Every clock in the country needs to be changed twice a year. It just doesn’t make sense. People forget to fix the microwave, the dashboard of their car, and the wall clock in the break room until February. This has been a tradition in the United States for decades, and over the last few years, more and more people have been asking their elected officials and others out loud why it is still going on.
It looks like the House of Representatives heard them. They passed H.R. 139, the Sunshine Protection Act, earlier this month. This is the law that would make permanent daylight saving time the law of the land. The vote was on both sides, which doesn’t happen very often these days, so it’s important to note. Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who is a big supporter of the bill, called it “commonsense legislation.” The head of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Congressman Brett Guthrie, said that there is proof that extending daylight saving time all year makes people safer and the economy grow. Representative Gus Bilirakis, who is also from Florida, said that Floridians were sick of it all: the trouble, the disruption, and the feeling that changing the clocks every two years doesn’t fit with how people actually live.
Florida has a lot of people involved in this push, which is hard to miss. Years ago, the state tried to make the change on its own by passing its own Sunshine Protection Act. However, federal law says that states can’t switch to permanent daylight saving time on their own. They can choose not to use daylight saving time at all and stay on standard time all year, like Arizona does, but they can’t keep that extra hour in the evening without Congress agreeing to it. From that point on, Florida has been waiting for Washington to catch up.
People don’t really understand what will change if the Senate passes the bill and the President signs it into law. The winters are not drastically different, but they are noticeably different. Since it would always be daylight saving time, the clocks would not go back in November. That looks easy. In real life, it means that sunsets would move later in the winter. For most of the country, cities where the sun goes down around 4:30 p.m. would see it go down after 6 p.m. That is a really big change for many people in how they feel on a winter evening.
On the other end of the day is the trade Off. Early mornings would often be well past 8 a.m., and in some parts of the Midwest, they would be just past 9 a.m. There would be more than 55 days in which the sun rose after 9 a.m. in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The latest sunrise would happen at 9:14 a.m. That’s not nothing. Parents don’t like it when their kids have to go to school in the dark, and some people didn’t like it when the country tried permanent daylight saving time for a short time in the 1970s. The test didn’t last very long.
A lot of health researchers have spoken out on this issue, and their views aren’t great for people who support the bill. If the country stops changing the clocks, most sleep scientists agree that the twice-yearly change is bad for your body. The medical community would rather have permanent standard time than permanent daylight saving time. The reason has to do with circadian rhythms and the amount of light you get in the morning. It’s still not clear how much political weight that argument has compared to the simple, emotional appeal of not having to watch the sun go down at 4:45 in the afternoon.
Right now, the bill is in the Senate, and no one really knows when or if they will take it up. In the past, the Senate was unable to move similar bills quickly. Congress is also considering other options, such as bills that would let states choose whether to use daylight saving time all year, a compromise “half” shift, and a plan to permanently switch the country to standard time, which is the opposite of what the president wants.
As I watch this happen, I get the impression that the country has reached a turning point on the clock-changing issue. It looks like most people want it to end. People don’t agree on what to stop it on. Even tho it’s not as broad as it seems, that argument can still take a long time in Washington.
