Macon Reporter

State Sen. Chapin Rose (R-Mahomet) is blasting the state’s new $42 billion state budget for its pork and what he sees as a planned tax increase.

“There is over a billion dollars in Democratic pork projects, $666 million in new taxes” Chapin said in a video from the House floor posted to YouTube. “The final version was filed about 5 minutes before the House began voting on it. This is what 3,000 pages look like.”

Republican lawmakers complain the new spending plan includes billions of dollars in expected revenue that is already missing and could be a prelude to yet another planned tax increase.

Rose views that as an outrage, arguing there are plenty of funds to navigate fiscal year 2021 without demanding more from already cash-strapped taxpayers. The veteran lawmaker said the state's revenue estimate has increased by $8.1 billion from the last fiscal year.

"And yet, Gov. Pritzker and his Democrat Party colleagues still say they don't have enough money," he said. "Now let's add to that the Biden bucks that came in, we've got another $8 billion on top of that from the federal taxpayers that have sent another $8 billion to the State of Illinois."

Rose isn’t the only Republican lawmaker voicing outrage.

“With the majority party, what we see is a continuous desire to operate through an expeditious process in the dark of night without any transparency that results in things like this: chaos,” said state Sen. Jason Barickman (R-Bloomington). “While countless people were sleeping in the state, you rushed through a $41 billion budget so fatally flawed that you had to use a procedural mechanism that even Speaker Madigan wouldn’t use to rescue it”