I note your opposition to the creation of Chicago as a separate city state which I share while offering no alternative solution and minimizing any attempt to consider return to a previous state constitution which is easy to do.
My reply was prompted by your characterization of conditions that would occur if Illinois did return to its previous state constitution. Which could be expected from anyone who anyone who comes from another area and has not participated in Illinois Republican politics during that period of time when it was successfully functioning.
The party fell apart when that change in it’s constitution removed minority representation at the state representative level. Using the political results you furnished which are post that 1980 period when the change took effect ignore its previous success offering political alternatives. Which offers a worthy consideration to return to as a solution .
Your apology is noted. Aherm.
My location is irrelevant. Given that you are presently in Wisconsin (another state I have family heritage in going back to around statehood), I could argue you should not be discussing IL politics. I study politics from coast to coast, which gives me the right to discuss it. Curiously, it was a former Chicago Congressman, who served in the 1950s, who deemed me to be a political historian (he also happened to be a Democrat) in the 1990s.
Carving out Chicago/Cook County as a separate state would not automatically resolve the problems present in IL state government. You would merely just be creating a corrupt, one-party city-state (close to 80% Democrat) that would also seek to influence and suck dry the resources of the state it exited. Instead of having one state with problems and corruption, you’d have two.
You’d have the same problem carving NYC out of NY.
Your experience with Chicago/Cook County politics, while laudable, occurred nearly 50 years ago. This is no longer the same city controlled by Richard J. Daley with a modest and semi-influential GOP. That is gone with the wind.
I told you that returning the state to the “Big Legislature” prior to the early ‘80s would not restore the good ole days, either. As I explained to you in prior posts, all you would end up doing is getting leftist Democrats elected in GOP areas (with the 3 member scheme) and getting few or zero Republicans elected in urban Democrat areas (with 2 Democrats and an ultraleft “Independent” as the 3rd member - and if you did get a “Republican” out of such a district, they’d be a total leftist stooge). Indeed, such a situation would result in even MORE Democrat power and representation, with some corrupt urban leftist RINO puppets doing the bidding of Speaker Madigan and undermining the Republican party.
It’s for that reason and others that I dismiss your proposition entirely out of hand. It won’t work and it won’t restore the party as you remembered it from the 1960s and ‘70s. The people and groups from that time that might’ve made it work have long since passed from the scene.