Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is a contributing editor to the magazine and a longtime friend,

John McGuinness. John is the George C. Dix professor in constitutional law at Northwestern

University, where he's taught since 2002, and he's the author, most recently, of

accelerating democracy, transforming government

through technology. Professor McGinnis has written two recent pieces for City Journal

over the last month that have garnered a lot of attention, the first on the looming fiscal

disaster in the state of Illinois, and the second on the outbreak of looting and vandalism in Chicago's most important shopping district just over a week ago.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

Glad to be here, Brian.

First off, it's been a while since we've talked about Illinois, a great state here on the podcast.

I know we have a lot of readers and listeners there, so I'm glad we could have this discussion.

Illinois, you wrote in the first of those two pieces I mentioned, is in awful economic shape post-pandemic

compared to its neighbors, Indiana, and Wisconsin. It's really

seemed like it's been heading, though, in the wrong direction for at least a decade with higher

taxes, more extensive regulation. But before we get into some of those problems, maybe you

could just give us an update on some of the politics in the state, you know, with Governor Pritzker, who is a Democrat in his second year in office after defeating Republican Bruce Rannner. How is he doing and what are some of the problems you see with the state?

Well, Governor Pritzker, to-Be-Fair inherited a difficult situation,

difficult for anyone to come in,

because there was a long time, there is still a long-time Speaker of the House

who's controlled, in many ways, Illinois politics for three or four decades. This is Mike Madigan.

Michael Madigan. And now he's under investigation for bribery. But he is really the source of a kind of

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