State legislators yesterday lost the ability to decide whom they will represent for a decade.
That power now falls to a federal three-judge panel, which Thursday began a two-day trial in Milwaukee to collect information to use when redrawing the state's 33 Senate and 99 Assembly boundaries following the Legislature's failure to compromise on two opposing redistricting bills.
\The Senate has passed its plan, the Assembly has passed their plan and in addition there are several other plans introduced,"" Sen. Fred Risser, D-Madison, said. ""The panel has the option of taking one of those plans or scrapping the whole batch of them and writing their own.""
Lawyers for both Democratic and Republican parties presented their arguments with help from a few expert political science professors.
Michael May, an attorney for the Democrats, acquired two UW-Madison professors, David Canon and Kenneth Mayer, while the Republican attorney James Troupis hired Bernard Grofman of the University of California-Irvine and Ronald Gaddie of the University of Oklahoma.
