Over the past few weeks, Harry Reid has demanded Norm Coleman’s concession and insisted that Franken would get seated as Minnesota’s Senator.  Now Reid has retreated from that position as quickly as he did from his offensive against Roland Burris.  Suddenly he wants to wait for Minnesota to finish its legal processes:

Reid previously has hedged on whether he would wait for the trial on the election results to conclude before deciding whether to seat Franken in the Senate. But on Tuesday, he said he was under the impression that a ruling would come down in the next two weeks, at which point he would decide whether the former comedian should become the 59th Senate Democrat.

“We have to let the trial get over with, that should be over in two weeks,” Reid told reporters.

Two weeks?  That’s a rather optimistic prediction.  The election contest could take weeks longer than that, especially if the three-judge panel decides to look at absentee ballots individually, as they signaled this week.  After the contest will come an inevitable challenge in the federal courts, which may have substantial grounds to throw out the entire recount on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause, as happened in Bush v Gore.

Has anyone looked as foolish as Harry Reid in these controversial Senate decisions since the election?