Contact: press@reformandtermlimits.org

The Committee for Legislative Reform and Term Limits began circulating petitions today to place a state constitutional amendment on the November 2014 ballot that would reform the legislature and enact term limits on state legislators.

“Too many in Springfield are part of a broken system that puts getting re-elected first and allows the special interests and government union bosses to effectively own the politicians,” said Bruce Rauner, chairman of the initiative. “At the same time, Illinois is full of politicians who use their power to enrich themselves as well as their political allies. It’s time to put the citizens first and that is what this amendment will do.”

“This constitutional amendment will help shift the balance of power in state government back towards the citizens,” Rauner continued. “Every element of this amendment is a good government reform and will empower the voters and make elections more competitive.”

“The broken system in Springfield is a bipartisan problem that deserves a bipartisan solution,” Rauner said. “Both Pat Quinn and Bill Daley have expressed support for term limits in the past. I eagerly encourage them to join this initiative and make it bipartisan.”

The proposed amendment would limit legislators to 8 total years in the legislature. Limiting the amount of time a politician can be in the legislature will help remove the structural incentives for self-dealing that currently exist in Illinois.

The constitutional amendment also reduces the number of state Senate seats from 59 to 41 while the state House will go to 123 seats, allowing 3 House seats to be ‘nested’ within each Senate district. This structural reform will make Senate elections more competitive and save the state money.

Last, the amendment would increase the threshold to override a governor’s veto from a three-fifths majority to a two-thirds majority. The governor is the only statewide-elected official directly involved in the lawmaking process, so reforming the veto override threshold not only brings Illinois in line with most other states as well as the U.S. Constitution’s treatment of congressional overrides of presidential vetoes, but helps ensure the best interests of all Illinoisans are represented.

The three interrelated reforms – term limits, legislative restructuring and changing the threshold for overriding a gubernatorial veto – together make structural and procedural changes to the Illinois Constitution and will result in a government more responsive to the people of Illinois.

In an initiative regarding the size of the House of Representatives, cumulative voting and single member districts, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the amendment, noting that all the questions were “related to the purpose of structural and procedural change in the House of Representatives” and were also interrelated and satisfied the single purpose test.