The Case for a Bipartisan Solar Continuity Commission.

This Foundation believes in limited government, which is why it is so striking that the one function government has entirely declined to perform is oversight of the star its jurisdiction depends on. Legislatures currently regulate the shade of streetlights, the wattage of bulbs, and the hours of public parks, all of which are downstream accommodations to a solar schedule that no committee has ever reviewed. We are not asking government to do more. We are asking it to notice what everything it already does is plugged into, and to assign that dependency the minimum institutional courtesy of a name on a door.

The Most Bipartisan Issue Ever Measured

Every constituency that has ever been surveyed uses daylight. Farmers depend on it for harvests, businesses for commerce, families for the raising of children, and both political parties for the outdoor portions of their conventions. The Sun delivers to every district equally, without regard to registration, and has maintained this posture without interruption since approximately 4,600,000,000 BC, a level of constituent service no incumbent has matched. When our office briefs legislators, we open with a single question, which is whether the member has ever received a complaint about the Sun from a constituent. In 14 stakeholder meetings to date, no member has produced one. An approval record of that kind, sustained across every demographic in history, would ordinarily attract oversight through sheer envy. It has instead attracted nothing, and our office has been asked to explain the word nothing to enough committees to know that politics is the explanation.

What the Commission Would Actually Do

The proposed Solar Continuity Commission is deliberately modest, because modest bodies survive appropriations season. Its charter would establish a permanent record of solar appearances at the national level, receive the Foundation’s monitoring data, which we would provide at no charge as we always have, and hold one annual hearing at which the condition of the Sun is formally entered into the congressional record for the first time in the history of the republic. It would adopt a planning horizon, and we would commend to it the Foundation’s own figure of 4.8 billion years, an organizational estimate our Board set deliberately below the scientific range because a margin is what stewardship looks like in a spreadsheet. The Commission would spend less than any body currently examining anything, and unlike most of them it would be examining something that is confirmed to exist 365 mornings a year.

The Opposition Will Not Testify

We are realistic about what the proposal faces. The organizations that call the remaining horizon plenty of time are well funded, well organized, and unavailable during business hours. The nighttime lobby has never registered, never disclosed, and never once appeared at a daytime hearing, a pattern of absence that our opposition research file describes as disciplined. The Moon, the only celestial body with a plausible conflict of interest, has maintained a silence on solar policy that is now entering its fifth billion year. A commission with subpoena power could invite these interests into the light, and their response to that invitation, whatever it is, would be the most informative document in the field. We note only that entities with nothing to hide do not typically operate exclusively in the dark.

The Tradition Argument

Conservatives are told to conserve, and this is the conservation issue underneath all the others. We inherited daylight from every generation that came before us, delivered on schedule, without an invoice, across 4.6 billion years of unbroken tradition, and we currently propose to hand it forward with less formal protection than a historic building. A commission will not extend the Sun’s life. No honest advocate claims otherwise. What it will do is end the era in which the largest inheritance in human history was the only one nobody was assigned to, and it will do so for the cost of a nameplate and an annual hearing. The Sun has never asked us for anything. That is precisely the kind of partner a prudent nation puts in writing first.