(The Center Square) – Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert died on Saturday at the age of 84, following an Illinois political career that included criminal behavior.
Hastert spent four years in the Illinois House and 20 years in Congress, including eight years at speaker from 1999 to 2007.
In 2016, the Plano Republican was convicted of evading financial reporting requirements following accusations that he sexually abused students at Yorkville High School, where he worked from 1965 to 1987.
“It seems a pretty unusual thing for someone that high profile to have managed to keep a scandal that great hidden for so long, but it certainly colors his legacy in a way that most people thinking about him now are not thinking about,” Brian Gaines, Honorable W. Russell Arrington professor in state politics at the University of Illinois, told The Center Square.
Gaines said Hastert brought stability to the U.S. House and quietly got a lot of the president’s agenda through.
“Ordinarily, in a more normal career, we would be talking about substantial accomplishments and how popular he was in his district and so on,” Gaines said.
The Center Square asked University of Illinois Chicago professor emeritus Dick Simpson why it took so long for Hastert’s crimes to be uncovered.
“It was because he paid off some of the people he had abused to keep it secret and was able to simply keep the crimes away from any law enforcement agencies until much later,” Simpson said.
Simpson said Hastert was also guilty of conflicts of interest related to his property holdings near a highway he had built.
“So he was guilty of the other kind of corruption where he made money off of illicit deals as well,” Simpson said.
Gaines noted that the Land of Lincoln was once home to two powerful speakers in Hastert and former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who was convicted on 10 counts of corruption in 2025 and is now serving a 7.5-year prison term at a federal facility in West Virginia.
“Mike Madigan was primarily convicted because of the illicit deals that he did, particularly the Commonwealth Edison situation where he got special benefits for the company in return for political favors that he doled out to his political machine,” Simpson said.
The longtime professor said Illinois is home to a “pervasive culture of corruption” where many officials have gone to federal prison for corruption.
“Since 1976, in the state of Illinois, there have been more than 2,300. 1,900 of them have come from the Chicago metropolitan region where Hastert came from,” Simpson said.
