Illinois lawmakers have until Sunday at midnight to complete action on legislation, including the state budget, a possible Bears funding plan and more.

We’re down to the final weekend of the Illinois General Assembly’s spring session. As we write this, there’s still no state budget approval. No Bears megaproject deal. No decision on the governor’s BUILD plan.

Even if a Bears deal or budget or BUILD bill magically appeared overnight Thursday or we get one this very minute, the lawmakers voting on it — and the public that must live with it — will have less than 72 hours to examine and understand it.

That should not be a surprise to anyone familiar with the countdown to May 31 in Springfield, where the session’s final days and hours are dominated by long-delayed debates, “shell bill” surprises, last-minute amendments and late-night votes.

It has become so commonplace that Illinoisans have come to expect that massive budget bills and other key votes will of course go down in the middle of the night, too late to make newspaper print deadlines or the 10 o’clock news.

But the May 31 frenzy isn’t just a punchline in Illinois politics, as Illinois Policy Institute analyst Lilly Rossi made clear in her eye-opening account of how it played out last year.

“Illinois General Assembly members filed 31,011 pages of amendments to bills in the last 24 hours of the 2025 regular session,” she wrote. “Truly understanding what they were deciding would require reading 22 pages per minute.”

If those numbers aren’t enough cause for concern, Rossi goes on.

The page total included 54 amendments to 34 different bills. Lots of those failed to pass, but the General Assembly OK’d roughly 6,000 pages — about 2,000 more than the entire seven-book Harry Potter series, Rossi pointed out.

Exhausted lawmakers speed-reading legislation at midnight might make for a clever Second City sketch, but it’s hardly the best way to legislate.

Plus, Illinois’ annual wait-wait-hurry legislation formula creates the perfect breeding ground for “shell bills,” also known as “gut-and-replace” legislation.

Both of these colorful terms describe a practice of introducing a bill containing text submitted prior to a session’s filing deadline that can be amended or replaced after the deadline for filing new bills with completely new and sometimes unrelated language. It’s a maneuver that both skirts Illinois’ constitution and tramples any illusion of transparency.

That’s because the constitution requires that bills must be read three times on three different days in each chamber before passing. The rule doesn’t apply to amendments, however.

Last year’s Senate Bill 328 was a particularly appalling example of shell bill abuse. Its original language called for a technical change in the Code of Civil Procedure and was amended to address electronic court filings, Capitol News Illinois reported. But on May 30, a “gut-and-replace” amendment stripped that wording and lawmakers wound up approving a controversial measure that allows corporations, in certain cases, to be sued in Illinois courts over toxic exposure — regardless of where the product was made or the exposure occurred.

Illinois Republicans filed suit to stop the process, and we hope the courts will address it. After all, we can’t expect lawmakers who rely on shell bills to push for change.

Meanwhile, Bears legislation — which would allow the NFL team to negotiate directly with local taxing bodies over a 40-year period — appears set to go down to the wire this weekend after the measure languished for more than three years. Even now, lawmakers are tweaking behind closed doors and the final details have yet to be revealed.

How much time does that give lawmakers — and the public — to digest the full implications? Very little.

And ditto for any changes to the state budget.

Unfortunately, we can only hope we don’t wake up to any unpleasant surprises on Monday.