Governors are given veto pens for a reason.
The General Assembly passes a bill. The governor gets one final look. He can sign it, reject it, cut spending, or send it back with changes.
It is supposed to be a check. Governor Pritzker rarely uses his.
Nearly 3,800 bills have landed on Pritzker’s desk since he became governor in 2019.
In 7 years, he has vetoed 31 of them.
We pride ourselves on checks and balances in this country; this process is not that. When you sign virtually everything that lands on your desk, you’re not providing much of a check at all.
This year, Pritzker continued this streak of nonparticipation. Nearly 400 bills passed the General Assembly and went to him. Only one received a veto.
The veto is not some dusty constitutional leftover. It is one of the last real checks in state government.
It is the governor’s chance, if he cares, to look at what lawmakers just passed and decide whether Illinois families should have to live under it. When one party holds the governor’s office and supermajorities in both chambers, that check matters even more; without it, Springfield becomes a conveyor belt.
Pritzker is not even showing up to watch the belt.
During the spring session, he spent just 22 session days in Springfield. In May, when the budget and the big bills were being decided, he was there for 11 of 19 session days. His calendar showed 14 scheduled in-person meetings with rank-and-file legislators all spring. Fourteen! While families in northwest Illinois were watching property taxes climb, energy bills rise, and a $56 billion budget, the largest in Illinois history, get pushed through, our governor was nowhere to be found.
His only veto action this year was to correct a spending error. One typo would have sent more than $500 billion to the Chicago Westside Branch NAACP. The intended number was $250,000. That mistake got caught. Good. It also shows exactly how sloppy the process has become, and why a governor who actually reads the bills isn’t optional.
Illinois isn’t unique in having one-party control. But governors in other blue states use their veto powers quite differently.
In 2025, Gavin Newsom vetoed 123 of the 917 bills that reached him, about 13 percent. Michelle Lujan Grisham in New Mexico vetoed 16 bills from her session. Roughly 100 bills crossed her desk.
Nobody is asking Pritzker to veto bills just to pad a stat sheet. But are we really supposed to believe that out of nearly 3,800 bills, only 31 were bad enough to stop?
Illinois families are living with some of the highest taxes in the country and a cost of living that keeps going the wrong way. State spending is now nearly $56 billion. Lawmakers keep piling on new spending and new mandates that hit taxpayers, small businesses, and local governments. This is the moment you want a governor who isn’t just in the building but also reading the fine print and willing to say no.
Pritzker has spent a lot of time building a national profile. His face is plastered on every ad you swipe through on Facebook and TikTok. You can’t even escape him at this point on TV.
But his first job is still Illinois. People in Freeport, Galena, Machesney Park, and every other town that does not make the evening news in Chicago deserve a governor who is present and who will use the power of his office when a bill is sloppy, too expensive, not aligned with our state’s ideals, or just wrong.
Illinois has enough problems. We do not need a part-time governor on top of them.
It is time Pritzker put his attention back where it belongs. Here.
