By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

Just two days before the issue is supposed to be resolved, Democratic National Committee member Joel Ferguson has defected from the Michigan Democratic Party’s compromise plan to seat the state’s delegation to the national convention.

The state party has proposed giving 69 delegates to Hillary Rodham Clinton and 59 delegates to Barack Obama .

“Our challenge, from Michigan, is fatally flawed. I mean, we cannot do what we say we want to do based on the rules,” Ferguson, a longtime Michigan Democrat, told CQ Politics.

The national party “can award how many delegates Michigan gets, do they get seated or not, but they can’t move the delegations around,” he said. The plan would change the delegate allocation to account for the fact that Obama was not on the ballot.

The Michigan Democratic Party is set to present its plan to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting in Washington on Saturday, when the party will try to find a solution to seating the delegations from Michigan and Florida, who violated the national party’s scheduling rules.

The plan was proposed by a group of four top Michigan Democrats — Sen. Carl Levin , Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick , DNC member Debbie Dingell and UAW President Ron Gettelfinger — and sought to “split the difference” between the two candidates. Clinton had argued that the entire delegation should be seated 73-55 based on the vote from the Jan. 15 primary, which she won with 55 percent of the vote. Obama’s campaign argued that the delegates should be split evenly 64-64 because Obama, like most other Democratic candidates, had removed his name from the ballot. The “uncommitted” line won 40 percent of the vote.

Just last month, Ferguson filed a challenge to the plan to cut all of Michigan’s pledged delegates and superdelegates. He argued that DNC rules compel the party to seat the superdelegates and only give the party the power to cut half a state’s pledged delegates. And then, earlier this month, Ferguson said that he agreed to substitute the party’s plan for his challenge when the party’s central committee aligned behind it.

And now, in a letter to the Rules and Bylaws Committee sent Thursday, Ferguson reversed himself and said he discovered the plan was “fatally flawed.”

Ferguson, who is a Clinton supporter, believes the committee “does not have the jurisdiction to grant the key element of the relief requested — taking 59 delegates won by other presidential candidates (including Uncommitted status) and assigning them to Senator Obama.”

The Michigan Democratic Party maintains that the Rules and Bylaws Committee does, in fact, have jurisdiction to transfer delegates as outlined in the plan.

“We continue to believe that our proposal is a fair resolution that follows the applicable rules,” spokeswoman Liz Kerr said.

The “group of four” on Thursday, meanwhile, released a letter to the Rules and Bylaws Committee dated May 22 in which they urged them to seat the state’s full 157-member delegation. The letter also placed the blame for the unresolved situation squarely on the Rules and Bylaws Committee, adding yet another reason the group wants the entire delegation to be seated.

The letter said that the party ignored a violation to the nominating calendar by New Hampshire, which was one of four states (including Iowa, South Carolina and New Mexico) granted the right to hold its contest ahead of the Feb. 5 cut-off but was slated to hold the third contest in the calendar. In fact, New Hampshire was second to Iowa.