James Butler may have lost his bid to become D.C.’s mayor last year, but now he has a new mission: to impose term limits on the city’s elected officials.

Butler, who unsuccessfully challenged Mayor Muriel Bowser in the 2018 Democratic primary and then as a write-in during November’s general election, has filed paperwork for a ballot initiative that would limit the mayor, members of the D.C. Council, the attorney general, and representatives on the State Board of Education to two consecutive terms in office.

There are currently no limitations on how long someone can serve in any of those offices. Butler says that is a problem, especially on the Council, where multiple members are in their second term or have served longer than that. Chairman Phil Mendelson and Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) have both served more than two decades on the Council.

“We can use rotation in government,” Butler said. “I believe when people spend too much time there, they lose the idea that they’re actually working for the people and it becomes almost the people serving them. That’s not what democracy in America is about.”

This isn’t the first time the issue has come up. It’s even already been put on the ballot before, and won. In 1994, 62 percent of voters decided that two consecutive terms would be enough for members of the Council and school board. But the Council overturned that referendum seven years later. Term limits were floated legislatively in 2011 in the midst of a government ethics crisis that saw multiple members of the Council resign and two serve prison time for bribery and stealing public funds, but were quietly dropped in favor of other reforms.

Butler also says cycling new people through D.C.’s elected offices will bring new ideas and insights into the city’s political system.

“In any marketplace, having new, fresh ideas and also competition is something that I think makes every market a better place,” he said.

Currently, 15 states impose term limits on legislators, while more than three dozen states limit terms for governors. The types of term limits can vary, though. Some states impose limits on consecutive terms. Virginia, for example, bans them, while Maryland has a two-term limit. But those do not apply to legislators in either of the states, though last year Gov. Larry Hogan did propose extending the two-term limit to include members of the General Assembly.

Locally, in 1992 voters in Prince George’s County imposed term limits on members of the County Council, and in 2000 shot down an effort to rescind them. In 2016, voters in Montgomery County agreed after multiple attempts to limit members of the County Council and the county executive to two consecutive terms in office, leading to significant turnover in the 2018 election.

Critics of term limits, both in D.C. and elsewhere, say they ignore the most powerful term limit of all: regular elections. If a legislator, mayor or governor is popular, why shouldn’t they be able to serve as many terms as the voters will give them? Those critics also say that term-limiting elected officials can also result in the loss of valuable institutional knowledge and experience, and that they can prove to be inefficient for the management of government. (For that argument, look no further than Virginia.)

Butler disagrees, and says that term limits are a necessary check on one of the biggest advantages elected officials have when they run for office: the fact that they already serve in office.

“Let’s not kid ourselves: incumbency has its advantages, and those advantages are very difficult to overcome,” he said.

Before the issue can get to voters, Butler faces a number of procedural hurdles. One of the biggest is collecting signatures from five percent of registered voters across the city — roughly 25,000 valid signatures. Once the D.C. Board of Elections approves the language of his proposed initiative, he’ll have six months to collect those signatures. If he succeeds, the initiative would be placed on the Nov. 2020 ballot.

And even if voters did approve imposing term limits in D.C., the Council could again overturn them, as it did last year with Initiative 77, which would have slowly phased out the city’s tipped wage. If the term limits were approved, they would not apply retroactively.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.