Illinois Senate Democrats on Tuesday opted to go their own way and passed a politically risky measure to hike the income tax and expand the sales tax, drawing the very reactions that almost surely doom the plan to failure.

The Illinois Republican Party, which is funded by GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner, quickly attacked, saying the vote “confirms that the entire Democratic Party’s position is to raise taxes while protecting the status quo.”

For much of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner’s term, longtime Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan was a highly visible and very vocal critic.

Though Madigan historically has operated behind the scenes to take down opponents without much fanfare — it’s not for nothing he earned the nickname “The Velvet Hammer” — he took a different approach to combating the former private equity investor turned politician.

At some point, Illinois might finally get a budget, a small one. Just big enough to pay for a single light bulb.

Then the last resident of Illinois will pick up and leave, switching off the light on the way out, and the state won’t need a budget anymore.

A federal judge could decide today whether insurers collectively owed more than $2 billion by the State of Illinois can move to the front of the long line of vendors waiting to get paid.

If they win, Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, who pays the state’s bills, says she could lose the little room she has to decide who gets paid first. Currently, she says, she prioritizes payments for agencies that care for the most vulnerable populations: children, elderly and people with disabilities, among others.

A far deeper crisis for Illinois is inevitable, we’ve long said, but it’s now more imminent because that certainty is becoming more obvious.

The exodus from the state will accelerate, unpaid vendors will start refusing to work, cuts by both the state and local governments will become more severe, schools and small universities will run out of cash, already impossible pension burdens will worsen and borrowing costs will continue to rise. When?

About 1,500 people demonstrated downtown Tuesday afternoon, calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The “Fight for $15” protest moved through the Near West Side and the Loop during the rainy rush-hour, causing some brief street closures, including along North Michigan Avenue, police said.

Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigators are overwhelmed by high caseloads and are being pressured to quickly close their abuse probes, even when they have not performed basic tasks like contacting police and doctors, according to several experts and lawmakers who spoke Tuesday at a joint House-Senate hearing in Springfield.

Front and center at the 90-minute hearing was state child welfare director George Sheldon, who faced intense criticism about the recent deaths of youth who had been the subject of DCFS investigations as well as the agency’s failure to protect vulnerable children and their families.

The substantial hike in Northern Illinois’ cost of electricity beginning next month is just the beginning of the increases for years to come.

With energy costs remaining at historically low levels, the price all consumers pay qualified power generators simply to promise to produce during the highest-demand days of the year keeps rising.

Target has agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle an investigation into its massive 2013 data breach.

The settlement, announced Tuesday and reached with 48 state attorneys general, also requires Target to maintain and verify a higher level of data security in connection with its collection, maintenance and safeguarding of personal information.

The Chicago Teachers Union said on Tuesday that its members lodged a vote of “no confidence” on the leadership of district chief Forrest Claypool, a symbolic effort union President Karen Lewis expanded into a referendum on Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Lewis, during remarks at a City Club of Chicago luncheon on Tuesday, repeated the union’s calls for new revenue to fund Chicago Public Schools, now that city and school district officials have laid out plans to stay afloat by adding as much as roughly $900 million in short and long-term debt to the system’s already substantial burdens.

The Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday is set to approve a series of changes to high school graduation requirements that will make one credit each in biology, chemistry and physics — plus a financial literacy course — compulsory.

Those new requirements are in addition to a previously announced plan requiring students, beginning with current high school freshmen, to provide a plan for life after high school in order to graduate. That measure, so far the most controversial of the series of changes, is also up for board approval on Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors threw around names of three West Side politicians Tuesday during the fraud trial of a woman accused of blowing state grant funds on shoes, cars and other personal expenses.

Franshuan Myles is fighting mail and wire fraud charges this week in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Elaine Bucklo. The feds say Myles, the head of Divine Praise Inc., misused $60,000 her organization received from the state in 2011 that should have been spent on summer jobs for participants of the Illinois Youth Recreation Corps program.

The teenager was purportedly paid $8.50 an hour as a summer youth instructor under a state grant designed to keep impoverished kids on Chicago’s West Side out of trouble.

But in reality, the girl didn’t instruct anybody, federal prosecutors allege. Instead, she spent the summer of 2011 working as an intern for longtime state Sen. Kimberly Lightford, answering phones and performing clerical duties in the senator’s west suburban office.

They’re all the rage with chic millennial couples on cable TV — but could “tiny houses” also be the solution for Chicago’s homeless population?

It’s a question 14th Ward Ald. Ed Burke hopes a series of public hearings can answer.

A Southwest Side aldermen wants to make it more difficult for “pimps” to profit from the world’s oldest profession from behind the legitimate veil of a massage parlor.

“The goal here is to turn the table on the cowards that operate these types of places and victimize the most vulnerable segment of our communities,” said Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th).

Concerned about a nearly 50 percent surge in home prices along the wildly popular 606 trail, a pair of local aldermen have a plan to stop that gentrification dead in its tracks.

At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Aldermen Proco Joe Moreno (1st) and Roberto Maldonado (26th) will introduce their plan to impose dramatically higher demolition fees along the trail and impose a new “de-conversion fee” whenever developers try to turn multi-family housing into more lucrative single-family homes.

Ald. Leslie Hairston (5th) said a proposal to change the zoning of 71st Street needs some tweaks after a raucous ward meeting Tuesday night.

Hairston wants to change the zoning to residential from commercial so new businesses would have to get her approval for a zoning change before they could open on 71st Street east of Stony Island Avenue.

Three months after a 15-year, $75 million makeover of Midway Airport concessions was cleared for takeoff on a runway crowded with clouted contractors, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is finally forging ahead with the next phase of his $323 million airport overhaul.

City Hall has issued a request-for-proposals for a “terminal parking garage expansion” that will give the land-locked Southwest Side airport 1,400 more premium parking spaces.

The substantial hike in Northern Illinois’ cost of electricity beginning next month is just the beginning of the increases for years to come.

With energy costs remaining at historically low levels, the price all consumers pay qualified power generators simply to promise to produce during the highest-demand days of the year keeps rising.

The Quincy School District plans to move forward with selling another $20 million in bonds in June tied to its K-5 elementary school construction project.

But the district’s bond rating has been downgraded due to the state’s ongoing budget impasse.

Every year the News-Democrat compiles lists to show what public employees are being paid.

People use the lists to be nosy and see what their neighbor or their kid’s teacher makes. They also use the lists to keep a watch on local government and see whose brother-in-law is getting a government job.