Attorney General Lisa Madigan has filed a motion for stay with the Illinois Supreme Court to keep the capital program alive for now. As you know already, an appellate panel declared the law unconstitutional because it violated the state Constitutions Single Subject Matter rule for legislation. The appellate court claimed that supporters of the law deemed the bill in question as being about “revenue,” when there was a whole lot more to the bill than just revenue.
As I told subscribers earlier this week, that reasoning seems more than a little silly. This was the capital bill. That’s how all the pieces fit together. And Madigan’s motion for stay points that out as well…
The State Parties have a substantial case on the merits. In Arangold, this Court upheld against a single subject challenge the State’s budget implementation act for fiscal year 1996, which contained a wide variety of statutory provisions creating and amending state programs and revenues in multiple acts, 187 Ill. 2d at 347-56. The State Parties argued below that the Capital Projects Acts were similarly related to a permissible single subject – the capital projects initiative – that was narrower in scope than implementation of a full years budget. (State Parties’ Br. at 28-33.) That argument clearly presents a substantial case on the merits.
