The letter is part of a concerted effort by Democrats and their allies to put pressure on Pawlenty in anticipation of the Minnesota Supreme Court’s ruling on the contest. A three-judge panel determined that the Democrat won the election by 312 votes and the state’s top court is widely expected to ratify that decision. Pawlenty has been cagey about whether he will sign an election certificate at that point, which would clear the way for Franken to be seated.

The Republican leadership in Washington has made it obvious that they’ll do whatever it takes to keep Franken from taking office, and therefore giving President Obama a veto-proof 60-seat majority. The latest evidence: the National Republican Senatorial Committee recently committed $750,000 to cover Coleman’s spiraling legal bills, reports the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza.

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Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele has Norm Coleman’s back. When asked by Hotline On Call recently whether he thinks Coleman should concede the U.S. Senate contest, Steele’s response was emphatic: “No, hell no.”

The RNC chairman went on to vow to take the fight to the federal courts if necessary. “Whatever the outcome, it’s going to get bumped to the next level,” he told a Hotline reporter after Saturday night’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner. “This does not end until there’s a final ruling that speaks to whether or not those votes that have not been counted should be counted. And Norm Coleman will not, will not jump out of this race before that.”

It’s merely the latest indication that the Republican leadership in Washington will do whatever it takes to keep Al Franken from being seated — and therefore give President Obama a veto-proof majority in the Senate — for as long as possible.

***UPDATE***

The Democratic National Committee issued a statement in response to Steele’s comments:

“Michael Steele’s comments this weekend regarding the Minnesota Senate election have completely erased any thought that Norm Coleman’s continued legal fight is about anything more than pure politics,” said DNC spokesman Frank Benenati. “If there was anyone left who actually believed that Norm Coleman, Tim Pawlenty, and the national Republicans actually cared about the true winner of this race rather than obstructing the seating of another Democratic Senator, Michael Steele’s comments this weekend should have disabused them of that notion.”

Republican Rep. John Kline was the Club for Growth’s second favorite House member from Minnesota. He voted their way 78 percent of the time last year. Not surprisingly, GOP legislators dominate the top spots on the list, with only four Democrats cracking the top 200. Among the group’s favorite Dems: Reps. Tim Walz (209th) and Colin Peterson (211th). Dead last on the list? Reps. Jim Oberstar and Betty McCollum. Along with 107 of their Democratic colleagues, they voted the wrong way (in the Club for Growth’s estimation) on all 22 bills.

On the Senate side, the anti-tax organization wasn’t particularly fond of either of Minnesota’s senators. Based on 20 votes in 2008, the Club for Growth ranked Norm Coleman 44th, while Amy Klobuchar tied for the 84th spot. She voted with the advocacy group just three percent of the time.

Protesters blame police for violence that broke out at the conclusion of last night’s protest parade organized by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. The group’s national organizer, Cheri Honkala, spoke to reporters this morning at Bushville, the temporary encampment set up by activists at 400 Western Ave. in St. Paul. “As a resident of Minnesota, I’m incredibly ashamed,” Honkala said. “I think our security team did a pretty damn good jop keeping the peace yesterday.”

Indeed the march was largely without incident until arriving at the Capitol. There it converged with the Ripple Effect concert where Rage Against the Machine was slated to perform. As documented by Jeff Severns Guntzel in this space, events quickly spiraled out of control with tear gas and explosive sound devices utilized by cops.

Honkala said anarchists, who have been blamed for much of the tumult on the streets of St. Paul during the RNC, were not at fault for last night’s trouble. “No fringe group took away from what happened yesterday,” she said. “It was those guys dressed all in black — I mean the police officers all dressed in black — that took away from our message.”

More than 300 people have been locked up during the first two days of the RNC, but Honkala dismissed the arrests as primarily trumped up allegations. “I highly doubt that they’ll get any convictions from any of these arrests,” she said. “Most of the folks were participating in using their First Amendment rights and practicing their right to assemble.”

Her comments were backed up by others at the press conference. Shamako Noble, an activist from San Jose, California, said police actions actually prevented the crowd from peacefully dispersing last night. “They almost trapped people in,” he said. “It seems to me that you have to justify $50 million somehow. I don’t think it was anything that we actually did.”

At a series of press conferences this week, St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington has defended the tactics utilized by police. “They did a great job in the face of a lot of challenges,” he said after the first day of disturbances. “They did not overreact.”

As this morning’s press conference took place, volunteers were packing up the remnants of Bushville. People filled trash bags and stacked mattresses. A couple couches still sat on the otherwise near empty lot. Honkala was leaving for a funeral in Philadelphia immediately after speaking with the press. But she vowed that the group will be planning more protests down the road to highlight poverty and economic injustice. “We do marches because we don’t have the money for lobbyists, we don’t have the money for billboards,” she said. “All we have is our voices and we will continue to insure that our voices are not taken away from us.”

Sandy Colvin Roy, chair of the Minneapolis City Council’s Transportation and Public Works Committee, was rattling off the next agenda item at the committee’s meeting last week, when a familiar name brought her up short: Donald Fraser wanted to buy a piece of city-owned property alongside his house for one dollar. The excess public right-of-way land was left over from the 1970s, when construction of Interstate 35W sliced the corner off the 800 block of 7th Street SE. Fraser has lived his whole life on that block — apart from time he spent in Washington, D.C., during eight terms as a member of Congress. That came after eight years as state senator and before 13 years as mayor of Minneapolis, during which he tried unsuccessfully to beef up the mayor’s role in the city’s weak-mayor system. Still, Minneapolis mayors aren’t so weak that their names go unrecognized at City Hall a mere 14 years after they leave office.

“Hmmm … I didn’t notice that earlier,” Covin Roy said, convincingly enough. What followed was a perfunctory public process with perhaps a little extra grilling of staff to ensure that the ex-mayor — who along with his wife, Arvonne, remains active in the public policy sphere and the political endorsement game — wasn’t making off like a bandit with 2,434 square feet of city property. The flat, undevelopable piece of land overlooks I-35W on its approach to the collapsed bridge site, a stretch of interstate that for the moment is comparatively quiet. Department of Public Works staff said Fraser’s appraiser, chosen from a city-provided list, found that one dollar is the city’s standard price for like properties (the currently weak dollar notwithstanding). Before the committee OK’d the deal, which returns the lot to the tax rolls, another line of questioning determined that Fraser has been mowing the property all these years, which seemed to impress the committee. It also suggested a new real estate maxim: Mowing is nine-tenths of possession. Now that and a piece of excess right-of-way will buy you a weak cup of coffee.