INDIANAPOLIS AND WASHINGTON — After a fierce eight-month voter recount battle in Minnesota, Al Franken's U.S. Senate victory Tuesday hands Democrats a powerful, filibuster-proof majority as they embark on the administration's ambitious initiatives for energy and healthcare reform.
The victory followed the Minnesota Supreme Court's unanimous ruling Tuesday declaring Franken the victor over Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by a razor-thin 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast in November's election.
Franken, 58, formerly of NBC's "Saturday Night Live" and later of liberal talk radio station Air America, said he was humbled "not just by the closeness of this election, but by the responsibility that comes with this position."
"I can't wait to get started," he said at a news conference.
His comic roots haunted him occasionally during the campaign. Rivals in the Democratic primary objected to a satirical piece he wrote for Playboy in 2000, in which he described sex acts at a fictional virtual-reality sex lab in Minnesota.
And Republicans cried foul when they learned that Franken had helped conceive an SNL sketch mocking Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the GOP presidential candidate -- and now one of Franken's colleagues.
During the campaign, Franken usually played it straight.
The win carries symbolic weight for the Democrats, undeniably branding them the party of power in the White House, House and now the Senate, where Democrats will hold a 60-vote supermajority -- counting two independents who caucus with them.
But the practical effect of the 60-vote milestone may be less profound.
It has been more than 30 years since Democrats have held a similar supermajority in the Senate -- from 1977 to 1979 during the Carter administration. As President Carter discovered, senators, by tradition, are notoriously independent and regionally minded, voting out of interests that extend beyond party loyalty.
Franken himself said he had no plans to be a Democratic automaton.
"The way I see it, I'm not going to Washington to be the 60th Democratic senator. I'm going to Washington to be the second senator from the state of Minnesota, and that's how I'm going to do this job," he said.
The success -- or failure -- of Congress to pass effective legislation is almost solely the Democrats' responsibility now -- a fact that Republicans were eager to note Tuesday.
