Congress: Senator Franken takes his seat

When my old friend Al Franken first said he’d run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota, said Howard Fineman in MSNBC.com, I had my doubts. As the dimwitted Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, and the liberal author of such polemics as Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, he seemed “too acerbically funny, too uncontrollably combative, too Hollywood” to be taken seriously. But Franken fooled everyone, said Norman Ornstein in The New Republic Online. For more than two years he worked hard to master the issues and connect with constituents. When the election turned into a squeaker, he kept a dignified composure while fighting through eight months of tortuous recounts. Last week, the Minnesota Supreme Court finally declared him the winner over incumbent Norm Coleman by just 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. “Political sophisticates” will try to paint the 60th Democratic senator as a running joke. “But those expecting a bombastic comic” will find Franken transformed into a formidable and canny politician.

Agreed, Franken is no fool, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. After all, he has “effectively stolen an election.” After initially trailing by 725 votes, he “swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Coleman.” Franken’s forces also managed to discover enough absentee ballots to put him over the top. Dubious though these votes were, Franken gambled “that courts would later be loath to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board.” His bet paid off. “Coleman didn’t lose the election.” He lost a recount that Franken engineered.

For Senate Democrats, this may be a hollow victory, said Mike Madden in Salon.com. Theoretically, Franken gives them a 60-vote, filibuster-proof supermajority that allows them to pass any legislation. But with the ailing Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd frequently absent, they “still don’t have 60 votes on a day-to-day basis, even if every member of the party fell in line.” And they rarely will, said Terence Samuel in The American Prospect Online. This new super­majority “turns every Democratic senator into a kingmaker or a deal-breaker, and that is a recipe for chaos.” Republicans know this, which is why party chairman Michael Steele gloated, “This government is totally theirs now. And everything that comes out of it and everything that results from it is on their plate.” Democrats will soon find their 60 votes “a curse as often as it is a blessing.”

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