On August 4, Governor JB Pritzker announced a mask mandate for all K-12 schools in Illinois.
State Senator Jason Plummer (R-Edwardsville) issued the following statement in response to his actions:
“I find it troubling that the Governor has clearly not learned from his costly past mistakes and has decided to double down on his refusal to allow lawmakers and other local officials the opportunity to give a voice to the people they represent. This mandate is just a continuation of the same go-it-alone approach that has driven our state’s response to this pandemic, making Illinois an outlier and leaving millions of Illinoisans voiceless. Our hyper-political governor needs to put our children before his politics. Enough is enough.
“This isn’t leadership, this is an unabashed power trip. The arrogance and irony that this mandate is coming just days after the Governor was publically plugging his intended attendance to a four-day long mass music festival attended by tens-of-thousands of people in Chicago does little to restore the public’s confidence that our state’s policy response to this tragic pandemic is rooted in hard data and common sense. There should not be two sets of rules, one for the Governor and like-minded autocrats and another for the people they are supposed to serve.
“Governor Pritzker’s continued go-in-alone approach has all too often put the very most vulnerable in Illinois at risk and has left our state facing one of the worst economic recoveries in our nation. It’s time he recognizes his continued unilateral mandates and executive orders don’t represent the will of the people that he supposedly represents.”