SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner suggested Friday that the state’s attorney general might be trying to “cause a crisis” by asking a court to stop paying more than 62,000 government workers while a budget stalemate drags on.
Democratic Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed the motion Thursday in St. Clair County, a working-class Illinois suburb of St. Louis where a judge nearly two years ago ordered that withholding paychecks, even without a budget, would violate the state constitution.
Madigan’s move would halt the state’s $400 million-a-month payroll and raise the specter of a government shutdown that could force feuding Democrats and Republicans back to the bargaining table.
“I hope this is not a direct attempt to cause a crisis to force a shutdown of the government … as a step to force a tax hike without any changes to our broken system,” Rauner told reporters Friday in Chicago. “This is going to hurt working families, the good, hardworking employees of Illinois who deserve to be paid, who deserve to stay working.”
The first-term Republican governor campaigned on smaller government and often impugned state workers. But he became their ally in 2015 when their paychecks were threatened and a work stoppage would have evaporated his leverage in his quest to tie a balanced budget to restructuring the business climate to boost commerce, curtail union influence and curb politicians’ power.
Illinois has been without a budget since July 1, 2015, the longest any state has gone with no spending plan at least since World War II.