We seem not so much to be disagreeing as to each be using a model of sentence meaning that differs from the other's in ways we have not fathomed the nature of.
My understanding doesn't have access to a model of sentence meaning in which propositions are used for things (such as illocutionary acts). I understand illocutionary operators to be part of logical form, and, for the reasons under discussion, an illocutionary operator can be an argument -- in this particular example, a question can be a causee, which is not ontologically weird. The illocutionary operator in its own right is (interpreted as) an action, while as argument of another predicate that in turn is argument of a different (in this instamce, assertive) illocutionary operator, it is part of a description of a state of affairs. The dual function of the rogative illocutionary is due to the way logical forms are interpreted: each illocutionary is interpreted as a performative action, and the argument of an illocutionary is interpreted as a description of a state of affairs. I claim not that my understanding is the only possible coherent one, but rather only that my understanding is the only coherent one I'm aware of.