Rauner reignites push for term limits

Gov. Bruce Rauner called on lawmakers on Monday to vote on a proposed amendment that would impose limits on their terms in office.

Speaking at Raise Marketplace, a tech startup in the Loop, Rauner pushed for the Illinois General Assembly to vote on the issue during its fall veto session. The governor spoke for less than 10 minutes and did not take reporters’ questions afterward.

Rauner said imposing term limits would bring “new faces and new ideas” to Illinois politics and give residents “more control over our broken political system.”

“We’ve got politicians in Springfield who have been there for 20, 30, 40 years, and look what’s happened in our state in that time. It’s time for change,” Rauner said.

Rauner supported term limits during his gubernatorial campaign against former Gov. Pat Quinn in 2014, but a judge ruled his citizen-driven petition, which collected about 600,000 signatures, was unconstitutional.

The governor’s renewed push for term limits comes less than a week after Judge Diane Larsen ruled against an amendment that would take the ability to draw legislative boundaries out of lawmakers’ hands. The ruling is now being appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

If lawmakers should pass the proposed term limits amendment, the issue would open to voters on the 2018 general election ballot.