Prairie State Wire

G.H. Merritt, chairman of New Illinois, said that corruption and financial collapse have undermined effective representation for state residents. This statement was made on the Prairie State Wire podcast.

"We do not experience that in Illinois," said Merritt, New Illinois Chairman. "The second is government corruption, and we've got a lot of that. And the third is the financial catastrophe in our state."

Illinois has faced recurring scandals involving corruption and mismanagement, with billions in public funds diverted, state employees implicated in $8 million in loan fraud, and nearly 32,000 retirees receiving six-figure pensions. According to STL News and WAND, these revelations have fueled debates over accountability. Illinois Policy notes that pension payouts exemplify systemic fiscal problems that undermine trust in government.

According to the Illinois General Assembly’s Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, the state’s five pension systems had $143.7 billion in unfunded liabilities in 2024, an increase from $85.6 billion in 2010. Equable Institute reports that statewide pensions are only 51% funded, leaving $211 billion in obligations. Meanwhile, the Civic Federation found that Illinois’ overall debt declined to $38.1 billion.

Illinois ranks among the most corrupt states, with Illinois Policy reporting in 2022 that corruption costs taxpayers $550 million annually, making it the second-highest in the nation. U.S. News places the state near the bottom in fiscal stability rankings, and its credit rating is among the lowest nationally, highlighting deep financial and governance challenges.

Merritt is Chair of New Illinois, a nonprofit advocating for forming a new state separate from Chicago and Cook County. According to Riverbender and public testimony, he argues that this effort is nonpartisan and rooted in constitutional rights, emphasizing Illinois’ pension crisis and governance failures as reasons to pursue separation.

New Illinois was founded in 2018 as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that educates citizens on their constitutional right to create a new state. According to the group’s official site, it models its mission after West Virginia’s split from Virginia by focusing on rural-urban divides and hosting town halls, county committees, and outreach events to advance its cause.

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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

Brian Hyde: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Prairie State Wire Podcast. Today we're very happy to welcome GH Merri, who is the chairman of New Illinois. And if that sounds like, wait, are you announcing a new state? I'm gonna let GH Merritt explain that. First of all, welcome to the podcast and tell us just a little bit about your background.

It's really important as we discuss this project that people understand you are not to by, by nature, a political animal. 

GH Merritt: Not really. I mean, you, you get interested in things you hear on the news, but no, I was a stay at home mom and I, then I went back to school, got a master's in nonprofit management, and so I spent a number of years in the nonprofit sector.

A lot of that was in Indian country. I was the US administrator for a Canadian native nonprofit called My People International, which. Has since merged with another group, but, and then I was involved in other [00:01:00] small nonprofits locally. And so yeah, a number of years ago I started thinking about this because Illinois is so corrupt and the taxes are so high.

And I think part of it too is the, the jobs here were job opportunities were limited and it was odd because. You would think that a place with a major metropolitan area wouldn't be quite like that. And, but after the, the economic crash of 2008, um, Illinois in the Chicago metropolitan area had some of the worst unemployment in the country, and it didn't make sense to me and just kind of looked at things and saw, wow, there's so much corruption here and the taxes are very high.

And so. I have a cousin who was a judge, and I thought, Hmm, maybe he would know. And, and so I, I said, Hey, since we, we live on a state line, could our county detach from Illinois and become part of [00:02:00] Wisconsin? And, and he just laughed at me. But you know, actually he's a criminal lawyer. That wasn't his.

Specialty, but he, he certainly supports what we're doing. So, 

Brian Hyde: so the, the prospect of one state or, or a portion of a state splitting off and becoming another, this has precedent after all. We do have West Virginia. I, although I'll admit, I'm not familiar with the process by which that is done. It's a legal thing that can be done.

But walk me through what's required if, if New Illinois is to take shape, what are some of the steps that will have to be followed? 

GH Merritt: Well, and, and here's something I should also mention. A lot of times people will say, you're secessionists. And, and it's like, no, this is something legally different from secession.

We don't wanna all have anybody associate us with the Confederacy, but it is in, in the US Constitution. Article four, section three, uh, gives you the process by which a state can split and it [00:03:00] has to have. The consent of your state legislature, and it has to have the consent of Congress. One thing people often say is, oh, well, the governor will never sign this.

He doesn't like what you're doing. Well, a resolution doesn't get signed by the governor. And so what's, what's really like, like I'm, I always say it, what's key is the support of the people. We have a situation here where if you don't live in Cook County, which 60%. The population does not live in Cook County.

You do not have meaningful representative government in this state. So there's, there's definitely things in the US Constitution that our state is violating in the way they treat the rest of the state. And, and so I, West Virginia was a, a kind of a special case because they were part of a state that was leaving the union and they didn't wanna leave the union.

But I think [00:04:00] our situation, I, I compare it more to Maine. Maine was a part of Massachusetts, the. Government in Massachusetts wasn't really serving the people of Maine well, and the government of Massachusetts was happy to let them go, but it took them over 20 years to convince the people of Maine that this would be the right course for them.

So anyway. Did I answer your question? 

Brian Hyde: You did. And, and I just for, for the sake of clarity, just so people understand this, is, this is not just a matter of anarchy. We go our own way. We do whatever we want. The main goal behind the, the cause of New Illinois is that people can experience a Republican, the benefits of a Republican form of government, which they're not currently experiencing under the current corruption.

GH Merritt: Exactly right. And another thing people often accuse us of, of being. A Republican group, and there are a lot of Republicans in our group, but there's a lot of libertarians, a lot of [00:05:00] unaffiliated conservatives. I'm not a Republican. The last party I belonged to was the Green Party because I grow organic vegetables, but then I didn't stay with them long because I didn't agree with other things.

So yeah, we're we're unaffiliated. It's strictly. About forming a new state. And under that umbrella, we have three focus areas. The most important, of course, is representative government. We do not experience that in Illinois. The second is government corruption, and we've got a lot of that. And the third is the financial catastrophe in our state.

And so I think that if you look at the situation where. A majority of the people actually are disenfranchised. There's no accountability and, and I should probably bring up something that's very key to this 'cause Illinois was always corrupt. Chicago has always been corrupt. [00:06:00] And yet it used to be that there was a balance that people in outstate Illinois weren't really disenfranchised.

What happened in 1964, there was a Supreme Court ruling Reynolds v Sims, that is the ruling where the phrase one man, one vote comes from, and that is considered one of the landmark rulings of the 20th century, unlikely to get overturned. And here's the problem that Reynolds v Sims created, because it really had nothing to do with Illinois.

It had to do with Alabama because Alabama. Had a lot of migration from rural to urban areas in the early, the first half of the 20th century. But they didn't bother doing any redistricting for 50 years. And so the people in urban areas, and I think that was a lot of African Americans that had had come from the rural areas, they were grossly underrepresented in their state government.

And so. [00:07:00] The Warren Court, rather than saying, Hmm, Alabama, you need to get your act together. And redistrict, what they sta said instead is that, well, acres and trees and farms and all this, they don't vote. We, it's people that are represented. Therefore, all the, the state senate districts need to be by population, just like the State House of Representatives prior to that.

You had the states operated on what they called the little federal system, where it was exactly the way it was done on the federal level. The House of Representatives was by population, the the Senate was geographically fixed. And so what happened when that ruling came down, one of our US senators was Everett Dirksen, and he warned that in any state with a sizable city.

That ruling was gonna cause all power in state government to be absorbed into that city, and that the [00:08:00] rural people would lose their voice. And so for the rest of his life, which wasn't very long, he died in 1969, he was working on having a constitutional amendment to modify Ty Sims. And so. That's where we're at.

And so over the course of years since that ruling, you've seen that gradual absorption of power into the city of Chicago, which already had a corrupt political machine. And so when you have that lack of accountability and that accumulation of power, then that is going to foster even more corruption. And now Illinois today has, even though our constitution.

Requires the budget to be balanced, and every year they come out and say it's balanced, but they're talking through their hat. We have approximately a $200 billion black hole or a debt in our state. Most of it has to do with [00:09:00] pensions, which our government refuses to reform. But in any of that, we have this, this catastrophe in our state.

That you can trace it back to Reynolds v Simpson. And so because that applied to the whole country. You see eastern Oregon, the all the power there is in Portland. The people in two thirds of the state and the eastern part, they don't have a voice in California. You have almost all the representation comes from San Francisco and LA and you have just the vast majority of that state has no meaningful representation.

And so we've heard from people in Colorado, Virginia, New York, it's, it's not just us. So, 

Brian Hyde: so talk to me a little bit about when people hear of this proposed solution. I'm sure you get pushback from, well, why do you have to do something? Oh, this is so radical. Why don't you just vote with your feet, go move [00:10:00] somewhere else.

Or maybe some variation of, why don't you just elect better people? 

GH Merritt: Oh, absolutely. But less and less as time goes on. I, I remember. Early on, mentioning to this guy from our county government was complaining about the situation and how Chicago makes all the decisions, et cetera. And I said, well, maybe we could be another state.

And he's like, oh, that will never work. Chicago's the economic engine of the state and without Chicago you'll be driving under dirt roads and turn into Mississippi. Actually that's not correct. The, you, you hear that a lot. In fact, there's a, a study that's been floating around in different versions since I think 2018 from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute in at Southern Illinois University.

And I mean, if I were a college professor and somebody turned that in as a paper, I'd give 'em an F because besides the fact that. I think half of the [00:11:00] citations were from the author's own work. It also was very, very biased, very political, and made a lot of assumptions. And the assumption is that there's a regional resentment because Chicago's got all the money.

No, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with the fact that we have no voice in our government. So that's, that's the kind of pushback we used to get Now that Chicago is running a $1 billion deficit for their, their upcoming year. People aren't telling us so much, oh, you really need Chicago. And then what was the other thing?

People just say simply, oh, it'll never happen. That's like totally over the edge, but. I think that's because most people are unaware that this has happened five times in our nation's history, and it's not really an out there kind of thing. The state lines are not something that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

They, they [00:12:00] were just some of the, some of the states. They were plotted out when there were hardly any people living there. And so we need to look at what is in the best interest of the people in the state. And our current status quo is not in the best interest of people outside of Cook County. 

Brian Hyde: If this effort were to succeed, what would the residents of New Illinois be gaining by being a part of that?

GH Merritt: They'd be gaining a government that represents them. And this is interesting because. We don't take positions on other issues other than school choice. That's the one thing we have taken a formal position on, which most of the people in the state support, but we have always believed that if the people are given the power to elect the people that they choose, they're going to.

Have laws that represent them. There's a lot of laws [00:13:00] now that don't represent the people of outstate Illinois. You look at who voted for them. I don't look at their party. I look at where they live, and you find that a lot of things come right outta Chicago. They're imposed on the rest of us. They may be good for Chicago, but they're not good for people in Effingham or Madison County, or who knows.

And so that's why we, we don't take positions on issues because we trust the people given the opportunity to be self-governing. They're gonna choose the legislators and the laws that work for them. 

Brian Hyde: So let's, let's talk for just a moment about some of the steps that actually are being taken. I understand that something rather important to, in regards to this new Illinois proposal took place back in April.

Tell me about the meeting that you guys had. 

GH Merritt: Yeah. In, in April we had the seventh session of, of our constitutional convention, [00:14:00] and so we. Finished the first draft last November, and then, so this is starting on a second pass through, and so it's, it's got some really interesting things and it's not available yet for the general public to look at, but, but there's some very innovative things in there.

I am on the constitution committee. That's several people. A couple of them are attorneys, attorneys, farmers, it people. All, all different walks of life. People are involved in our organization. Anyway, what we do is we look in the constitutions of other states and, and at the legislation in other states so as to not try and reinvent the wheel.

And we've had some help from New Hampshire because what's interesting about them, if you look at the. Legislative maps that have been drawn in Illinois, even though our Constitution says that the [00:15:00] districts must be compact. Yeah, like there's one up in Northwestern Illinois that swings around in the Bloomington, and it's shaped like a tyrannosaurus rack that's not compact.

There's another one, a congressional district that starts down in, oh, he is St. Louis and it's shaped like a lightning bolt and it goes all the way over to the champaign area, almost to Indiana. You look at that and you say, Hmm, what community does that represent? Well, I can tell you it doesn't represent any community.

It represents a power grab from Chicago. And anyway, so some of the things that, that we've done is looking at how that requirement of compactness is ignored. And you look at places like Iowa and their map, the districts are like squares all around the state. In, in New Hampshire, it's the same thing. And so we talked to a, [00:16:00] a, a state legislator in New Hampshire who was on their redistricting committee, and he gave us a lot of help telling how they are able to do that without violating the rental V Sims requirement.

And so we, in our, uh, constitution, looked at all the other states. And many of them have different requirements besides compactness. And so what we did is we took every stipulation from every state, put it in there so that it'd be pretty impossible to gerrymandering new Illinois. Um, another thing that's I think innovative in our constitution right now, we've had a situation where our legislators give themselves pay raises.

They're, they're in charge of making that decision. And other states, sometimes they'll have a commission, but then you think, okay, who's on the commission? And so what we came up with [00:17:00] was that the legislators pay would be tied to the median income. The median household income of Illinois, and that way if the people prosper, the legislators prosper.

If the people don't prosper, they don't either, but you don't have some wheeling and dealing by politicians to game the system. 

Brian Hyde: We are talking with GH Merit. She is the new Illinois chairman and is, is there a website where people can go to, to further dig into this topic? Mm-hmm. 

GH Merritt: Yes, our website is new Illinois state.org.

Brian Hyde: Thank you so much for your time and, and I wish you the very best. I, I look forward to following up with you in the future to hear about, well, what I hope is your future success. Thanks again. I. 

GH Merritt: Thank you very much. I appreciate your interest. 

Brian Hyde: This is the Prairie State Wire [00:18:00] Podcast.