Maybe this year for a flyers' rights bill

Maybe next year. That's what Kate Hanni has been saying for a long time, ever since she was stranded on an airliner stuck for about nine hours on a runway in Austin back in 2006. After that she began a push for an airline passenger bill of rights with a surprisingly well organized lobbying and grass roots group. Well, her year may have come. The House last night passed an FAA bill that contains the kind of language her Flyers Rights group has been pushing. The House, though, was always the easy part because the lower chamber has been receptive to the bill of rights, passing a version last year, although it went nowhere in the Senate. The airlines' promise of voluntary pledges of better service won the day in the upper chamber. But the Senate this year is a very different place than it was a year ago, with a Democratic majority that has a pretty much veto-proof balance of power. Not that there's a likely veto. After all, as Hanni notes, a senator named Obama supported the passenger bill of rights last year, and he's now in the White House.