Attorney General Lisa Madigan wants the Illinois Supreme Court to take up the issue of whether state employees can be paid without a state budget.

Madigan filed a motion Wednesday asking the state’s high court to quickly take up the issue, bypassing a ruling from the state appellate court.

“It is detrimental to the people to allow the timing of the normal appellate process to run its course because the impacts of this situation are dire,” Madigan’s office said in the filing. “Illinois is in an ever-deepening crisis due to the lack of a complete budget for the last two years, and lasting economic damage is being wrought on the state.”

State workers have continued to be paid even without a state budget because of a preliminary injunction issued in 2015 by a St. Clair County judge. Last year, though, the state Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that state workers owed previously denied wage increases could not be paid without an appropriation in place.

Armed with that ruling, Madigan went back to St. Clair County last month and sought to have the 2015 order dissolved. The judge refused, so Madigan is now trying to have the Supreme Court take the case rather than go through the appellate court.

Madigan said the original court ruling has enabled Gov. Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly to avoid passing a budget.

“As Illinois’ unprecedented budget impasse drags on, the executive and legislative branches have not had to fulfill their constitutional obligations because of the legally baseless preliminary injunction,” the motion says. “In every other state and at the federal level, the imperative to prevent even a partial shutdown of government operations forces the executive and legislative branches to negotiate and enact appropriations legislation. In Illinois, in contrast, the legislature and executive have never faced the true consequences imposed by our constitution and instead have relied on the preliminary injunction to keep all state government operations running for over 20 months without enacted appropriations legislation.”

The motion says the result has been “serious and collateral damage” to higher education, social services, college students, state vendors and others.

“The legislative and executive branches have had more than enough time to perform their constitutional obligations,” the filing says. “An injunction that a court might have viewed as a short-term buffer against hardship has instead become an indefinite excuse for the legislative and executive branches to not fulfill their duties.”

In response Wednesday, Gov. Bruce Rauner said Madigan “has continued to aggressively try to stop state employee pay, to create a crisis and shut down the government. She’s doing an end-run around the appellate court and going straight to the Supreme Court. That is wrong. This is an attempt to create a crisis and force a tax hike without any changes to our system.”

The Republican governor said Democrats Madigan, Comptroller Susana Mendoza and House Speaker Michael Madigan are staging a “coordinated pattern” to force a government shutdown. He called on the legislature to pass a bill sponsored by Rep. Avery Bourne, R-Raymond, that would ensure state workers are always paid, even without a budget. The bill is stalled in the House.

Lisa Madigan’s office later issued a statement that Rauner “is clearly desperate to shift blame onto anyone but himself. He needs to stop the baseless finger-pointing and do his job.”
