SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – A financial showdown more than two years in the making is slated to play out in the Illinois House on Thursday as Democrats try to enact a $36 billion spending plan fueled by a $5 billion income tax increase over the Republican governor’s objection.
House votes to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s vetoes of the budget package would give Illinois its first annual budget since 2015 and spell the end of the nation’s longest fiscal stalemate since at least the Great Depression.
The first-term governor, already facing several Democratic heavyweights hoping to displace him in the 2018 election, took to the trail Wednesday to implore the House – run by Speaker Michael Madigan of Chicago – to sustain the vetoes. He’s taken to calling the revenue surcharge “Speaker Madigan’s 32 percent tax hike.”
“This is not just a slap in the face to Illinois taxpayers. This is a 2-by-4 smacked across the foreheads of the people of Illinois,” he told reporters at a bar on Chicago’s far South Side. “This tax hike will solve none of our problems. In fact, in the long run, it will make our problems worse, not better.”
Rauner, a former private equity investor whose massive personal wealth has largely funded the state Republican Party, said he would do “everything possible” to persuade House members to rebuff Madigan, including 15 House Republicans who broke ranks and voted in favor of the measure last weekend. Each of the budget bills cleared the 71-vote veto-proof majority.