Illinois lawmakers pass almost 100 bills on final day
Illinois General Assembly members raced the clock to pass legislation. Of the 416 bills sent to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk this session, 155 were passed in the final week and 96 of those were on the last day.
In the final week of the regular session, Illinois General Assembly members scrambled to pass over 1 in 3 of the bills that made it to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk.
It was actually worse than that: 96 bills passed in the final 24 hours.
Many of those last-day bills saw the text replaced with new, entirely unrelated language. They were not quick reads, so what are the chances lawmakers fully read, much less understood, what they were voting on? Plus, the practice violates the Illinois Constitution, but state courts have given lawmakers a wink and a nod to continue the practices.
One of the bills was Senate Bill 2510, the fiscal year 2026 budget appropriation bill. It started with nine lines of text that were deleted and replaced with 3,386 pages dictating how to spend $55.2 billion. It was chopped, swapped and passed within 24 hours.
A similar rush happened last year, too. During the dash at the end of that session, lawmakers only had 26 seconds per page to read 3,389 pages of a budget proposal. That meant they had to review about $616,000 worth of state spending every second.
Illinois lawmakers keep skirting their responsibilities to taxpayers each time they short-circuit the bill reading process by gutting and replacing what are known as “shell bills.” These are bills introduced with no substantive change to the law to be later replaced with longer, substantive topics or appropriations.
Article IV, Section 8 of the Illinois Constitution requires bills to be read on three separate days before they are passed. This provision is intended to give lawmakers – and taxpayers – a chance to know what is in the bill before it is passed. But lawmakers regularly insert hundreds or thousands of pages unrelated to the original bill and pass it the same day.
Why are lawmakers allowed to do something clearly prohibited by the Illinois Constitution? Illinois courts adhere to what is known as the “enrolled bill doctrine.” That means courts defer to leaders of the state House and Senate to determine whether all procedural requirements for passing a law have been met.
In practice, this means the three-day reading requirement is never enforced, and lawmakers must vote on bills they had little to no chance to read. These bills cannot face real scrutiny until after they pass.
The budget appropriations bill is just one example of this gut-and-replace legislation. Of the 416 bills that passed both chambers, 30 began as empty shell bills.
Many others were amended with unrelated language and passed the same day or the day after.
The regular practice of gutting and replacing legislation at the last minute is aggravating the economic spiral Illinois continues to endure.
Lawmakers should have time to consider how legislation will impact residents and taxpayers. They should stop using shell bills to rush the budget past serious scrutiny.
Some in the Statehouse agree: state Sen. Andrew Chesney, R-Freeport, and six other legislators filed a lawsuit to challenge the last-minute passage of the budget bill, asking the court to enforce the constitution’s three-day reading requirement.
If the lawsuit succeeds, lawmakers might start reading the legislation they vote on.