Translation: we've already pulled everything out of our ass that we could, so it's going to take us longer now because we have to go back up in there and look again.

There is a legal reason team Coleman wants a slightly longer schedule - to be sure that no matter how fast the Minnesota Supreme Court decides the issue, the US Supreme Court will be in recess. That way, they file a petition for certiorari and even if the Supremes decide not to take the case, that will not happen until October.

Coleman's timeline is simple: However long it takes him to be declared the winner. Any decision favoring Franken obviously was taken too fast.

Coleman is just running a Fedayeen Saddam-style insurgency.

He's tried to kidnap the election, is holding one of Minnesota's senate seats hostage, has used IEDs (Improvised Election Deceptions), destroyed bridges of bipartisanship, used Lawyers of Mass Destruction to fill courtrooms with noxious gases (CO2-laden hot air), and used his surrogates to operate a ridiculous and unpersuasive propaganda campaign.

And like the Fedyeen Saddam, his fanatical insurgency is destined to collapse.

My translation: somebody high in Team Coleman has a personal thing they can't or don't want to get out of hard-scheduled for this weekend. A wedding, a kid's play or some other miss it and I'll divorce you, buster kind of thing would be my guess. Something similar is probably driving the extra time they want to give Franken and the suggestion for hard date deadlines rather than a clock that starts running the day of filing.

Dear Minnesota,

Please stop FAILing.

Thanks, and kisses,

Everyone in America

As long as we're all being held hostage by this obscene manipulation of the system, let's move on to the real-world situation we're in... and start the betting:

Franken gets seated, in December of 2009 (and I'm gonna say after Christmas). A year and a month after he was elected. That's my estimation.

Next..?

I suspect Coleman asked for less time to submit his initial appeal than for Franken's response because Coleman already has had all the time since the decision to start working on his appeal, whereas Franken's needs to respond to specific arguments not yet seen.
Coleman's request is one of the most reasonable he's made throughout the process, and the SC is not likely to spend much effort deciding whether to grant a few days or a few more days.
The concern that the schedule is designed to delay SCOTUS review is intriguing, and would be more plausible if there were a Rove or Cheney behind it, rather than Coleman's ship of fools.

The district court already explored all the issues that were brought to litigation in the initial case, and the appeals court reviewed the work of the original court. All the Coleman camp needs to do is rework its arguments for the Supreme Court.

What the Hell would take them even as long as the Franken proposal? They should be thoroughly familiar with the material by now, and should have worked out all the additional need for evidence for the appeal?

This is either legal incompetence or a major delay effort by the Coleman Kamp. Nothing else. There is a clear time pressure on the Supreme Court to get this in, review the issues, evidence and prior decisions and then make a ruling on the already performed legal proceedings. Considering the time and effort already put into this case and the scrutiny it has gotten along the way, it is extremely unlikely that anything has been overlooked or wrongly decided under the law. The appeals court is a committee made up of highly trained and experienced experts, for Christ's sake.

If the Supreme Court is competent and is not ideologically biased, they will take the Franken proposal and blow the Coleman Kamp off. Then it will be a quick decision.

Coleman's proposal shouldn't be automatically assumed to be about "delay" - if you look objectively at what's proposed, it's actually a fairly reasonable schedule given that it's a case in the state's highest court and it involved a seven-week trial. Although I strongly believe Coleman should NOT have appealed and should QUIT NOW (and have no doubt that he lost, and that his appeal will not be successful), Franken's proposed schedule was ridiculously short. Under the Minnesota Supreme Court rules, the default schedule is as follows:

- filing of notice of appeal (this happened in this case on April 20th)
- appellant has 10 days to order the transcript of the trial proceedings
- court reporter has 60 days to prepare transcript
- appellant (Coleman) then has 30 days to file a brief
- respondent (Franken) then has 30 days to file a brief
- appellant has 10 days to file a reply brief.

Instead, Coleman has proposed 7 days from the filing of the notice of appeal to file his brief, then 11 days for Franken to file the response, then 4 days to file the reply -- less than 1/3 of the normal time provided in the rules.

If Coleman's team were intent on "dragging this out," they have ample latitude under the Minnesota Supreme Court's rules to ask for far more time than they did. So -- for once -- Coleman's lawyers have asked for something reasonable.

I do a fair bit of appellate work in state and federal courts, and preparing a brief with appendices on a case that involves as many factual issues as this one does in 7 days (even with a huge horde of lawyers, paralegals, and legal assistants, and even assuming they've been working on preparing things for a long time ... they still had to digest the 50+ page ruling of the 3-judge district court which came out about 10 days ago) is an enormous job -- which is why normally there are 30 days allowed for it.

I get really pissed off at fellow progressives who insist on enforcing "the rule of law" until it means we have to give people we disagree with the fair process that the law allows. The law in Minnesota - whether we agree with it or not - ALLOWS Coleman to file an election challenge, allows for an appeal, and doesn't give the governor the right to issue a certificate of election until the state court appeal process is over. The Minnesota people, through their legislature, decided in their wisdom that this process is how contested elections would be decided. Impatient people around the country have to let the process work -- and Coleman's team of lawyers has not been unreasonable in the timing and deadlines they have requested.

As I suggested above, whether or not Coleman should be pursuing the appeal at all is a different question -- he has almost no chance of winning, that I can see, and shouldn't be putting the state through this pain. That said, though, nothing that he's done is outside the bounds of the process the state allows, and in the case of his proposed schedule for briefs to the Minnesota Supreme Court, a 22-day schedule for completing briefing, when the default is 70 days, is pretty reasonable.

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