan-Jennings race provides a good analogy to the Franken-Coleman race, and the same procedures the House used should be acceptable for the Senate. It's fair, it protects the people's interests, and it preserves the presumption of validity in Senate elections.
Senator Reid should prepare to hear the standard whine-and-gnash from the Right, and gear up for the inevitable rending of garments from the centrists. But when the judges rule that Franken won, Reid's job--whether he likes it or not--is to get Franken's ass seated as the duly elected Senator from Minnesota. Even provisionally seating Franken is fine: some anti-democratic blowhard like Sen. Cornyn or Sen. Kyl can raise an objection or file a parliamentary inquiry or whatever, and hold open the option of seating Coleman if the appeals go his way. That's their job as the opposition, I suppose, but Reid has no options so far as I'm concerned, because he's not just the leader of Senate Democrats, he's the leader of the United States Senate, and this is about the credibility of the body itself.
Al Franken was elected to serve the people of Minnesota, and your job, Senator Reid, is to help him do his job. Either act like a Democratic leader in the Senate or step back and let someone with backbone lead the fight.
Make no mistake: John Cornyn has thrown down a gauntlet. The war has been declared--now it's our job to make sure our side wins.
Support Al Franken
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And just because it's always good to remind ourselves why we fight:
Al Franken tours Afghanistan with the USO:
USO Takes The Stage With Al Franken in Afghanistan (VIDEO)
Part of Al Franken's epic smackdown of Bill O'Reilly (with bonus Molly Ivins footage--the best BookTV episode ever aired)
Al Franken pwning Ann Coulter:
"We've just been taking it on the Left...and we're not going to sit for it anymore. We just aren't."
-Al Franken, 2003