WASHINGTON — Illinois Democrats may be savoring the possibility their party could retake the U.S. House, and possibly the Senate, after next month’s elections, but the state’s likely incoming and returning lawmakers are split on how aggressively to use that power against Republican President Donald Trump.
If Democrats win back power in the Nov. 3 midterms in a year when experts and polling predict a blue wave of Democratic victories in congressional races, they still will face competing demands on their time and attention.
They could tackle the economic issues that have dragged down Trump’s popularity in recent months, but they would need Republican support to get those measures to the president’s desk and signed into law.
Or they could reassert Congress’ power and try to thwart many of Trump’s unilateral actions, which would alienate Republicans and likely anger the president.
All of that will play out as the term-limited Trump approaches lame-duck status and Democrats lay the groundwork to retake the White House in 2028.
“Congress is designed to operate on two parallel paths: The oversight track and the legislative track. We need to do both,” said U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, who represents Chicago’s north suburbs and chairs the New Democrat Coalition, a caucus of more than 100 moderate Democratic House members.
“Irrespective of who wins the majority, it’s imperative that we restore checks and balances to our government,” he told the Tribune. “Those checks and balances have been weakened before the Trump administration, and the Trump administration has just basically completely trashed them.”
The Congress that convenes in January will include dozens of new faces, as more than 70 lawmakers opted not to run for reelection in 2026, and many more incumbents could lose in November.
Illinois alone will send five new House members and one new U.S. senator. Most, if not all, are likely to be Democrats.
That turnover could reshape the party’s direction in Washington. Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, for example, is favored to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin in a race against Republican nominee Don Tracy.
Both Stratton and Durbin have regularly criticized the Trump administration, but their approaches differ significantly. Stratton has openly challenged long-held Senate conventions, such as the filibuster, which are designed to slow legislation and promote bipartisan cooperation, while Durbin has championed the Senate’s traditional conciliatory approach.
Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last month during an event in Washington that Democrats should not block Trump’s Supreme Court nominees in his final years in office, even though Senate Republicans kept President Barack Obama from filling a high court vacancy in his last year. He also discouraged efforts to change the number of justices, saying the idea was not “realistic.”
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Stratton sees it differently.
“I’m not going to Washington, D.C., to try to find common ground with a dictator,” Stratton said in an interview. “I’m going to Washington, D.C., to fight for the people of Illinois and to stand up to a dictator.”
She said constraints like the filibuster would hamper Democrats’ capacity to restore voting rights protections weakened by the Supreme Court, guarantee reproductive rights, raise the minimum wage and reverse the cuts to food stamps and health insurance that Republicans passed in the last two years.
“The way that I look at it, Trump and the Republicans have thrown out the entire rulebook. They’ve stomped on the Constitution, and I always say that unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures,” she said.
Stratton has adopted the political outlook of her mentor, Gov. JB Pritzker, who has characterized the split in the Democratic Party during Trump’s second term as “Team Fight vs. Team Cave.” Both count themselves on “Team Fight.”
Stratton said she would not vote to confirm any Trump nominee.
“It’s a hard line for me. I’m not going to support any of the president’s nominees,” she said. “I’m not going to confirm anyone who is seeking to advance (Trump’s) agenda that threatens our democracy and completely discounts the rule of law. Those aren’t people that deserve to be in office.”
Nor would she vote for any spending bill that funds U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she said. Trump has vastly expanded ICE to ramp up deportations of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers, and the agency was a major part of last year’s law-enforcement surge in the Chicago area known as Operation Midway Blitz. Stratton has repeatedly called for abolishing ICE.
“I’m certainly never going to support more money for Donald Trump’s personal police force,” she said.
Not every newcomer is likely to be as combative.
Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller, the Democratic nominee in a congressional district that stretches from Chicago’s South Side to vast swaths of central Illinois farmland, said she will focus on racking up legislative wins to help restore public confidence in government. That, she said, is how she would “fight” the Trump administration.
“‘Fight’ in the sense of we can’t just sit by and let things happen,” she said. “I’m more focused on collaboration, building blocks, how we can work together in a consensus-building way, and what those individual conversations look like.”
Simply showing the public that Congress is doing its job would be an improvement, said Miller, who fended off some more progressive challengers in the Democratic primary. The Republican-led House has been in session only 65 days this year, the fewest in a midterm year since 1994, and Congress has passed only 34 bills into law, by far the fewest since at least 1990.
“They want to see us working, which, as we know, Congress being at home early doesn’t appear to help, because it looks like they’re not working out there,” Miller said. “They want to see things moving forward, whatever they happen to be. And right now, … people cannot afford healthcare. People cannot afford gas. People cannot afford just regular everyday life.”
Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, the Democratic nominee in a district covering part of Chicago’s North Side and several near north and northwest suburbs, said the likely wave of new members could recall the Democratic “Watergate babies” elected in 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace.
“That class — which was diverse in many ways — was full of people who ran because they understood that Congress was broken, and they understood in the wake of Watergate that Congress had simply not fulfilled its core responsibilities. I expect we’re going to do something similar,” Biss said.
The main difference between the new class of legislators coming in January and those who already have served in Washington, he said, would be the new lawmakers’ demand for action.
“We have massive problems in society — economic problems, geopolitical problems, climate, AI — and what is our federal government doing about it? Almost nothing,” Biss said. “That status quo bias is part of what got us to this situation with Donald Trump as president. Congress has basically stopped doing its job, whether that’s legislating or oversight.”
The impeachment question
Ahead of the election, Republicans have warned about the consequences of Democrats taking over one or both chambers of Congress.
“If this group took over, heaven forbid,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said recently on Fox News, “they would turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body. They’d spend every day investigating the president, the first family, the Cabinet, donors to the party, leaders of business and industry. It would roil the markets, and it would empower our enemies across the world at the worst possible time.”
In a separate interview, Johnson said it was “guaranteed” that Democrats would try to impeach Trump for a third time “probably on the first day.”
Trump issued a similar warning in a late-September fundraising email.
“In just 4 weeks, we might have to say goodbye to each other forever,” it began. “That’s if we lose the Congressional Majority on Election Night. On day 1, Democrats will file the Articles of Impeachment against me for the THIRD TIME. But this time, they will have the votes — the votes to lock me out of the White House and throw away the key.”
“Could you even begin to fathom MAGA without Trump??” the email asked.
But Illinois Democrats don’t appear to be in a rush to impeach Trump or anyone else in his administration, even those they believe should be removed from office.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat and Iraq War veteran who will become Illinois’ senior senator in January, has repeatedly denounced Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as unfit for the job. House members — including one Republican — have made several attempts to impeach Hegseth. But at a foreign policy discussion in September at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank, Duckworth urged her colleagues not to pursue impeachments.
“What I encourage my colleagues to not do — especially those who have more fire in their belly in this area — is don’t be impeaching anybody. Let’s just get back to work. Maybe we can come to compromises” on issues like restoring foreign humanitarian aid, she said.
But in response to questions from the Tribune, Duckworth’s office provided a statement from the senator saying she would, in fact, support impeaching Trump.
“Families are desperate for a lifeline and, if we take back the majority, Democrats must deliver,” Duckworth said in the statement. “Of course, I would also support impeachment for any of Donald Trump’s many illegal actions, unprecedented corruption and abuses of power. I voted to convict Trump twice and I’d do it again — but Democrats cannot be backed into a corner and presented with a false choice: Impeachment or lowering costs for families. If we take back the majority, we will be calling for both accountability and immediate relief for the families he is leaving behind.”
Stratton said the barrier to impeaching Trump is the two-thirds majority in the Senate required to remove him, which could dissuade Democrats from starting the impeachment process in the House to begin with.
“You can impeach him 50 times, and I would always say that Donald Trump deserves … it. But in the Senate, we don’t have (67) votes because there’s not one single Republican that has the courage to stand up to this president,” she said.
Schneider said the same logic applied to Cabinet officials. “Any one of these Cabinet secretaries has more likely than not done things that merit impeachment — Hegseth for sure — but we can’t paralyze the government, especially when … it’ll be hard to get a two-thirds vote on anything in the Senate,” he said.
Still, Democrats aren’t ruling impeachment out entirely. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York has said he doesn’t want to put impeachment on the table or to take it off, and the Illinois delegation seems to be taking a similar tack.
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State Rep. La Shawn Ford, the Democrat running to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Danny Davis in a district that stretches from Navy Pier to the Tri-State Tollway, said he wants to persuade Trump to strike deals on legislation that makes everyday expenses more affordable. But Congress needs options if Trump flouts the law, Ford said.
“The ultimate threat and deterrent is impeachment,” he said. “If the president doesn’t follow the Constitution, and if he governs unconstitutionally, that’s … the only threat or deterrent that we have to check the president.”
Ramping up oversight
Even if it doesn’t lead to impeachment, Democrats clearly want to apply more scrutiny to Trump administration actions through hearings, investigations and subpoenas. Their dissatisfaction is so widespread that basically every congressional committee could be a battleground, because the administration is expected to resist that oversight, as Trump’s first administration did after Democrats took the House in 2019.
Democrats want to investigate the $1.4 billion in earnings from cryptocurrency deals and other ventures that have enriched Trump’s family. They also are likely to train their sights on Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Investigations also could reach private businesses, such as those owned by billionaire GOP megadonor Elon Musk, that played a significant role in shaping administration policies.
“What I hope is with the act of having these hearings, of putting the bright shining light on the actions and intentions of the administration, the American people will see the impact this corruption is having, not just on our institutions, but the health of our nation, the health of our economy, our relations around the world,” Schneider said.
“The foul sense of corruption permeates every action of this administration, and that is true for every single agency and every department within every agency,” he added.
Biss, who was among protesters who clashed with federal agents outside the ICE processing facility in Broadview last year, said the point of oversight is “not some sort of frustration or anger.”
“It’s because, if you allow this kind of lawlessness, this brutality, the violence, the corruption to go unchecked, you are basically inviting it to happen again,” he said. “The purpose of the oversight system is to make sure it can’t happen again.”
U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, a Democrat representing the western suburbs who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, cautioned that Democrats can’t be overly broad in targeting private companies.
“Depending on what we uncover in terms of whether companies were just simply responding to pressure or whether they were active participants in the Trump corruption, you will see a very different response,” he said. “I think Democrats are united on that.”
Foster also said Democrats should clearly separate oversight from the legislation they want to pass to improve Americans’ lives. Maybe each committee should reserve one day a week for oversight activities, he suggested, and spend the rest of its time working on substantive legislation.
Otherwise, he cautioned, lawmakers could miss other pressing issues, such as the growth of artificial intelligence, rising household debt and the spread of opaque financial instruments. There also could be bipartisan support for rolling back Trump’s tariffs and ending the war in Iran, Foster said.
Democrats also likely will pass legislation Trump will never sign “to let the country know that Democrats are on one side of the issue, and Trump and the Republicans are not,” Foster said.
“We’re going to have to think separately about those two classes of legislation and not confuse them,” he said. “We simply have to pass bills that the president won’t sign. That won’t represent a failure of Congress or a weakness of Congress. It’s just the political reality.”
‘Cut that out’
Balancing work with Republicans against efforts to check the Trump administration will be tricky, and fissures already are showing.
Duckworth, who has urged colleagues to focus on getting back to work, has also signaled deep impatience with her party’s caution. At the same Center for American Progress last month, she said she is “tired of fixing s−−− Republicans break.” When Democrats held power during the Biden administration, she said, “we didn’t do anything innovative, and we didn’t make people’s lives better. We just spent the time putting out fires and trying to solve the pandemic.”
“We spent time on the Democratic Party with our leadership being polite, not wanting to break the filibuster because ‘God forbid, if we blow up the filibuster, then they might do it to us and we’re not going to do it.’ We’re going to give their Supreme Court nominees the full process. We’re going to do everything by the book,” Duckworth recounted. “What I’ve told Democratic leadership is: Cut that out. You’ve seen what happened. They steamrolled us as soon as they took over, and it was to the detriment of the American people, and it was to the detriment of America’s national security around the world. So, f−−− that s−−−. We’re going to make it better.”
Duckworth said she wants to expand foreign aid, restore funding to fight AIDS globally, make it possible for students to graduate from college debt-free, create a public option for health insurance and expand Medicare to people 50 and older.
“I don’t want the old world order. I want a better order than it was before. And I’m not beyond steamrolling to get there,” said Duckworth, who uses a wheelchair. “In fact, they’re going to see my wheelchair tracks on their backs.”