The Illinois House of Representatives failed to garner enough votes on Wednesday to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of a bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase tobacco products from 18 to 21-years-old.
The bill, SB 2332, needed at least 71 votes to pass but fell to defeat by a 62-45 vote. Even though the Senate supported it earlier this month, it figured to be a challenging task to recruit an additional 10 votes in the House.
The bill narrowly passed the House in the closing days of the session by a 61-49 vote, setting up an unlikely scenario for an override given the last-minute heroics to recruit votes for the bill’s initial passage. The week of the original vote, there were significant questions as to whether it would be able to be passed at all, with it effectively considered dead just days before it was passed.
With the bill dead, it leaves six states as having passed a statewide tobacco purchasing age of 21-years-old: California, Hawaii, Maine, New Jersey, Oregon and Massachusetts, though that state’s is a progressive increase that will be rolled out over the next two years.
Featured image by Meagan Davis [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons