By Dylan Matthews
Eric Kleefeld - who's been covering the legal nitty-gritty of the (still!) ongoing Senate battle in Minnesota for months now - comes bearing some potentially good news. Due to the relative speed of the arguments from Al Franken's lawyers, a Minnesota election law specialist, David Schultz, is now predicting that there'll be a ruling on Norm Coleman's election challenge before the month is out. That doesn't mean that Franken will be seated by April - Coleman would appeal, probably all the way to the state Supreme Court - but it does seem to indicate that this whole charade will be over by summer. Given as that's when the Senate is set to consider health care reform, it appears that Obama will have 59 Democratic votes in place for that fight. It won't beat a filibuster, but it'll make peeling off the necessary Republican support a whole lot easier.
