Senate Republicans advance party plan

"This is about politics," protested Sen. Burton Leland (D-Detroit). "We will be undercounted. We will be frozen out."

And Mark Brewer, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said the bills are unconstitutional and will be the target of lawsuits if they are enacted.

"Far from making this less political, they have made it more political," Brewer said of majority Republicans. "This is a lawyers' full-employment act."

The partisan dispute focused on surveying, or sampling, in an attempt to reach accurate population numbers in the next census. Both state legislative and congressional districts are drawn using census figures.

The Republican-sponsored bills call for using census head-counts to reach population figures. Democrats urged the use of sampling to estimate the population, saying only sampling would count the homeless, immigrants and other people likely to support Democratic candidates.

"We'll focus in Michigan on having a hard, accurate count, so nobody's left behind and nobody's frozen out," said Sen. Bill Schuette (R-Midland), Senate Reapportionment Committee chair.

"Sampling doesn't cure an undercount problem," he said. He said such surveys actually can make the count more inaccurate.

The Republican bills adopt reapportionment standards used by Michigan in past censuses. They do not attempt to draw district lines - that will follow the 2000 census - but put in place the standards to be used when those lines get drawn.

Those standards include permission that the population can vary 10 percent between districts. For congressional districts, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled populations must be virtually identical.

The redrawing of districts following the census is expected to be a partisan issue, because where district lines are drawn often determines which party will control the district.

The bills were approved on votes of 6-3 or 5-3, with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed. They now go to the Senate floor.

Schuette said the legislation is designed to "cleanse this process of partisanship" and "remove gamesmanship." But Senate Minority Floor Leader Virgil Smith (D-Detroit) said "that has not been the case in the past."

"It has been a process that both parties have tried to get their best hold," he said.

"We feel we haven't been able to put our players in place," he said, urging a week's delay in order to get Democratic experts and attorneys before the panel.

But Schuette refused to put off the vote.

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