* Quincy Herald-Whig…

A Quincy woman has filed suit against the Quincy School Board over requiring face masks and temperature checks for her child to attend school.

Roni Quinn seeks an injunction barring the School Board from enforcing the mandates against her child, a fourth-grader attending Quincy Public Schools, and says the board overstepped its authority in issuing the requirements.

A hearing is set for 11 a.m. Thursday in Adams County Court. […]

“This is about our children’s right to an education and allowing decisions such as these to be left to the parents not our government/local officials,” Quinn said in a post on the Re-Open Adams County Illinois Facebook page.

“If you want to send your child to school in a mask, by all means you have that right. As it stands right now, no one has the right to choose to send their child to school without a mask. That is not ok. These rights belong to the parents.”

* WGEM…

In the lawsuit filed Friday morning, Quinn alleges that she, and her child, will suffer irreparable injuries based on the implementation of the mask and temperature check mandates because they infringe on the child’s right to an in-person education within the public school.

Quinn’s lawsuit goes on to allege that the mandates are not lawful as they were not implemented by legislature.

Quinn states that the requirement of a face mask to be admitted to a public school building is beyond the board’s authority or otherwise in violation of Illinois law.

Quinn is being represented by attorney Thomas DeVore, who recently filed a lawsuit against Gov. JB Pritzker accusing him of abusing his emergency powers with his Stay-at-Home order.

Click here and scroll down to read the lawsuit.

* Meanwhile, here’s some background on our next story. From May…

A judge on Thursday sided against an Illinois organization that claimed restrictions implemented to combat the novel coronavirus made it impossible to gather the necessary signatures to place a constitutional amendment on November’s general election ballot. […]

The Committee for the Illinois Democracy Amendment is advocating for a constitutional change that would obligate the General Assembly to take roll call votes on bills proposing “stronger ethical standards for Illinois public officials.”

It would also allow residents to propose related bills by submitting a petition with at least 100,000 signatures.

Former Gov. Pat Quinn is one of the lawyers in the case.

* The plaintiffs appealed and lost this week. From the decision…

One important question, when a plaintiff seeks emergency relief, is whether the plaintiff has brought the emergency on himself. The district judge concluded that Morgan had done so. During most of the time available to seek signatures, Morgan did absolutely nothing. He did not evince any interest in the subject until early April 2020, several weeks after the Governor began to issue orders requiring social distancing. The other plaintiffs did not do anything of substance until the suit was on file. Plaintiffs had plenty of time to gather signatures before the pandemic began. That’s a good reason to conclude that they are not entitled to emergency relief.

We add that plaintiffs also have not established that the Governor’s orders limit their speech. The orders concern conduct (social distancing), not what anyone may write or say. Orders regulating conduct often have incidental effects on speech, but this does not require courts to treat them as if they were regulations of speech. See, e.g., Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U.S. 288 (1984). Plaintiffs do not question the propriety of those orders. Cf. Jacobson v. Massachuse=s, 197 U.S. 11 (1905); Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church v. PriJker, No. 20-1811 (7th Cir. June 16, 2020). Although the orders surely make it hard to round up signatures, so would the reluctance of many people to approach strangers during a pandemic.

One more consideration bears emphasis. The federal Constitution does not require any state or local government to put referenda or initiatives on the ballot. That is wholly a mafer of state law. If we understand the Governor’s orders, coupled with the signature requirements, as equivalent to a decision to skip all referenda for the 2020 election cycle, there is no federal problem. Illinois may decide for itself whether a pandemic is a good time to be soliciting signatures on the streets in order to add referenda to a ballot.

The order denying the motion for a preliminary injunc- tion is affirmed. The plaintiffs remain free to contend to the district court that a permanent injunction would be justified if social-distancing rules are indefinitely extended, but that long-term question does not require immediate resolution.

…Adding… Rebecca Anzel has more on the decision…

Former Gov. Pat Quinn, an attorney representing the committee, said in an interview Friday he and his clients are “disappointed.”

They brought this lawsuit, he said, because “it’s impossible” to comply with state law mandating petitions be circulated in person and with the governor’s social distancing order.

“The state should not be allowed to try to cancel out the rights of voters to circulate petitions to put issues on the ballot,” Quinn said. “It makes the whole process very dangerous. We’re going to keep fighting.”

Their options, he said, include appealing the decision — the committee is “free” to pursue the issues in this case in a district court, the judges wrote in their ruling — or attempting to change the law “so voters have the option to sign petitions electronically during the pandemic, which is not going away.”