Drawing the lines

What do people in the leafy, upscale Oakland County town of Sylvan Lake have in common with the Asian immigrants and heavily pierced and tattooed young artists of Hamtramck?

What do any of those groups have in common with the soccer moms of Farmington Hills, the mean streets of Motor City's east side, the poor but vibrant Hispanic neighborhoods of southwest Detroit, and Oak Park's Orthodox Jews?

They've all been thrown together in a congressional district that has long been represented by John Conyers. By the way, Southfield, Pontiac, West Bloomfield and Keego Harbor are in there too.

When many of these people find out they are about to become Rep. Conyers' newest constituents, they are likely to react with something approaching horror. No, not out of racism, so much, as their perception — largely accurate — that the 82-year-old congressman isn't heavily invested in suburban concerns.

That, plus the fact that those in the know are aware that Conyers' office seems to be in a near-perpetual state of chaos. This isn't especially reassuring to those who need constituent services.

"You're crazy. Are you serious? We got Conyers? How the hell did that happen?" a Farmington Hiller told me when I told him.

Well, a woman I met by chance at a lunch meeting last week put it best. "This is a case of the legislators choosing their voters rather than the voters choosing their legislators," said Susan Miller, who works with the League of Women Voters in Ann Arbor.

That's exactly what's happening. Every 10 years, we get new official population estimates from the U.S. Census, and then, by law, new districts have to be drawn. Congressional districts all have to have the same number of people — 705,974, based on the April 1, 2010 count. They can vary at most by only one person.

Pretty much the same rule holds for districts in the Legislature, though these can vary by as much as 5 percent from the ideal population of 89,881 for the state House, 260,096 for the state Senate.

Dividing us up into districts isn't all that hard, for anyone with detailed census data and a computer. But the art is doing it to give one side or another partisan advantage. Usually, you have fights over just how to do that, followed by court hearings and compromise.

Not this year. Republicans control everything — both houses of the Legislature, the governor's office, the Michigan Supreme Court.

They can do whatever they want, and they have. The state is losing a seat in the U.S. House due to its population decline. As a result, they tossed two Democratic congressmen into the same district, with the result that either Sander Levin or Gary Peters will have to retire, or be defeated in a primary next August. They aren't happy.

The Republicans controlling the process have also redrawn legislative boundaries in an effort to give their candidates maximum advantage. They did this in secrecy; behind closed doors. They just created the districts, let us see 'em June 17, and soon will enact them.

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