Illinois Senate Republicans sue peers over last-minute, $55B budget vote

Republican Illinois Senate members are suing their Democratic peers over the last-minute rush to OK a $55 billion state budget few people had seen – just like they do every year. The lawsuit aims to block the budget before Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs it in to law.

Illinois state lawmakers just passed a $55.2 billion budget, the biggest in state history, just hours after the final version surfaced. But a group of state lawmakers is suing, saying the process used to pass it wasn’t fair or legal.

State Sen. Andrew Chesney, R-Freeport, and six other lawmakers filed the lawsuit in Sangamon County. They said the Illinois budget was passed unlawfully in both the Illinois House and Senate because the Illinois Constitution requires both chambers to read every bill on three different days before a final vote. The three-day rule gives lawmakers and the public enough time to understand how taxpayers’ money will be spent.

But lawmakers regularly use a “shell bill” with only a few sentences for two of the required days. Senate Bill 2510 started as a one-sentence bill about court spending, but lawmakers replaced that with a 3,386-page budget just one day before the final vote.

State lawmakers had less than 30 hours to read through it, but it technically met the three-day reading requirement. The lawsuit states this “gut-and-replace” strategy keeps people in the dark and shuts down public debate.

The lawmakers behind the lawsuit want the court to block the budget from taking effect, which Gov. J.B. Pritzker has yet to sign. Illinois’ budget has grown by more than $16 billion since Pritzker took office. The new budget includes more than $900 million in tax and fee increases, plus delays and gimmicks that boost the total to $1.4 billion.

Illinois state lawmakers have a long history of backroom budget deals that are dropped for a vote at the eleventh hour. They have averaged 67 seconds per page to review budgets since 2017, but it was less than half that time last year – meaning for the 2025 budget they had to review an average of over $616,000 in state spending per second.