BENTON – U.S. District Judge Staci Yandle denied an injunction that would have allowed indoor dining and drinking at H’s Bar in Belleville.
She entered the order on Saturday night, Nov. 21, and H’s counsel Thomas Maag filed notice of appeal on Monday morning, Nov. 23.
Maag sued state and St. Clair County officials on Oct. 28, claiming H’s patrons had a First Amendment right to discuss issues of the day at the bar.
Defendants urged Yandle to follow a Supreme Court decision from 1905, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, approving police power to control smallpox.
The decision held that individual rights “may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”
Yandle adopted that view and found Gov. Pritzker’s emergency orders reasonable.
She wrote that more than 600,000 Illinois residents tested positive and more than 11,000 died.
“Airborne transmission of the virus, in which infection spreads through exposure to small droplets and particles that can remain suspended in the air for hours, is more likely to occur in enclosed spaces and with prolonged exposure,” Yandle wrote.
She found Pritzker based his prohibitions on scientific and medical data linking restaurants and bars to the spread of the virus.
She found ceasing indoor service until the positivity rate declines has a real and substantial relationship to preventing the spread.
She found Illinois law “permits the governor to issue multiple and successive disaster proclamations and to exercise emergency powers for additional 30 day periods, so long as a disaster continues to exist.”