The S.C. Senate has neither the money nor the time to waste on drawing new district lines for its members, state Sen. Darrell Jackson said Tuesday.

The Richland County Democrat decried his colleagues' attempts to rush through a plan to create new districts - with deep cuts to education spending looming in a difficult state budget debate to come.

"Johnny lost his teacher, but guess what?" Jackson asked the Senate. "We're paying some lawyer to write Senate districts when we already have districts to run with."

Under questioning from Jackson, Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, said the Senate has paid an outside lawyer about $15,000 or $20,000 to create new district maps for the 46 senators.

"The money we've spent hasn't been enough to pay for one teacher," McConnell said.

But one dollar is too much, Jackson said, considering the state spent more than $1 million on lawyers for redistricting in 2001. And, with the NAACP promising to challenge any new plan in court, those expenses will only rise, Jackson said.

No decision on the proposed maps was made Tuesday, as Jackson used Senate rules to delay any vote until today. But a vote today is not a sure thing, either, as Jackson threatened to hold the Senate floor in a filibuster all day to prevent a vote.

McConnell said more than 40 of the 46 senators - including most Democrats - support the plan. It would take 31 votes to force Jackson to sit down and bring a vote, but it was unclear Monday whether Democrats would vote to silence one of their own. Republicans hold a 25-21 edge in the Senate.

Redistricting is the process by which lawmakers draw the lines that form their own districts. It is important because it impacts voting trends and affects communities by adjusting their state representation.

Normally the state redraws lines for the House and Senate every 10 years using new Census population data. The General Assembly did this in 2001, but that plan was vetoed by then-Gov. Jim Hodges and challenged in federal court.

The court threw out the lawmakers' plan and drew its own maps. All 124 members of the House of Representatives ran on the court-ordered plan in 2002. But the 46 senators are not up for re-election until next year and Republican leaders in the Senate want to create their own maps.

Jackson and state Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, argued against the new plan.

"I said to (McConnell) months and months ago that we should not be taking up reapportionment and spending any money when we are indeed firing teachers and firing state employees," Leventis said. "We are ill-advised to fight this fight."

But McConnell argued that the plan improves upon the court's maps. As drawn by the court, 130 voting precincts statewide are split into one or more Senate districts. The Senate plan, he said, leaves no precincts split.

"We can heal those districts," McConnell said.

The proposal also would make the racial makeup of most Republican districts more white and most Democratic districts more black. In South Carolina, black voters have historically voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

While the Senate proposal protects all 46 sitting Senators, it particularly shores up the district of Sen. Ralph Anderson, D-Greenville. Under the court plan, Anderson's district became much more Republican, but the Senate plan makes it more Democratic.

State NAACP director Dwight James said his organization opposes the Senate plan because there has been no public input into the new district lines.

"It's worth it to challenge because we believe it should be a more open process," James said Tuesday.