The Emperor Has No Clothes

Judge's TRO ruling provides legal assertion for Pritzker's monarchal reign to end

Feb 05, 2022

Late Friday afternoon, a judge in Sangamon County, IL wrote in a stunning ruling describing the two years long oppressive actions of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

The arbitrary method as to contact tracing and masking in general continue to raise fair questions as to the legality of the Executive Orders in light of violations of healthy children’s substantive due process rights. Statutory rights have attempted to be bypassed through the issuance of Executive Orders and Emergency Rules … This type of evil is exactly what the law was intended to constrain.

A sitting judge referring to policies of a state governor as evil may not be unprecedented in American history, but gobsmacking nonetheless.

Sangamon County Circuit Court Judge Raylene Grischow, in granting a Temporary Restraining Order allowing for students in 145 districts to attend school maskless, called out what has been true since March of 2020 when the virus first entered our lives.

How the Governor of Illinois has used his position in the Executive Branch unlawfully.

The executive orders, the mandates; all abuses of power of the highest order.

That argument – that Pritzker cannot use EO’s to deny due process of the people – gets to the core of the preservation of democracy.

A judge said Friday that an elected official in the Executive Branch has been undermining, for two years, the representative form of government our country was founded on almost 250 years ago.

It’s a stunning admission and validates all of the criticism yielded against Pritzker – how wielding that kind of power over citizens in a free society is dangerous, and over time, catastrophic.

Imagine a state governor, unhappy over rising crime rates, issuing an executive order declaring a public health emergency. The mandate? All guns must be turned in.

Abortions? An EO saying any doctor who performs one must surrender his or her license.

I’m not making an moral argument here about crime, guns or abortions. We all have strong opinions on these topics. I’m arguing how would any rational person be in favor of a singular politician unilaterally deciding what someone can or cannot do?

That’s what Pritzker has been doing. Not with guns or abortions, but with masking/testing/vaccines in our schools (and businesses).

Late Friday, a judge admitted his actions are not that of an elected official voted to look out for the best interests of his citizens, but of a despotic dictator residing not in a federalist state, but a sovereign one, in a land far from here, where countrymen are forbidden access to education or property.

Like the Kingdom of Cambodia. Or North Korea.

We hear the term “change the narrative” almost daily in our media culture.

Now, affirmed by the courts, we are at a touchstone moment in changing the narrative about Pritzker in Illinois.

“This ruling, you know 100 percent, tells us that is unequivocal that no Appellate Court could ever change? Is that there is a conversation to be had,” attorney Tom DeVore said. DeVore is lead attorney on the consolidated legal action that led to Grischow’s Friday decision. “All (hundreds) of school districts public and private, you know what they are thinking, you know what conversations are happening? The emperor has no clothes. Maybe the governor isn’t all powerful.”

School districts are scrambling this weekend in response to the flurry of legal rulings, which included a predictable appeal from Pritzker late Friday night.

Almost all correspondence from administrators are a version of this:

Whatever conversations are occurring with legal counsel, they should include the following questions from administrators to their attorneys:

“Why are we still fighting this?”

“How is continuing to fight this helping our kids?”

“Why are we listening to the Governor anymore?”

Legally, a judge said districts can’t.

Just look at the judge’s 30-page ruling that deems “null and void” Pritzker’s emergency rules through the Illinois Department of Public Health concerning COVID-19 mitigations for schools.

So off with the masks. No more contact quarantines and forced testing of unvaccinated teachers. Judge Grischow called their enforcement a “type of evil.”

Are district leaders really going to endorse ‘evil?’