Sens. Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar, as well as DFL gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton, are pressing the Democratic National Convention Committee to host the DNC in Minneapolis in 2012. The state’s most populous city is on the short list along with Charlotte, N.C., St. Louis and Cleveland. Also shortlisted in 2008, Minneapolis lost out to Denver, but partnered with St. Paul in hosting the same year’s Republican National Convention. Protest groups are opposing any efforts to bring the DNC to Minneapolis.

Anti-war groups filed for a permit to march on opening day of the DNC should it come to town, but were denied by the City of Minneapolis. The RNC in 2008 resulted in more than 300 arrests; of those, 15 people were charged with wrongdoing and only five were convicted.

Here’s the letter from Franken, Klobuchar and Dayton:

To the Members of the Democratic National Convention Committee,

We are writing to you on behalf of the State of Minnesota urging the Committee to select Minneapolis as the host city for the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
Each finalist city presents valid reasons politically, socially and economically as to why it should be chosen to host the Convention. As you know, Minneapolis is resourceful, reliable and ready to serve Democratic National Convention goers. With vibrant cultural attractions, efficient transportation and world-class dining and hotel accommodations, we would be thrilled to host delegates, nominees and attendees alike. But, you know this and we know this decision has as much to do with politics as it does with logistics.
To that end, please keep in mind that history shows the national political convention site doesn’t necessarily influence the outcome of the election. In fact, only half the time has the state in which the DNC was hosted, went for the Democratic Party in the general election.

The objective now is to select a city that will establish the proper political setting for the 2012 election. With this in mind, we firmly believe Minneapolis is the best choice for the Democratic Party. Located in the country’s heartland, Minnesota is often on the list of swing states and winning the heartland has proven to be a key region in many presidential elections. Key constituencies for the Democratic Party, including labor, have a strong presence in this region and are eager to serve as hosts of this convention.

Like many others, we have seen a significant shift in our political atmosphere following the mid-term elections. Our state legislature turned from Democratic to Republican control for the first time in 38 years. We lost a 35 year veteran of the U.S. House and our congressional delegation is now split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The one positive coming out of the election is that we appear to have elected a Democratic governor – a significant victory and one that no other finalist host city can boast. Minnesota proved that despite a tough election year across the country, Democrats can still win here – in a place Democrats will need to win to be successful in re-electing President Obama.

Remember, not only is Minnesota the state in which President Obama decided to accept his nomination but it’s also the state Republicans chose for their National Convention in 2008. Our state is in play and has political importance. It’s time again for Democrats to lay claim to Minnesota and help regain control in 2012.

We respectfully urge you to select Minneapolis as the site for the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Sincerely,

Senator Amy Klobuchar
Senator Al Franken
Mark Dayton

As Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) explained at the hearing, the health insurance industry — unlike any other private industry in the country — is allowed to engage in price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation, all of which would violate the law if any other sort of company did it. Last month Leahy introduced the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009, which would repeal the antitrust exemption for health insurance and medical malpractice insurance providers. Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) are co-sponsors.

Although Lawrence Powell, a professor at the University of Arkansas, testified on behalf of the Physician Insurers Association of America in support of continuing the antitrust exemption, even he struggled to explain why it makes sense. He repeatedly said that allowing insurers to share data on losses and costs of claims helps insurance companies price their services accurately and competitively. But as Leahy made clear in his questioning, his legislation would not prohibit such data-sharing. That led Powell to stumble and say that while he’s “not an attorney,” his understanding was that insurance companies would have to file a request to pool data, which would impose additional costs.

But Robert Hunter, Director of Insurance for the Consumer Federation of America and former Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Ford and Carter, saw it differently. In his view, the antitrust exemption, intended initially to be temporary but made permanent during closed-door conference committee sessions of Congress more than 50 years ago, must be repealed to overcome the insurance industry’s anticompetitive practices that have led to higher prices and reduced services. “It is high time that insurers played by the same rules of competition as virtually all other commercial enterprises operating in America‘s economy,” he testified.

According to Hunter, health insurance companies have been able to consistently pay less on claims by agreeing to lower the amounts they reimburse doctors and hospitals for services; adopting similar clauses in their contracts that limit their liability in unfair and abusive ways; agreeing to cut back coverage to certain places, and using similar claims processing systems designed to systematically underpay claims.

As Hunter testified, federal authorities have recommended eliminating or cutting back the antitrust exemption for health insurers and medical malpractice insurers on at least four different occasions after studying it. But Congress has never taken that step, presumably due to the power of the insurance industry lobby.

With the soaring cost of health care now in the spotlight, this may finally be the right time.

A Coleman spokesman insists that the move is purely financial and reflects no sense of pessimism about the race.

“The senator needs to earn a living while the contest is going on,” said Mark Drake, adding, “I think our supporters recognize that Sen. Coleman is not a millionaire.”

Meanwhile, Coleman’s opponent, DFLer Al Franken, is getting ready for work at the Capitol. According to our sister site, The Minnesota Independent, Franken discussed Senate business and potential committee appointments with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and Reid has indicated that he would like to seat Franken as soon as possible.

But in all likelihood, they’ll have to wait for a ruling from a specially appointed three-judge panel, which will begin hearing Coleman’s election contest on Monday.

Yesterday, Franken sought Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s (D) signature of the election certificate, but they declined, citing a statute requiring any court contest of the election result to be resolved before the certificate can be signed. Franken’s opponent, former GOP Sen. Norm Coleman, is contesting the election in a lawsuit.

But now Franken’s lawyers are arguing that one subdivision of the statute overrides another, and as a result the state is compelled to certify Franken’s victory, even if Coleman’s suit is not yet resolved.

Here’s an excerpt of the subdivision cited by Franken’s lawyers:

In an election for United States senator, the governor shall prepare an original certificate of election, countersigned by the secretary of state, and deliver it to the secretary of the United States Senate. … If a recount is undertaken by a canvassing board pursuant to section 204C.35, no certificate of election shall be prepared or delivered until after the recount is completed. In case of a contest, the court may invalidate and revoke the certificate as provided in chapter 209.

And here’s the subdivision cited by Pawlenty:

No certificate of election shall be issued until seven days after the canvassing board has declared the result of the election. In case of a contest, an election certificate shall not be issued until a court of proper jurisdiction has finally determined the contest. This subdivision shall not apply to candidates elected to the office of state senator or representative.

The two appear to contradict each other, and now it’s up to the state Supreme Court to resolve.

(Via The Minnesota Independent.)

At the end of the statewide recount, Franken led by 225 votes, and today he sent letters to Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie (D), arguing that Minnesota should have full representation in the Senate as the upper chamber begins to debate its agenda. The state leaders have yet to respond.

According to state law, the election certificate cannot be signed within seven days of the certification of the result. That seven-day window has now elapsed, but it is unclear whether Franken can be seated in Washington while Coleman’s lawsuit is pending.

In the meantime, Coleman’s case has taken a serious hit. He is seeking to have 654 rejected absentee ballots counted, even though they have twice been ruled faulty — on Election Day, and upon a second review by election officials last month. Now it looks as if they will be rejected for the third time.

Several counties have once again reviewed these ballots, and the numbers aren’t good for Coleman. Nate Silver reports that of the 151 of these ballots that the counties have reevaluated, just one has been deemed improperly rejected. For Coleman, that’s a success rate of two-thirds of one percent.

Of course, Coleman’s aim is to have the courts rule in his favor, and local officials will probably not play much of a role. But at a time when Coleman needs literally everything to go his way if he is to have a chance of overturning Franken’s victory, this isn’t a good start.

UPDATE 2:08 PM: The Minnesota Independent reports that Pawlenty has rejected Franken’s request for a signed election certificate, citing a statute indicating that election contests must be resolved before a certificate can be issued.

Nate Silver, who predicted way back in November that Franken would win the recount, slices and dices the WSJ’s arguments. Basically, it’s full of lies and spin that Republicans abandoned weeks ago, like the myth that some precincts counted more Franken votes than had voters on the rolls. Even John McCormack of the Weekly Standard–another Murdoch-owned publication, and a reporter who did not want Franken to win–notes that arguments about election night/recount vote total discrepencies have been shredded by the discovery process.

For example, without a 246-vote correction in Franken’s favor in one precinct, he would only have had 27 votes–an unbelievably low number in a precinct where John McCain and Norm Coleman each tallied 175 votes and Obama garnered 336 votes.

Again, that’s from a young conservative reporter who’s worked this story for months.

I don’t think the WSJ’s is the most shameless attempt by a Murdoch-owned media outlet to muddy up the Minnesota process. That honor goes to Fox News’s web site for buying two columns by John Lott, a notorious fraud whose career in statistics melted down after libertarian reporter Julian Sanchez caught him using a false online persona to defend his own work. From his first column, explaining the mistabulated votes that McCormack discusses:

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large. Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482).

Yes, that’s it: the counting errors in the most expensive Senate race in state history, a contest in which most voters disapproved of the two major-party candidates, were four percent greater than the errors in other races. For Lott, this was enough to start damning the recount.

Republicans lost a heartbreaker of a Senate race against one of their most-hated political figures. What the WSJ edit board and other pundits are trying to do is make this into a Democratic scandal, more proof of a “culture of corruption” in a party that, gasp, stole a Senate seat.

But Franken didn’t respond to reporters’ shouted questions about exactly when he would go to Washington and retreated up the front steps of his downtown Minneapolis townhouse with his wife, Frannie, and campaign aides.

In a brief statement in which he twice referred to his “victory,” Franken also acknowledged just how close his 225-vote margin of victory over former Sen. Norm Coleman was. “I didn’t win the support of every Minnesotan. I’m going to have to earn it,” he said. “I work for you now and I will work hard to earn your confidence.”

Franken paid tribute to Coleman with a note of sympathy that recalled former Minnesota Gov. Karl Rolvaag’s statement after the state’s last big recount in 1962. ”I know that this isn’t easy” for the Colemans, Franken said, because his own family had faced tough days since the election. But he described the recount process as “long, fair and … thorough.”

With a nod toward threats of lawsuits and filibusters, Franken said he hoped Minnesota would continue to be served by two senators “without interruption.” Whatever happens on that score, Franken said he would “focus all my attention and all my energies” on working on issues facing Minnesotans — including an economy he said was in the “worst crisis since the Great Depression.”

Franken’s appearance was one of a very few he’s made since Election Day, and his statement included offerings of thanks to staff, supporters and others that “I wish I’d been able to give on Election Night.” He also thanked election workers in a state that he said had shown the world it “takes its democracy seriously.”

As Franken ended with a pledge to get to work, a woman passerby who had stopped to listen shouted out, “Yeah, get on the job!” From the tone of her voice, it wasn’t entirely clear whether she was a Franken fan, a Coleman backer or simply another citizen ready for the recount to end.

Chris Steller is a reporter at TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent.

In its order, the court wrote that “the threshold question before us in this motion is whether disputes over rejected absentee ballots can be resolved in this automatic recount proceeding, or whether they must await an election contest proceeding.”

Only “obvious errors in the counting or recording of the votes” that all sides could agree on, the court said, should be fixed in the recount that the canvassing board will certify today. All other disputes belong in a court action called an election contest that either side may file within seven days of certification.

That reasoning goes some way to explain an aspect of the court’s Dec. 18 ruling (pdf) that has since been roundly criticized: a provision allowing the Franken and Coleman campaigns to remove from the recount even those absentee ballots that election officials decide should have been included on Election Day.

“[W]here election officials and the parties agree that an absentee ballot was improperly rejected, correction of that error should not have to await an election contest. We therefore ordered that any absentee ballot envelope that local election officials and the candidates agree was rejected in error should be opened and its ballot counted, subject to challenge by either candidate. In doing so, we implicitly recognized that any agreement among the parties was voluntary and, absent such an agreement, resolution of those disputed ballots would need to await an election contest proceeding.”

The order today carried the signature of Associate Justice Alan Page — who was first in line to criticize the court’s Dec. 18 order with a blistering dissent. As with earlier recount issues, the two members of the court who are currently serving on the State Canvassing Board — Chief Justice Eric Magnuson and Associate Justice G. Barry Anderson — did not take part in considering or deciding the question. All legal filings before the court related to the recount are available online.

Chris Steller is a reporter for TWI’s sister site, The Minnesota Independent.

When did this Republican love for extended recounts start? Sometime after the 2000 elections, probably. Back then Republicans were universal in their desire for Al Gore to do the right thing and concede. Here’s current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appearing on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on Dec. 4, 2000:

Al Gore at this rate, is going to become — will be remembered as the Tonya Harding of American presidential history, unwilling to accept the results after we’ve had a count, a recount, and a selected hand recount in overwhelmingly Democratic areas.

McConnell on Larry King Live, Dec. 6, 2000:

I think at this rate Al Gore is going to become the Tonya Harding of presidential politics. You know, he will contest this until he runs out of lawyers, and there are lots of lawyers down in Florida.

Coleman wasn’t vocal about the Florida recount, but he did make a statement on election night in 2000 that suggests his affinity for close elections has waned over time.

“Every day that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were in Minnesota, they weren’t in Florida,” Coleman told cheering Republicans at the Radisson Riverfront Hotel in downtown St. Paul around 1:30 a.m. “You brought them here. We helped make this work.”

In Coleman’s defense, he was sort of wrong—Ralph Nader’s vanity campaign in Oregon, Minnesota, Washington and Wisconsin made those states less blue than they would have been otherwise, which meant more Gore trips to those states that, as you can say of so many things in 2000, cost him the election.

When the new Senate is sworn in next week, it will most likely be a team of 98, following declarations by Senate leaders that Minnesota and Illinois will not be allowed to seat their controversial junior senators.

In Minnesota, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar suggested last week that Al Franken be seated if he is certified as the winner by the State Canvassing Board, even though his Republican opponent, incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman, will be certain to contest the results.

But today, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the new head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, vowed to block any attempt to seat Franken, according to Politico. Faced with the prospect of a Republican filibuster, it is unlikely that the Democrats will try to seat Franken before the election is fully settled.

And then there’s Illinois, which these days is looking like something out of Lewis Carroll. Daphne has a great post on this, in which she argues that the Democratic leadership in the Senate might have trouble preventing Roland Burris from taking his seat in the chamber. My old professor Akhil Reed Amar, widely considered the coolest constitutional scholar out there, comes to a different conclusion.

In any case, it’s almost inconceivable that the Senate will start its session at full strength. You might have to revise your lesson plan, Mr. Miller.