Did Scott Johnson bump his head? Here he is, talking sense to his fellow wingnuts on the Franken-Coleman election tussle here in Minnesota. Either the atoms of his brain were somehow jostled into functioning order for a half hour, or we are living in the end times.
I have written, here and here, that Coleman, with the lawyerly polysyllables stripped away, is asking Minnesota judges to overturn Minnesota election law, and that the success of this endeavor depends upon finding activist judges of the kind Republicans purport to abhor. So I was not surprised when, on April 13, the three-judge panel hearing his election contest unanimously rejected his arguments and found that Franken is entitled to an election certificate. The panel's findings of fact, conclusions of law, and order for judgment are available here.
I was surprised, however, to read Johnson saying practically the same thing as I. Money quote:
The election-contest court has simply followed Minnesota’s absentee-ballot statute. Arguing, as Coleman has, that a panel of judges should disregard the Minnesota absentee-ballot statute seems like a losing proposition, at least to me.
Oh, sure, he drops in some Power Line boilerplate concerning Franken's "ugly" political views--if he didn't, no one would believe it was him, for his analysis of what actually has happened in the legal proceedings is a welcome corrective to what one reads, for example, on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.
Coleman has now appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which will likewise decline to overturn Minnesota election law. Will he then appeal to the federal courts? On this question, there is in Johnson's column one more sensible, if somewhat oblique, passage:
Coleman contends that he comes out a loser only under a system that allows for Republican counties to apply a strict standard and Democratic counties to apply a lax standard to the counting of absentee ballots. He may be right, though the Franken campaign disagrees, and it has had an impressive read on the universe of rejected absentee ballots.
This is the last arrow in Coleman's quiver, and it rests on the idea that election officials in venues such as Hennepin County, home to a significant proportion of the Democratic vote in Minnesota, performed their duties with an eye toward boosting Franken's prospects, while their counterparts in outstate Minnesota strictly adhered to the law. I consider that an outrageous imputation, an example of a reckless and paranoid style. There is an additional problem, which Johnson, by choosing "may," rather too gently indicates: the claim is unsupported by any evidence.
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