Billmon and friends raise some good points regarding why Cons may suddenly be getting cold feet about Coleman battling all the way to the Supreme Court (h/t):

Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.

Anton Scalia
Bush v. Gore
December, 2000

Fellow diarist Libertarian Friend notes that some of the asylum dwellers over at the National Review are experiencing intermittent flashes of rationality, which have led some of them to doubt the wisdom of the GOP’s strategy of tying up the Minnesota Senate race until hell freezes over or the Obama Administration is overthrown by the Glenn Beck militia movement, whichever comes first. Ramesh Ponnuru runs up the white flag:

If [Coleman] keeps up the fight, he is likely to lose, unnecessarily deprive Minnesota of a second senator, end his political career seen as a sore loser, and hurt his party in a state that is eager for this fight to be over.

Ponnuru doesn’t mention it, but I can’t help but wonder whether the prospect of Norm Coleman before the Supreme Court, a highlighted copy of the 14th Amendment in hand, doesn’t have something to do with his (and Powerline’s Scott Johnson’s) sudden conversion to cheese-eating surrender monkeying.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it was the electroshock therapy. But I’ve suspected for some time that conservatives would eventually have serious reservations about where Norm and his mouthpieces are trying to take them. Maybe it’s finally dawning on some of them that making a federal case out this election contest risks a long-term disaster for the GOP — one that would completely outweigh the short-term benefits of depriving the Democrats of their 59th vote.

After all, what Norm is threatening to do — if he can’t get his way in state court — is to demand that the US Supremes go storming through the equal protection door they opened just a crack, and then promptly tried to close again, in Bush v. Gore.

But if we’re really going to start vigorously applying the 14th Amendment to how votes are cast and counted in this country, then a whole bunch of GOP-friendly election realities are going to be open to constitutional challenge. How, for example, is it “equal” for poor and urban precincts to have 1/5th the number of voting machines per capita as wealthy surburban ones? Is it “equal” for election officials to routinely deny elderly, undereducated or inexperienced voters the assistance they need to understand complex, confusing and/or poorly constructed ballots? Is it “equal” for prosecutors to aggressively pursue registration fraud cases against ACORN, while generally ignoring those against GOP-leaning groups?

Can you say “disparate impact”? How about “protected class”?

Something tells me that’s a road they don’t wanna travel. Should be interesting watching them twist on the horns of that dilemma.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Awesome) on Rep. John Boehner (R-Lame):

“Does Boehner need any justification? It says it right there on his partisan hack license that he can say anything that he wants.”

Now, I could let that stand by itself. It is whole and complete in its power of pwn. But Barney Frank is not a one-trick pony. He is not merely a man of clever one-liners, he is also master of the long-form smackdown. Digby presents one of his recent classics:

It occurred to me today that the way to get Wall Street’s so-called best and brightest to slink off in shame is to dig into their sex lives. After all, that’s all it took to conveniently take down one of the Democratic party’s top experts on corporate crime and turn him into a pariah. It’s really too bad. He would be very useful right about now.

It doesn’t always work, however. After all, there’s Rep. Barney Frank, who the Republicans once tried and failed to destroy for his personal life and are now holding personally responsible for the collapse of the world financial system. And he’s not having it.

Frank reminds them of the facts in his inimitable style:

In the House of Representatives, the majority party has almost unlimited power over the minority party. The majority party owns the committee chairmanships; it controls what bills come to a vote; and it is under no obligation to consider the ideas of the beleaguered minority. When the Republicans were in the majority they ruled with an iron first; it is no accident that Tom DeLay was known as “The Hammer.”

That is why I find it particularly flattering the Republicans now claim that in the years 1995 to 2006 I personally possessed supernatural powers which enabled me to force mighty Republican leaders to do my bidding. Choose your comic book hero — I was all of them.

[snip]

According to the Republicans’ misty memories of the period before 2007, I allegedly singlehandedly blocked their determined efforts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and my supposed intransigence literally caused the worldwide financial crisis.

Fortunately, we have tools to aid memory — pencil and paper, word processing, transcripts, newspapers, and the Congressional record. And as described in the most reputable published sources, in 2005 I in fact worked together with my Republican colleague Michael Oxley, then Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, to write a bill to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We passed the bill out of committee with an overwhelming majority — every Democrat voted in favor of the legislation. However, on the House floor the Republican leadership added a poison pill amendment, which would have prevented non-profit institutions with religious affiliations from receiving funds. I voted against the legislation in protest, though I continued to work with Mr. Oxley to encourage the Senate to pass a good bill. But these efforts were defeated because President Bush blocked further consideration of the legislation. In the words of Mr. Oxley, no flaming liberal, the Bush administration gave his efforts ‘the one-finger salute.’

The Republicans can claim some supposed successes despite my awesome power. In 1999 they passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned a Depression-era law preventing commercial banks from acting like investment banks. In 2000, they passed another bill which loosened regulation of derivative markets. I voted against these bills — but to no avail.

If I ever do ScriptFrenzy, I think it’ll be a comic book with Barney Frank as the superhero. It’s just too bad the supervillians he faces are so comically inept.