In 1970, Illinois wrote a new state constitution (the current one). Article IV, Section 7(b) states:
"Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings and a transcript of its debates. The journal shall be published and the transcript shall be available to the public." Before this change, the Illinois Legislature did not keep transcripts of its debates. This only started in the latter half of 1971. This leads to a rather astonishing conclusion: We have no official records on how the Illinois Legislature viewed any constitutional amendment that was ratified. When I said the other day that I would start looking at the ratification debates on the modern amendments, I didn't realize that the record-keeping was this bad. I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose. Many state legislatures even now are part-time. Transcribing the proceedings was much more expensive before video (let alone) artificial intelligence. Still, I thought that since a few states did keep more detailed records in the nineteenth century, surely more would have done so in the twentieth century. State legislatures kept journals, of course. But these rarely included speeches. For example, I looked at the Hawaii Legislature's Journal from 1971. One speech on the 26th Amendment is there (Was that the only speech? Maybe.) How many states fully recorded legislative debates in 1971? I don't know yet.
Posted by Gerard Magliocca on May 13, 2025 at 07:28 AM