After election returns showed that Mark Dayton had defeated Tom Emmer by just under 9000 votes in Minnesota's gubernatorial race, GOP state chair Tony Sutton declared that something smelled bad and that Dayton's apparent victory could be explained only by some combination of fraud and the incompetence of election officials. Republicans, after all, had in the same election wrested control of both houses of the state legislature from the DFL and had, moreover, defeated an 18-term incumbent, Jim Oberstar, in one of the state's eight congressional districts. Emmer therefore could not have lost. He was cheated.
I evaluated these claims here. I had thought that Sutton's election-night analysis might have been impaired by the heat-of-the-moment disappointment of a partisan, but he soon declared that the GOP, in its determination "not to get rolled again," would turn over every stone in a search for more Emmer votes. "Getting rolled," apparently, is what judges, including several appointed by Republicans, did to the GOP two years ago when they held, unanimously, that Democrat Al Franken had gotten more votes than Republican Norm Coleman in a US Senate race that was more than 25 times closer than this year's gubernatorial contest. That Dayton won is impossible and the task is to do whatever is necessary to flip the result obtained by the ordinary election machinery, which, notwithstanding a great many Republican victories, is unreliable, corrupt, sloppy, and, though the details remain murky, tilted in favor of the DFL.
Such talk brought into view a nightmare scenario. What if the GOP played out the recount, employing every delaying tactic along the way, and then, when Emmer remained several thousand votes behind, contested the outcome of the recount in court? That would all take long enough to keep Dayton from assuming office at the appointed time, and the newly elected Republican legislature could then act in concert with the current Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, on a conservative agenda that Dayton, were he in the office voters had elected him to, would surely block. I at first thought this sounded as crazy as Sutton on election night and that cooler heads would prevail. But the local rag has quoted an unnamed Republican operative to the effect that maneuvering to permit Pawlenty to preside over the next legislative session is a no-brainer for his party, and now the GOP has asked the State Supreme Court to delay the start of the recount in order to determine whether "phantom votes"--Sutton's phrase--were cast in a few precincts that allegedly failed to reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots cast. Jay Wiener, of Minn Post, has the technical details concerning the dubious merits of what looks like a fishing expedition.
But if the goal is to keep Dayton out of office for as long as possible, a fishing expedition is perfect. And a fishing expedition before the recount can even begin--perfecter! I'm done thinking there's something so low that state Republicans wouldn't dive for it.
Addendum: Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., national Republicans are doing their best to block ratification of a START treaty that would commit the US and Russia to work more closely on issues pertaining to nuclear proliferation and "loose nukes." As Michael Tomasky points out, you have, on one side, not only President Obama but also former Republican secretarys of state Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft, Republican senatorial grown-up Richard Lugar, and also every government in the world save the ones in Iran and North Korea--and, on the other side, John Kyl and other Republican members of the US Senate.
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