Campaign Diaries

With the fate of two Senate seats hanging in the balance, politics was dragged in the legal realm today in Illinois and Minnesota.

Ever since it became clear that a special election would provide the GOP a clear shot at Obama’s Senate seat, Illinois Democrats have been furiously backpedaling their public commitments to call a such special election. (It is worth noting that Blagojevich would have to sign any bill stripping him of his appointment power.)

Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn, for instance, declared yesterday that he would be willing to appoint a new Senator if he comes to replace Blagojevich; when the scandal first broke out, Quinn had whole-heartedly endorsed the idea of a special election.

But Democrats cannot get away with this if they do not also ensure that Blagojevich will not appoint Obama’s successor. In other words, the only way for Democrats to justify not stripping the governor of his appointment powers is to argue that Blagojevich is no longer a threat.

Blagojevich is showing no sign of considering resigning, and impeachment procedures would last into January. So Attorney General Lisa Madigan (a longtime Blagojevich rival) took matters into her own hand today: In a legal filing, she asked the state Supreme Court to temporarily remove Blagojevich because he is unfit to govern the state. “We want to make sure the people of Illinois have a governor who can legitimately fulfill the duties of that office,” she said.

Madigan asked the court to at the very least bar Blagjoevich from appointing a new Senator. She also requested restrictions on Blagojevich’s ability to deal with the state legislature and to issue spending directives.

Madigan’s filing invokes a state law that give the state Supreme Court the power to remove a Governor from office. But these provisions have never been used before - and how (or when) the Court will act is entirely unpredictable. It seems important to say that Blagojevich is not yet indicted (he has only been issued a complaint document, and the grand jury is presently considering the next step), and it does seem difficult to argue that Blagojevich is incapacitated before he is served an indictment.

If Democrats succeeds in their efforts to marginalize Blagojevich, it would give them the political cover to table their own special election proposals and transfer the appointment powers to Pat Quinn - ensuring that the seat remains in their hands until 2010.

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In Minnesota, it took the Coleman campaign no time to challenge the directives the state canvassing board issued this morning.

As I explained then, the board instructed counties to tally the hundreds of absentee ballots that they deemed to have been improperly rejected. However, the board specified that this was only a “recommendation” and that it did not have the power to require counties to do so.

Seizing on the board’s vague instructions and in an argument with obvious echoes to the Florida recount in 2000, the Coleman camp announced it was filing a petition with the state Supreme Court for lack of a “consistent standard applying statewide” - an argument with obvious echoes to Florida’s 2000 recount.

“Based on a lack of direction from Minnesota’s Secretary of State’s office,” said the Republican’s attorney, “we’ve now gone from a state that has clear consistent verifiable standard to one where each county has to decide on their own what constitutes a fifth pile ballot.”

It is important to distinguish between, first (1) the lack of statewide standard in whether fifth pile ballots will be included in a county’s tally (as things stand now, Minneapolis might add hundreds of votes to its total while St. Paul might not); and, second, the lack of a statewide standard as to which ballots a county is allowed to reconsider.

This latter issue is one I am less clear about, but it is the one the Coleman campaign is choosing to contest: State law seems to clearly list four reasons for which an absentee ballot can be rejected, and a “fifth pile ballot” is simply any ballot that does not fit those four reasons - and whose rejection is therefore improper. (That said, it’s hard to blame the Canvassing Board for laying standards that are too specific…)

As if all of this was not complicated enough, two of the Supreme Court’s seven members are part of the Canvassing Board and they thus participated in the decision Coleman is now contesting. That practically ensures that they will have to recuse themselves from the Court’s decision, throwing the decision in the hands of only 5 Justices.