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Franken Takes Over Senate Office Monday
July 6, 2009 7:01 a.m. EST
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Kris Alingod - AHN Contributor
Washington, D.C. (AHN) - Eight months after election day, Minnesota will have a second senator on Capitol Hill beginning Monday, when Senator-elect Al Franken (D-MN) takes over the office occupied by his rival, former Sen. Norm Coleman. Franken is expected to be sworn into office on Tuesday.
A former comedian, Franken last week won a unanimous ruling from the Minnesota Supreme Court, ending the state's closest and most contentious U.S. Senate race, and giving Democrats a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority at a time when they are pushing hard to have controversial energy and healthcare reform bills passed.
The 58-year-old makes his public debut as the newest Senate Democrat in a press conference with Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-NV) on Monday, when lawmakers return from a week-long Fourth of July recess. He is tentatively scheduled to take the oath the next day in a ceremony on the Senate floor presided by Vice President Joe Biden.
Reid has made clear that Democrats will be counting on Franken to help push their agenda, despite a statement from the newly elected senator that he would represent "all Minnesotans."
Franken will "play a crucial role as [Democrats] work to strengthen our economy, ensure all Americans can access and afford quality health care, make our country more energy independent, confirm the President's outstanding nominee to the Supreme Court, and tackle the many other challenges we face," Reid had said last week.
The GOP, in the meantime, has called on supporters to double their efforts for the 2010 elections to counter the "unchecked supermajority" of Democrats.
"With their supermajority, the era of excuses and finger-pointing is now over," the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), said in a statement. "With just 59 votes, Senate Democrats in recent months have passed trillion-dollar spending bills, driven up America's debt, made every American taxpayer a shareholder in the auto industry and now want Washington to takeover America's health care system. It's troubling to think about what they might now accomplish with 60 votes."
"The American people will now have a particularly clear choice in next year's election," he added. "To continue down this path of fiscal mismanagement, more big government, and one-party control in Washington or to restore a system of checks and balances that will hold government accountable to its citizens."
Coleman, a former Democrat and former mayor of St. Paul who was seeking a second term, had appealed an April decision from a three-judge panel that upheld recount results that had Franken winning by 225 votes. Franken's lead grew to 312 during a seven-week trial, when wrongly rejected absentee ballots were reviewed.
A manual, statewide recount had been held because election night results had Coleman ahead by only 215 votes, or less than one -half of one percent.
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