Q: First, your reaction to House Bill 4293 not being called in the House. And secondly, why do you think you and your team were unable to whip the support needed for the Speaker to put it on the board?
Pritzker: Well, maybe we ought to start with what the purpose of the bill was, which was to protect children and families and adults and people of Illinois from very unsafe, intoxicating hemp products that are sold without regard to the age of the purchaser, without regard to the ingredients that are inside those packages that are being sold at convenience stores and at gas stations, and that we already have seen children go to the hospital for, and adults too. And I talked to a mother of a daughter who took one of these packages didn’t understand how intoxicating the package was, and ended up passed out, ended up in the hospital, has been in and out of the hospital now for eight months as a result of just this product that looked, you know, at all, for all respects, as if it were candy. Some of these products, if you’ve ever seen them, it’ll say Skittles on the front with a “z,” and they’re not Skittles, like the ones that you know, but rather this intoxicating hemp. So what we’re trying to do is keep people protected from products like that. This is consumer safety and health.
I was tremendously disappointed that this is a demonstration, from my perspective, of the power of special interests and the money that they spread around to thwart the health and safety of the public. And you know, this was the choice by a number of people to go for profits over people. And I was disappointed to see that. Now I want to be clear, if this had come up for a vote, if the Speaker had called this, this would have passed with a super majority. We know that the vast majority of Democrats were in favor of it, and the vast majority of Republicans were in favor. So the fact that didn’t get called, a bipartisan bill to safeguard the people of the state of Illinois is a tragedy.
Q: Are you considering whether to instruct IDPH to interpret the Illinois Food and Drug Act defining hemp products to be an intoxicating substance?
Pritzker: We’re looking at all the options that are available to me in the executive branch to secure the safety and health of the people from these intoxicating hemp products. And I want to make clear to everybody, because I know the other side on this, people who are advocating for these packages to be just available. They’ve been making the case that we’re going to shut down CBD oil, or these shops that are good actors that are just selling products that come from hemp, which, by the way, I signed a bill to legalize in the state, to make sure that products can be sold safely, and they found a loophole to jump through. But the people who are doing it safely and who are providing products that many people use day to day are not the ones who are involved here. It’s others. And so I want to make sure that we’re using every possible power that I have in the executive branch to deal with, but it does take legislation to do some of the things.
Q: What are your thoughts on yesterday’s House Democratic Caucus meeting, particularly in regard to what happened with your staffers?
Pritzker: So, for those of you who don’t know, we were invited to bring our experts from our departments to the House Democratic Caucus meeting to present to the members and to answer questions of the members.
These are professionals. These are really top-notch professionals. No political, anything involved. They literally were there to answer questions and to provide information, and they were berated by people who were opposed to the bill. They were berated. They were called liars. They were treated extremely poorly. One of my staff people had to get up and leave because she felt ganged up upon and called a liar and pointed at. And I mean, it was frightening for her.
And so I have to say, treating staff people like that. I mean, politicians can take it. Politicians are, you know, should be made of enough steel to deal with. These are professionals and that we want to attract to state government. We want to stay in state government. To have them treated poorly by elected officials is, frankly, unacceptable. And I told that to the Speaker, I have made it clear that people owe my staff, those staff people, I would say my staff, these are people work in our departments. They are owed apologies by the people who impugned their policy.
Q: Obviously, it doesn’t seem to get any easier from here a challenging budget cycle coming up. Transit agencies need money. Tier Two pension issues. Are you confident in Speaker Welch’s ability to deliver votes from his caucus for a lot of these tough issues that you’re going to be facing in the session ahead?
Pritzker: I’d like to say that there have been easy years since I became governor to get things done. We’ve been going after big things. Balancing the budget in the state of Illinois is never an easy thing, but we’ve done it for six years in a row, and we’re going to do it again. But, yeah, they’re big challenges to overcome and certainly what happened with regard to the hemp bill is, you know, is potentially a demonstration of challenges that the House will have in organizing to overcome some of the challenges that we’re going to face this spring.
Q: The mayor of Chicago has talked a number of times about his team communicating with your team on lots of issues, like CPS, CTU, migrants, hemp. Can you talk about how often you talk to him or his administration, or how often your team talks to him or the administration, and what those conversations are like? Is it a meeting? Is it a phone call?
Pritzker: When they reach out to us to ask me, either to talk about any particular topic, and remember, we’ve got cities and towns all over the state of Illinois that I engage with. Chicago is certainly the largest, but we have lots of mayors and county board members and chairs that we talk to. Whenever they reach out, we talk to them. And the same is true with the Mayor of the City of Chicago and his staff. They don’t reach out that often. And it seems like they don’t have good relationships in Springfield, in part because they don’t do the outreach that’s necessary. But again, I’m always, I’ve taken calls from the mayor whenever he’s, you know, he has my direct number. He calls me whatever he needs to. He doesn’t call very often. Maybe in the time that he’s been there, he’s called me, perhaps five times, that’s two years almost. And I have no reticence to call him if I, you know, if there’s something that I want to raise with him and my staff has no [garbled]. But you know, look, the lines of communications are open, but people have to take advantage of the open communication line. And often that didn’t happen. That didn’t happen with the the hemp bill. Didn’t call anybody in my administration. Never raised it. And with regard to his budget, literally, the last call that we got from them was in September, and then once in December, we, by the way, scheduled calls, and then they didn’t show up. And then there was a December call that happened in which they didn’t ask for anything. They just …reported on what was in the budget and then other no other communication. But again, he has my number. They have all of our staff numbers. We’re open to anything they’d like to talk about.
Q: How much influence do you think Mayor Johnson had with the hemp bill’s demise, and do you think any House Democrats lied to you about their votes on the hemp bill? Do you think maybe they had different positions?
Pritzker: No, I mean, I don’t think people lied. I mean, I’d like to think that people didn’t lie to us. They told us that they would vote for it, and indeed, there were many, many people ready to vote for it. And as I told you, if you put this up to a vote, you get a majority of Democrats and the majority of Republicans that would vote for it. And this is an important issue. So, I wish it had been called. I think that it’s, I think not calling it was irresponsible.
Q: And on Mayor Johnson?
Pritzker: I think that the mayor, you know, my impression is he didn’t have much to do with this. There’s a there’s a powerful lobby that has been working against this bill for quite some time. This was not an easy bill. If it had been, it would have passed last May, when it passed the Senate, they would have passed it in the House. They worked hard in the House to keep it from from getting a vote in May and and in December. I let people know that I thought it’s important for us to get this done this year, because every day that goes by, there are people buying these products, and there are people whose health is being put in danger with these products. And so it’s like I said, it’s a tragedy that the bill didn’t pass. The mayor had very little to do with the ultimate result. I think it was, there was a raucous meeting of the Democratic House caucus in which there was a lot of yelling at staff by people who are opposed to the bill that the Speaker did not intervene about, and you shouldn’t let staff get berated like that, you just shouldn’t.
Please pardon any transcription errors.
Discuss.
Rep. La Shawn Ford is the one who reached out, although I’m told by multiple sources that his apology in caucus today wasn’t much of an apology. Others have not made an effort to apologize, however.
