Cheri Bustos represented Illinois’ 17th congressional district from 2013 to 2023, before deciding not to run for reelection last year. Prior to serving in Congress, Bustos worked as an investigative reporter, healthcare executive, and city council representative. Here, she shares her insights into pressing legislative issues, ethical governance, and the future of the Democratic party.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Illinois has a very diverse political landscape, but it is often dominated by Chicago-area Democrats. What are the most important perspectives you think politicians in the party miss concerning small-town and rural constituents, both at the state and national level? How can Democrats better serve people in these areas?
Cheri Bustos: There are a lot of interstate highways all around our country. What I would suggest to anybody who wants to have a deeper understanding of what rural America looks like, what small town America looks like, is get off those interstates and get on the small town roads. Get on sometimes the gravel roads or the blacktop roads and venture off and go to places that you don’t typically go to if you’re either flying or if you are driving on the interstate. The congressional district that I represented for 10 years, is made up of small towns across 14 counties and 7,000 square miles in downstate Illinois. 85% of the towns in the congressional district that are represented are 5,000 people or fewer, and 60% are 1,000 people or fewer. I think that’s hard to imagine if you are in the city of Chicago that that is what much of Illinois looks like.
But obviously, if you want to be an elected official, with no aspirations to go beyond your urban enclave, then maybe there’s not much of a desire to understand what else is out there. But if you want to ever run statewide, if you ever want to run nationally, if you ever even want to have a deeper understanding of Americans and the shifting political landscape, get off the interstate and go into some of these small towns. It will be amazing what you see in the people who you interact with and their beliefs and their values. It is very different from what you see and hear and are around in a more urban area.
HPR: You’ve been a staunch advocate of working across the aisle, but you were also very critical of Trump while he was in office. Considering the nature of your district, which Trump won, how do you find the line between compromising on policies but also staying true to your Democratic values?
Bustos: I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, and I think what brings most Democrats together are our core values. And I think those core values start at helping individuals and families succeed, however that looks, and having an understanding that not all of us were born into a nuclear family, not all of us were born into having a loving mom and a dad and a brother and a sister and no abuse and no drug and no major issues that are disruptive to a child’s upbringing. And I think it’s very important to have an understanding that sometimes people and families need a little help to succeed, and I think that’s where government can play an important role. So, that’s number one, I think that’s really the core value of being a Democrat.
I was raised in a household where my father told us from a very young age that if it weren’t for the Democratic Party and organized labor, we wouldn’t have a middle class. That is what we grew up hearing and believing and to this day, I believe that I’m a staunch supporter of organized labor. I have very personal stories within my family about how organized labor helped lift one of my sons up to a very successful middle class livelihood. My brother, my aunts, we’re a big labor family.
That said, I’m also a believer, like I think most Americans are, in the truth. And my issue that I had with Donald Trump is that he wasn’t truthful with the American public about many issues, many things that happened under his leadership, including the 2020 election. I was on the House floor on January 6, the day of the insurrection, and for Donald Trump and his loyal followers to say that it was just a peaceful protest is just a flat out lie. And listening to his speech just this past weekend, where he’s talking about running again in 2024. It’s very dangerous rhetoric that he’s spewing. So I have many issues with Donald Trump, but reasonable Republicans, I get along with very well, and I’m a realist about what it took to get legislation passed when either I was in the minority party in the US House of Representatives or where we are in the majority, but it was a very slim majority. So I do believe in working across the aisle, I do believe in working with people who are reasonable. I just wouldn’t put Donald Trump in the category of reasonableness.
HPR: You’ve talked about how even while running for Congress, it was important to you to focus on local issues, particularly running in a swing district. Why do you believe that is the best strategy given that Congress is at the national level? Why not just stay in local politics to focus on local issues?
Bustos: Well, because there’s so much you can do at the local level, even when you’re in a federal elected position. Let me give you an example: we have something called community project funding, which is the federal government at the most local level, and I was the number one Democrat in all of Congress when we brought this back, last congressional session, at bringing money home. It’s $56 million for local projects. And these were, you know, projects that were maybe a couple $100,000 at a time or it was things like building sidewalks in a high crime neighborhood where it was a food desert and where kids didn’t have safe sidewalks to walk on, or good sidewalks to walk on, or it’s getting a million dollars to tear down an old school that had just had really made a neighborhood look unsightly. When it was just a matter of if we had some funding to tear this down, we could help turn that into a playground, we could help turn that into a beautiful area, as opposed to an area that really hurt the neighborhood. So that’s what I mean by making things local. And there’s a program under the U.S. Department of Agriculture called Rural Development. It focuses on communities that have 20,000 people or fewer. And so that’s what I mean by making all things local. There’s all kinds of federal programs that are about getting funding to help families and communities back home. And the big stories are about women’s reproductive rights or voting rights or other issues that are national in nature, but there are many local projects that can be helped through the federal government. And so that’s what I mean by trying to make all politics local.
HPR: While you were in office, healthcare and Social Security were two of your biggest priorities. Given the current debate surrounding the debt limit, what should the new Congress do to secure Medicare and Social Security for the long term? Are there opportunities to gain bipartisan support?
Bustos: Well, there has to be a willingness from people across the aisle to commit to making sure that Social Security and Medicare are there not just for the coming years, but for coming generations. Medicare and Social Security are the greatest lifters out of poverty for seniors in the history of our nation. And I don’t use the word entitlements that I think some people use disparagingly, because when you get to be in your 60s, these are programs that you’ve paid into your entire working life. This is not a gift to seniors. This is what they have paid into and it is a way to keep them out of poverty, to keep them in their homes, to keep them as healthy as possible.
I think there are solutions that are not overly painful to make both healthy for generations to come, and that is to take a look at the cap where we ask Americans to pay Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes and raise that cap. Right now, I don’t even know what that number is, but it’s less than $200,000 per year that Americans are taxed for Social Security. I don’t think that makes sense, if you make over that amount that you get no more taxes taken out to help fund Social Security. And look, I’m in that category where I make more than that now, and I don’t have any issue with paying more in order to be able to help make sure that that is a program that’s there for my kids and my grandkids and great grandkids, and for all for all future generations.
President Biden just today talked about raising the tax rate for Medicare for those making more than $400,000 a year and will that pass? I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s going to be the political will for actually even some Democrats to support that. But numbers don’t lie, and we are going to have to make some changes to make both of those programs healthy financially. We can’t just keep going the way we’re going. They are great programs, we need to keep them and we just need to make sure that the numbers work. I applaud President Biden for starting this dialogue on it and I hope that it makes some progress.
HPR: How did your time in journalism inform your time in public service? What do you think is the role of journalists in the political sphere?
Bustos: Well, you know this because you’re a journalist, but the best journalists are those who ask the best questions, and then listen to the answer. And in listening to the answer, figure out what are the follow up questions, but the secret to what I just said is the listening part. I was in Washington for a decade, and now it’s more than a decade, I’m still working in Washington. And I can tell you that there are a lot of people in politics at all levels who do a heck of a lot more talking than listening. And I would sit in some meetings and just internally roll my eyes. I always had to fight myself from doing it where people would witness it, but I would just think to myself, just be quiet, you know, just listen. When members of Congress were in an audience with other people where we were there to learn, I just wanted to learn, I wanted to absorb whatever the issue was, and yet you would have so many people, elected officials who would just do all the talking and dominate in the room. And I just think the best lesson you learn from being a journalist is to ask the best questions you can possibly ask and then listen to people. So that’s one thing.
I think the other thing the best journalists I’ve ever worked with brought to their jobs was relentless curiosity. Always wanting to learn, always wanting to dig a little bit deeper, and those are those are characteristics that are very important to being an elected official at any level. The curiosity to question a program. Is it working? Is it not working? What could we do to make it better? Always asking those questions and getting the right people in the room. And when you put together a story it’s almost never a matter of two sides, right? It’s a matter of multiple sides. And getting the right people in the room, asking the questions, listening. All that makes for good journalism also makes for good politicians.
As far as the state of journalism, It really pains me to see what is happening to local newsrooms. And I have seen newspapers that had once had robust newsrooms with investigative reporters, with editorial boards that were filled with really smart journalists and community members. You’d walk into the newsroom and the police scanner would be on, the phones would be ringing, there’d be people talking with their editors, there would be side meetings going on. They were just the most energetic, energized places and I love that, I always loved walking in newsrooms. You walk into a newsroom today at a mid sized or smaller paper and it is just crickets. And it’s painful to see that in our country. We are going to have to fix that problem, and I see it as a huge problem. We’re going to have to fix that problem, whether it’s through nonprofits helping build newsrooms or whether it is through figuring out how the internet, the search engines, are going to pay for local news content.
There’s a model in Australia that I think America should look at where news content that media outlets are paying to produce, that they are paid if that is information that’s aggregated online. And I mean, we are going to have to figure out this formula. There needs to be money to fund them, and the thought of local journalism going away is not good for any community. Journalism is a watchdog. And we need to have those watchdogs keeping an eye on elected officials because without it, there will be corruption, there will be abuse of government funds. And there needs to be a watchdog in place in even the smallest of communities. It is a real problem that we’re facing in our country that needs to be addressed.
HPR: You grew up with your father and grandfather working in public service, and also have a close relationship with Senator Durbin. What were some of the most important lessons you learned from them before starting your own political career, and what advice would you give to someone hoping to enter into public service who doesn’t have these kinds of connections or role models?
Bustos: You know, even from the time I was very young, I could sit at our kitchen table with whoever stopped by to have conversations with our family. And my dad was a political columnist at a local paper, and then went on to be a Deputy Press Secretary for two governors, and then Chief of Staff to the lieutenant governor, the State Treasurer, Secretary of State, and then a US senator. So I’ve been around people in elected office since I was a little girl. Including my grandfather, as you mentioned, who was a state representative. What was so great about my family is, never once ever did my dad say “go away, little girl, you can’t sit here with us and listen to this conversation,” never once. And so I always had interest in what they were talking about. I did have one price of admission, which was my dad would say, “Hey Cher, can you go get us a beer?” So I would go to the refrigerator and pull a Budweiser out, and I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’d take a quick swig before I delivered it to my dad. But I just got to listen in on some of the most amazing conversations.
There are lessons from that, that to this day I carry with me and I’ve shared with my staff that I’ve worked with over the years. Lessons like my dad would always say know everything you talk about, but don’t talk about everything you know. He would say there’s a little duplicitousness in all of us, which, when you think about politics, there are some things where you realize how true that is. Just so many so many lessons, but number one, a good politician never writes a letter and doesn’t throw one away. And what he meant by that is be very careful about what you put in writing and keep an eye on what others put in writing. So just all these little lessons that I learned along the way, and just some of the greatest public servants in the history of the state of Illinois.
I had access to, I’ll use an Institute of Politics connection here, Paul Simon, who was one of the fellows in the early ‘70s, after he ran for governor of the state of Illinois and lost. He came out here to Harvard, and he was a fellow at the IOP, and he had brought his wife and two kids with him. And when he was done with the fellowship, he made a decision to move back to Illinois, but his kids were enrolled in school here, so he moved back to Illinois and moved in with my family. Many of your readers might not know Paul Simon, but he was a congressman, he was a U.S. senator, and he ran for president of the United States. He was the youngest newspaper publisher in the country at age 19, very early on in his life. But a guy like Paul Simon, who was legendary in Illinois politics — he was known for his bow tie, by the way — lived with my family. So I’ve been blessed as far as the public servants that I’ve been able to know very well and have had in my life.
But for those who didn’t grow up in a family like that, or didn’t grow up around anybody in politics, what’s great about living in this country is anybody can run for office. But to be successful, you’ve got to learn the fundamentals. And there are all sorts of ways to learn the fundamentals. I started a program in 2016 called Build the Bench, where after recruiting candidates nationwide to run for Congress, I realized how different it was to recruit women than recruiting men, and it was harder to recruit women. I also realized that there weren’t enough young people, there weren’t enough people of color, and there were not enough women who were running. So I started this program, and it’s free to anybody who goes through it because I pay for it out of my own campaign funds, and I focused on recruiting women and people of color and young people to go through my program. I don’t want somebody’s financial status, or whether they’re connected politically, to play a role in if they want to run for office. And that’s really, really important to me that I help the next generation. I’ve been really lucky enough to have great exposure to great people, I’ve been lucky enough to serve in Congress, and I want to make sure that I’m passing on what I’ve learned to help other people.
