Rep Raja Krishnamoorthi has announced his run for Illinois’ open Senate seat and said all through his career, he has stood up to bullies and now it’s time to do the same to the Donald Trump administration. The race is open as senator Dick Dutrbin announced his retirement. “I’ve made a career of standing up to bullies in Congress, and now we have to stand up to Donald Trump, who’s in the way of people realizing they’re full economic potential,” Krishnamoorthi said to POLITICO. “It’s the number one agenda item for a lot of people: to stand up to Donald Trump, not back down and make sure that we get our government back working for the people.”“Whoever the next senator is has to continue Senator Durbin’s incredible legacy of representing the entire state in the U.S. Senate,” Krishnamoorthi said. “As somebody who’s from downstate, who represents the suburbs and who’s worked in the city for many years, I think that I bring some of the qualities necessary to represent the full breadth of what it means to be an Illinoisan.”

Who is Illinois Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi?

A staunch Trump critic, Krishnamoorthi has a long career in politics. He was deeply involved in the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. He attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 because he said he wanted President Trump “to look at the crowd and Congress and see on day one that he will be strongly opposed if he continues to pursue policies that hurt working families”.Born in India into a Tamil Hindu family, Raja Krishnamoorthi came to the US when he was three months old as his father attended graduate school in the US. Krishnamoothi attended Princeton University where he earned mechanical engineering summa cum laude. Then he received a Juris Doctor with honors from Harvard Law School. His early career included clerking for a federal judge, working on Barack Obama’s 2000 House and 2004 Senate campaigns.