On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would lock in daylight saving time as permanent. The bill is called the Sunshine Protection Act, and it’s sponsored by two Republicans, Brett Guthrie and Gus Bilirakis.
It seems to stem from something President Trump promised shortly after he was elected the second time.
The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2024
But this bill wouldn’t eliminate daylight saving time. It would lock it in—though Trump seems to have revised is stance and become a pro-permanent daylight saving time guy more recently.
Either way, passage of the bill would end this abomination:
Daylight saving was perhaps originally conceived by a New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson who realized that in the longer summer days, he was wasting two precious hours of bug-collecting time because they were in the morning. He felt that the extra hours should simply be transferred to the evening so he could prance around in the meadows after dinner, instead of, y’know, waking up earlier. For non-entomologists, the time could be used “for cricket, gardening, cycling or any other outdoor pursuit desired,” he said.
Daylight Saving time was later enacted in the U.S., not for prancing, but, of course, for wartime productivity. So the time change is a remnant of World War I.
Finally removing the most annoying nuisance in the universe—the twice-annual clock thing that everyone hates—from American life would be, on the whole, beneficial. Unfortunately, switching to permanent daylight saving time instead of permanent standard time is inane and childish.
It locks in 1:00 p.m. instead of 12:00 p.m. as solar noon, the point at which the sun is theoretically straight overhead. And the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says, “permanent daylight saving time would delay morning light exposure, making it harder for children and adolescents to wake, learn, and travel safely to school during dark winter mornings.”
Locking it in does what daylight saving time does in the summer, but year-round: robs daylight from the morning to give it to the night. The result would indeed be eerie, unnaturally late sunrises in the dead of winter.
In, say, Chicago, where the latest winter sunrise of the year is currently around 7:18 am, the sun would rise at 8:18 am at the latest, which is horrendous. And the benefit of transferring all that morning daylight would be a winter sunset at 5:31 p.m. instead of 4:31 p.m. The thing about winter days is that they’re just dismally short, and you can’t collect bugs after dinner in the winter, no matter what you do with your clock.
But if the Senate passes this bill, that’s what we’ll be stuck with forever. Oh well. It’s less dumb than the system we have now.
The Senate actually did pass a version of the Sunshine Protection Act back in 2022, but it failed in the House. This time around, the bill has clearer opponents, like Tom Cotton, who hates permanent daylight saving time. He delivered a floor speech about it last year, saying in part:
“If permanent Daylight Savings Time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans.
By moving the clock back an hour in winter, permanent Daylight Savings Time would push winter sunrises to an absurdly late hour, depriving Americans of morning sunshine that’s essential for our safety and well-being.”
Which is all true, but it’s better than changing our clocks.
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