WASHINGTON—Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has joined lawmakers who say that the Democratic Party, through its elected lawmakers in Congress, must take stronger stands on key issues if they are to successfully combat Trump, the oligarchs backing him, and the dangers associated with his administration.
But the Dems can’t just complain, Pritzker told the Center for American Progress. They also “have to deliver” positive alternatives, and take them—and publicize them—to the country, to win voters back.
That means campaigning for everything from raising the minimum wage to defending the U.S. Constitution against Trump, his oligarchs, his party allies and their corporate backers, he said.
“In this day and age, it means fighting for all of that”–economic boosts for workers and the middle class–“while defending what it means to live in a constitutional republic.”
Pritzker, who spoke on March 19, joins a rising chorus of calls for stronger action by his party which intensified after Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Schumer did an about-face to support the House GOP-crafted and -passed spending bill to keep the federal government going through the end of this fiscal year on September 30.
Democratic critics such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., said the measure lets Trump and his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk, wield Musk’s chainsaw without safeguards protecting federal workers, programs, policies and the people they serve.
A prominent Republican in money struggles, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., admitted such leeway during debate on the money bill, called a Continuing Resolution.
The House passed what Ocasio-Cortez called “a sellout” of party principles and the working class on a virtual party-line vote, with only one House Democrat joining all but one of the ruling Republicans in voting for it. Even Dems in districts Trump carried, except Maine’s Jared Golden, opposed the money bill.
The Senate story was different. There, 52 of its 53 ruling Republicans backed the measure, too, but it required 60 votes to pass. Schumer’s endorsement provided the needed Democratic support. The rest of the party, Pritzker included, complained strongly.
The bill cut $13.5 billion from domestic spending, gave $6 billion more to the military, and looked forward to what those decisions anticipate: A $4.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the rich, while taxes rise on workers, the poor and the middle class.
Although Pritzker was critical of Senate Dem defections he reserved his main fire for Trump. The governor, who is Jewish, says Trump reminds him of the Nazis.
This time, he quoted the Old Testament declaration of “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.” Pritzker added that means “When you see injustice, don’t look the other way.
“The lords in the White House say they have to order people’s lives,” he declared. In Trump’s first term, in 2017-21, there was a question of whether his actions represented “competence or treachery.
Proved it’s “both”
“In 2025, he’s proved it’s both…This is incompetent recklessness.”
But Democrats shouldn’t just stand idly by or enable Trump’s excesses, the governor said. Instead, they must offer positive alternatives and parade them to the voters, many of whom they’ve lost.
“Why are people not screaming about how low the $7.25 [federal] minimum wage is?” he asked. “You can’t let up on that. They [the Republicans] don’t want to increase it. They don’t want it at all.”
Election results since the wage last increased, in 2009, agree, as voters in blue cities in red states, and in red states themselves along with blue and purple states, have raised minimum wages.
Producing alternatives is what he did in Illinois, the governor claimed, after taking over from the ruinous four-year reign of right-wing GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner, whom Pritzker beat in 2018.
Rauner left the state with no budgets for years, “$17 billion in unpaid bills,” continuous confrontations with the Democratic-run legislature—now more than two-thirds Democratic—“the lowest pension rating in the nation” and junk bond status in money markets, due to the rivers of red ink.
Rauner accumulated those deficits by holding budgets hostage unless lawmakers made Illinois a right-to-work state, plus other radical-right policies. Right-to-work for less was his top priority.
He lost badly in the state capital of Springfield and to Pritzker in 2018. Four years later, voters re-elected Pritzker and enshrined the right to organize and collectively bargain in the state constitution.
“If we want to regain voters’ trust, we have to call out the B.S.” by the GOP “but we also have to deliver” positive programs, Pritzker said. He touted several Illinois examples, including $300 million to pay off student loan debts, a 75% expansion of Medicaid, elimination of state sales taxes on groceries and enactment of a child tax credit.
Illinois also “enshrined protections for reproductive rights two years before” the GOP-named U.S. Supreme Court majority—including three justices Trump named—took away that federal right, Pritzker said. The state has since become a destination for women seeking bodily autonomy but who live in surrounding anti-abortion states, from Indiana to as far away as Texas.
Pritzker also gave an example of how people can help when the government won’t: His home, Chicago, after the 1871 Great Chicago Fire “burned down one-third” of the already growing city.
“It was rebuilt. It was reborn. It showed ingenuity. And Chicagoans built the first skyscrapers,” he said. Democrats, he implied, must show the same can-do Windy City residents did.
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