If Elected, Juliana Stratton Will Serve in the Senate as a Far-Left Ideologue

The U.S. Senate was conceived to be a deliberative body, not a chamber filled with militant ideologues

As Election Day looms — early voting has already started — in Chicago and the rest of Illinois, here is some history for you to ponder. Particularly when you cast your vote for Senator.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the United States Constitution in 1787, one of the major disagreements among Delegates was how states would be represented in the new national government.

The result was the Great Compromise, which created a bicameral legislature: The House of Representatives, with seats apportioned by population, and the Senate, with two members from each state. The Constitution sets the minimum age for senators at 30 — five years higher than the requirement for House members. In addition, with only one-third of the Senate facing reelection every two years, the chamber is structured to promote greater continuity and consistency in Congress.

James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, argued in Federalist Number 62 that the Senate was necessary because of “the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.”

In a more colloquial manner, an apocryphal story relates that George Washington remarked to Thomas Jefferson that the Senate was designed to be a legislative
“cooling saucer,” a more deliberative and more cautious body compared to the House, whose members face voters every two years.

Which brings us to the Senate race in Illinois.

The F-bomb

After a slow start in the Democratic Primary race, Juliana Stratton, Illinois' lieutenant governor, unleashed a bizarre ad, with actors shouting "F*ck Trump." The F-word was redacted, thankfully.

That sounds like, to use Madison's words: An “impulse of sudden and violent passions.”  That campaign commercial, along with millions of dollars from the campaign fund of Governor JB Pritzker, pushed Stratton over the top in the primary.

Stratton is selling “F*ck Trump, Vote Juliana” T-shirts and buttons on her campaign website.

Don Tracy

Fortunately, Illinois voters have a far better choice in the election, Don Tracy, an attorney and former chairman of the Illinois Republican Party.

In a guest column for Chicago Contrarian, Richard Porter, a special assistant to the president of the United States under George H.W. Bush, among other White House positions, had this to say about Tracy:

Don Tracy is not slick — he is sincere. He is not an ideologue — he is practical. He is not driven by some deep psychological longing to be loved — he is running out of a deep affection for Illinois, America, and for the principles of freedom, self-governance, and equality before the law which define our Republic.

Don is a man of many strengths, but in this tumultuous age of rage defined by social media gotcha gamesmanship, the most important personal quality to understand about him is this: Don is normal.

That he is. Unlike Stratton, who regularly posts videos of herself dancing poorly to even worse music on social media, Tracy does no such thing. Politically, he is a moderate leaning conservative.

Back to the early days of our Republic. As nefarious as Aaron Burr was, when he was a U.S. Senator from New York, or when he served as President of the Senate in his role as Vice President, never once in a speech did he scream, “F*ck Alexander Hamilton.”

A small business death sentence

Stratton’s dancing is awful, but her political positions are worse — standard far-left fare. She supports a national minimum wage of $25 an hour, which would harm young workers by pricing them out of the job market. You can’t hold a second job if you never get the first one, and you can’t be promoted from an entry-level position if you were never hired.

Or, as the old saying goes: Want a job? Get experience. Want experience? Get a job. Minimum wage jobs are the starting point of many successful careers.

Tracy calls a $25 minimum wage “a death sentence for small businesses everywhere.” Here is some background on his statement: Tracy’s parents founded their family business, Dot Foods, from the back of a station wagon. It now employs over 6,000 workers. Tracy is a part-owner of the company, and he serves as its general counsel. 

High minimum wages can be harmful. The ongoing rioting in France has many causes, but chief among them is the country’s minimum wage — one of the highest in Europe — which has contributed to persistently high youth unemployment.

A Senator who is not an ideologue — Tracy would be that type of legislator — is able to look beyond the popular slogans of the day when voting on bills and crafting legislation.

Court-packing

Stratton supports expanding the U.S. Supreme Court — commonly called court-packing — in order to eliminate its current conservative majority. Although the Constitution does not fix the number of justices and that number has changed over time, it has stood at nine since the Judiciary Act of 1869. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, failed to alter that number with his 1937 court-packing scheme. Shortly before her death, liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg rejected the idea, calling FDR’s scheme “a bad idea” and stating, “Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time.”

Donald Trump was serving as president when Ginsburg made those observations.

In the only debate between Stratton and Tracy, she revealed her closed mind regarding any hypothetical Trump nominees to SCOTUS. “And I’ve made it clear that I’m not going to vote to confirm any of Donald Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court.”

Like many Democrats, Stratton favors abolishing ICE, but she is unclear what agency, if any, would replace it. Crime is down in Illinois and the rest of the country. One of the reasons for this welcome news is that illegal border crossings are almost non-existent under Trump. Many of the illegals who entered the country during the Biden presidency have been deported or left on their own initiative. 

In that debate Stratton mentioned Trump 15 times, which led Tracy to quip: “I’m starting to wonder if my opponent is running against me or the president."

Stratton is campaigning for the support of the low-information voters, the ones who get what often passes as news by watching TikTok videos and viewing vitriolic headlines on Facebook posts.

Fortunately, Illinois is not as liberal as most people believe. Trump, who made only one campaign appearance here in 2024, managed to win 43-percent of the Prairie State vote that year. 

If you voted for Tracy already, thank you. If you haven’t, do so now, and tell your friends and relatives to do the same. 

The “cooling saucer” of Congress deserves a Senator with a cool demeanor — not a radical ideologue.