Frankensenator...

Al Franken has won the election, says the Minnesota Supreme Court. The blow-by-blow battle for this election is too complicated and convoluted for a mere blog post – I'd need 100 pages or so to do it justice. But my take on it is real simple: Franken and his lawyers were very clever, very ambitious, and completely uninhibited by concerns of propriety or legality – and they stole that election, plain and simple. This has consequences:

• Minnesota now has a certifiable lunatic as a senator. That sounds awful, but Franken is not the first such Senator, even in the current Congress. I suspect there are at least 10 others that fit that category (and no, they're not all Democrats).
  
  
• The Democrats will now have 60 votes in the Senate, enough to quash any Republican attempt at a filibuster (and the filibuster is the only way Republicans can currently stop a bill if the vote is purely partisan). Some commentators are making this sound like the end of the world. I don't think it's quite that bad, and it's not like this is the first time that's ever happened. In practice, politics is far from a precise science – and it's actually quite difficult to find an issue on which all 60 Democrats will vote their party's way. What traditionally happens in these scenarios is that the minority party identifies a few vulnerable votes in the majority party, and then puts enormous pressure (mainly through publicity) on those Senators to vote against their party – and this technique, more often than not, works just fine.
  

To me, the biggest impact of Al Franken's win is his rather open and blatant theft of the election. I've read extensively about the Minnesota contest, and it's clear to me that Franken won basically through simple and effective manipulation of the electoral process and the subsequent court battle – not by the now somewhat quaint and old-fashioned way of having the most votes. I'm not saying that this is the first time an election in the U.S. has been stolen, for clearly others have been. What's different here is that there was (so far as I know) no rigging or vote-buying done here – this election was stolen by litigation. And that's a scary precedent. Clearly we will see more of this, and I can't see any way that's good for the country...