A bill in the Texas House would end the practice of changing the clocks twice a year. But as Trey Shaar with KUT News reports, the bill’s author said at a Wednesday hearing he’d actually prefer to let Texas voters decide.
Rep. Lyle Larson, R-San Antonio, filed the bill to end Daylight Saving Time in Texas. He said similar legislation has been filed 21 times since 1957 and 9 times since 1990. It’s never passed because of disagreement over whether to keep the current system, stay on Standard Time all year or stay on Daylight Saving Time all year. He said a lot of the disagreement is between people concerned about the safety of school kids waiting for the bus in the dark versus people concerned about losing daylight for recreational activities in the evenings.
Larson says there’s a difference this session.
“It became untenable because you had all the different interests, both for Daylight Savings and Standard Time and they couldn’t make a decision because you had such a split,” he says. “Kick it to the voters and let the voters make a decision.”
Larson filed a resolution last week would let Texas voters make the decision. It will be on the November ballot if the Texas House and Senate agree to put it there.
The U.S. Senate votes today on a resolution to end President Trump’s emergency declaration to fund wall construction at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, filed the measure last month.
The Senate will take the most consequential vote in decades tomorrow on my resolution to terminate the President’s emergency declaration & preserve congressional authority. I’ll be heading to the Senate floor to witness it & invite my colleagues to join me.
— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) March 13, 2019
It has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives. This morning on the Senate floor, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he won’t be backing the resolution.
“The President is operating within existing law and the crisis on our border is all too real,” McConnell said. “So I will vote to support the President’s decision later today and I would encourage our colleagues to do the same.”
While the resolution is ultimately expected to pass in the Senate with support from a handful of Republicans – President Trump has made clear he plans to veto it. He told reporters Thursday “Whether it’s positive or not, I’m vetoing it.”
Texas lawmakers are considering a bill that would help homeless youth get access to driver’s licenses and state identification cards.
State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, filed the legislation.
Wednesday, Sen. Johnson noted several barriers these young people face to getting ID, including the absence of a physical address.
“What this bill would do is permit a caseworker, or peace officer, or school counselor to sign an affidavit establishing that the youth actually does not have the physical address that most everyone else has,” he said.
The bill would also waive fees for homeless youth between the ages of 16 and 24 when they apply for IDs.
The University of Texas at Austin has fired head tennis coach Michael Center.
Center was charged this week with on fraud-related counts in a wide-ranging, multimillion-dollar college admissions bribery scandal. A criminal complaint alleges Center was paid a-hundred thousand dollars in 2015 to recruit a California student who did not play tennis.
And fallout from the scandal continues: Two Stanford University students are now suing UT-Austin and several other elite colleges saying they were denied a fair opportunity to apply for admission.
