Could this lawsuit turn around the Florida delegate problem?

The guy who filed this lawsuit last August probably never imagined, in his wildest dreams, it could turn out to be so….pivotal.

Atlanta could become the center of the political storm on Monday when a federal appeals panel hears a lawsuit that seeks to force the Democratic National Committee to seat all of Florida’s delegates at the party’s national convention in August.

The suit was filed in August in Tampa on behalf of Floridian Victor DiMaio. It claims the DNC violated his constitutional rights when it stripped Florida’s Democratic Party of all 210 of its delegates to the convention as punishment for holding its Jan. 29 presidential primary earlier than DNC rules allow.

This is like some obscure atheist who files a suit in court alleging that a Christian symbol somewhere violates his constitutional rights…..and the thing blows up into a big media affair that winds up stripping some public park or square of a longstanding, historial monument or something.

The suit was rejected at the district court level in Tampa, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has agreed to hear the case.

DiMaio said Thursday in an interview that the appellate panel’s decision to hear the case gives him hope.

“They’ve cleared the entire docket for the entire afternoon,” DiMaio said. “They definitely want to hear our argument.”

Sure, now they do, based on the challenge to count Florida delegates after the Democrats disqualified themselves from counting there, turning the state (and Michigan) into critically important prizes for Clinton (or Obama, though Clinton sort of won it the first time around, which didn’t count, which is why they’re trying to think of everything now to make it count).