Coleman-Franken to stand off

January 21, 2009, 3:21 pm

Another Round in the Coleman-Franken Stand-Off

By Michael Falcone

Outside the Capitol on Tuesday, Al Franken sported a thick Russian-style winter hat as he settled in to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama. Inside the Capitol, there is still no office with his name on it.

That didn’t stop Mr. Franken, the Democrat and entertainer, from circulating a statement that hinted at the prospect of “working together” with the newly sworn-in president.

“Like so many others, I have been inspired by our new president to look towards the future with optimism, and with the knowledge that there is nothing we can’t accomplish together,” he said.

Mr. Franken’s own future, however, is in the hands of a three-judge panel in Minnesota that will hear arguments on Wednesday from both sides in the election contest filed by former Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican, who trailed at the conclusion of a statewide recount. Their first order of business will be to consider the Franken campaign’s argument that the contest should be thrown out before a trial begins.

If the judges disagree, the trial phase is expected to begin on Monday and the panel will weigh Mr. Coleman’s contention that the recount process was flawed and the results should be invalidated against Mr. Franken’s claim that the election is over. At the end of the recount Mr. Franken led by 225 votes.

The Democrat’s lawyers have been arguing that his certificate of election should be signed by the governor and secretary of state in Minnesota immediately, a move that would pave the way for seating Mr. Franken in the United States Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, said on Wednesday that he would be monitoring the deliberations of the panel and raised the possibility of provisionally seating Mr. Franken.

“There is no way that Coleman can win this,” Mr. Reid said. “The numbers just aren’t there. He should concede.”

But Mr. Coleman, who relinquished his Senate seat earlier this month, expressed confidence that the panel would eventually rule in his favor.

“I certainly wish that I was ahead in votes rather than behind right now,” he told a local television station on Tuesday. “But I believe in the end we’ll be where we were on Election Night — that I will be ahead.”

And, by the way, Mr. Coleman offered his own words of congratulations for President Barack Obama too.

“Watching Barack Obama be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States will forever be etched into the minds of so many of us as one of those moments for which you remember where you were and what you were doing when it happened,” Mr. Coleman said in a statement yesterday.