On Wednesday, we noted former congressman and judge Abner Mikva's letter to the Tribune in which he voiced his opposition to holding a Constitutional Convention in 2010.  A week earlier, Mikva and John Marshall Law School professor Ann Lousin both sat down with the Alliance to Protect the Constitution -- a coalition opposed to Con-Con -- to discuss their thoughts on the prospect of a convention.  Listen to this excerpt from Mikva's comments:

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MIKVA: The problem is that when the people are not together on where they want their country to go -- where they want their government to go -- trying to form the basic document that will set that direction is very, very hard.  I think we're at that position today in Illinois.  Our people are very unhappy with state government.  They don't like the decisions that have been made or the decisions that haven't been made.  And I think that any constitution that would come out of that state mood would be a very difficult one to live with.  It would have all kinds of prohibitions on it that probably wouldn't make long-range sense.  It would have all kinds of ideas in it that might solve today's problem, but might not work for the future.  [...]

It seems to me the best thing at this point to do is to live with what we have -- which I think has been a pretty good product, it's worked quite well over the 30 or 40 years since it passed -- and wait until we are in a better mood for revising the basic document that runs us.

Meanwhile, Lousin discussed what she views as the prerequisites for a constitutional convention:

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LOUSIN: First prerequisite, I think, is that the civic and political leaders of the state -- especially the party leaders -- must support a Con-Con very enthusiastically.  Every now and then I hear someone say, "Oh, we're going to have a constitutional convention by running roughshod over the political leaders."  And frankly, it just can't be done.  They're the ones who can turn out the votes.  They're the ones who can stymie you.  They have to be part of the process.

Another thing is you have to have delegates -- and I don't know how you do this, frankly -- but you have to have delegates to a convention who really want to produce a good product and one that will be acceptable to people of the state more than they want any one particular issue.

And on the other side of the debate, Greg Pierce of United Power for Action and Justice responded to Mikva's letter in our comments section on Wednesday:

[One] argument the opposition is using is that a constitutional convention will be controlled by the same people who have created the mess in Springfield in the first place. Listen, if 60% of the voters vote for a constitutional convention, it will be like "the second shot heard around the world." The powers that be, most of whom are opposing a constitutional convention (I wonder why?) wouldnt dare to subvert it, and if they did we would all be there to stop them.