Editor's note: This article was originally published at Wirepoints.org.
The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously rejected a lawsuit on the constitutionality of certain general obligation bonds issued by the state.
The suit was brought by John Tillman, CEO of the fiscally conservative Illinois Policy Institute, though it was based on his status as an ordinary citizen and taxpayer. It alleged the bonds were issued in violation of state constitutional debt limitations, which we wrote about earlier here.
The case was not decided on the merits, but on a doctrine known as laches. Laches is basically a common sense rule against claims where the plaintiff waits too long to bring a lawsuit, harming the defendant and creating additional complications from the delay. Though Tillman sought to prohibit only payments going forward on those bonds, the court said too much time had passed since the bonds at issue were sold in 2003 and 2017.
That result is no surprise and laches is part of why we and most others have said the lawsuit had little chance of success. The state had a range of defenses that could be raised before even getting to the merits of Tillman’s claim.
However, it’s disappointing that the case was disposed of solely on the idea of laches. We had hoped that a teaching moment was at hand — that the court would provide some interpretation of how the constitution’s restrictions will be enforced. Those restrictions are reproduced below.
Laches may well have been a proper doctrine to apply, but Tillman’s claims did, on the merits, raise fair questions. Indeed, the supreme court chose not to base its ruling on the notion that Tillman’s claims were frivolous, as the state had argued. The lower appellate court, too, had said the claims were not frivolous or malicious.
So, big questions remain unanswered:
What, if anything, do the limitations on debt in the Illinois Constitution mean? Is sky is the limit for state borrowing as long as the three-fifths voting requirement is met?
Is the state free to spend whatever it chooses, letting the unpaid bills run up, to be refinanced by bonds similar to the 2017 bonds challenged by Tillman?
Can the state simply claim the “specific purpose” required in the constitution is to refinance payables, just as it did in 2017?
Can the state just run up pension debt indiscriminately, then borrow to fund them in unrestricted amounts?
Those are reasonable questions but the court avoided all of them, so the state will probably go on borrowing with no concern about them.