Illinois House Democrats used their supermajority Tuesday to push through revised boundaries for the state’s 177 legislative districts aimed at ensuring their control of the General Assembly through the end of the decade.

The maps, redrawn following the release of hard census data earlier in August, continue to face lawsuits contesting their fairness in representing minority populations and communities with like interests.

A state Energy Policy Overhaul agreeable to both organized labor and environmental groups, meanwhile, remained elusive as legislators spent most of their scheduled one-day session in Springfield holed up in closed-door negotiations.

Commonwealth Edison parent Exelon has said it will close one of the state’s nuclear plants if it doesn’t get the state subsidies that would be part of an energy deal, putting pressure on lawmakers to act.

Democrats advanced the new legislative map over opposition from Republicans and from minority advocacy groups who said they had little time to review the latest plan to see if it ensured proper representation following a census that showed growth in the state’s Latino population and a decline in Black residents.

“We simply don’t have the reassurances that communities of color have had their voting rights respected,” Ami Ghandi, senior council for the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told the committee.

The House approved the map on a 73-43 party-line vote — with 71 votes required for passage — sending it to the Senate, which also has a sizable majority over Republicans. Senate passage would send the measure to Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

An earlier map passed by legislators and signed into law by Pritzker was based on population estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That map was drawn to beat a June 30 state constitutional deadline that would have given Republicans a chance to control the mapmaking process.

Republicans and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed federal lawsuits over the earlier map. A federal judge, anticipating Democrats would adopt a new map, gave them time to refashion their legal arguments.

Democrats sought to put themselves in a better legal position with a map guided by more specific figures from the federal census count that didn’t come out until earlier in August due to delays brought on by the pandemic.

State Rep. Elizabeth Hernandez, D-Cicero, sought to discount complaints of a lack of citizen input and transparency in unveiling the latest map.

“I am a person who wants to hear from the community. It’s important to listen to the public and to consider very much what they’re saying because they play very much a role,” she said. “But in the end, it’s not always going to be all satisfied. We’re going to do the best that we can to accommodate and I think that this is what we’ve done.”

That prompted Republican state Rep. Ryan Spain of Peoria to counter: “‘What we’ve done to accommodate should appear in a dictionary of what it means to be disingenuous.”

And state Rep. Tim Butler of Springfield, the ranking Republican on the House remap panel, called the process a “farce” and “charade.”

Legislators also were still working to strike a deal on an energy policy overhaul that would meet Pritzker’s goal of putting the state on a path to 100% carbon-free power by 2050 and put power customers on the hook for a nearly $700 bailout of three nuclear plants owned by the parent company of scandal-plagued Commonwealth Edison.

As negotiations dragged on, a committee hearing on the latest changes that was originally set for Tuesday morning didn’t convene until just after 5 p.m.

Lawmakers are under intense pressure to act because ComEd parent Exelon has said it will shut down its Byron nuclear plant in September and its Dresden plant later this year if it doesn’t get more assistance from Springfield.

A proposal that would keep the plants open and establish Pritzker’s clean energy goal in law was introduced Monday in the Senate, but Pritzker vowed to veto it if it reached his desk due to concerns about ongoing pollution from coal plants.

Responding to pushback from Pritzker and allied environmental groups, a revised Senate energy proposal floated Tuesday set a 2045 deadline to shut down both the Prairie State Generating Station in southern Illinois — the largest source of carbon pollution in the state and one of the largest in the country — and Springfield’s city-owned coal plant.

Environmentalists continued to push for decreasing limits on carbon emissions from the plants in the intervening years.

“We are out of time to solve this problem of our state’s biggest polluter,” Juliana Pino, policy director for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, said during a Senate committee hearing Tuesday evening. “Our climate doesn’t have time, and the families of those affected by the plant’s pollution don’t have time.”

But labor unions who represent workers at power plants across the state argue that a lack of action will lead to the loss of more than 2,000 nuclear plant jobs and increased pollution as a result of making up for the lost generating capacity.

Pat Devaney, secretary-treasurer of the Illinois AFL-CIO, called the latest proposal a ““very, very reasonable, comprehensive energy package.”

“It’s going to preserve the existing jobs in nuclear generation, it’s going to create many new jobs in the renewable energy industry, and with the changes and the compromises that have taken place, it is going to combat climate change and tackle that issue head on,” Devaney told the Senate committee.

Democratic state Sen. Michael Hastings of Frankfort, who’s sponsoring the proposal, bristled at the continued opposition from environmentalists.

“The parties have been asking for a hard close date. The Senate is giving them a hard close date,” Hastings said.

In a separate matter, the Senate approved a tweak Pritzker proposed to an ethics overhaul lawmakers passed this spring in response to an ongoing federal corruption investigation that has stretched from City Hall to Springfield.

Pritzker and lawmakers have hailed the package as an important step toward addressing pervasive public corruption in Illinois, but good-government groups and even some supporters have argued that doesn’t go far enough.

The legislature’s top watchdog, Legislative Inspector General Carol Pope, was so incensed with changes affecting her office that she tendered her resignation last month, telling lawmakers their work this spring “demonstrated true ethics reform is not a priority.”

The measure requires additional disclosures from officials on personal financial interests, aims to prevent lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues immediately after they leave office, and allows the legislative inspector general to initiate investigations of alleged wrongdoing without asking for the blessing of a panel appointed by the partisan leaders of the General Assembly, among other changes.

Critics contend many of those changes are filled with loopholes that render them ineffective.

Some advocates called on Pritzker to use his veto power to recraft major portions of the proposal. Instead, the governor used his amendatory veto power Friday to suggest a fix to a “technical drafting error” in a section dealing with the executive inspector general’s office.

The House still had to vote on whether to accept Pritzker’s change, and if it passes the measure would become law upon the governor’s certification.