16-Feb-20 – It is time for Rod Blagojevich to come home and fix Illinois’s problems, says the Republican candidate from River North running to unseat 5th District Congressman Mike Quigley.

Tommy Hanson says the former Illinois governor, now serving a 14-year prison sentence for soliciting bribes, should be pardoned.

“I don’t think he really did anything wrong,” said Hanson at a candidate forum in Elmhurst. “I think he knew too much. And I think that he served enough time that he needs to come home. And I think that if he comes home, he could be the key to unlocking a lot of the problems we have in Illinois – the corruption, the high taxes, this mismanagement of our government.”

Hanson, a commercial real estate broker and condominium unit owner, is running against Dr. Kimball Ladien, a physician, in the March 17 Republican primary. The winner will run against Quigley in the general election if he wins the Democratic primary.

Hanson is at odds with Quigley’s view on the electoral college and does not believe it should be abolished.

“I think it’s a way of balancing out the vote for everybody throughout the country,” said Hanson. “Yes, the big cities – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles – have more people and there can be a larger popular vote, whereas an electoral vote may be less for somebody that has a larger popular vote. But imagine going to the grocery store and there’s nothing there. No food, no greens, no fruit, no nothing. These all come from the farmers of our country, the rural areas that want to be represented.”

Quigley called the electoral college part of “the dinosaur age” but said it would be “extremely difficult” to abolish it. “Our work is cut out for us,” said Quigley (left), but “it has to be on a non-partisan basis.”

Neither Hanson nor Ladien support illegal immigration. Instead of coming into the United States unlawfully, Hanson said immigrants should “stay at home and band together and fight for their own cause at home.”

“Imagine if you just unlock your doors tonight, and just let anybody in,” said Hanson. “It’s the same thing as letting them into the country. If you’re going to unlock your doors and let people sit in your den and watch tv and use your refrigerator and all that stuff, it’s the same thing as letting them into the country. They’re overloading our system. We have to take care of our own people. We don’t have the money to take care of everybody in this world.”

Said Ladien, “Most of us – all of us – are immigrants, at one point or another, so it’s not a matter of [supporting] immigration, it’s how you do it. And no country can survive without laws.”

Illinois has bigger problems, says Hanson, including high taxes, people leaving the state, and crime.

“The crime downtown in Chicago is getting worse and worse and worse. They come downtown on the subways and they have flash gangs and they beat up people and they rob people and they’re going to come out here eventually on the trains and they’re going to do that to you, too.”

Ladien put gridlock at the top of his list of issues for Illinois, saying the problems need to be looked at and not accepted as business-as-usual.

”We can do profound good for the country,” said Ladien (right). “We can reduce gang crime and murders 95 percent in the next few years...we can pay for universal health care and education on a bipartisan basis...and that can do a lot to end [partisanism] and gridlock in the process.”

Hanson was the Republican candidate in the November 2018 general election for 5th District Representative. He received 23.3 percent of the votes, losing to Quigley, who received 76.6 percent. Quigley has represented the 5th District, covering parts of Cook and DuPage counties, since 2009.

The January 30 forum was organized by The League of Women Voters of Elmhurst.