For people still on the fence about whether Illinois should host a constitutional convention -- and according to polling data, many of you are -- check out Medill Reports' clearinghouse on all things Con-Con.

While articles on the site detail how various organizations plan to advocate for or against a convention, I found the two featured interviews to be the most helpful. The first is with Greg Pierce, a pro-Con-Con organizer for the Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate United Power for Action and Justice:

You can't have a democracy where people just come out every 2 to 4 years and vote and then go back to their regular lives and just don't do anything about it. So when an opportunity presents itself, like we have now, to do a constitutional convention, we think it's a good exercise in democracy for people to say ‘yes let's have a constitutional convention. Let's look at how things are done’…

That's followed by a conversation with Illinois Business Roundtable President Jeff Mays, whose organization stands in opposition to a convention:

If there's a consensus to enact change on recall or a change in how we elect judges. If there's a consensus to change how we elect judges, if there's a consensus on how we should approach re-apportionment, then a change mechanism like that is absolutely a viable and focused way to bring about a debate and discussion that I think that a change in our constitutional framework should have…

But while the two Medill Reports interviews might lead you to believe that it's just business leaders who oppose Con-Con, their are a variety of voices taking that position. Indeed, some progressive reformers argue that, while state government is broken and the constitution contains some regressive statutes, opening up the entire document (especially our comprehensive Bill of Rights) to a politically-connected delegation brings with it considerable risks. From my feature article on the convention:

The cost of a convention is another red flag. Wayne Whalen, vice president of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Foundation board and a delegate in 1970, told Illinois Issues that facilitating the labor-intensive work of convention deliberations would cost taxpayers roughly $100 million.

That figure doesn’t account for the heavy sum prospective delegates would need to raise to win a seat at the convention either, meaning that lobbyists, special interests, and party leaders would be well positioned to set the convention’s agenda and reap its rewards. “Money is going to play a much bigger role in who runs today,” says Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “We may get bogged down in discussions on things like gay marriage and choice and gun rights that won’t help us move to a nice bipartisan resolution on the crucial fundamental structural issues we want to confront.”