The lawsuit, filed late Monday by the state GOP and three local Republican organizations, asks the court to exempt political parties from the cap on gatherings and seeks permission to hold in-person events without size restrictions in the runup to the November election.

Republicans criticized Pritzker last week for attending a march with hundreds of other people June 8 in south suburban Matteson amid the response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer.

For their part, Illinois Republicans held a virtual state convention Saturday to comply with the governor’s executive order.

State GOP Chairman Tim Schneider said during an online news conference Tuesday morning that Pritzker is picking and choosing who gets to fully exercise their First Amendment rights, noting the governor’s participation in the protest march and an exemption to the gathering limit for religious groups.

“Gov. Pritzker is ruling Illinois like an unaccountable king, where he only gets to decide which violations of his executive order have his blessing,” Schneider said.

The 10-person limit is part of Pritzker’s May 29 executive order, which eased some restrictions he put in place to slow the spread of the new coronavirus. The state is on track to move to the next phase of the reopening plan, when gatherings of up to 50 people would be allowed, on June 26.

Republicans are seeking a temporary restraining order blocking the restriction and also want the court to declare the entire order invalid because they allege Pritzker has exceeded his authority to extend a disaster proclamation beyond the initial 30 days.

The lawsuit alleges that Pritzker’s May 29 order violates the First and 14th Amendment rights of political parties by treating them differently from religious groups or protesters.

“Political parties are for political expression what churches are for religious expression: the corporate manifestation of speech and interaction within a community of shared belief,” the lawsuit says. “Political parties’ events and rallies are also like protest rallies and marches. And like churches and marches, political parties operate in a world where time matters; the 2020 election is only months away.”

While many Republicans initially held off on criticizing Pritzker’s stay-at-home order when he first issued it in March, tension has grown over the past three months as GOP officials have pushed the state to reopen its economy more quickly. Pritzker has faced a barrage of lawsuits over his orders, including from two Republican state representatives and from various church groups.

The Illinois Republican Party along with the Schaumburg Township Republican Organization, the Northwest Side GOP Club and the Will County Republican Central Committee are being represented in the lawsuit by the conservative-leaning Liberty Justice Center.

The group is best known for its 2018 U.S. Supreme Court victory in a case that struck down the requirement for fees to public-sector labor unions from workers who choose not to join. The so-called fair share fees were a prime target of then-Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.

“Every American has a right to free speech, and the Constitution doesn’t allow this governor to create special exceptions for churches or protesters because they have a high media profile, because they’ve got good lobbyists or because he agrees with their political viewpoint,” an attorney with the Liberty Justice Center said during the online news conference.

Pritzker’s initial statewide stay-at-home order took effect March 21. The state moved into phase three of Pritzker’s “Restore Illinois” reopening plan May 29. The stay-at-home order has largely been upheld so far in the face of legal challenges by churches and religious organizations, businesses and Republican lawmakers.

The U.S. Supreme Court even weighed in, denying an appeal from two Chicago-area churches seeking to overturn a previous executive order that placed the 10-person limit on religious gatherings. Before the high court ruled, however, Pritzker lifted the size limit on religious gatherings in favor of safety guidelines from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Pritzker last week defended his decision to take part in the Matteson march, saying he was “not going to run away” from taking a stand at a time when people across the U.S. are pushing for major changes to the way police interact with African Americans and other minorities.

“I go places, and it’s very difficult to get socially distant when an awful lot of people show up, and I’m not going to run away,” the governor said June 9 at an event in Decatur.

“Especially at this moment, it’s important to express ourselves. It’s important to stand up for people’s First Amendment rights,” he said.

Pritzker was critical of rallies that took place outside the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago and the Illinois Capitol in Springfield protesting his stay-at-home order — some of which included signs comparing the governor, who is Jewish, to Adolf Hitler — but his administration did not take any action to stop them from happening.

Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a statement Tuesday that the GOP lawsuit “is about scoring political points and criticizing civil rights protests supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.”

“The courts have repeatedly upheld the governor’s executive orders as based on public health guidance,” Abudayyeh said. “And as the Republicans who attended protests against the public health guidance are well aware, the state has never prevented people from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

State health officials on Tuesday reported 623 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 72 more fatalities, bringing the total number of known cases to 133,639 and the statewide death toll to 6,398 since the pandemic began.

While Tuesday’s fatalities were a large jump from the 19 reported the previous day, the number of daily deaths has been below 100 for 12 straight days. The number of newly confirmed cases has been less than 1,000 for 11 straight days.

On Monday, the governor argued that the steps he’s taken to slow the spread of the coronavirus have helped Illinois see a decline in new infections and deaths while other states that have reopened more quickly are seeing new spikes.

“You wouldn’t want political decisions made, in my opinion, about how to manage through a pandemic,” Pritzker said at an unrelated event in West Frankfort in southern Illinois. “It’s not really about politics; it should be about science. And as a result of following the data, I think we’ve been doing this right.”

As it stands, gatherings of more than 50 people would not be allowed to resume until Illinois reaches the fifth and final phase of Pritzker’s plan, which would require a vaccine for the coronavirus, an effective and widely available treatment, or the elimination of new cases for a sustained period.