“Indiana Rejoins the Union”

That’s the very apt headline on my boss’s blog today, as Indiana passed a law putting the state on Daylight Savings Time. This will hopefully be the last year that we have to change our entire schedule to keep in sync with the rest of the country.

Amazingly, this happy outcome is not certain, as some lawmakers are vowing to try and repeal the bill before next April, when we change our clocks for the first time.

Most of the people unhappy are Democrats. That’s because a significant number of Democrats who are on record as supporting the DST move have voted against it in order to try and pressure the Republicans into passing other legislation they want. Consider this quote:

Indiana, he said, has too many children who need help from the state, and too many people out of work. Instead of focusing on those problems, he said, the legislature had become absorbed in daylight-saving time. He’d supported the issue before, he said, but now he would vote no.

“I will always choose children over clocks,” [Democratic Rep. from Indianapolis William] Crawford said.

Of course, the problem is not that we are forced to choose between clocks and children; the problem is that the two issues can now be separated and considered on their own merits. The Democrats pulled this stunt two months ago, when they walked out over unrelated issues.

There are people in the state not happy with the change, although there’s hope their concerns can be satisfied without repeal. In particular, the governor will now ask the federal Department of Transportation whether the time zone boundary needs to be moved, putting some objecting western counties into Central time. But I suspect that the majority of support for repeal will come from Democrats seeking to link their pet causes to the issue, and not from principled opposition to the change. It would be nice to get a list of legislators like Rep. Crawford, who supported DST before the general election last November but who voted against it yesterday.