Illinois House Republicans are getting their shots in on State Democrats about not meeting their own deadline.
The Democrat-controlled General Assembly had set Friday, May 19th as the final day of the Spring legislative session. The timeline for passing the state’s budget before the end of that deadline came and went on Wednesday evening, with no introduction of the budget even coming on Friday.
With new predictions of the state’s revenues dropping by almost $800 million, approval of a new spending plan for the state has been turned into a complicated process. State Representative C.D. Davidsmeyer expressed his frustration last night: “We are going to be walking away this weekend having not accomplished a thing. We don’t even have a bill to put the budget into. So, now we’re going to be here longer, but we can do it the right way. We have time. We have another week-and-a-half to get this done the right way. We have to work on issues like Medicaid, ethics. We have to look at the COGFA projections that have been coming out on the revenue estimates. But once again, we are at a point where we are no longer having an open discussion on major issues. We don’t have an open discussion on any of those issues that I’ve talked about before. We haven’t had an open discussion about the budget. The people of the State of Illinois have not had an opportunity to be at the table.”
Davidsmeyer says that Democrats should pass a budget under veiled secrecy in the dead of night, like it has been the previous two times. House Republican Deputy Leader Norine Hammond said the budget process is not new, but Republicans have been removed from it: “It doesn’t have to be this hard. Our budget working groups began meeting back on March 15th. Less than one week later, March 21st, Republicans were uninvited to the first working group – Higher Education. With no further notice, Republicans were uninvited to all but one working group – a General Services working group. We would be uninvited to that one also by the next week.”
Hammond says that Republican priorities are pretty straightforward: “Our asks are simple. We want no new spending. We want to pay our bills on time and to support good fiscal measures to increase our credit rating and continue to fund the Rainy Day Fund. We can get there, but only with true, genuine bipartisanship and true cooperation. That’s why we want to start seeing the Democrats over the coming days, regardless of their failures in this regard to date, we would like to see cooperation and a movement in this budget process.”
House members will return to Springfield Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of next week in an attempt to wrap things up. Votes will need more than 2/3rds to pass.