Endorsement: For House District 46, GOP primary, Orozco

In March, Republicans in the 46th state House district have an opportunity to choose a candidate out of their normal wheelhouse.

Roger Orozco, of Carol Stream, is a detective with the Schiller Park police. His family immigrated legally from Mexico when he was young. He joined the Marine Corps at 17, became a cop, and then a U.S. citizen in 2001. He spent two years on the Carol Stream Elementary District 93 school board.

Orozco is a Republican. He admires Marco Rubio, but voted for Donald Trump when Rubio lost the nomination. He supports term limits, streamlining government to reduce the tax burden and reforming business regulations. He does not support legalizing marijuana for recreational use.

Orozco is clearly not a traditional suburban Republican. That is his gift to the party. He brings a rare bit of diversity to the suburban GOP, and says most of his friends are working class people, some of them even low income. There are plenty of working class Republicans in Illinois who can identify with that, but don't often see themselves in government.

He is grateful for what this country has given him and is governed by a sense of fair play - he wanted to be on the school board because he heard that schools on the East Side didn't get equal resources as schools on the more affluent West Side (which he later disproved).

Orozco is endorsed. His challenger in the Republican primary is Gordon "Jay" Kinzler, a transplant surgeon who was on the Glen Ellyn Park District board from 2009 to 2017 and who unsuccessfully challenged U.S. congressman Peter Roskam for the GOP nomination in 2016.