If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Most of us have imagined our answers to that question. But when it is posed to a collection of distinguished men and women who helped write the current Illinois Constitution 40 years ago, their responses become real possibilities for future public policy.

The question arose during a reunion of 1970 Con-Con delegates and staff November 7 in Chicago. It was proposed by Jim Nowlan, a senior fellow with the University of Illinois’ Institute of Government and Public Affairs, during a panel discussion I had the pleasure and honor to moderate.

The exact way that Nowlan, a former state representative who served on the Illinois House Constitutional Implementation Committee in 1971 and 1972, jokingly phrased his question to the 50 former delegates, staff and relatives of deceased delegates was: “Would any of you have suggestions for change of the document, or maybe since you enacted it, it is sacrosanct?”

Former convention staffer Richard Lockhart quickly latched onto the bait: “I would like to see something done about the amendatory veto power of the governor. In my opinion, it is abused. I know the speaker is trying to mitigate that with House rules.”

Indeed, that issue has long been a bristling point for Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, also a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and a reunion attendee. He believes that the amendatory veto power was drafted to allow a governor only to correct minor technical mistakes in legislation — not to rewrite bills, as he says several governors have done. For instance, Madigan said attorneys for the House and Senate contend that 45 of 51 amendatory vetoes Gov. Pat Quinn has issued “were not compliant with the Constitution.” One, he said, “actually attempted to change a section of an existing statute which was not changed by the underlying bill.” 

Dawn Clark Netsch, former Demo-cratic state comptroller and candidate for governor, chimed in with another suggestion: “I would still like to get rid of the restrictions that got built into the Revenue Article, over the protest of many of us who were involved in it. You have the flat-rate requirement [for the state income tax], the 8-to-5 ratio [linking the corporate income tax rate with the personal income tax rate] and some of those things. … I don’t think that’s going very far, though.”

Former delegate Ray Garrison recalled that the flat income tax was inserted because delegates feared that voters who opposed the graduated tax would reject the entire Constitution. “We took the safe side,” he said, adding that convention president Samuel Witwer “was mainly interested in getting a document that would pass.”

Nowlan then brought up the sticky subject of how to fund public schools. During the convention, some delegates believed that financing schools through a statewide method, such as the income tax, solved inequities that occur when schools are funded mainly through local property taxes. But local property tax support for schools stayed in the document — although the Constitution does add, “The state has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education” — and arguments over the issue have ensued ever since. 

“I’ve done a lot of thinking about this over 40 years,” said former delegate Malcolm Kamin, who was a member of the education committee at the convention. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t really dictate an effective public financing system unless the public is behind it. The major problem with funding education in the state of Illinois is that the Chicago suburbs really don’t want to change their advantages. And that was the thing that undid what was proposed 40 years ago.”

He added that funding education entirely through a statewide method essentially would result in a state school system. The congressional legislation that created the state of Illinois, Kamin said, dedicated a portion of every township for a public school, thereby urging local support. “Anything that smacks of real state control flies in the face of our tradition of local education.”

Suggestions then turned toward the current system of drawing legislative districts every 10 years. It usually results in the secretary of state pulling a name out of a hat, with the chosen person’s political party controlling the commission that draws district maps. Netsch said she recently reviewed early redistricting discussions, and “it’s not as nutty as everybody is representing it.” Convention delegates believed the drawings “would never have to be used because it was just too much of a crap shoot for both parties.” She said the delegates also never expected that the two names chosen from different political parties would be “really bitter partisans. … It was thought to be the choice of two people who would really try to resolve the differences.”

“What’s happened over 40 years,” Madigan elaborated, “is that nobody has felt the compulsion to compromise.” A current proposed constitutional amendment would allow the House and Senate to each map their own districts with no relationship to the districts of the other chamber. Now, each Senate district entirely contains two House districts. Madigan said if that proposal became law, legislative districts would meander all over Illinois, “but it clearly makes things easier if each chamber can do its own.”

Reunion organizer Ann Lousin, a former Con-Con staffer and now a professor at John Marshall Law School, which co-sponsored the event along with the Union League Club of Chicago, said afterward that 19 of the about 40 living convention delegates attended. “It was a very congenial group. These are people who used to go after each other hammer and tong. … They worked together, they got mad, then they came back together and they compromised. I don’t see that [among current politicians].”

Lousin, who has organized six or seven similar reunions over the years (two more were coordinated by others), pointed to such topics as education funding, redistricting and election versus appointment of judges that dominate the headlines 40 years after Con-Con. “Some of the issues delegates could not agree on are still issues today.”

She says she hopes to continue to stage events throughout the coming year that will be connected to the 40th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, and that she plans to assemble another reunion next fall.

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Please welcome back to our staff Jamey Dunn, who did a great job as an intern for us during last spring’s legislative session. She earned her master’s degree in public affairs reporting from the University of Illinois Springfield and has a bachelor’s in speech communication from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has assumed the role of our visiting Statehouse bureau chief.

Dana Heupel can be reached at heupel.dana@uis.edu.

Illinois Issues, January 2010