Congressman Krishnamoorthi perverted migrant sanctuary hearing into grossly dishonest rally for Pritzker and Illinois – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Off-topic politics and deceit are all too common in congressional hearings, but Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi’s performance last Thursday was off the charts.

The House Oversight Committee hearing was supposed to be about sanctuary status for illegal immigrants with questions directed to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and two other sanctuary state governors.

But Krishnamoorthi bastardized his segment of the hearing with one of the most partisan, denialist, irrelevant and dishonest performances in memory. You can watch that segment in full here.

Most of the segment is devoted to the congressman’s claim that Illinois is a net donor state to the federal government, sending more in tax revenue to Washington than it gets back. That’s followed by Krishnamoorthi’s reasons why that’s supposedly so – a big economy, production of soybeans and corn, lots of manufacturing, inbound corporate relocations, quantum computing, workforce development, startups and more. Pritzker proudly agreed with all of it.

And Illinois gave us the first cellphones, McDonalds and, yes, the new pope, Krishnamoorthi told us. He proudly had a picture held up of Pope Leo wearing his Chicago White Sox hat.

Let’s start with the claim that Illinois is a net donor to the federal government.

Not true.

It hasn’t been true since around 2019, right about when Pritzker took office. The two leading studies on state balance of payments with the federal government have shown that Illinois has been a net taker from the federal government ever since. We’ve written in detail about those studies here, here and here.

Illinois is a drag on the national economy, a truthful Krishnamoorthi would have said. On that, you could look no further than the report last year by Illinois’ bipartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability. The report focused on the four most important measures of performance: Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Total Nonfarm Payroll Employment, Unemployment Rate and Total Personal Income. Illinois ranks a miserable 45^th to 47^th on each of those measures. Other measures of Illinois failures have been documented ad infinitum here and in countless other sources.

Krishnamoorthi also repeated one Pritzker’s most infamous claims – that Illinois budgets have been balanced during his governorship. For reasons explained over and over again, here and elsewhere, Illinois has not had an honestly balanced budget since 2001. They rely on underfunding pensions, increasing debt and other gimmicks to claim a balance under the state’s phony budget accounting methods. In its newly passed budget, for example, the state raided over $270 million from pre-existing, dedicated funds, claiming it as income, and every year it shorts pension contributions by billions of dollars according to the state’s own actuaries.

And Illinois has blown through the all-time record for state delinquency on delivering audited financial statements that use true accounting methods. The last financial statements it has produced were for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023. That’s 715 days ago. Consequently, we don’t have the basic numbers that tell us how truly unbalanced budgets have been since then.

Much of the rest of Krishnamoorthi’s time was spent, as you’d expect, bashing Trump on matters unrelated to sanctuary for illegal immigrants, such as recent budget proposals and Medicare, which he reinforced with Trump’s picture.

The only matter on which Krishnamoorthi directly addressed sanctuary was in claiming the policy is just “following the law” in Illinois. That’s the Trust Act signed in 2017 by Republican Governor Bruce Rauner, which limits Illinois state and local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Pritzker agreed.

That’s preposterous. Pritzker has done essentially everything he can to “cement Illinois’ leadership as the most welcoming state in the nation” for migrants. Those words are from his own press release. The Trust Act is a tiny element in that picture.

Pritzker’s actions have included spending over $1.6 billion on Medicaid for illegal migrants, expanding and reinforcing the Trust Act, restricting landlords’ use of tenants’ immigration status against them, providing undocumented students with access to state financial aid, creating the Illinois Immigration Impact Task Force to ensure state programs and policies to? best serve immigrant residents and creating the Welcoming Illinois Office.

That’s just the start.

Much of that has been done through Pritzker’s issuance of “emergency” executive orders that expanded his unilateral power. The orders might as well say “please come here for our giveaways” to illegal border crossers, listing among the freebies medical assessments and treatment; case management services including legal services and job readiness support; benefits for victims of trafficking, torture, and other serious crimes; enrollment in public schools; and longer-term housing and housing assistance.

Pritzker’s emergency proclamations self-authorized him alone to do pretty much all he wants for immigrants. Among the powers granted again as recently as January 2025:

• Authorizing Pritzker to “transfer the direction, personnel, or functions of State departments and agencies” as necessary to implement emergency measures.
• Suspending ordinary purchasing rules — the Illinois Procurement Code and the Illinois Governmental Joint Purchasing Act – insofar as they would get in the way.
• For grant-making, suspending the Grant Accountability, Transparency Act and the Illinois Administrative Code, which require the state to conduct merit-based applications and review, insofar as they would get in the way.
• It covered the entire state, proclaiming all counties as disaster areas.
• Most importantly, it kept active the State Emergency Operations Plan. That plan consists of hundreds of pages allowing for displacement of seemingly all normal state operation – everything from public safety, communications, transportation, housing and healthcare to household pets.

In a sad way, it’s entirely appropriate that Krishnamoorthi would have praised Pritzker and Illinois in the way he did. That’s because denial is the common theme in both Krishnamoorthi’s comments and most everything Pritzker says about Illinois. Whether it’s failing schools, “balanced” budgets, illegal immigration, out-migration, bad business climate, crime and more, Pritzker’s trademark is denial. None of those matters are an issue thanks to his leadership, Pritzker tells us repeatedly.

That strategy of denial has worked in Illinois for Pritzker, thanks to a compliant mainstream press that rarely lays a hand on him. Same for Krishnamoorthi. Not a soul has questioned what he said in the hearings. They better brace for a new reality as Pritzker pursues the presidency and Krishnamoorthi runs for the Senate.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.