West Central Reporter

State Sen. Steve McClure (R-Chatham) says he agrees with a Brownstone Institute study that gave Gov. J.B. Pritzker an F on his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

“He should have consulted the legislature from the start and I’ve co-sponsored a bill that you have to go to the legislature after the first 30 days of an emergency order and they never called it for a vote,” McClure told the West Central Reporter. “I think in general people that comment on health issues often disagree. The fact we couldn’t ever have hearings about this is very detrimental to our state.”

McClure said that he’s not surprised by the findings of the Brownstone Institute study that grades Pritzker’s mitigations as “worse than an F” and a “complete fail.”

The study composed data from every state from March 2020 through April 2021, with researchers further concluding “there’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S. average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.”

McClure said he doesn’t see how anyone can argue that Pritzker has put the needs of Illinois residents first given he has spoken with so few of them in coming to his decisions and other lawmakers haven’t been allowed to vote on anything.

“The people I represent haven’t had a voice and he needs to spend more time downstate,” he said.   

McClure said it says a lot about the governor’s leadership that his wife and daughter chose to spend most of the pandemic away from the state.

“A lot of people have a problem with the way the governor has handled this,” he said.

In late 2021, Pritzker said his critics harassed his family so mercilessly that his wife and daughter spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Florida. More recently, the Prairie State Wire reported, his daughter Theodora “Teddi” Pritzker spent New Year’s Eve in the Bahamas in a nightclub environment without a mask after her father spent time urging residents to stay home.

“It’s just more of the same double-standards,” McClure said.

McClure said there’s still the question of how effective masks are in actually slowing the spread of the virus

I don’t think they do, and there’s no science that says anything different,” he said.