Interview with Dawn Clark Netsch # ISL-A-L-2010-013.07 Interview # 7: September 17, 2010 Interviewer: Mark Depue

Interview with Dawn Clark Netsch # ISL-A-L-2010-013.07 Interview # 7: September 17, 2010 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is Friday, September 17, 2010 in the afternoon. I’m sitting in an office located in the library at Northwestern University Law School with Senator Dawn Clark Netsch. Good afternoon, Senator. Netsch: Good afternoon. (laughs) DePue: You’ve had a busy day already, haven’t you? Netsch: Wow, yes. (laughs) And there’s more to come. DePue: Why don’t you tell us quickly what you just came from? Netsch: It was not a debate, but it was a forum for the two lieutenant governor candidates sponsored by the group that represents or brings together the association for the people who are in the public relations business. I think its initials are CPAK or something of that sort. They have programs from time to time and not surprisingly have public figures or people who can talk about public events, since they’re all involved in public relations in one way or another, some of them for private companies and some in other respects. I’m not a member, obviously, but one of my good friends, who actually was my press spokeswoman when I ran for governor is, and so she had called back some time ago and said that this was happening and invited me and another of Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.07 our mutual friends to attend. So it was a forum—not a debate—not literally a debate, anyway—a forum between the two lieutenant governor candidates. DePue: Who are…? Netsch: Sheila Simon and… DePue: Plummer. Netsch: Plummer, yeah. Jason, right? DePue: That sounds right. Netsch: Yes. Why did I go blank on that? Goodness. Because we haven’t seen much of him around, actually. DePue: We are here today, though, to talk about your own personal career. Today’s subject is going to be exclusively on the Equal Rights Amendment issue in Illinois; it has a long history, that battle. Netsch: Yes, which started before I was actually in the legislature, even. DePue: If you don’t mind, I’ll take a little bit of time just to set things up, and certainly you can correct the record if I get something wrong here. March of 1972 is when the Equal Rights Amendment emerged from the U.S. Congress, and therefore it goes to the states. The seven-year clock starts clicking at that time in March of 1972, so that means 1979 is the time limit [for ratification] that we’ve got here. Thirty-eight states are going to be needed for it to be ratified by 1979. Netsch: That is correct. DePue: Illinois was one of many states that took it up that first year, in 1972. This obviously precedes your time in the state legislature, but because you were at the Constitutional Convention, you’d already had an impact on this whether you realized it at the time or not. So let’s talk about how the three-fifths rule came about in the 1970 Illinois state constitution. Netsch: Well, my recollection is that it grew particularly out of some amendments that were floating around the states at that time. Let me go back half a step and say that it probably is a perfect example of why you should never write a constitution in light of today’s headlines and hot issues, because the hot issue then, if my recollection is correct, were some amendments that I think got to be known as the Dirksen Amendments. They were really a response to some of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions and one-person-one-vote—some of the Warren Court decisions, if you will. There were three amendments, I think, one of which would have created a court that was sort of a supermajority over all of the state supreme courts, that is, a court that would have been allowed, 2 Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.07 in effect, to overrule what state supreme courts did. Another one, I think, dealt directly with the redistricting issue and made it clear that one-person-one-vote was not applicable, at least in both houses of the state legislature, and… DePue: School prayer, perhaps? Netsch: No, no, I don’t think it had anything to do with school prayer. It had to do mostly with that kind of thing. I’ll think of the other one at some point. But they were all very anti–U.S. Supreme Court and anti- the federal government being dominant; they were very much states’ rights decisions. The other one had something to do with the states being able to overturn a decision that was made at the federal level. The precise details will come back to me (laughs) at some moment. But very pro–states’ rights. They were making their way around the state legislatures and were getting very close to having enough state legislatures which had proposed a federal constitutional convention for the purpose of considering these amendments that, although it was not generally known among (laugh) the citizenry as a whole, some political scientists were getting very concerned about this. In Illinois, I think, the state legislature had had the proposals before it but I believe had not at that moment adopted it. But we were about two states short of a resolution to convene a federal constitutional convention for the purpose of considering these states’ rights decisions. The concern was that Illinois might become part of helping to seal that. Now, nobody knew what would happen if indeed the required number of states did pass the resolution to convene a federal constitutional amendment, because there would have been all sorts of challenges, whether they all did it in the same language and a whole variety of other things. But it had never happened before, (laughs) so nobody knew what was going to take place. There was a good deal of concern about this. I think probably more than anything, it was the idea of not allowing something like that to quietly sneak up and take a hold that very likely led to the proposal in the constitutional convention that, Gee whiz, if we’re going to do something with the federal constitution, we really ought to know what it is and make sure that there’s time to think about it and that we know exactly what we’re doing, and, you know, very, very, very serious matter. So that was, I think, probably at least one of the reasons—there may have been others—that those on the election and franchise committee were aware of, but that certainly was one of the things that many of us were very conscious of. So one of the ways of slowing the process down was to require a three-fifths vote, not only to call the convention, but for ratification of a proposed amendment. DePue: Some have characterized this as a desire to change the Illinois constitution to make it easier to amend the Illinois constitution from what was in the 1870 model where you had to have, I think, a simple majority in elections. But in the case in those elections, an awful lot of people didn’t even bother to vote on 3 Dawn Clark Netsch Interview # ISL-A-L-2010-013.07 the constitutional amendments because they didn’t understand it and they didn’t know what was going on, so you very rarely got to a simple majority in the election. So the three-fifths rule in the 1970 constitution was seen as loosening that process up. Netsch: Well, but that was the three-fifths rule on amendments to the state constitution. What we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes is how you deal with proposed amendments to the U.S. constitution. So we sort of adopted the three-fifths rule in part because we had already decided to make it a three-fifths requirement for adopting amendments to the Illinois constitution, but also because we wanted to do something to kind of slow down the process of ratification or proposing amendments to the U.S. constitution, a much more dramatic thing. It was something which most of us had never even dealt with at all in our lifetimes, that is, dealing with proposed changes to the federal constitution—very, very rare—and we just wanted to make sure that everyone was going to have to look at it. Of course, we hadn’t even thought about the fact that it would affect the Equal Rights Amendment.

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