Travis Weaver introduces bill to repeal gaming tax

Travis Weaver told CDC Gaming he introduced his repeal bill now because once the tax starts generating revenue, it gets hard to kill.

That sentence contains most of what you need to understand Illinois House Bill 5811.

The state's fiscal-year 2027 budget, signed by Governor JB Pritzker, classified certain sports-event contracts on prediction markets as "exchange wagers" and imposed a tiered transaction tax: 1.75% on the first five million exchange wagers a platform processes in a fiscal year, 3.5% on every one after that. It also attached a $15 million initial licensing fee, valid for four years. Kalshi and the CFTC both challenged the law in court almost immediately. Weaver, a Republican state representative, is now trying a different route — legislative repeal before the tax becomes load-bearing infrastructure in the state's budget math.

The timing is deliberate. The Illinois legislature returns in November for a six-day veto session. Weaver's realistic target is the full 2027 session beginning January 13, but he wants the bill visible before then. His frustration, as he described it, is specific: the state budgeted money for the attorney general to defend the new taxes, not revenue the taxes would actually generate. The taxes are live and producing nothing.

What Weaver is identifying is a political window that closes on its own. If the litigation drags long enough and the tax survives, some version of it will eventually collect something. The moment it does, the fiscal committee arithmetic changes. A zero-revenue tax is a liability. A tax that cleared $40 million last year is a program with constituents.

The broader legal environment is running in the same direction as Weaver's bill, and that is what makes his timing worth examining. Federal judges in Iowa and Ohio have told Kalshi that state gambling law applies to its contracts. The 10th Circuit denied an injunction as Utah moved to enforce. Connecticut has sued. The CFTC's position that its exclusive jurisdiction forecloses state regulation has not found traction in the courts that have ruled so far. If that pattern holds, the prediction market industry needs a legislative path in states where the legal one is narrowing. Illinois, where the governor who signed the original law is a Democrat and the legislature returns to session in eleven weeks, is an unlikely venue. Weaver knows this.

I think the market on Weaver's bill is mispriced toward passage. Not because his argument is wrong — the tax is legally vulnerable, economically incoherent, and politically untested — but because Pritzker signed the original provision as part of a budget package that included a dozen other contested levies, and the coalition that built that budget has no obvious incentive to hand a repeal win to the industry before the courts have finished with it. A governor who went on record taxing prediction markets is not likely to sign legislation removing that tax while his attorney general is in active litigation defending it. The legal and the legislative tracks are not running parallel here. They are competing.