Two Republican congressmen from Illinois are urging the Obama administration to change course on Honduras after a visit there a week ago.

Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was shipped out of his country, then infiltrated his way back in and is now holed up at the Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.

He had been scheduled to leave office after the Nov. 29 presidential election. But because of his removal, the Obama administration now says it will not recognize the legitimacy of that election. It has cut off the $30 million-a-year foreign aid budget for Honduras.

U.S. Representatives Peter Roskam (R-Wheaton) and Aaron Schock (R-Peoria) say the administration should side with the rest of the Honduran government, which believes Zelaya's ouster was for the best.

"The high court made it clear that in their view, they acted in consistency with their constitution," Roskam said after meeting with all 15 members of the country's supreme court.

The congressmen also met with five of the six presidential candidates, including Zelaya's vice president, and all of them said the country's congress and courts were justified in removing Zelaya from office five months early before he could rewrite the constitution to extend his reign, as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez did.

"It struck me that we met with not only the interim government, the 15 supreme court justices, the presidential candidates -- five of the six -- who all agree Zelaya was corrupt and needed to be removed, including Zelaya's own vice president," Schock said.

But the Obama administration feels that removing a president from office and exiling him from the country sets a bad precedent in a region with a history of coups.

They insist on Zelaya being reinstated as a condition of recognizing the upcoming election and resuming foreign aid.

Like Chavez, Zelaya was popular with Honduras' poor, raising the minimum wage from $6 to $9.60 a day. But his critics say that populism masked corruption; that he took a payoff from Chavez and was allowing his country to be used as a transfer point for illegal drugs.

All sides agree the government went too far by deporting him to Costa Rica, but the government is apprehensive about giving him back the presidency even with limited powers.

"It seems ludicrous to me that we are turning our back on a 30-year friend of the United States," Schock said. The congressmen and other Republican congressmen and senators have asked for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss the matter.