looking into that stupid mississippi senate race
Trying to gauge the exciting Mississippi race pitting Thad Cochran — the surreal favorite of black Democrats — Travis Childers, trying to woo white Republicans…
and the ghost of Chris McDaniels, who… is arguing some precedent that I can’t make heads or tails of to reopen his case.
In a legal brief filed late Thursday, McDaniel noted that Gunn waited 34 days to challenge a 2003 Republican primary loss to incumbent state Rep. Jep Barbour. Gunn won the court challenge and the election, and he became speaker of the 122-member House in early 2012.
However, in McDaniel’s case, a judge said the candidate failed to meet a 20-day deadline to challenge the loss in a multi-county primary. McDaniel started his challenge 41 days after the primary. Judge Hollis McGehee dismissed McDaniel’s lawsuit.
Cochran’s attorneys said in Jones County Circuit Court last month that the Gunn challenge is not relevant to McDaniel’s case because the timing of Gunn’s filing was not argued as an issue in the court case that became known as Barbour v. Gunn.
McDaniel attorneys Mitch Tyner and Steve Thornton wrote Thursday that if the state Supreme Court was wrong in the way it handled Barbour v. Gunn, “then Speaker Gunn could be removed from his office, since this court’s ruling in that case would be void. … Therefore, the Republican Party’s State Executive Committee’s certification of Jep Barbour as the winner would stand.”
You figure that Cochran knows what he’s doing by denying all requests to debates from Childers… which demands for debates aplenty are the last desperate act of the challenger for these things.
One more wild card… the third party… Reform Party (???) Candidate Shawn O’Hara. Whatever the Reform Party is at this point in time.
Or… Watergate like conspiracy could tip the race? (Sure. Watergate. Though… that case hasn’t much to do with anything.)