The Minnesota Supreme Court has now responded to the Coleman campaign's lawsuit to restart the latest phase of the recount, the sorting of wrongly-rejected absentee ballots. They're taking no action for now -- but aren't ruling it out, either.

At issue here is the Coleman campaign's attempts to get about 650 ballots put in that the local officials throughout Minnesota have said were correctly rejected. The campaign is contending that ballot envelopes in different parts of the state are being treated unequally -- and it just so happens that the ballots they've picked out are from areas that Coleman swept in the election.

The court has neither denied nor granted Coleman's request, and they haven't scheduled hearings, either. Instead, they've ordered the Franken campaign, plus the counties in question, to furnish more information by tomorrow morning. In short, they want to find out whether Coleman truly has a potentially legitimate claim, or if he's just complaining about a constitutional violation because he's losing.

With the clock ticking for Coleman, though, this is more bad news than it is good. After all, the regular sorting and approval of these ballots is scheduled to end today, and those ballots will be counted over the weekend and give us a new vote total for the race. Absent any new court intervention that would restart the process or force the admission of those 650 ballots, Al Franken is expected to still be ahead by Monday's canvassing board meeting.