I didn’t write about the election in Georgia before it happened, I just didn’t want to allow myself to think about it, and really it was a matter for the people of the Peach State.
But now that it is clear that both of the elections went to Democrats, and that the U.S. Senate will now have different leadership, I’m allowing myself to consider one other significant change:
The Senate Commerce Committee will now have new leadership. A new day is dawning.
As I’ve written about in the past, there was one guy who was holding up progress on fixing Daylight Saving Time more than any other one person: Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Commerce Committee. Under the Senate rules, if he doesn’t want a bill to get a hearing, it doesn’t get a hearing.
(Colorado, by the way, has a much more democratic system. It requires that every bill introduced get at least one hearing. That system, however, can be abused, as it was against my bill last year.)
Well, with the new makeup of the Senate, the current ranking member, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington State, is in line to become the new head of the committee. While I haven’t seen that she has taken a position on Daylight Saving Time, I do know the best predictor of if a U.S. Senator or Representative was willing to co-sponsor federal legislation was if the state they represented had passed a bill to #LockTheClock.
Washington is just such a state. Rep. Marcus Riccelli sponsored an excellent bill, which passed with wide, bipartisan majorities and became law in 2019.
So, Sen. Cantwell has every reason to at least give a hearing to a bill to fix Daylight Saving Time for good.
One small note about bipartisanship:
This last year has been rough, and it seems like an issue that honestly crosses party lines would be most welcome. How fantastic would it be if the advent of Democratic control of the Senate meant that a Republican-sponsored bill could get a hearing?
And further, how marvelous would it be if after the horrible year of 2020, we got to end the barbarism of Daylight Saving Time clock changing in 2021?
We have a lot of work to do, but I have more hope than I’ve had in any of the six years that I’ve been working on this issue.
Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. – Psalm 30:5